Shalla asked Alan Moore:

my 14yr old has a darker side when it comes to life + occasional depression, a sweetheart/gentle soul hidden in a trenchcoat, very intelligent but he's the villain/orc/troll/demon god in games, the bully to the school bullies, sketching darkness & he devours books (yours, dune, g rr martin, pratchett, peter v brett)..we're americans in france any advice on being yourself in a world that says you don't fit in?

Alan Moore Without knowing your son, and without wishing to presume to understand the (at 14, largely chemical) complicated matters that are going through his mind, I’d take a guess that a desire to (probably fleetingly) adopt a dark or scary persona is probably born of completely understandable fear. I remember that from a fourteen year-old perspective the world was a place of looming dangers that, at that age, I had no idea how to deal with. Also, it’s around about this age that we are starting to realise that our sweet, natural, normal personalities that have got us through the first ten or so years of our life with no great existential difficulties are clearly not going to be adequate to dealing with the scary and alien territory of adolescence. Traits that your grandmother found adorable are neither going to ward off bullies nor attract a girlfriend or boyriend: probably, in fact, the exact reverse. This is the age at which we are frantically scrambling to put together a workable identity for ourselves, and we tend to do it by borrowing bits from people we know, or more often from completely fictional characters that we admire in some way. I dread to think of the number of otherwise potentially nice young men who have grow up with the impression that acting like James Bond will make them as irresistible to adult women as James Bond is to a twelve year-old boy. I imagine that with your son, he is probably trying on a ‘dark’ persona as a form of armour for the vulnerable person that most of us are underneath. Fortunately, at that age we are trying on identities like masks in a fancy dress shop, and we usually realise that they don’t really work, or certainly not for us. You say that he’s read my work, so I’m guessing that he’s perhaps read Watchmen and that maybe he found certain qualities of the character Rorschach to be admirable. Although I wrote that character to show what the internal and social life of a justice-obsessed masked vigilante would most probably actually be like, I have actually had a couple of grown adults tell me how much they identified with the character...which, again, is just the futile attempt to be the most scary thing in a world in a world that you personally find scary. These were adults, and in neither case did they end in what you’d call an enviable state. Luckily, your son is fourteen, when this behaviour is completely normal and understandable. He will realise, as I did, that nobody in their right mind wants to go out with Skeletor or Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and he will very probably adjust and moderate his balance until he reaches a point where he feels confident and happy in himself, when you will probably see the child he used to be becoming confident enough to re-emerge, albeit in a modified and more sophisticated form. As for how to be yourself in a world where you don’t feel you fit in, I can only advise that you grow a beard, speak in a deep and unintelligible English regional accent about things that normal, rational people have never considered for a second, and take to the worship of a creepy-looking human-headed serpent god. In my own experience, this course of action always works. And you can tell your son that if he really wants to frighten everybody away, it works pretty well for that, too.

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