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| - Sometimes the outside world can be a cold, cruel place, full of mean hurtful people and scads of author-induced pain. That's why the best solution to a world bent on making you suffer can be to just curl up into a fetal position, suck your thumb, and go to a Happy Place inside your head. The Happy Place is rarely uninhabited though; it may be populated by scantily clad harem girls/boys, Spirit Advisors, an inner child or three, or if one is particularly unlucky they'll be roommates (headmates?) with a Split Personality, Super-Powered Evil Side or Enemy Within, the troublesome roomies usually want to pick a fight.
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| abstract
| - Sometimes the outside world can be a cold, cruel place, full of mean hurtful people and scads of author-induced pain. That's why the best solution to a world bent on making you suffer can be to just curl up into a fetal position, suck your thumb, and go to a Happy Place inside your head. The Happy Place is rarely uninhabited though; it may be populated by scantily clad harem girls/boys, Spirit Advisors, an inner child or three, or if one is particularly unlucky they'll be roommates (headmates?) with a Split Personality, Super-Powered Evil Side or Enemy Within, the troublesome roomies usually want to pick a fight. A character interacting with others (or himself) in their Happy Place is a good way of giving them depth and explaining their motivation without having them act out of character in the show. The Stoic or The Quiet One who will never talk about the trauma that left them so may well relive it inside their mind, confronting a spectre of their guilt in the form of a dead loved one or other inner conflicts. In its extreme the dreamer may make a Journey to the Center of the Mind, sometimes accompanied by another. Some characters are lucky and have their trip to the Happy Place happen outside of a show's real time, making their time and exposition there happen "instantly". A Cloudcuckoolander is seldom so lucky. They may enter a fugue state or literally go catatonic while visiting their Happy Place, though this may sometimes be for the best if it's induced by emotional or physical trauma. Usually this depends on the nature of the Happy Place. Then again, the reason the Cloudcuckoolander is so strange might be because they live there and visit real life. There is one significant danger to the Happy Place, that being that if the resident has been sufficiently abused in the real world they might choose not to go back despite realizing it's fake. Kinds of Happy Place:
* Inner Monologue, a safe place for the character to get on a soapbox.
* All Just a Dream (a la Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz film adaptation).
* Personal getaway and spa, ideal for escaping torture and stressful situations.
* Sitting on the Roof
* Madness Place: The hyper-productive creative fugue state of the Mad Scientist. For some reason, the Happy Place is often a beach of some sort. See also All Just a Dream, Convenient Coma, Dream Sequence, Arcadian Interlude, Ghost in the Machine, Journey to the Center of the Mind, and Spirit Advisor. Compare with Cuckoo Nest, The Final Temptation, Happy Flashback and Lotus Eater Machine. This is often how Heaven is represented. Contrast Black Bug Room, which is just the opposite of a Happy Place. This is in fact Truth in Television and is a short term way that many people with anxiety use to slowly function in the world. Examples of Happy Place include:
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