Imbroglio:
- a confused or complicated disagreement or misunderstanding
- an intricate, complicated plot, as of a drama or work of fiction.
Sometimes the problems that lie in fiction are preferable to one's own. In fiction, lives and loves can change, end, or begin. In fiction, the world can come crashing down with a scream that echoes across the realm of the immaterial into the reader's (or viewer's) mind, bringing an echo of that loss that reverberates in one's soul. Then, impossibly, all is not lost. Love and life springs anew, though all is changed. The characters, and indeed the reader, find peace of some fashion.
But it does not last.
The book is closed, the film credits roll, and the fantasy world melts away. The real world is still there, lurking outside with its choking snares of emotion, passion, rage, and despair. These losses, these apocalypses that occur every day inside one's soul, do not go away. There is no happy ending for most. The escape of fiction is just that: an escape. All who use it know that their problems still await them, and that perhaps it might be better to stop the movie, to put the book down, and fight (rage, rage against the dying of the light*).
And yet Karkat cannot.
His friends are dead. His home is gone. The only world he knows now is one filled with frustration, fear, and the pressing weight of doom. The threads of hope he had grasped had begun to dissolve, and with them went his bravado, his railing and screaming against the dark (not with a bang, but a whimper**). He withdrew into a world where problems were solved at the end of the day, where love never withered away and friendships never splintered. All he wanted now was silence and a happy ending.
He knew he could have neither.
* Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas
**The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot