1. The darkest protagonist. A creature like in the Alien/Sigourney...Weaver? movie. It so happens such creatures are actually intelligent but utterly overwhelmed by their urges and desires and they will eat themselves to death or die to have sex. Average life expectancy is 6 months. They often hide in the garbage receptacles of spaceships and will wreak havoc at the next planetary stop. They are always killed on sight, if possible. But this one ended up very different. Somehow... He hides in a huge garbage pit on a densely populated planet and survives off garbage. He's lived for a long time this way and has learned to read, etc....

But there will be multiple dark protagonists so that more than one direction can be explored of related ideas and just for the escapist fantasy of it. The Alien creature befriends a young person. Because that person isn't quite right in the head... etc. What are they doing? Just surviving. The Alien mostly just surviving his self. His genetics, etc. The young person not much better. Primarily escapist.

2. Imagine dark times from my own past and try to figure out what in the world could have possibly been done to make those moments relatively happy. Somehow lived in a way that if I had then shortly after died, death wouldn't have felt like quite such a horrible thing.

3. The same as two except taken over completely into fantasy situations.

4..... Ahhhh. Did I write it down as I've now forgotten....? Oh yes, I remember. A happy story. Light and simply happy. I could start for example with the text message I got from S yesterday. "Happy Easter!" Just light and wandering, outside of social norms or not to somehow manage it? Ignoring horrific realities? Just trying to find as practical a way forward as possible to live in This World and be happy.

5. And then the truly awful one. The Kunderesque story. Taking the social norms of our society and showing them in the worst possible light. Turning everyday stuff into the macabre. What possible end result? People changing the social norms? Or people just becoming hermits?