2012: The Lemuracolypse - Part One: Prophecies · 5:50am Jan 14th, 2018
2012: The Lemuracolypse
A 2012 Skirtsian Blargh in 12 Parts
Part One of Twelve - Prophecies
It was the early 1990s. I was a year or two from turning ten. I spent the entire decade of my young life being taught an evangelical form of conservative Christianity. I was going to a Protestant Christian school, with classes no larger than twenty students. I loved my classmates and my teachers. Even in hindsight, I have nothing but positive memories from the tranquil (albeit sheltered) experience.
I had a very linear perception of life, cosmology, and existence as a whole. A person was born, lived out their years, and--assuming they served God with righteousness and heartfelt commitment--then they inevitably destined themselves to an eternal afterlife of basking in the Creator's glory. The universe was meant to be explored in a rigid, narrow, straight line. This was a mindset fostered and maintained by regular daily Bible studies.
When we weren't reading the Bible, we delved into material deemed "Christian living." The older and more "traditional," the better. One such piece of literature was the epic allegory Pilgrim's Progress, written by John Bunyan in 1678.
The story depicts the arduous journey taken by "Christian" to reach the "Celestial City". There are innumerable hazards and conflicts to struggle with along the way, not to mention random individuals bent on either deceiving or thwarting Christian's righteous trek. It's a trippy piece of work, and every single character, element, or object in the story is a literal metaphor for something integral to religious Christian theming. Almost every role in the story is named arbitrarily, with human characters such as "Hypocrisy" and "Talkative" and "Prudence."
As a kid, I read or perused at least three or four different "versions" of Pilgrim's Progress. I recall having a comic book version of the narrative that illustrated some of the story's finer, more colorful moments. The story's pretty crazy, and--if adopted into a screenplay--would probably make for an unironically awesome movie or webseries. There's just so much random adventurous shiet that goes on, from Christian putting on the Armor of God and fighting a dayum demon lord to flying chariots pulling some Tolkienesque golden eagle shiet.
The story achieves so many highs and lows; the protagonist vacillates between making awesome decisions to making really stupid, destructive mistakes. Characters come and go. Some individuals who you actually get attached to end up vanishing or becoming martyrs, only to be replaced by others. However, as wild and erratic as the plot might become, the one consistent thing about the whole narrative is Christian and his straightforward quest. It's almost as if the only thing you--the reader--can anchor yourself to is the journey itself, as if it's the most important character in the entire allegory.
As a very young kid, I grew to respect the idea of long, forward-moving narratives. There's something wonderful about their simplicity... not to mention potential for both entertainment and enlightenment.
It's the year 1995. I was about to leave my old Christian school and embark upon an irrecoverable change in my adolescence, but I didn't entirely realize it yet. I had long fallen in lurve with Star Trek, and they had a brand new show now--set in the far off Delta Quadrant.
Star Trek Voyager was unique in that it was committing to a very linear narrative about a crew of displaced officers being forced to make an arduous journey across the galaxy in the slim hope of returning home to Earth. In concept, the ship would be traveling in a straight line, encountering various adventures, worlds, cultures, and hazards along the way. This had the potential for infinitely awesome story-telling.
Too bad that it sucked. Or--at least--that's how I felt at the time, and I still consider it the weakest of all the Star Trek series to this day. While I lurve certain things about Voyager (mainly the actors), I felt that the writers really messed up a lot of things in the storytelling. They had at their hands what was essentially "Lost in Space," only in the Star Trek universe. Given the degree of epicness that they achieved in both Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, I figured that they would be able to tackle some seriously awesome story arcs. And while Voyager would indeed accomplish some epicness eventually, I felt that a lot of the earlier seasons got needlessly hung up on teenage-soap-opera levels of melodrama and embarrassingly redundant stories dealing with mind control or hallucinations and cheap red herrings and... f'naaaaaa.
Perhaps it was because--for the first time in my life--I was starting to adopt a bittersweet world-view, but I wasn't in the mood to tolerate all of the mistakes that Voyager made. I looked at the concept they had and would constantly drum up ideas that I felt would somehow "improve" the narrative as a whole.
"Someday," I told myself, "I would attempt a long-form linear narrative and I would do it right." It was an egotistical statement, to say the least, but I still clung to it... not knowing when the time would come that I might cast off on such a journey.
In 1999, I had learned how to become happily obsessed with things. In this particular case, I discovered The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I had been exposed to Zelda on the NES as a kid, but I didn't pay it too much mind. OoT, on the other tentacle, was a breakthrough masterpiece of its time, and while there has most definitely been improvements in the franchise since then, I do believe the game's awesomeness stands the test of time.
Ironically, I wasn't too incredibly floored by my first playthru of the game in late '98. But then in 1999, for some inexplicable reason, I grew obsessed with finding a cartridge and replaying it to completion. Spring of '99 was a curious juxtaposition of experiencing leisure tranquility, listening to awesome music, and absorbing positive endorphins all around. It's still something I happily relive in my mind from time to time.
As fate would have it, I finally did grab a copy of OoT and beat it. And... the ending left me wanting for more. Like, I needed something deeper than what the denouement of the game gave me. I threw myself meatedly at primordial fansites, seeking more and more content and subtext to the Ocarina of Time experience. Still, reading fan-theories and fabled quests for the in-game Triforce wasn't satisfying enough. I needed to relive the essence of the game's story in a way that nothing on the surface could allow. Well, thank Nietzsche for fanfiction.
Art by Anna Larsson, circa 1999
Previously, I had toyed with creating fanfiction for the likes of The New Batman-Superman Adventures (TNBSA). While I didn't produce much from that obsessive period in my life, it did lay the groundwork for my first major epic: the Teen Titans fic These Black Eyes. But back in 1999, it hadn't occurred to me that one might be able to write fanfiction for video games. Lo and behold, The Legend of Zelda was deep and invigorating enough to convince me otherwise. I threw myself into the fanon of Ocarina of Time full-force, and the material I produced was... so embarrassingly horrible and cringey that no marsupial in their right mind will ever have a snowflake's chance in Hell of finding it. No, not even you.
It doesn't change the fact that--for better or for worse--writing Zelda fanfiction helped me flex my literary muscles for future endeavors. Before OoT, I was writing all of my fanfiction in a "script" format. The Zelda stories I did were my first time attempting longform narratives in actual prose. Yeah, it all sucked, but like James Rolfe once said, "Sometimes you've got to take a really nasty shit before you take a good shit."
As I wrote, I carried with me the predominant theme of being unrecognized and forgotten. Why? Well, because this is precisely what happens to Link at the end of Ocarina of Time. After selflessly giving everything to protect Hyrule, he travels back in time and gives up the Master Sword to undo all of Ganondorf's evil. However, this also means that the future versions of Zelda and the Sages and his friends are forever cut off from Link. The story's hero can't even afford to relish in the fruits of his labor. It felt very... non-cathartic and unsatisfying, despite the fact that Link's last act was noble and all-encompassingly righteous.
Something fanficcers like to do often--especially amateur idiots like myself--is craft a Mary Sue character who re-experiences something that the canon's protagonist does, albeit with slight changes. I did this in These Black Eyes when I had Noir--the Gary Stu--go through essentially the same "apprentice" shiet that Slade put Robin through at the end of Teen Titans Season One.
Back in the Zelda fanficcing days, I decided to put an established character into a situation where they were constantly encumbered by amnesia. Despite this obvious frailty, they nevertheless endeavored to make life as positive and enriching for all those around them. It was a far more pathos-driven plight than Link's in Ocarina of Time, and in the end I made sure that all of the character's accomplishments were eventually--if not belatedly--recognized by the rest of the literary cast.
While it wasn't exactly a good piece of fiction, it marked the first use of a theme that I would return to multiple times throughout my fanficcing career. I soon learned to fall in lurve with the idea of selective amnesia, whether it was an affliction of the protagonist or the other characters surrounding him or her. To me, death isn't necessarily the most poignant way you can encapsulate a tragedy. There's something even deeper and darker--a "second death," perhaps... where forgetfulness, ignorance, or outright apathy causes one's accomplishments to become virtually unsung. Toying with that... and the pitfalls and revelations regarding... was far too delicious to ignore. It's another level of cheap pathos-driven storytelling, but one that gets me jazzed almost every time. I would come to revisit more than a few times later on.
Barely a year and a half later, I found myself playing a game that would completely shatter my adoration of Ocarina of Time, effectively nailing its top spot on "favorite video games of all time."
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask came at the weirdest, most perfect window in my life. I was having a strangely happy Junior Year in high school. I was listening to lots of Radiohead and early 2000s techno. I had a very close friend with whom I chatted with religiously every night online. The autumn weather had cooled, Halloween was around the corner, and a cataclysmic failure of an election had left us wondering who the next U.S. President was for over a week. In the thick of all this, I played Majora's Mask and it was a positively supernatural experience. All of the right endorphin-cultivating things came together and left me with an unshakeable buzz that I still feel everytime I revisit that title.
I didn't truly realize it until writing to a certain Fuzzhead about the game thirteen years later, but Majora's Mask impacted me on so many levels. It had a very trippy magical take on time travel. It made side-quests far more interesting and impactful than the central conflict. It accomplished world-building and immersion in a video game that still hasn't been tackled in quite the same way to this day.
What's more, it explored the themes that had already attracted me to Ocarina of Time, only now the idea of courage and heroic deeds were shone in a gazillion bands of some mega-awesome spectrum. You could spend hours in-game and in-real-life, working to salvage one person's plight in Termina, only to watch all that hard work go out the window the moment you reboot the Apocalypse back to the Dawn of the First Day. It was pretty bittersweet, because although you knew you were doing the right thing, there was almost no sense of personal accomplishment to the entire process. The part that the ego played with Link's actions was practically nil, pointless, and futile. It's almost Zen in a way, and when the game ended I was left with the same feeling of want that had plagued me at Ocarina's culmination.
Alas, you simply couldn't get what you truly wanted out of the game. Link doesn't get remembered by name for all that he's done for the innocent denizens of Termina. He doesn't get to stick around and hang out with Kafei and Anju. He doesn't get to bask in the glory of the peoples and places he's rescued. And--on top of that--there are lots of unresolved conflicts left lingering in the storyline, leaving us with the very realistic moral that not everyone gets good endings.
Throughout the entire game, you get this sense that you're... invisible. And yet you're important. Only what you do matters in the grand scheme of things, and you have so much to give and sacrifice for the poor victims of the impending moon-crash. It speaks straight to the heart of empathy, and sorta nails in just how selfless Link--as a video game protagonist--can be. No matter what he does for the other characters in Clock Town and beyond, he's having to reboot the three days over and over again, and he is constantly being forgotten... his deeds unsung.
Being a young mofo who had already grown an affinity for "selective amnesia" in fiction-telling, this sort of an angle struck a very obvious chord with me. My mind twirled and flailed in search of a satisfying narrative to pursue. Eventually, I came upon (what I still think is) a stupidly-awesome idea: that performing the Song of Time so many dayum times in a row caused Link to be stuck in a permanent loop. Long after Skull Kid is converted and Termina saved, Link re-materializes in the heart of Clock Town, remembering only the events preceding Majora's Mask. Then--after three days--this chronological doppelganger of his vanishes and a new amnesiac appears in his place, a perfect copy of the original. Y'all marsupials might recognize this re-used plot as the twist to the Starlight Glimmer oneshot: Step Right In and Start Again.
However, in the Majora's Mask version, it'd be an exercise in brutal irony. The residents of Clock Town become wise to Link's integral contribution to the salvation of their land. However--as fate would have it--they are unable to properly thank and reward Link for his deeds, because Link is forever stuck in a repeating time loop that makes him incapable of permanently ascertaining what his past self has done. His courageous accomplishments are forever unsung, only to himself. So while we have the catharsis of the other characters recognizing Link's heroism, there's the melancholic device that Link himself can't be properly rewarded. Instead, the characters choose to nurture and care for the Hylian outsider with all the respect that he deserves, even as the constant time-loops eventually degrade from his physical being, ultimately killing him off over the years like some chronologically-afflicted cancer victim.
This fanfic idea enthralled me... but I could never find a proper way to execute it. Nietzsche knows, I tried. Between 2000 and 2007, I must have tried writing/implementing no less than four variations of this story, only to fail fantastically each time. More than any other single fanfic in my life, I struggled to start this thing, but no attempt was ever successful. I kept re-working and re-structuring it in my head countless times, attempting to concoct a version that was good enough to write to completion. But after all those years, I never succeeded. It's still a thorn in my brain, even to this day.
It's almost as if my attempts to make a story would end up just as unsung as all of Link's heroics. Nevertheless, the themes that Majora's Mask ingrained into my consciousness would stick with me forever... many of them blossoming into things far bigger than the failed Zelda story would ever have hoped to achieve.
As 2001 came around, I was still chatting religiously with a very close friend of mine online. They were an inspiring individual, with a poetic soul and a fabulous taste in music (with perhaps a few exceptions; see above). One thing they and I had in common was a fondness for The Legend of Zelda, and we explored this together in a way that only two young high school nerds can conjure up: online role play.
For hours on end, one night after another, we continued multiple separate "long-form stories" via AOL Instant Messenger. These plotlines were predominantly set within the Zelda universe, but they featured shittons of original characters and villains and landscapes and etc. So I suppose it was just as dedicated to the Zelda canon as Peter Jackson was to The Hobbit.
While the two of us mutually steered much of the plot--one line of prose or piece of character dialogue at a time--there was one particular RPG "epic" that I predominantly controlled in terms of story setup and order of events. Essentially, a much-older Link and a younger generation of like-minded adventurers were having to make an epic journey to some distant destination in order to deliver a Macguffin that would prevent a new Gary Stu villain from bringing destruction to the entire world. There were multiple bosses and monsters and hazards to deal with along the way, and most of the fun was trying to create newer and crazier "locations" and "action sequences" that would make my online friend go "OMGWTF" in bolder and bolder caps.
Whelp, this world being based on a medieval-fantasy Hyrule and all, I figured that I could perhaps throw in an imaginative curve ball that was sorely-lacking from the RP narrative. And what's more typical of medievalish fantasy shiet than the fact that everyone lives on a flat earth? Hell, why stop there? What if there was another world existing on the underside of that flat earth? And what if somewhere in the center of that flat earth, located on the exact opposite side from Hyrule, was the destination for the online RP's protagonists?
There's a certain degree of delicious flexibility in exploring Old-World concepts of cosmology. Gone are the bleak and buzzkill realities of reality. In a fantasy universe, there's no cold vacuum of space that'll keep naked protagonists from sailing outwards towards other planets or fighting celestial dragons among asteroid fields. When nothing makes sense, you can truly tickle the senses, as t'were. In essence, you can get a lot of awesome shiet done when not even the sky's the limit in world-building.
I wasn't aware of any other instance in literature or mythology where someone suggested that you could cross over to the "other side" of a flat-earth... or that there could be entire cultures of Mordor-esque societies dwelling there, operating under some subjective form of gravity, just waiting to be explored by a fantasy cabal of do-good protagonists. Suddenly, my brain was a-buzz with the mother of all Hollywoodesque action sequences, where Link and several other Hylians attempt to take a boat across the "rapids" separating opposite ends of the world--where they have a crazy ass fight scene with bad guys attempting to board their tempestuously-encumbered craft. I wrote such a scene online with my friend, waaaaaaay back in 2001. And it was truly awesome.
But somehow--I knew in the back of my head--I could make it awesomer. I stored the idea away for later use, and as the years rolled by I drummed up several possibilities of how I could execute such a narrative. The most popular idea was to funnel it through Majora's Mask canon. Link discovers that Termina is actually situated on the opposite side of a flat earth from Hyrule, and the only way he can make it back home is to literally walk the entire distance to the world's edge, cross over, then walk all the way across the opposite side's radius until he's back in his kingdom of origin. Along the way, he would encounter many hazards and situations, much like Janeway's crew in Star Trek Voyager. What's more, characters would join him and leave him along the quest, much like in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The only consistent anchor of the story would be Link--and Link's journey.
There was one major problem with this story concept. In order to work effectively, the fic would have to be long. And I mean lonnnnnnnnng. Back in 2001, I hadn't any idea that I would someday do a 2.7 million word long Teen Titans fic, so the idea of actual concrete longform narratives was too daunting to even contemplate.
So, I shelved the idea... until such a fabled time when I could actually make the awesomeness happen.
In 2002, I had evolved into a far different person than who I was in my youth. I had become aloof, introspective, and thoroughly secular. I had also accomplished the remarkable feat of becoming virtually friendless in-real-life, and I much preferred it that way. I relegated all my acquaintances to the online scene--to which I was irreversibly addicted.
A victim of senioritis, I lived out the end of my high school years in gradual decay, melancholically motivated by the split with my RP buddy, a bleak perspective of the future, and--of course--9/11. This same malaise effectively eliminated all enthusiasm I had remaining for Legend of Zelda fanfiction, and so I looked elsewhere.
One particular source that rekindled my interest in fanfiction was X-Men Evolution. Now there's a show that fuqqing begs to have fanfiction made of it. "Hey! Let's take the X-Men, divide them up into separate age groups, and put them into a high school scenario that our target audience can relate to!" Friggin' genius. Too bad the execution was kinda shit for the first season or two... but it did get better.
What kind of fanfiction can someone write for a show like this, you ask? Why, Gary Stu garbage, of course. However, I didn't want to write just any Gary Stu fic. I felt that the character's mutant ability should necessarily define the storytelling... so why not go for something cool, unique, and provocative? My head started searching around for a gimmick, and the first thing that came to me was the idea of the spectral haunt "observer." Think Heart and Souls starring Robert Downey Jr or the TNG episode "The Next Phase." While it's definitely a cheap, old-hat device... it's still crazy fun to write a scenario where everyone ignores the protagonist, and yet the protagonist has a perspective that supersedes the rest of the characters bound by the story's plot.
So, I embarked upon a fairly lengthy slice-of-life Gary Stu fic called Between the Walls, and it centered upon a protagonist whose mutant ability allowed him to be such an unseen/unheard phantom. Enter Shion Komine:
Shion was a Japanese-American from upstate Michigan. An addict of techno music and the rave scene, he had a dormant mutant gene that allowed him to turn into a "ghost form" that nobody around him could sense. However, this ability wasn't activated until Professor X happened to "target" him through an otherwise harmless scan with Cerebro. After a fantastic spectral green light-show renders him invisible, Shion is teleported to Xavier's School for Gifted Mutants, where none of the show's cast can see or hear him. There's also a catch--he can't just "ghost walk" or "float" anywhere. Instead, his powers are weak, and he's forced to "anchor himself" to another mutant... incapable of distancing himself from the individual in question unless he finds another mutant to "anchor" himself to. This ultimately reinforced the plot device where Shion is reduced to a narrator bound to the established cast, seemingly incapable of any agency. This became the backbone of the story that was "Between the Walls." And yes... it was sucky and melodramatic, but I enjoyed myself and made a new wave of friends from the entire experience.
Our Gary Stu is essentially "trapped" in this slice-of-life scenario. However, due to possessing a charismatic and talkative personality, he maintains his sanity as well as he can. Furthermore, as time goes on, he finds out that he indeed can affect those around him, but only subtly and subconsciously over lengthy periods of time. This gives him an ounce of hope, although he still waxes philosophic about his plight from time to time. Eventually, however, his optimism spreads osmostically to the mutant students he's attached to, and they all come to grips with the fact that their personal lives have significantly improved, although they don't know at first who to credit for the ego boosts, affirmations, and emotional support. One event leads to another, and Shion Komine is eventually able to manifest himself in time to save the school from a conspiratorial plight that only he has had the intuition to foresee. At long last, his deeds can be recognized, and he's embraced by the cast in open arms.
Shion eventually adopts the moniker of "Ecto," and he depends on a specially-crafted bullshit plot watch that he wears in order to stay corporeal. Because nothing Skirtsian can ever remain subtle, I eventually made him a dimension-hopping G-Man esque character named "The Messenger" who's appeared in other fictions of mine, most notably These Black Eyes.
Why am I going at such great length to discuss an old XME fanfic from 2002? Well, it's a slice of life story where the protagonist is a virtually invisible optimist who talks a lot, rambles philosophically, and wears a hoodie.
Jee, where have we fucking heard that before?
In the first half of 2003, I went through what I charmingly refer to as the "Bum Days." I had graduated from high school, but I had no immediate plans. I worked a short stint of retail with two separate jobs at the close of 2002, but afterwards I lingered on for months and months with no employment, no aspirations, no educational pursuits, nada. My daily existence involved either playing video games, watching television, or just... walking and walking for circles around town... like a literal bum.
Well, at least my creative cultivation got some good hits in, though, right?
About a year previous, I had grown obsessed with the Resident Evil Remake on the Gamecube. Suddenly I was "into survival horror games." So after I was let go from my temporary holiday retail positions and was seeking something to distract me while I wasted time in 2003, I set out to find a game that was competent enough to quench my appetite for the virtual zombie lurch. Lo and behold, after a brief visit to the local Electronics Boutique, I had stumbled upon this cheap game that looked interesting, Japanesey, gritty, and--holyfuckinghellwhatisthisbullshit:
Ever accidentally stumble upon a masterpiece that forever shapes the way you look at mood, narrative tone, and world-building? Silent Hill 2 was one such experience for me. It's one of the most influential games I've ever played, and while it hasn't exactly aged well, it's still pretty dayum sexy from the inside out. It's one of the best allegorical expressions of guilt, denial, and purgatorial punishment I've ever seen. There's a sublime use of unreliable narrator--which is kinda difficult to do in a video game. Also, the music is to die for.
You can go on for hours and hours breaking down the themes and motifs of this game. But--suffice to say--it affected the way I viewed a proper hellscape. On the surface, I was really impressed by the representation of a metaphysical nightmare dimension being personified through industrial rot. But--going in deeper--I was awestruck by how undeniably subjective the horror was. Silent Hill isn't the subject of the game; it's all about James Sunderland and what he's running after and also what he's running from. He and the rest of the game's cast sound disconnected, confused, and starved for purpose... and it just works. Because it's like they're in a limbo that never stops to grant mercy to them. It's as if they've been lingering in pain and confusion for a long, long time... and you're glued to the screen to find out what perilous abyss they might slide into next.
I fell in love with the aesthetic of Silent Hill--the rust, the fog, the darkness, the chains and malicious metal madness--and one way or another it would forever change the way I imagined hellish scenarios in literature. Yes, even curses.
Back to fanfiction:
While writing "Between the Walls" rekindled my lurve for selective plot-amnesia in stories--the same sort of shiet I used to explore in Zelda fiction--I ultimately had to leave Shion Komine and his mutant antics behind.
In late 2003, once the Bum Days had dwindled, I serious'd the fuq up. I learned to drive, enrolled and college, and got a job in retail all in the very same month. At long last, the senioritis slump that I had been suffering from since 2001 had ended, and I was starting to actually make use out of the daylight given to me.
While I got my general electives out of the way, I steered my way towards a degree in English with a pursuit of creative writing. I started thinking less and less about fanfiction, and more and more about the potential for original works. It was because of this that I started looking back at a longform narrative concerning a fantastical flat-earth that I had long left on the backburner.
Every once in a black moon, I experience a dream that's so trippy it inspires me to create a story from it. Combine that with other preconceived ideas of awesomeness, and you've got the winning formula for gripping fiction.
One such dream happened on an early morning. I had these vague visions of being this young boy who suddenly washed up along the canals of a giant Venice-like city. I met a girl--presumably a princess or someone else of importance--and then I began lurching off in a straight line on some mysterious quest. As the fog unfolded, I realized the world was hollow... turned porous by some incalculably huge cataclysm. Residents of a giant sepulcher city wandered along giant bridges that spanned the misty rivers, seeking long-lost children such as I to come to the surface so they that could be reunited with their families again. But I couldn't stop to help them; I had somewhere to be, and it involved the fate of this afflicted world.
Waking up, I tried to make sense of this dream. I decided that the reason for this dream world being damaged and the implied disappearance of everyone's children were both related. There was this persistent image of white fog, smoke, and soot in the dream... and my mind instantly connected it with scenes from 9/11. What I eventually came up with was that there was a city built out of wealth, pride, and self-righteousness. Demons from the forsaken corners of the earth hated and envied this kingdom, so they launched an attack that demolished the cityscape and blighted the surrounding areas in an accursed fog. They fell the tower of the sepulcher city, and the resulting wave of ash swept away every child and infant. What's more, the adults remaining in this kingdom found that they had become immortal; the only way they could now die was through violence or a mortal wound. However, at the same time, they no longer aged and they could no longer produce children. The survivors of the blighted world had to deal with the fact that--while they could now live forever--they could no longer reproduce or diversify themselves. Nobody could attack the demons in retribution because they were too far away, so instead they turned on each other, waging wars and skirmishes that whittled the stagnant, sterile population into smaller and flimsier numbers.
Years turned into centuries as the population gradually embraced their melancholic, whimpering fate. Eventually, some children would reappear--washing ashore from the ashen rivers left by the sepulcher city's fallen debris. But they were stuck in a permanent mindscape of animalistic raving insanity and would have to be sequestered forever in mental institutions, incapable of registering the love that their surviving families had for them. The only glimmer of hope--faint at best--was the prophecy that a soul of destiny would emerge from the wounds of the world. He would be called the Netherchild, and he would serve as the vessel of salvation that would restore the land back to its natural standing.
Cut to another part of the kingdom altogether. There's a group of individuals who border upon the age of teenagedom. They were too old to be swept away by the ash, yet too young to be considered adults. To them, the curse is a "blessing," and they get to be eternally young... partying it up and sexing it up with absolutely zero consequences. They hunt demons for sport, freeing the bodies of insane children from the monsters' insides and selling them back to their grieving families for ransom. Among this group is a young carefree adventurer named Petra. His girlfriend is an elf who was exiled from her family for one reason for another. She was always immortal, but--thanks to the curse--she now has a non-elf mate who can live forever along with her. Together, she and Petra enjoy their microcosmic, selfish existence in the moment.
Then one day, a random child shows up and slays a monster on his own. Not only that, but by a single touch of his hand he's actually able to cure the demon-imprisoned children of their madness... effectively freeing the first young soul from the curse in centuries. Petra and Co. learn that this is none other than the prophesied Netherchild who spontaneously washed up along the canals of the Sepulcher City. Drawn by a force older than time itself, this child begins marching off in a single cardinal direction, seeking to reach the Home of the Demons beyond the Firmaments where he can finally undo the curse and restore the balance of mortality back to the world. Petra and his beloved feel compelled to follow along, fully-knowing that to assist the Netherchild with his quest means eliminating immortality--and the cornerstone of their everlasting love--from the world. But some things are far nobler than living forever, they surmise, and this theme would serve to dominate the literary series as a whole.
I would borrow a lot of things from the old Zelda RP ideas--most notably the idea of a flat-earth that can be crossed over to complete an epic quest. Suddenly, this idea became really special and exciting for me, and I put it at the forefront of my mind, along with Golem Genesis and some other original fiction concepts I figured I would be working on in a year or two...
...and then I fell in love with Teen Titans, and These Black Eyes absorbed all my attention for the next two years.
Whelp. So much for that. Maybe The Netherchild would manifest itself another day... or perhaps in some other digestible form.
2004 - 2005 was the Golden Age of Skirtsian Fanfiction. And it was glorious.
Good quality? Nope. But who fucking cares. Jordan Hayes aka Noir aka Wildcard aka Gary Stu of the Century kicked a lot of ass every two to three days and a buncha readers on the Teen Titans directory of fanfiction.net absolutely lurved it. And so did I.
These Black Eyes taught me quite a few things about consistent, semi-"daily" fiction. If you write it, they will comment. If you write it for a very very long friggin' time, they will make a message board about it. Persist for even longer and you'll have fanarts and physical prints and maybe even hoodies made about the topic, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
It's mind-boggling to look back at the shiet I wrote at age 21. Somehow, between attending community college and doing a part-time job and indulging in avid video gaming (Halo 2, San Andreas, Metal Gear Solid 3, and Kotor were all played during that timespan) , I still churned out three million words of fight scenes, adventure yarns, romantic escapades, world-building, and comical one-liners. I grabbed from every canonical corner of DC-Animated that existed at the time, just to embellish the continuous train wreck and prove that I could. While the series was never "fully" written in the end (TBE collapsed near the beginning of Act Three of Six), I had complete two epic Acts under my belt and I considered it mostly a "triumph."
Art by Randirogue
But all things must die. Including epic Teen Titans fanfiction runs. But, still, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. While my MLP "career" has most definitely dwarfed the accomplishments I did back then, the Silver Age was still a supremely important and self-sustaining time in my young life. I made priceless friends at the time, including LB, and I developed a new appreciation for what it means to work on continuous fiction. In fact, one might say I had some much-needed training in longform storytelling.
And--as if it wasn't already predictable--I managed to squeeze in some psuedo-philosophy into the narrative as well.
2006 was the death of creativity.
One of the worst years of my life, 2006 brought with it the death of my cat, a stressful work environment, and a lackluster performance at my new liberal arts college. There was drama in the family, drama at the workplace, two embarrassing wars gnawing consistently at my political conscience...
Needless to say, Skirts was not a happy lemur. It's not like I had to deal with any legit melodrama like being thrown out of the house or becoming gravely ill or losing a parent... but the daily grind turned needlessly angsty and melancholic all the time. I had absolutely zero inspiration for writing any longer.
I needed an escape.
Soon enough, I found it. And it found me.
For better or for worse, World of Warcraft would consume my way of life for the next four and a half years. True, the waves of obsession came and went, but there's no denying that I transformed entirely from a person who created substance to make himself feel complete and instead into a person who leeched off of digital content just so his head could feel occupied. Where once there roamed adventures and fight scenes and playful dialogue, my brain had now surrendered itself to mildly amusing tedium. And when one deals with the regular, the expected, and the commonplace... anything different is frightening, even if it might grant the imagination freedom.
I wasn't alone in this addiction. LB was there, and we did manage to keep each other entertained. When WoW wasn't consuming us, we watched shiet online and rambled about story ideas--story ideas that would practically never be written. Kinda sad when you think about it. At least he came out of the ordeal making original stuff.
But, for all of its pitfalls, my constant exposure to the land of Azeroth did inspire me in one area: World Building. Now I won't pretend to say that the good boyos over at Blizzard are necessarily original or pristine in how they sculpt landscapes and cultures. Most of their "kingdoms" involve cookie-cutter rearranging of preexisting real-world fluff. But they did what they did confidently and unashamedly, and once I got to roam around it for so long... I learned to appreciate it.
And, Hell, if I had my way... who says I wouldn't be capable of doing similar landscaping myself? Hmmmm... the world beneath the outer skin of Azeroth is some sort of manapunk machine layer? That's kind of interesting...
In 2011, I achieved autistic levels of wizardry. Eh, who cares...
To be Continued in Part Two: Elephant Burial Grounds
I remember Pilgrim's Progress. Epic stuff.
Also, I would totally read the story about the Netherchild. That sounds like some cool dark fantasy, yo.
I just spent 5 minutes trying to figure out why the links were broken on the yellow text before I realised what you did there.
I enjoyed the blog. It's cool to see what all lead up to the creation of everything that I've spent way too much time diving into these past few years.
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I don't read blog posts too often but this was definately an amazing one.
I wasn't intending on reading the whole thing but it was just so interesting.
I would totally read that Netherchild story, in fact, I would buy a hardcover of it
I get what you mean by the 'bum days.' I think I'm going through a similar phase myself right now.
What I'd like to say, however, is that the idea of a person who seeks good, even when their accomplishments goes unnoticed, strikes a cord with me as well. Striving for something inherently human and empathetic even when nothing matters in the grand scheme of things never fails to leave me feeling emotional moved. It's why, when it comes to pony fiction, I come back to thinking of the first chapter of Background Pony, and how it captured that feeling in a way I hadn't seen before. Got me thinking, and staying up late at night staring at the ceiling.
I just wanted to express those thoughts, since they were on my mind when reading this blog. Wait, there's eleven more of these to come? Oh boy.
Hype
Gee, I have no idea where this is going.
Shame you feel Silent Hill 2 hasn't aged all that well. I love it as much as ever. Believe it or not, it still has my favorite visuals of any game.
You're an interesting man, Skirts.
Back in the summer of 2014, I spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about the concept of a world where being forgotten was a worse fate than dying, and how an entire setting could be designed with that as the core tenet... and I had barely even heard of pony then. It's a fascinating subject, and I totally loved seeing all these old ideas, written or not.
...Also, now I want to go replay Majora's Mask...
Yeah dude. Fuck Couchtavia.
Yeah. WoW was both a void filler and friend killer all at the same time. Tail end of 2005-2010 were just pretty shit. I wasn't even supposed to have a 2010 by how things went in 2009. I miss my cats.
That cursed RP sounded pretty epic. I wonder what part 2 will bring.
I'm looking forward to the next blog explaining in detail how the Rapture works
The takeaway from this blog:
None of us will ever be as contemplative, creative, introspective, or verbose as Skirts.
I'd feel humbled by this, but...no, actually, I feel humbled by this. Just, wow.
Pirates of the Carribbean totally cribbed your idea!
Im looking forward to part two!
I can't wait for part two. This gon be gud.
I'm pretty sure I want to read some vintage, 1999 Skirts fics.
For the first day of Skirtsian, we recieve a Fartrige In a Fair Tree(3), and it it glorious.
My mind boggles at the use of the word "meatedly".
Awesome blog Skirts, I love the journeys that you share with us, whether its the adventures of a certain blue Pegasus (or green unicorn), or indeed the journey of your own life that has shaped you into who you are.
You could almost write a fic out of Skirt's life
*starts handing out copies of Space Ghost Conquers the Martians*
As a T-shirt of that era put it: "JANEWAY--STOP THIS CRAZY THING!"
This is truly interesting stuff.
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*nods*
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Just wait till you hear about the sacks of meat.
This is not even close to what I was expecting, but, by god, I love it.
There is a fascinating story hidden here in the bombast. Really. It is worth telling. And it is worth telling well.
You are too much in love with the sound of your own voice. Edit. Never use two sentences, two words, two syllables where one will do.
And if you just have to enjoy the delicious work of your jaws--chew gum.
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I don’t think Skirts would be Skirts without the ramble.
Ummmmm. The link to part two goes to the blog post editor, rather than the blog post itself.
Dayum lemur.
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Everything (about your writing) makes so much more sense now.
As someone who didn't discover your stuff until 2 years ago, this is the epic historical blog-blargh that I didn't realize I've been waiting for. I mean, I knew you wrote a super-long Teen Titans fic before Easthorse and BP, but that's about all I knew. I'm looking forward to doing some LEARNIN'.