#hannapocalypse

[snailsinthesails]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Fandom: Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name Rating: Explicit Word Count: 2.8k Summary: While spending some time in Tallahassee, Conrad and Worth make the most of having the house to themselves.

I was possessed by a demon to write this instead of the many things I'm supposed to be doing. Hannapocalypse, because of course it is.

[desdemonafictional]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Rating: Explicit

Fandom: HiNaBN; conworth

Summary:

It took four fucking years and Doc Worth had to die, but they are finally communicating the bare minimum about their relationship. Anyway. Doc Worth has kinks.

It's not even that long of a fic, but I've been sick on antibiotics and it's made the whole smut writing process a bit slow going. Anyway, this is for the four and a half people who followed me in 2012 for Hannapocalypse and then somehow didn't leave

[lifeoflnoel]

That feeling when you binge read almost all of the Hannapocalypse series for the millionth time and break out your old sketchbook to reminisce about the days when you used to actually draw fan art for your favorite series. Or is that just me?

These are years old and I know I’ll never finish them but maybe they’ll inspire me to draw some new stuff. Or upload more quality shots of my old stuff. IDK.

[desdemonafictional]

retrospective

Since it’s been ten years since I wrote Up in Smoke (my god, what the hell) I’ve been thinking about it again with some distance and I’m fascinated by the product of the me I was back then, in 12th grade, before tumblr and twitter and corona and even #StopKony (you remember that, don’t you?)

Anyway, for today, I’ve got a messy collection of thoughts on themes and on masculinity in Hannapocalypse:

The way the apocalypse itself is treated in the narrative is sort of interesting. In masculine fantasies of apocalyptic survival, violence usually does get valorized. There’s this emphasis on the ability to take (usually what the villains do) and defend (usually what the heroes do), and the struggle for resources with robbery and cultlike monopolies dominating the economical scene. Look at Zombieland for an example of what was popular around this time—no one makes anything, they just wander around the ruins of an empty civilization, scavenging whatever they need. Doomsday preppers, which were about to break into the mainstream within a year or two of UIS coming out, overwhelmingly focus on 1. Hoarding supplies 2. Planning how to defend those supplies. It’s all MRE’s and canned food and fantasies of shooting other people who desperately want your MRE’s and canned food.

Hannapocalypse isn’t like that. While Hannapoc isn’t exactly focused on crafting and making the way that a more solar punk take on post-civilization recovery would be, it’s also not interested in hoarding or defending resources. It’s mercantile, honestly—by the third installment It’s the life of a traveling tinkerer, a service-based economy, in which you provide a service (exorcisms, magic, courier services) or you provide goods (scavenged, admittedly). There are many bases of stable civilization with which to trade. Hannapoc, in contrast with shows like The Walking Dead, offers a decentralized but ultimately capable view of human society. Instead of inevitable entropy and dissolution, communities look toward their local leaders for guidance and pull together in such a way that they survive and build new isolated governmental structures. It happens all over, and it doesn’t involve a lot of mass refugee movement. Neighboring towns consolidate and band together in every region. Sometimes the new power structure is bad, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s neutral.

But violence itself… violence is deeply rooted in hannapoc in a way that goes beyond just “action based plot, fight the bad guys, save the good guys”. Violence is not social power—as stated before, aside from CMC, violence isn’t really the principle that society organizes upon. Violence here is personal power.

The moment that Conrad’s entire character begins the shift from being “helpless, confused, passive” to “formidable, capable, active” is the moment in the gas station where he either kills or very seriously injures another man in order to protect Worth (and himself, but Worth is the locus of the action). Conrad uplifts himself through violence. The basis for Doc Worth’s respect of him in canon is his lashing out at Worth in violence, and that trend only carries forward in hannapoc.

Yes Hanna Cross values negotiation and compromise, empathy; yes the social structure of the world values community recovery. But the two main characters at the center of this world are building not only their value (as guards) in the little economic unit of their traveling family but also their value to each other in a language of violence. They communicate on their very first road trip (and later) through outbursts of violence where words seem to fail them. Conrad’s fear, as well as his grief, are expressed through physically fighting with Worth. At the same time, Worth is struggling to express his compassion and care for Conrad by initiating violent interactions in which Conrad can express himself this way. It’s cathartic, but deeply dysfunctional. Maybe it’s inevitable for the situation—how can anyone hope to grapple with a meaningless and terrifying die out of their species without retreating into some mad urge or another? But it certainly isn’t wholesome.

This is where Fight Club’s influence really shows through. Because all of this? This is what Worth brings to the narrative, and the single greatest influence on the writing of Doc Worth is Fight Club. Fight Club (the novel) deals in themes of isolation, alienation, problematic coping, and most of all, masculinity as monolith. Tyler Durden famously states that “self improvement is masturbation”: self destruction is cleaner, more beautiful, more meaningful. It’s a nihilist view that idealizes the ugliness of permanently open wounds on a living-but-dying body. When you first meet Doc Worth, he is masochistically reveling in his own rock bottom life. He is a Tyler Durden without the cult, or maybe he is a Cult of One. He loves exactly two people, and only grudgingly. His ideal state is one of having nothing to lose. It takes the end of the world to make him admit that maybe he cares for Conrad, too.

The narrative never actually questions whether Conrad becoming more comfortable with violence is good or not. When he’s introduced he is repressed, afraid of his own strong and negative emotions as well as--it seems--his more positive ones. Does he get better at expressing himself once Doc Worth has provided a pressure release valve on his darker side? Debatable. Defending himself, Defending Worth, and contributing meaningfully to the family unit as physical support all make him marginally more confident as time goes on, but Worth continues to belittle him regardless of the ways in which he has improved. He takes Worth at face value throughout all of this, barely entertaining the idea that Worth might even be capable of warm feelings. The violence might help Conrad cope with his grief, and it might provide a basis for communication with Worth that augments their extremely limited verbal dialogue, but it does not give him the tools he needs to make this place--make this person--a home. He becomes very good at killing, which is a useful skill under the circumstances, but there’s not much room in the bedroom he shares with Worth for him to grow.

For a long time, antagonism remains the main way that Worth initiates connection with Conrad. There’s an uneasiness between Worth’s rock solid life philosophy and the story of survival/recovery that the overall series is trying to tell. In a Cowboy Beebop fashion, Worth seems to regard himself as someone who is already dead, and so whatever happens…. happens. It isn’t until his death and last minute resurrection by Conrad that these two poles are brought into alignment. It’s worth noting that the battle at the barricade where Doc Worth dies was written years before the fic containing it. It’s a specter that looms over the first era of the series, while also drawing out the uncomfortable disharmony for a very long time.

I have to talk about POV distance here. Even though all the parts of hannapocalypse are technically close third person, there are things both accidental and intentional that strip away the intimacy of reading Worth pov. The deliberate thing is the avoidance of using any clear emotional descriptions at all. Worth reacts to emotional stimulus in purely physical ways—his fists clench, teeth grit, his stomach sinks. He never describes his fear or anger or anything more delicate, leaving all of it in a kind of primordial stew of impulses and reactions. It is almost as if he doesn’t have the language to describe his internal state. The reader is forced to interpret his emotional core without much help.

But the accidental technique is the dialogue. The funny thing about transcribed accents is that usually they have the side effect of putting distance between the audience and the reader, because of the effort it takes to decode them and also because of the othering that happens when the narration looks one way and the dialogue looks the other. Doc Worth’s accent was inherited from a comics format, where accents are still pretty common in the mainstream and less othering because of the lack of frame narration, so it’s interesting to look at what it might accidentally be doing on the page. Doc Worth is your narrator, but he’s also sort of resisting the ordeal of being Known. I’m not saying the accent has aged well—honestly I think the writing would probably be better off without it, or at least with a much more toned down version—but it does cause some interesting effects. (Also, what the hell is this accent. It’s some hellish mish mash of whatever Tessa Stone was writing and I think a southern accent I was channeling. Trading “can” for “kin” definitely feels southern in the mouth.)

So what's the take away here? We have Spike Speigle’s dreamy nihilism, Fight Club’s empowerment through violence, a community-based social philosophy. Worth’s suspicious nature and cynicism are validated in almost every installment right up until it kicks his ass and causes him to self-sabotage in the death/resurrection arc. But in a way it’s been undermining him all along, putting Conrad in the position where he cannot safely make any overture of open friendship or care without being afraid of the punishment he will almost certainly take, even though what Worth wants most deeply is the security of Conrad’s affection. When you consider that Worth starts the story with only two relationships, both of which he maintains through antagonism and gestures of service (like a distant father, or a confused bachelor) a structure of themes starts to come clear. 

I think you’ve basically got a clash of masculine and feminine lenses here in Hannapoc. The world itself, with an emphasis on community ties and cooperation, is a more feminine space. Worth, with his pride, isolation, and reliance on physical aggression, is a highly masculine figure superimposed on it. Conrad occupies this ambiguous space between, where he can be empowered through violence in the same way as a traditionally masculine character, but can never be comfortable in that place because of his longing for empathy, affection, and support. Because the series is ultimately a romance, warmth and human connection ultimately triumph, and at the end of things, perhaps the biggest takeaway is this: yet again, Gay Love Pierces Through the Vale of Death and Saves the Day.

[desdemonafictional]

@erinthesails

So looking at the Office scene from “Saints and Spirits”, which is actually kind of two scenes? With a dream sequence in the middle? I’m having an interesting time trying to figure out which things Vaysh wrote and which things I did. I had the last word in the drafting process so a lot of the time there are sections where she wrote most of it but then I wrote a line or a sentence in the middle. What I’m noticing that’s kind of funny is that almost every time Worth says something outright flirtatious or sexual, it’s Vaysh’s contribution. Man, I just was not interested in sexual innuendo, huh? Every time someone talks about eating, though, it’s usually me

So the office scene happened because we really wanted to include Lamont, and we wanted to include Lamont because ever since Up In Smoke I had been treating Lamont as an actual ghost haunting Worth. As I had gone along in the series, I had decided that the ghost needed to be addressed explicitly in the narrative, and the mechanism for the haunting needed to be clarified. The stuff about actually putting Lamont to rest came later, as we were hashing out the plot of the story. I had watched a fair amount of Supernatural by this point in the series (I started watching it after a reader turned me on to it, somewhere around installment 3) and the importance of burying a body properly was more on the forefront of my mind.

When I wrote Up in Smoke, I fully intended for the office to have been destroyed entirely by the fire. But while working on the outline for this fic, we realized that by skipping over the scene of actual destruction, I had left us a lot of freedom to return to the structure and interrogate it for answers. Coming back to this is a chance not just for Worth to get closure, but for Conrad to come to understand him better. When they were last in this space, Conrad didn’t have the tools to parse why Worth did any of the things he did, but now they’re here together and everything that he once took for granted is new to him again. Looking over it, I think the most important moment from Conrad’s point of view is when Worth asks him “who do you think I am, anyhow?” There’s a lot going on in this scene, but those were my emotional beats: the corpse (guilt; regrets that you thought were dealt with), Hanna in one of Worth’s earliest memories (the contrast of how self conscious he used to be), and Conrad beginning to e-examine the foundations of his understanding of Worth, and whether Worth is a feeling being with his own history of love and loss after all.

When I was in 9th grade my English teacher explained to us how the Homecoming tradition each fall traces back to the need to lead ghosts back home to revisit the world of the living. I think she was just saying stuff to keep us listening because we were 14 and bored, but I never forgot it, and I feel a lot of homecoming when I look over this fic now.

[snailsinthesails]

Familiar, Like My Mirror

More Hannapocalypse fic!

@sauntervaguelydown requested Lil Lamont meeting her namesake! This was going to be short but then I started having......ideas..... Raising a teenage antichrist has gotta be a hell of a job, but I can’t imagine being Conrad and Worth’s kid is an easy task either.

Summary: It’s Halloween in California. Again. This time, Conrad and Worth have an extra passenger along for the ride, and Lamont is determined to prove she's up to the job. But on Hallows Eve, you can't outrun the ghosts of the past for long...

Word Count: 14.5 K (strap tf in)

“Hate bein’ back here,” Worth said through gritted teeth. “Gives me the heebie jeebies.”

He had been cleaning his shotgun since they hit Reno, in that compulsive way he always did when he was nervous. Conrad’s knuckles had been going steadily whiter on the wheel of the borrowed SUV for each mile of desert that ticked by enroute to the west coast.

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[snailsinthesails]

Lay Your Hands, Rest Your Feet

Yep, you heard right, coming in hot with a new Hannapocalypse fic in the year of our lord 2019. Vampdads got me feeling some kind of way this week, so be sure to do the appropriate required/heavily suggested reading beforehand.

Summary: It ain’t easy baptizing the antichrist, but God as his witness, John is going to try.

Rated: E for Everyone and D for Disgustingly Sappy

Word Count: 5.5K

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[snailsinthesails]

a long way from you // another conworth playlist

1. dark pink // fischerspooner | 2. kill of the night // gin wigmore | 3. the masochism tango // tom lehrer | 4. is this it // the strokes | 5. brothers // tanlines | 6. you only want it ‘cause you’re lonely // parlovr | 7. these streets // bastille | 8. turn // the wombats | 9. little mouth // los campesinos!

[listen]

the things i’ve yet to lose // a hannapocalypse nostalgia playlist

1. dark days // pup | 2. home of the strange // young the giant | 3. 79 shiny revolvers // rayland baxter | 4. casino (bad things) // houndmouth | 5. house of my soul (you light the rooms) // langhorne slim | 6. two coffins // against me! | 7. bloodbuzz ohio // the national | 8. bad things // rayland baxter | 9. take me to church // hozier | 10. 2 heads // coleman hell | 11. pixie stix // cullan bonilla | 12. our deal // best coast | 13. the calendar // panic! at the disco

[listen]