I wrote a story for Inktober 2018.
-announced the voyage yesterday. This news comes not two weeks after the explorer was accused of “peddling myths and delusions, not science” in a review responding to his controversial presentation at the-
-need only glance at the fossil record. The scientific community has comprehensively failed to explain these striations, yet the answer becomes eminently obvious the moment one considers the rest of the evidence: we are not the first-
-confess that I have trod the streets of that world in my dreams, I have felt that primordial light on my face. Their own faces are obscured from me. Naturally, I dare not speak to another living soul of these visions, lest-
-departed at dawn in spite of severe weather warnings. "Our position - relative to the sun - shall be critical if my instrument is to function correctly," declared-
-witnessed the ocean's might for myself. Peculiar, I believe I finally understand how such a civilisation as theirs could be crushed beneath its weight... and now recognise that our own so-called civilisation is itself barely clinging-
"-off course, we barely have enough supplies to see us home if we turn back now!"
"That's out of the question. We ration the food. There won't be another opportunity in my lifetime, and I'll be damned if-"
"-boy who keeps the birds, you talked to him yet? He wouldn't meet my eyes when I went to hand him today's report, but I didn't see him blink even once... I dunno, he's got a right look to him-"
"-but that madman's fool quest will be the death of us all."
"So you say. It's not too late. Why, this might be our only opportunity to-"
-NOTHING TO FEAR FROM THE HUMBLE
A SWAN-DIVE BORNE OF A STUMBLE-
-SMALL-MINDED EMISSARIES
SHORT-SIGHTED VISIONARIES-
-SELF-DESTRUCTIVE ACCORD
SWUNG A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD-
-know little of what happened out at sea that day, over a century ago. One homing pigeon did eventually reach shore, carrying not a final report but a confession of love that received immense scrutiny in the press and resulted in-
-a nationwide search for the letter's intended recipient. The newspapers did eventually find the girl in question, who was by all accounts deeply unsettled by the letter's content and the media attention. It is perhaps for the best then that-
-this saga was what lingered in the public consciousness, else the expedition itself might've served as an inspiration for those looking to undertake a similar voyage. One thing is clear: the deaths of sixty-eight men-
-can be attributed solely to the blind obsession of that wealthy crackpot. Perhaps the wreck lies with the mythical sunken city; that is to say, like the city, it shall never be found-
-love you I love you and I know my birds will carry my love to you surely better we might be united in God's heaven than on this cruel-
-was last seen by her housekeeper almost a week ago. This marks the family's second disappearance, following that of famed explorer-
"-shouldn't watch so much television, son. Those men are all the same: vultures, and they've dragged our family name through the dirt-"
-has a wonderful imagination. He demonstrates the ability to solve challenging problems. He is a confident speaker, but should try harder to positively connect with the rest of the class. Your child would benefit from-
"-he's a creep! Like, he thinks he's a big deal, but... he's totally not? I don't know... I just shut the door on him. Is it bad that I don't, like... I don't even feel bad about-"
-his business acumen has already earned him a reputation in the industry. His latest announcement has therefore surprised many: over the coming weeks, the majority of his assets will be liquefied to finance a state-of-the-art oceanic survey-
-regret to inform you that your research proposal has not been selected for funding. The board has found several assertions of dubious validity in your proposal, a detailed evaluation of which follows. We recommend-
-but I learned not to talk about you. People always think I'm crazy or something, but I'm not crazy, and I don't think you were either. The man I've seen in your papers is nothing like the man the world made you out to be. I think that-
-if you were still here, you'd... you'd get it. You'd be proud of my accomplishments. I mean, I've made sacrifices - I've rebuilt the family fortune, and I've practically spent it all on this journey, on replicating your instrument, so-
-I can finally find out what happened to you out there. I want to see the wreck, at least. That would- well, it'd be a kind of closure, anyway. A hollow, bitter, nihilistic sort of closure - it'd prove them all right... still, the idea-
-rings false to me. I've seen your drawings of the lost city (though of course, you didn't label them as such) and I've never seen someone write with such conviction. I don't know how you knew, but you knew. No, I simply-
-can't shake the image: that I'll finally go down there, and I'll find you waiting for me with open arms outside the gates of your drowned city. Just a daydream - after all, if they were so much better than us, then why-
-AS IT HAPPENED THEN
START ANEW AGAIN-
-NOT PETTY PROPHECY
BUT PROBABILITY-
-AND ALL THAT IS DONE WILL THEN BE UNDONE
AND THE EARTH WILL SHINE LIKE ANOTHER SUN-
Writer’s Commentary
When I moved away for university, I really just traded one small town for another - much colder - small town. It’s got three beaches, but it’s really only warm enough to visit them at the very beginning and end of each academic year.
So there I am, at the end of the year, walking the longest beach with my parents. My dad asks me if I’ve had any thoughts for Inktober.
I haven’t.
I’d previously contributed outlines and text to his run participating in the March of Robots challenge, back in March 2018, starting with day 18. He’d decided to tell a single continuous story while sticking to the challenge’s list of prompt words, and was struggling to find a natural way of incorporating the later ones. I gave it some thought and soon enough captions were completed for the rest of the series.
Inktober 2017 was the project that got my dad - a lifelong professional illustrator and graphic designer - onto Twitter in the first place. His first illustrations on the platform followed a mouse on a journey around Europe, visiting various national landmarks. By the time Inktober 2018 started to loom in his mind, he’d accrued a decent following and wanted to attempt something a little more ambitious.
Maybe a little too ambitious.
Leviathan
People who’ve spent a lot of time around me generally know that I have an irrational fear of sea monsters. I say “generally” because it’s usually completely irrelevant, and I might never end up telling them, and I say “irrational” because - as dangerous as sea monsters are - they mostly don’t exist any more and certainly can’t hurt me. In fact, I think it’s a fear of large things in the water in general - megahydrothalassophobia.
It’s the fear that comes with being trapped in open waters, where any number of carnivorous giants may be lurking beneath. You’re an interloper in the environment of an all-consuming creature of unimaginable strength, one that is completely apathetic to your existence.
A long time ago, there were occasions where I’d be in the shower, and I’d start thinking about sea monsters, and I’d have to get out of the shower.
You can bet I struggled with swimming pools.
Despite all that - or perhaps because of it - I’ve retained a mild fascination with the ocean. Stories such as BioShock and Ever17: The Out of Infinity prove how much power can lie in a world below the waves - but I think my personal interest in the ocean as a setting goes back much further. I mean, look at SpongeBob. Stories of the Bermuda Triangle. I saw Disney’s Atlantis like once, and that giant lobster scared the heck outta me, but think I still enjoyed it enough to remember snatches over a decade later. Finding Nemo didn’t scare me, so I’ve seen that one a bunch of times. I had a lot of Alpha Team and Aqua Raiders and Atlantis Lego. Anyone remember the second Charlie Small book? How about the third Mortal Engines book? The eleventh novel in A Series of Unfortunate Events? The entirety of How to Train your Dragon? My favourite Astrosaurs book might’ve been the one on the ocean planet (wait, no, it was the one with the ghost dinosaurs on the mining planet - the ocean planet one was my second favourite). My favourite episode of Doctor Who was “Under the Lake”. My favourite episode of Bojack Horseman was “Fish Out of Water”. My favourite year of Bionicle was 2007 - the one where they all went scuba diving - but my favourite of the books was the one where they went on a boat trip through a maze of underground tunnels full of sea monsters. My favourite Transformer was Depth Charge - think Batman, only he turns into a giant manta ray. And a jet - he can turn into a jet too. Sorry, what were we talking about?
Oh yeah, the ocean. Actually, around halfway through October I read Jeff Lemire’s The Underwater Welder (having previously seen an episode of Strip Panel Naked examining its panel composition), and towards the beginning of that comic I was surprised to see similar themes of obsession and paternal relationships coming up. I haven’t had a chance to play Return of the Obra Dinn yet, but apparently it came out during October. It’s a monochromatic story about piecing together some grisly events that took place at sea. By that point, Another Son had been written pretty much in its entirety - I remember seeing Obra Dinn’s trailer and thinking “aww man, that looks so much better.”
But anyway, that was all still to come. I’m standing on that beach, with the big blue to my side. I think about Inktober - the moody, scratchy, detailed visuals that often come with use of a traditional ink pen. I think that I don’t want my dad to have to draw the same thing thirty-one days in a row.
Well. The ocean it is.
Up
For a good while, Pixar’s Up was my favourite movie. It’s a story about this old guy, and when he was younger he idolised this explorer, so he has a dream to go exploring too - only he meets some girl, and they get married and live their whole lives without ever getting the chance to follow that dream all the way to South America. So in the present - when the movie’s set - this old guy’s obsessed with his house, which to him represents his past and his now-dead wife and their dreams, and everything’s changed and he hates everyone and refuses to move. Eventually he turns the house into an airship and flies to South America, only some kid stows away, and the kid teaches the old guy to care about people again, and it turns out the explorer who the old guy idolised is still in South America, only he’s totally evil, and they fight. And at the end of the movie, they have to leave the house behind in South America, and the old guy looks after the kid, and they live happily ever after.
I like that movie a lot.
There’s something about Up’s old-timey adventure story aesthetic that appeals to me. You see it in Philip Reeve’s Larklight (and, to a lesser extent, Mortal Engines), and a myriad of the other stories I’ve already mentioned. It’s a style I dabbled in for “Alien Fireflies”. It’s characterised, I think, by this sense of the untouchable - civilisations lost, creatures untamed. The protagonists of these stories are filled with wonder, or with greed, and - ideally - their quest fails.
Witwicky
Remember the first Transformers movie? Of course you do, even if you don’t think you do. In the scene where we meet our human protagonist, Sam Witwicky, he’s giving a class presentation about his great-great-grandfather, Archibald, a "very famous explorer.” He elaborates that his ancestor was a pioneer, one of the first to set foot in the Arctic Circle, which is a “big deal”, but that he went insane after the expedition. His class isn’t impressed - and neither is Sam, really, who’s just trying to sell his grandfather’s junk to raise funds for a car.
Anyway, it turns out that Archibald saw a giant metal man beneath the ice, and that aliens were real the whole time, and - despite ostensibly not caring about his grandfather - Sam’s got one hell of an ego, a feeling that he was made for great things, and then there were another two movies.
Something that rubbed people the wrong way about those movies is, I think, Sam’s misanthropy. He basically hates people, he idolises the Transformers, he basically wants to be the Transformers, and he thinks he’s better than everyone else. And, ultimately, the Transformers ruin his life. Like, he straight-up kills a guy at the end of the third movie. He’s a deeply-flawed, tragic hero who only really changes for the worse.
(Check out Terry Van Feleday’s I Actually Kinda Appreciate the Transformers Movies for a wider analysis of the franchise - I promise it’s more than worth your time.)
Ultimately, I think I made the same mistake Transformers did. But I’ll get to that.
Premise
So fine. It’s the ocean. And there’s this explorer. Only I don’t want my dad to be drawing the same stuff every day - so let’s do half the story in the present, and half in the past. And it’d be cool to do Up, only maybe darker. Lots darker. Do the reverse of Up’s arc - no, combine it with Transformers’ arc - it’s a story about the explorer and his obsession, and the guy in the present’s garbage, so he never stops idolising that explorer. And...
And they destroy the world together.
Here’s my first draft of the synopsis, typos and all:
It is the late 19th century. After years of public ridicule, a wealthy explorer decides to set the record straight. He hires a crew and charters a vessel. When warnings of a storm brewing out at sea reach his ears, he refuses to delay his departure by even a day. His quest? To find the lost city of Atlantis, using an instrument of his own design to measure fluctuations in the Earth's gravity. At first, things seem fine - the vessel makes good progress. Things immediately take a turn for the worse, however, when the storm makes its scheduled appearance. The ship is hundreds of miles off-course, and it seems that there may not be enough supplies to make it back if they continue. Convinced that they need not worry about supplies if only they can make it to Atlantis, the explorer presses on. By the time they reach the patch of ocean within which his instrument claims the lost city lies, the crew is starving and on the verge of a riot. Nonetheless, he drops the anchor, gets into the diving suit and slowly makes his way to the ocean floor. There, he finds something - blocks of carved stone. All that's left of his sunken city, everything he ever dreamed of. He follows the blocks and comes across an object, sticking out of the ocean floor. He reaches out... Meanwhile, tensions at the surface have reached a breaking point. The crew polarises, with most of the rank and file turning against a small group of loyalists. In the ensuing fights, the winch is tripped. Before the explorer touches the object, his breathing tube suddenly goes taut and he is pulled at breakneck speed towards the surface. The effects of decompression sickness set in almost immediately, and he loses consciousness. The winch is stopped, but it is too late - he hangs and drifts. The fight in the boiler room has meanwhile escalated, and a fire starts. The boiler explodes, splitting the ship in half. The wreckage is never found. The ship had sent regular communications back to land via homing pidgeon, and when it sank all that remained were sent at once - attached to one was an unsigned confession of love, written in a hurry and addressed only with a first name. The press is unable to identify either the sender or the intended recipient. The explorer's wife, left with nothing but a brute of a son named after her missing husband and piles of debt, jumps from a bridge.
The son is raised by the state and eventually has a boy of his own. He tells his son what his carers told him - that his grandfather was a fraud, a quack, and a fool. As the grandson reaches adolescence, however, he rejects this reality in favour of his own: that his grandfather was a misunderstood visionary. As he grows older he suffers perceived misfortune after misfortune - his estranged mother flees the country, he is rejected by girls, universities and employers. Still, he invests well and amasses a shipping empire from scratch. Once he is confident in his position he commandeers one of his vessels and, under the pretense of sponsoring a biological survey, sets out to succeed where his grandfather ultimately failed. Guided by a modern replica of the instrument in his grandfather's notes, he finds the same spot and dives. At the sea bed he finds a length of black tubing, and he follows it past the blocks until he reaches the black metal monolith. There, at the end of the tube, his grandfather waits. They talk, and the secrets of the Atlanteans are revealed. They ruled the icy wastes once - strange, inhuman creatures. Wars were fought. Weapons were built. Used, melting the ice and creating the oceans. One remains. Bitter, alienated, and seduced by the voice speaking through his grandfather's corpse, the grandson reaches out and touches the black metal. For the second time, the planet shines like a second sun.
Change
So how does that differ to the final version of the story?
The lost city is explicitly Atlantis - I decided to avoid using the name, because neither the explorer or his descendant see their belief in the city as the cliche’d fantasy it is.
The explorer’s instrument explicitly uses the Earth’s gravity - in the final version, day 5′s “relative to the sun” note is all we learn about it.
The explorer rationalises pressing on by deciding that they’ll be able to salvage supplies from the lost city - I thought this was a bit too stupid, and just made his emotional motivations (the idea that he’ll only get one chance) more explicit during the argument on day 7.
The love-letter subplot (which begins on day 8) is different - more on that later.
The sunken city consists only of sunken blocks of stone, as seen in day 10 - it was my dad’s prerogative to make them more building-like, and the end result looks much better than I’d envisioned.
The mutiny is covered in much more detail - I decided to play up the sense of speculation, of being a historian looking back on events, by cutting it down to just day 13′s winch scene and the ship sinking on day 17.
The circumstances of the explorer’s wife’s suicide are clearer - I couldn’t really find a way of concisely conveying that information with in-universe text, and it was ultimately just covered on day 18.
The descendant is just the explorer’s grandson! This was entirely an error on my part; I did a rough mental calculation that was completely wrong. In reality, he’s probably a great-great-grandson (as Sam was in Transformers).
More detail’s given on the descendant’s parents - in the final version, we don’t technically even know if the one parent we see (on day 19) is his mother or father. For thematic consistency, I envisioned him as the father.
The details of the descendant’s path to darkness are different - I added day 20′s presentation as a direct nod to the Transformers scene, and didn’t really cover how he got to the point where he could finance the survey (seen on day 22). The “rejection letter” idea was reconstructed as a rejection for funding (seen on day 23), which felt like a far less contrived and far more thematically relevant way of presenting the information.
The story’s climax features exposition on the lost civilisation from the ghost/zombie explorer. The “ghost” only ended up appearing on day 28, and I left it more ambiguous as to whether or not he exists at all. The exposition ended up mostly being left to implication, told over the six “prophecy” days but most explicitly through the image on day 29.
Looking back on all of these changes, I think they generally improved the story. Except one.
Letter
I can’t remember when I came up with the love letter subplot - probably in the car on the way home. Originally, I intended it as a single page, a little interjection of someone else’s story into the otherwise pretty focused narrative. As you can see from my original outline, the recipient was originally never going to be identified, as a sort of mirroring for how the ship and the city were themselves never found.
But I decided it was a little darker to play up the asymmetry of the sequence - tying more closely instead to the explorer’s themes of obsession - and turned the letter into a stalker’s last words. There was something darkly compelling about the idea that the letter drags its intended recipient into the story, against their will - and years later, this stranger’s all she’s known for. It seemed like a cool subplot, and it kinda still does.
That was when things started to go off the rails - I couldn’t find a way of squeezing the subplot into a single in-universe document, and it ballooned out - beginning on day 8, where I cheated a little by just having an unnamed crew member talk about the “boy who keeps the birds”. The payoff comes on day 13, day 14 and day 15 through the documentary extract, with an extract from the letter itself appearing on day 17 alongside the pigeon.
Unfortunately, I’d already planned for day 18 to be a nod to the explorer’s wife. This is where things get messy. I’d planned to mirror the letter’s recipient against the explorer’s wife, but the immediate transition from the former to the latter caused some people in the audience - very reasonably - to read them as being one and the same. Of course, that creates logical inconsistencies elsewhere, but the story’s format makes it hard to check those. At this point, the story becomes confusing, and the readers end up doubting either themselves or me. The fact that none of the characters in the story receive names and none of the dialogue/documents are attributed adds to the confusion. The letter itself, at least, clearly doesn’t come from the explorer - it refers to the birds specifically to show that it’s written by the boy spoken of on day 8.
Another Son is very dark, and it’s very fragmented. I wanted the readers to piece the story together - work out how the captions relate to the images, to each other. That’s one of the main reasons I wrote as much of the story as possible in the form of documents from within its world: I wanted the readers to feel like historians working from incomplete, primary sources, struggling - like the explorer - to understand something they can never be part of.
There’s a problem with hiding your story like that, though - with making your characters so unlikable. It’s the problem with the Transformers movies. If the readers don’t care about the story, then why should they bother? The very moment they lose interest, the moment they throw their hands up and say “whatever, I don’t get it” - that’s the moment I’ve failed as a writer.
Art
After writing the story’s outline, my next step was to translate that into art direction for each of the thirty-one images my dad would need to illustrate over the month.
1. Cover. 2. The interior of a fancy, lived-in office overlooking the port. 3. Schematics for the instrument. 4. The explorer's illustration of what his vision of Atlantis looks like. 5. The ship on a calm sea with the wind in its sails. Clouds on the horizon. 6. The storm. 7. Seen only in silhouette through the window of his quarters, the explorer argues with his first mate. 8. The cages where the pigeons are housed. 9. The explorer dons the diving suit, while the rest of the crew sullenly watch. The engine that operates the winch is prominent. 10. Wide shot of the explorer being slowly lowered parallel to the chain of the anchor. 11. He traces a path through the ruins. The black object is visible in the distance. (composition parallels that of day 4) 12. He reaches the black metal object, and reaches out... 13. By the winch, a brawl has broken out. 14. He is yanked backwards by the tube, up and away. 15. He clutches at his throat. Bubbles escape the suit. 16. He hangs limp. 17. Above, the ship burns and sinks. Birds are seen fleeing. 18. A woman stands on a bridge. (composition parallels that of day 9) 19. A young boy sits in front of a bright television. Behind him, in the shadows, a large man watches. 20. The boy gives a presentation about his ancestor's expedition to the class. 21. A bunch of flowers, trampled in the rain. 22. The interior of a fancy, modern office overlooking the port. (composition parallels that of day 1) 23. The new instrument. (composition parallels that of day 2) 24. The ship travels past icebergs. 25. The grandson prepares to dive. (composition parallels that of days 9 & 18) 26. Surrounded by bones, wreckage, and the barest hints of the ruins - all buried in layers of crustaceans and plant life - the grandson sets foot on the sea bed. 27. He stands between two ancient cables, dragged back towards the black object looming over him. 28. His grandfather stands between him and the black metal. 29. The Atlantean civilisation, as it was - ravaged by war. (composition parallels that of days 4 & 11) 30. He reaches out to touch the black metal... 31. Seen from the outer solar system, two stars glow brightly.
There wasn’t really much in the way of images that we cut - at one point I’d suggested doing an image of the anchor being lowered, and another of the ship’s hold. That image was to be accompanied with an excerpt from the ship’s inventory/manifest, as a way of illustrating that the crew was running out of food in the wake of the storm - my dad was quick to point out that if I was having to research what a reasonable amount of food for a ship of this size was, then I couldn’t expect the audience to work out what was too little.
We passed back and forth on the two A4 pages of thumbnails. I kept encouraging my dad to be more adventurous with his compositions to create more eye-catching imagery, but - apart from a couple of times where my descriptions were misleading - his illustrations continually blew me away. I mean, just look at them! The tone, the detail... these drawings are even more impressive when you take them in the context of the rest of his work, which covers such a wide range of styles.
You can notice that I noted in some places where I thought composition could be used to draw a link back to earlier moments. The final story ended up using that technique a little more than I’d expected - day 5 and day 24 share composition. Day 27 ended up using the same “lost city” composition as day 4, day 11 and day 29. That is, incidentally, my favourite of my dad’s compositions - my only suggested changes were to make the buildings’ architecture more alien (you can see the original look in the rough pencil drawing above) and change the direction of day 11′s fish so they swim away from the black object.
Something I always tried to stress was that the black object should, from the moment we first see it, be this textureless blot of ink that just sort of consumes the page. The story’s ending, starting with day 27, features it very prominently, but it’s perhaps day 12 that achieves the effect most successfully.
Text
Thanks to the hashtags we were using, I only had 241 characters to work with for each of my captions - and some of them really came down to the wire. It was mainly that limit, along with a desire to keep characters as nameless as they are faceless, that inspired the fragmented paragraphs. Making sure to start and finish each one in a way that made it clear you were only seeing part of a sentence was often pretty tricky!
Many of the science-y bits of the story were directly inspired by a module in “astrobiology” (read: aliens) that I took last year. We learned about things like the Apex chert and ALH84001 controversies, and I was struck by just how personal those conflicts were - you can see that influence directly on day 3. I’d originally planned to go much deeper into the effects of the black object, perhaps tying it into the faint young Sun paradox.
To a certain extent, I envisioned the black object as being a metaphor for some combination of climate change and nuclear weapons - something catastrophic that feels kinda inevitable, but which is ultimately within our power. The only solution is to do everything you can to avoid it. The icebergs on day 24 were a stab at that kind of ecological imagery, but it would probably have made more sense to have had them appear back on day 5 instead.
Prophecy
I knew from the start that I wanted the story’s final line to be about the Earth shining “like another sun” (well, “like a second sun” - the story’s preliminary name was just “Second Son”). The “prophecy” came about in the form it did mostly because I had some space to fill! I very occasionally write (terrible) lyrics in my spare time (and have had occasional success with poems), so I liked the idea of doing a good ol’ fashioned rhyming prophecy - it seemed like a much more interesting way of providing exposition on the lost civilisation than just by having the explorer’s ghost say it, as in the original draft.
“nothing to fear from the humble / a swan-dive borne of a stumble” - pride can be dangerous; small delusions can quickly snowball into much bigger ones
“small-minded emissaries / short-sighted visionaries” - the lost civilisation was advanced, but kinda hypocritical and unwilling to compromise; they didn’t understand the repercussions of their conflict
“self-destructive accord / swung a double-edged sword” - they knew what the black object would do; they were still unanimous in their decision to use it
“as it happened then / start anew again” - the black object acts as a kind of “reset”; they knew their successors might activate it themselves
“not petty prophecy / but probability” - the black object will survive its activation; it’ll only be a matter of time before something triggers it again
“and all that is done will then be undone / and the earth will shine like another sun” - it’ll scorch the planet
I think the most important tip I’ve ever picked up for writing verse is that, once you get a couplet, you should swap each line. Generally speaking, you come up with one line, then come up with one that rhymes with that, and take for granted that that’s the order they’ll have to be in - but you get a stronger, more unpredictable rhyme by swapping them. As far as I can remember, pretty much all of the prophecy’s couplets was written that way.
Oh, and ignoring what I wrote in the original draft, here’s one final thought on the prophecy - what’s to say the black object was something they created? Maybe, like the explorer, they just found it.
Record
Here’s a full list of in-universe sources that appear in the story:
2, 5, 18, 22. newspapers 3. open letter 4, 6. explorer’s journal 7. dialogue (first mate, explorer) 8, 9. dialogue (crew) 10-12, 29-31. prophecy 13-16. documentary 17. love letter 19. dialogue (father, to descendant) 20. descendant’s school report 21. dialogue (girl, present-day, on descendant) 23. rejection letter to descendant 24-28. descendant’s journal
End
It’s ironic that the mistakes I made here snowballed in the way they did - a swan-dive borne of a stumble.
Another Son is too confusing, too dark, and is trying to be waaay too clever. You can see that the descendant’s journal was a direct attempt to course-correct the story’s ending, by making things as clear as possible. It asks a pretty straightforward question - “if they were so much better than us, then why” did they all die? And the answer’s simple - because they didn’t do enough to stop that from happening.
Of course, the descendant can’t even finish the question.
The fact that the explorer’s wife even exists isn’t even known until day 18, after his death - and that’s entirely deliberate. There’s this entirely one-sided relationship between the boy who keeps the birds and the girl he writes to - hopefully, his letter comes across every bit as deranged and creepy as I intended it to. Day 21 is the only occasion in the story where we hear from a female character first-hand - she’s venting to a friend, having scorned the descendant’s advances.
Throughout this story, I wanted to convey the idea that these men weren’t owed anything. I wanted to say that sometimes, you’re allowed to ignore them - because they’re wrong, and they make more people wrong. When that last girl asks whether it’s bad that she doesn’t feel bad about rejecting this guy, I wanted to imply the answer that it’s totally not. But in the moment, she doesn’t know that. Worse, a big part of me feels like this story conveyed the opposite - that the reason the descendant killed the world is because nobody would ever give them what they wanted. And then it’s like, well, were those people wrong to reject the roses, reject the research?
I don’t think so.
Be sure to follow my dad on twitter - if you want to know more about any of his artwork, just tweet at him. He regularly posts illustrations in a huge variety of styles, so there’s definitely something for everyone there. If you’re in need of a freelance designer/illustrator, don’t hesitate to contact him!
My own ask box is always open, but you can also follow me on twitter (where I mostly just talk about Transformers) if you prefer. You can view the rest of my writing on my blog - I recommend starting with Everything Is Red Now, a dumb comic about Spider-Man.