Came across my sort of headcanon masterdoc for how BLI was started that I all wrote down because I have an au in my drafts that deals with the creation of BLI and the killjoys and danger days universe if the Fab Four were there since the very beginning and how they went from normal teenagers to rebels fighting a war and. holy SHIT guys this shit is genius and I totally forgot about it all. Anyway figured I’d finally post some of it.
As we all know, canon information on the formation of Better Living and how the country became a postapocalyptic, irradiated dead zone is… scarce to say the least. We know that there were the Helium/Atomic wars but don’t know if those are separate wars or two names for the same thing. We know that the great fires happened in 2012 and that they were a possible cause for the rise of Better Living. We know the pig bomb was dropped in 2017 thanks to a Cherri Cola tweet and if I remember correctly it was dropped in Texas(literally can’t remember if that’s canon or part of my shit) and probably related to the wars, which apparently took place not long before the music videos. We know that the further out into the zones you go the more radiation there is and that as of 2019 the zones get acid rain. And we also know that Australia somehow just up and disappeared which is by far the most eldritch canon detail about the dd universe.
So I have built upon the breadcrumbs of canon and just sweeped some under the rug and done quite the feat of worldbuilding to explain how BLI and the killjoys came to be.
In my mind it all starts in 2012, but it’s probably been in the works for decades. There were conspiracy theories of corrupt governments and secret societies but nobody knew the true extend of it. One second the country was running as normal, the next the government was taken down by people in its own ranks, people that have lied their way to the top and were secretly working together just to take over. In a day the country falls, America attacks itself. Communications are cut off along with everything else that society needs to function. Power is shut off nationwide, satellites are disabled, missiles(non nuclear) shoot into the air just to turn around and attack the very land they hailed from. From the ashes of America rise the corrupt individuals that made it all happen, with the woman that’ll become known as the director at the helm of it all. They form a new government and try to round up the survivors, intent on creating a utopia from the rubble.
I have no idea what’s going on with other countries if they help or if this new government attacked any other countries or just its own or if a world war is essentially started I just figure since canon didn’t touch on it and nobody else ever does I won’t either. Use your imagination I guess.
But it’s 2012, the country is in shambles, the biggest cities have fallen, smoke covers the land. The great fires of 2012 start not a week after the demolition of the USA, beginning as fires from burning cities that cause surrounding land to catch light and later on, its deliberate napalm to shape the path of the fires and drive people out of their shelters, using the destructive powers of Mother Nature to literally herd survivors to certain areas of the country.
The great fires quickly lead to the start of the Helium/Atomic wars, which are two names for what’s the same fight, but different sections of it. The helium wars come first, a rebellion to the new government was quickly formed by what remained of uncorrupt military and control over weapons are essentially split between the two sides. An all out war breaks out and the sides start off evenly matched, the numbers of those loyal to the new government and those remaining images of what fell fairly well matched.
A month after civilization falls the new government drops the first nuke on New York City already demolished by the first missiles, its now doomed to be a nuclear wasteland as well. It seems like this would be called the atomic war, with the use of atomic bombs, but it’s not. This is the true start of the helium war, for it seems both sides are suddenly eyeing the precious resource, for who has control over its production might very well come out on top of this fight, for helium is used in everything from medical technology to space exploration and national defense. It’s used for welding and in rocket fuel and nuclear reactors and yes, nuclear weapons. And it’s already a finite resource, non renewable and already said to be running out. And now in this ruined country there’s more of a demand for it then ever. And guess what? The United States is the biggest producer of helium worldwide, with the largest helium deposit located in Texas.
It’s unclear which side drops the second nuke, but what matters is that it falls smack dab on top of that deposit. It seems desperate times call for desperate measures and the desperate measures were to wipe out the source of advancement for the war completely. It becomes known as the pig bomb.
The fight goes on for two years during which the new government builds ‘safe zones,’ aka walled cities for survivors to head to, just to get trapped in and made to work. The rebellion is diminishing and unfortunately the enemy is winning. Then the third and final nuke is dropped, once again by the new government. It’s discovered that the rebellion was actually the side to drop the pig bomb, but it did pay a crucial blow to the enemy and helium remains scarcer than ever, meaning they must limit what the manufacture and how they build.
The third nuke is dropped northeast of the pig bomb, around Wyoming , and the sick thing is it doesn’t do that much. The country there is already burned flat so it wipes out a good chunk of the rebellion that was hiding in the Midwest but other than that all it does is drive the last of the survivors to the far west, where the ruins of LA and the biggest of the safe zones resides. The placement of the nukes really locks off this to-be battery city and the zones, trapping them in a big irradiated box.
At this point numbers in both sides have dwindled and fighting has died off, not to a standstill, but the last bomb marks the official end of the helium wars as the last survivors trickle into the LA safe zone and the surviving rebels hide just outside it, in the fairly untouched desert and ghost towns that litter the borders. Supplies on both sides are running low and this quiet period of rebuilding and recollecting becomes known as the dust bowl.
The west is pretty much uninhabitable aside from this chunk of land and the rest if the country is all burnt up and cut off and the northeast is a no-go zone to radiation and in fact the entire east coast has essentially fallen into a nuclear winter, fucked up from the trade winds carrying over the radiation and ash clouds from the pig bomb and the great fires and even after two years they sky never seems to clear. The entire eastern half of the united states is a wasteland of dust storms, acid rain, pockets of radiation, and thanks to permanently altered weather patterns due to rapid Atlantic climate change from all the ash and radiation clogging the atmosphere, that means the coast is under attack from a constant barrage of deadly cyclones, meaning even if it wasn’t irradiated, living there is impossible due to the monthly high winds and flooding and all the horrible things cooking up in that ocean.
For anyone that didn’t make it to the LA safe zone, still stuck in survivable pockets of the country in the Midwest or even in the deadly east, none of them are going to last long for sure. Anyone that didn’t head west while they could has to watch out for whoever is left there with them, scrounging for resources. Looting gangs and desperate madmen roam these states and they won’t show mercy. It’s kill or be killed beyond the wall of radiation that now separates the far west from the rest of the country.
That quiet time known as the dust bowl passes slowly and at some point the LA safe zone becomes known as Battery City and the safe areas around it and the small bit of the west coast not ravaged by radiation or fires become known as the zones, numbered one through seven by how risky they are to inhabit, one being the safest, just beyond the city walls, and seven being the most dangerous, with the highest levels of radiation. They’re not perfect circles like the canon maps, since there some small dead pockets of radiation and stretches of ash land(fire ravaged areas) that are deemed inhabitable. The zones are also much larger than canon, stretching out into the edge of Arizona and maybe even Utah and Nevada.
All levels of the zones are desert wastelands, but go north and that’s the ash lands, the giant stretches of land burnt through by the great fires. The fires took months to die out and some are still burning, but the empty areas on the edge of the north zones are a true wasteland, the soil contaminated by the vast amounts of ash that coated it and if you drive through it you just kick it all up, then you can’t get out of your car or you can hardly breathe. Step onto that dead land and it’s completely barren, it feels like another world. Nothing grows, not a sprout is to be seen, just the vast dark, dead, soil. As time passes and the zones get a culture, they say that’s where you go to die, they say it’s filled with ghosts.
But back to Battery city, it’s 2016, the dust bowl period is coming to an end and each side has been rebuilding. The city is shinier then ever and the new government, now calling themselves Better Living Industries, is putting all their resources into medical experiments and technological improvements, working on robots and AI and mind altering medication. With each passing month the citizens seem to become more sated and meanwhile in the desert, the rebels are having some improvements of their own. After the last bomb fell and everyone headed to the zones and the rebellion survivors found each other, they had to spend time figuring out how to survive while avoiding the city and whatever was happening within, but now it’s been a couple years of recuperation, and the rebellion has been planning. They’ve heard of the experiments Better Living has been doing and what’s going on with the citizens and they’ve decided it’s time to stop just surviving and start fighting again, and this marks the start of the Analog Wars, a much smaller scale fight, free of missiles and bombs, it’s just one side against the other with mainly handheld weapons. It’s named for the rebellions reliance on analog equipment like radios and other older devices since there’s no normal communications or electronics available. They use things like morse code and secret messages to communicate via the airwaves and this is where Doctor Death Defying gets his big role. He was a marine turned Helium War survivor and veteran, losing his legs in the fight, and now he may not be able to be on the front lines but he mans the radio and somehow always stays positive, spreading news and hope through the zones. He coins the term Killjoys for the rebellion and this is the time when the zones culture starts blossoming, with Doctor Death coming up with most of the slang, originating as unique code words to let rebels what’s going on and where without BLI figuring out what they’re talking about, and the young folks somehow taking the lead in the fight instead of the few veterans that remain. They’re not trained soldiers, just people fighting for what’s right, and that’s what makes them dangerous. The rebellion gets their hands on some of BLIs weapons, the laser guns, making their fight more equal. The Fab Four pop up around this time and they inspire people across the zones, a team of four friends that found each other in the apocalypse, they’re still pretty much kids but now they’re leading the fight against BLI. They remember how life used to be but as the years pass and they really become soldiers, they start to forget, until all they know is the desert and a life that’s a cycle of violence and hope, life as killjoys.
When 2019 comes around and the events of the music videos may or may not happen, it’s still technically the Analog War but the term isn’t really used anymore, since it’s just life for everyone at this point, having weekly skirmishes with BLI goons, which start turning up as dracs and scarecrows instead of just soldiers in 2017.
But it’s 2019, we’re all caught up, it’s life in the zones as we know it, and that’s all I have for you today.
