Origin of the Series: The Descendants

This is a continuation of a previous post on my reflections of how I became a writer, stopped being a writer, and then came back to being one. That was a story about me. In some ways, so is this, but more accurately, it's a story about the events and ideas that gave birth to The Descendants.

If you'd like to read more, look under the cut.

College found me discovering a lot of new things I liked. I joined the anime club, started roleplaying, and with my shiny new high speed internet, I discovered webcomics. Not just discovered, but created one. With the artistic talents of my best friend, I created Ledgermain Comics, a misspelled fantasy romp that drew inspiration from RPGWorld, but usually gets compared (unfavorably) to Order of the Stick for it's highly meta treatment of the game world.

Ledgermain was a great part of my life. It allowed me to work with a dear friend on something that gave me my first taste of incredibly minor celebrity. We got to speak on a panel at a convention and made a lot of great friends and fans.

We've said this for years now, but we'd really love to continue it someday. Someday.

In any event, Ledgermain went on hiatus and I returned to my habit of writing and destroying short stories as I got to certain points and then petered out. There are probably a dozen ten to twenty page items on a disc somewhere where I tried and failed with new stories, mostly in the Ere setting, but a few that were set in space.

Around this time, my friends were starting a new roleplaying game in a new gaming system: HERO. It was set in the Xavier Institute with the cast of New X-men: Academy X. I held my nose and said 'yes' because I wanted to try the new system, quickly dashing off a basic concept of a character who was Magneto if he were a teen geek. Some of you, I sense, can see where this is going.

Just to get a feel for the setting, I went out and bought some of the comics where our 'classmates' had been lifted: New Mutants vol. 4. And I fell in love. It was a thoughtful teen drama with superpowers. I couldn't ask for anything better. And looking around the shop, I found another great teen book: Runaways, and another: Blue Beetle (Jamie Reyes). I wasn't really a comic book guy yet, but I was making a start.

I spent a few weeks sampling books, finding the ongoing House of M storyline odd, but interesting in the same way Age of Apocalypse was (I'm a sucker for AUs). And then it happened. I really should have seen it coming, because I was too happy with what was going on. House of M ended in an event called Decimation, which took out the corner of the Marvel Universe I cared about most. Not only that, but a pair of writers who acted like unruly frat boys on internet forums took over my favorite book (Academy X) and started killing off characters, many of whom the original creators had plans for, and cutting short storylines I'd been looking forward to.

This was done in order to clear the whole 'racism' angle off of superhuman registration so Marvel could make it a major 'ambiguous' issue in their Civil War storyline. I'm not going to go into the whole thing now, but the entire concept of Civil War annoyed me to no end. The fact that the government wanted to create a superhero army and this wasn't considered and evil plot just floored me.

I decided to vent this constructively and use the concept of how bad a plan a superhero army would be as the basis for my first ever National Novel Writing Month novel.

If you subscribe to the many worlds theory, that's exactly what I did too. I probably got five thousand words in, got bored and walked away from it and this blog is about genealogy.

But in this world? My internet cut out. For a month. Without it, I was left with only sporadic calls to my friends and a creeping sense of isolation. I started writing and came up with the first draft of my massive excoriation of Civil War. It was called Elementals.

It's no secret that The Descendants has a few jabs against Marvel in it. I've had Laurel talk about how stupid making a deal with the devil is, and the entire character of Wartorn is me lashing out at Mark Millar for being Mark Millar, but rest assured, Elementals was far, far more vitriolic and blatant.

Elementals was set fifty years after America built a super soldier army, which triggered a biological arms race, the cascade effect of which was pretty much Armageddon. Halfway through, a group of soldiers tried to rebel and convince their super-brothers to stop working for the government and work for the people. They were slaughtered. When the war ended, the nations exterminated their elementals.

See? Subtle.

Flash forward fifty years and we learn that the super soldier treatment ended up being hereditary. No one had thought to check this and suddenly, we had super soldier teens running around.

It also turns out that some of the ‘good’ elementals we thought were destroyed are still around and they take in some of the younger generation to teach them how to use their powers for the benefit of mankind and prevent attempts by the still-in-turmoil government from instituting super slavery again.

Again, Subtle.

Elementals was a screaming internet post with a narrative. After writing up the plot, I realized that that wasn’t what I wanted.  It wasn’t a comic world or a story I loved, it was just an emotional lashing out at something I didn’t like and in that way, it wasn’t any better than the deconstructionism I’m annoyed by.

So I went to re-writes. This time, I started with what I wanted to do; a love letter to what I love about comics. Somewhere between the silly Silver Age, the Character driven Bronze Age, and the dramatic elements of the Post Modern I saw what I wanted: A central set of characters who would eventually function as a family (though many of its members would have real family). They would have pure motivation and while they weren’t drama/character growth immune, they wouldn’t wallow in it and drag down the comic. The relationships between the characters would be showcased just as much as their awesome powers and fight scenes.

Teen drama was a big part of it, in the vein of Kim Possible or early Buffy. Showing that the kids weren’t little soldiers, but people that wanted to do good in the world for whatever reason.

The mentors would also be able to relate to the younger generation; to guide them, clash with them and complement each other. Eventually, Chaos and Darkness (resurrected from my old high school stories with actual characteristics instead of being me and my ex-girlfriend) landed here and I resolved to make the mentors just as much main characters as the younger generation.

For the setting, I decided to bridge the real world with the fantastic. I had read about Project Montauk, carried out at the appropriately named Camp Hero, where urban legends say psionic powers were tested and other otherworldly things happened. I picked up the ball and ran like hell. In the Descendants-verse, those legends aren’t only real, but happened all over the world during and after WWII.

Not only that, but I exploited one odd flaw in sci-fi and old school genetics thinking: people expect the alterations they make to people to take effect instantly. Genetics do not work that way. It would take many, many generations before the results bore fruit.

Genetics don’t work the way they do in Descendants either, but bear with me.

This put the setting in the range of the fifth and sixth generations after The Greatest Generation (2070+) where a population explosion of powered people would take place. Conveniently, it also set the whole thing twenty minutes into the future and nicely around the time of America’s tricentennial.

Tome was created as the new enemy (more on this in another article) to take advantage of the ’secret testing’ conspiracy I’d created. I haven’t fully revealed their goals, but sharp eyed readers can guess.

And there you have it; Descendants from concept to birth. Where will it go in the future? What will influence it next?

Very worthy questions. Ones I hope to answer as I create as I speak.