As I often point out, some arcs and storyline take longer to come to fruition than others. The Ian/Alexis relationship arc is one of my biggest examples of this besides George (more on him later) and it's far and away the longest running non-core plot thread in the series.
Starting all the way back in Descendants #2 and getting at least two issues devoted to it each volume, the relationship has had it's ups and downs and hopefully meant something special to the readers. Descendants #43 “Love You Madly” and its follow-up, #44 “It's Official!” mark a sort of half time in their arc. Those familiar with comic book relationships may think you know where it's going. Don't count me out just yet.
In this post, I explore the history of The Descendants' alpha couple, from preconception to print. All that, under the cut.
In the beginning, there were Chaos and Darkness; but not as you know them. As detailed in another post, the original Chaos and Darkness were just self insert characters for myself and whatever girl I was crushing on in High School at the moment in high school. Not my proudest moment, but luckily, C&D were less 'us with superpowers' and more life embellished characters.
Chaos had my name, but he was fearless and kind of a deadpan snarker (while I am and will always be more of a pungeon master with plenty of fear). Darkness was likewise only like my erstwhile lady loves in name and appearance. In action, she was a mix between Gargoyles' Elisa Maza and Spider-man's Black Cat. Still, they went to our high school, had our families, and shared hobbies, favorite foods and CD collections with us.
Eventually, I grew out of that phase, but Chaos and Darkness had made a place for themselves in my heart. Keeping their power sets and big chunks of their personalities, I moved them to a new setting; the far flung future of the year 2990 where a secret war with dimensional aliens (later the inspiration for Faerie) landed Issac Smith, the grandson of a famous war propagandist became the Chosen one to wield the Chaos Band, the source of the Chaotic Energy.
In an odd couple style twist, he was forced to learn the functions of the Bands as partner to the by the book and straitlaced former Airforce Major, Alexandra Keyes. It was a buddy cop movie except they fall in love in the end. Also lasers and aliens.
But it didn't stick. Mostly because I continued to insist on the mystical backstory of the Bands in the tech-only 2990 setting, bogging the whole thing down. Further, I remained distracted by the Digimon-esque mega-forming concept. Eventually I forgot the whole thing and played Dungeons and Dragons.
When I came back, before attempting Elementals, which eventually became Descendants, I wrote the first chapter of Impactor. Impactor was the story of a world where certain people were born with gifts. These gifts had terrible names, one and all, but the one belonging to Ian Smythe (name changed to make reference to Ian Malcolm and Alistair Smythe) was called Impactor, and was basically, the same density control Ian has in Descendants. In this story, he was recruited as part of Alexandra “Alex” Keyes's superhuman law enforcement division.
I lost interest in that one pretty quickly. So quickly in fact that I don't even have enough interest to keep blogging about it. So let's move on. Elementals did not include Chaos and Darkness at all, but did include an old, married couple as mentors. When I de-aged the mentors to use in Descendants, that couple was de-aged into Ian and Alexis.
At this point, allow me a tangent:
There has been some complaining and criticism of my decision to make Descendants #0 start after the fight at the Academy and Ian's house being burned down.
Let me say this: Descendants #-1 exists. And it is not good. I wrote everything from when Alexis knocks on Ian's door after two years of being MIA to the explosion that destroyed Ian's house. It is on my computer right now. Perhaps one day I'll rewrite it, but the version that I did write will never, ever see the light of day. I will explain this in another post, but I put it here because #-1 features a moment in Ian/Alexis history that I consciously omitted.
You see, in conceptualization, I knew they had a history together, but I hadn't solidified it by the time I started writing. This led to one version where Alexis had disconnected herself from her friends because Ian declared his unrequited love for her at her college graduation.
I'm going to say that again so you can see how freaking brutal this idea was: Alexis broke off contact with Ian because he said he loved her. Not only that, but she broke off contact with her other best friend, Laurel to make it a clean break.
Thank god I didn't make that canon.
The idea was to start things off as a bad day for Ian and make it worse, but the idea that Alexis would bring down doom on the guy whose heart she crushed made her pretty irredeemable. The canon fact that she bought doom down on two friends she abandoned just gives her something extra to atone for.
I also toyed with the idea of there being absolutely no tension between them. The idea there was that they had been like brother and sister before and now they were just noticing one another. Some of this lingered in the writing of Descendants #2, but it was one of those 'characters act on their own' type things. The fact that Ian remembered, after years apart, what Alexis's favorite road trip foods were was, to me too sweet to ignore.
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