Commentary: Issue #46 Post-Game

As mentioned before, I have a long and complicated history with the character of Juniper Taylor (Zero). She was created to be a character vastly different than what she eventually became and escaped a terrible fate purely because I developed a soft spot for her. This in turn led me to constructing one of the series's longest running subplot, namely: Who is Juniper Taylor.

The clues were spread out over nearly three volumes and all led up to a resolution in Descendants #46 “The Juniper Chronicles”, which is impressive for a plot that was something else entirely for most of Volume 1

So what was going to happen, and how did things wind up the way they are now? Find out, under the cut. Warning: Spoilers for Descendants #46

Anyone who follows this blog knows that originally, Juniper was going to be a sleeper agent designed to destroy the Descendants from within and who would sacrifice herself in penance for this at the end of the Siege arc in Volume 1.

It was dark, t was cruel, it was everything I dislike, but I envisioned it was a deconstruction of that kind of plot. The problem was, not only did I get wise to the fact that I wasn't really deconstructing anything, but I was starting to really like Juniper, who was based on a girl my mother worked with an Mutsumi Otohime from Love Hina. I didn't want to have to stop writing her, and though resurrection (or rebuilding, as she was supposed to be a cyborg) was clearly on the table, I didn't want to kill her at all.

So in Descendants #9 came around, instead of kicking off the Judas story with Juniper starting a relationship with Warrick in the guise of making him feel better, I punted. There's no other way to say it. I didn't really rejigger anything, I just ignored it. Even Cyn's speech to Warrick at the end there was actually there to be used later is a reason Warrick was dating Jun.

And so, during the Siege storyline, I let slip that 'Zero' was a reference to Juniper's father. I followed this up by having Juniper's parents conspicuously unreachable during the subsequent 'family' arcs of Volume 2.

Majestrix and Zero Point started life in my big file of character concepts as a nameless super-couple, one with psionic powers, the other with tech. The idea had hit me when I was thinking about a time travel plot where we got to see what old, married version of Warrick and Tink would be like.

Majestrix's name was born of a conversation I had with a friend about how it seemed a shame that the '-trix' suffix for indicating a female of a profession was limited to aviatrix and dominatrix and that dentisttrix or acttrix would be better words than what we have now. Instead of a kingtrix, though, I thought majestrix was better.

Zero Point was more difficult because I'd already dug my grave with the remark about Zero's choice of codename. Zero is a terribly trite and overused name when it comes to heroes, like the non-Marvel version of X. Luckily, over the course of a week, both The Incredibles and Stargate: SG-1 reminded m of the concept of Zero Point Energy and the wonky idea that it can magically do anything. It was like getting a name and concept in a neat little package: a man who used psycho-kinetic energy to magically seem to do anything.

Which is where I punched myself in the face again, this time with my Universe Bible. See, according the the rules I've laid down for the Descendants Universe, a person can't gain powers that aren't at least tangentially related to their bloodline. Thus, Alloy and Spark have some sort of control over the chemistry of metals, but no one in the family tree can read minds.

And while, of course, you can mix and match bloodlines, or be adopted (one of these explains Lady Nightshade, whose father was an empath), but freezing and whatever ZP's powers are? Problem. What I came up with was that Zero Point doesn't run of zero point energy at all, but heat energy he absorbs from the environment.

In him, the heat absorption part of power is crude and only controlled in a general on/off manner (as illustrated in Descendants #29 when he needed to be 'recharged' by vented steam). Juniper, however, has great control and potency to that part of her power to the point that she's able to use it almost exclusively.

I'm not sure how obvious it is, and I'll make it more specific later in the series, but Juniper was more or less groomed as a child to grow up to be a superhero. That's why she has so much first aide knowledge and knife throwing skills and such a casual attitude toward the possibility of dying as a superhero (“I'm pretty shootable.”)

And now a word about the antagonists of this issue: Ethan Braylocke and his wife. They and the Greenview Ridge incident was originally going to be a background event to give a bit more bite to the anti-psi folks during Volume 5. Greenview Ridge was going to be the major rallying cry and excuse for hatemongers to use, but one the Descendants weren't involved in.

I think making it so that they were there and actually did save lives/end the threat and people are still going to use it as a reason to spit in their faces only makes the atmosphere of misinformation and rabble rousing more potent. Expect to hear many distorted accounts of Greenview Ridge throughout Vol 5.

Something I'd like to point out though: while this might seem all too familiar now (I quickly noticed parallels to the grievously misnomered 'Ground Zero Mosque' (Which is actually a community center with multi-faith chapel completely out of eyesight of ground zero), the groundwork and shape of this was in my head since Descendants #18. The series was always going in this direction, and really, people whip themselves into hate-rages all the time. That's how X-men has been symbolic for civil rights, counter culture, and civil rights for gays without really changing the formula at all.

Descendants isn't trying to make this a status quo though. I just felt it would be an interesting subplot for a while.