This is my attempt at writing a superhero story. I was inspired to start working on this after reading the Invincible comic book series and hating it so much I was inspired to see if I could write something even slightly better. (I still really like the Invincible TV show, though). I want this story to explore the experience of being a young adult with autism. I know that sounds overdone, but I want to do it in a really allegorical way that ties into the superhero elements. I'll explain more the next time I update this page and hopefully it'll start making sense then
I'm still not super sure how I want to depict the setting of this story. I know for sure that I don't want to do the standard 'golden age metropolitan city' environment that everybody already uses, so I was thinking maybe something Solarpunk? Above all else, I want my art (if you can call it that) to be distinctive. So much of what people write comes off as masturbatory genre fluff to me, and I'm piss scared that somebody else will have the same opinion of my work, so I'm trying to put everything I've got into making this memorable and different without the story suffering from my attempts to be not like the other girls.
Our protagonist is a young adult male who's grown up feeling alienated from most other people. I'm basing him on myself and what I imagine is the universal autistic experience, is what I'm trying to say. Shortly after graduating from high school, he has a vivid dream of being visited by a consciousness far greater than his own. In the dream, he's bestowed with great power, and is told he must use this power to fulfill his purpose as a human being. Upon waking up, the dream slowly fades in his memory, but he soon discovers that he truly has been bestowed with incredible powers. He can encase himself in a golden shell called a 'Carapace' which acts as some sort of non-Newtonian fluid and grants him enhanced strenght, durability, speed, flight, and the ability to fire kinetic blasts from his fingertips. He also learns he has the ability to expel pieces of the Carapace from within his body and command it to move and spread across surfaces. Unfortunately, the Carapace also alters his mind in strange ways when it's active, rendering him unable to speak or understand any form of human language be it written or spoken. It also renders him incapable of differentiating all animal life forms, including humans. Our protagonist needs to figure out how to use the Carapace to help others while working around its strange drawbacks. Unfortunately, he's not the only one in the universe who's been bestowed a Carapce, and the others who've taken notice of him are none-too pleased with his interpretation of the purpose bestowed upon him
Something I want to be very particular about is the fact that the cosmic entities that give our protagonist the Carapace are unknowably advanced to the point that he doesn't really understand what the Carapace is or why he has it. Part of this is the fact that this was explained to him in a dream, which he progressively forgets more and more as he tries to remember the finer details. In addition there are several alien creatures who have their own Carapaces, and who each have reached their own philosphical conclusion for what they're supposed to use it for. I want the big reveal here to be that those bestowed with a Carapace have been elected as 'Endlings' by the cosmic entities, and are therefore destined to be shielded from the extinction of their respective specieses to serve as living records of the various planetary civilizations that once inhabited the universe. They'd basically get put into stasis in a grand cosmic museum, preserved forever while the cosmic entities wipe out all other members of each species in a series of grand cataclysms as they make way to restart the universe. While our protagonist interprets his purpose as using the Carapace to help the people of his planet, he's dubbed 'Candide' by the other Carapace wielders for his obnoxious optimism. I wanted all the Carapace wielders to be named after different philosophers or philosophically related characters so that you knew immediately what they were about and how they used their Carapace in different, often villainous ways. I'd explain this in the story as the Carapaces translating and transmitting the thoughts of each wielder telepathically, and that the terminology used by the alien Carapace wielders was garbled by heavy cultural localization due to humans' primitive conventions language. I want our protagonist to be the kind of guy who's really interested in reading old philosophy books and uses them to shape his view of his place in the universe, as well as his system of morals. This is why the aliens are named after philosophers specifically, that they're the closest frame of reference our protagonist has for the bizarre titles the aliens of bestowed upon themselves.
I based him off myself, but I don't have a name for him yet. He wants to use his Carapace to help people, but struggles heavily at first on account of its drawbacks. People that see him when he's out wearing the Carapace don't even think he's human at first, and the public's perception is that he's some sort of android or automaton. The other Carapace wielders refer to him as Candide as a sarcastic nickname pertaining to his optimism and desire to help everyone. This is a delicate subject, but I also wanted to include in the protagonist's backstory that he's a victim of sexual assault, since I am too and I wanted to try to talk about my experience a bit through the story. I'm planning on doing this with some of my other stories as well, but I don't want to make a huge deal out of it. It's never gonna be the sole focus of a story, and I want to be able to tell a story well without relying too heavily on dark stuff like that when I don't think it's warranted.
I wrote this character as an allusion to Don Quixote (as if that wasn't obvious). Considering the modern social climate, a young adult woman who obsesses over romance fantasy novels and sees connections to them everywhere is a pretty close analogue to the character of Don Quixote, so that's how I'm writing Dawn. I also thought it would be cute as an extra allusion to have her constantly be wearing a hoodie that's stylized to look like a suit of armor. She cursed by a magic book she finds in the back of the city library while searching for old romance novels. I haven't fleshed out her origin story much at all, but I wanted her to start off as an unintentional supervillain, as the curse she bears turns her irrational fears into legitimate physical threats that wreak havoc on the city (like Don Quixote imagining windmills are an army of giants that he needs to slay). She eventually learns to control her psyche better and winds up being able to use the curse to create positive stuff that helps people. Again, I haven't figured this out much yet, but I know I want her to start accidentally causing chaos, and eventually getting her powers under controll and using them to help people.
He's a major antaognist in the story and the second Carapace wielder we see after Candide himself. He believes the purpose of the Carapace wielders is to help the cosmic entities along in the extermination of their specieses, and as such is in the midst of committing a mass genocide against his own people
Another major antagonist and Carapace wielder. While Machiavelli believes their purpose to be the destruction of all non-Carapace wielders, Hobbes believes it's their purpose to rule over everyone else. He's taken over his home planet and serves as its god-emperor. I wanted his character to be a reference to the concept of the Leviathan from Thomas Hobbes' writings. To tie in with this allegory, I want Hobbes' design to be that of a tiny insect at the heart of a massive swarm of his subjects. He commands them as a unified force, but on his own he's small and weak enough that you could crush him between two fingers. I probably got some of my inspiration for his character from Mr. Mind, a villain appearing in DC's SHAZAM comics.
Our protagonist's ex-girlfriend who later goes on to be a formidable supervillainess. This character is based off a real person, so some of the worse stuff I plan on having her do in the story is stuff that this real person has actually done. She's extremely manipulative and emotionally volatile. Our story starts with her already having broken up with our protagonist, but he's still healing his mental scars at this point. She winds up being bestowed a magic shell necklace from an ancient sea deity that grants her hydrokinesis and the ability to control aquatic creatures. She winds up using this power to get famous and becomes
I have autism and I wanted to explore some of my more angsty thoughts on the matter through this story. I've found myself feeling pretty lost and vulnerable for the past few years ever since I reached adulthood, and it certainly hasn't been helped by the fact that my condition renders me mentally retarded to a certain extent. I wanted certain elements of my experience as an autistic person to bleed through in the ways that the Carapace alienates our protagonist from everybody else. He doesn't understand what people mean when they speak, in much the same way I don't pick up on a lot of the nuance in nonverbal communication that goes on around me. Even when there isn't much of that, I still sometimes struggle to identify what a person is really thinking when they speak. At the same time, I find it difficult to articulate a lot of my experience to others, in much the same way that the Carapace literally seals the protagonist's mouth shut when it envelops his body. I wanted the Carapace to render the protagonist incapable of differentiating different creatures as an allegorical connection to the way that I've seemingly never been able to prioritize things in the way other people expect. When I'm faced with a problem, I pretty much always go about solving it in a way that somebody else asserts is wrong, so I translated that into the way our protagonist would fly into a burning building, and save a family's guinea pigs before any of the human family members because he literally can't tell them apart when the Carapace is on. In his eyes, they're all equally living creatures, so it doesn't matter what order he saves them in. At the same time, he considers it a failure if he doesn't save all of them, even if the only one he doesn't save is one of the guinea pigs. This element also ties into my heightened sense of empathy/sympathy towards animals. I've seen plenty of people my age abuse animals without much thought, while those same people have looked at me like I'm a weirdo for feeling bad about it. I know this is something that non-autistic people experience as well, but to put it in perspective, I've dove into a swimming pool to save a bug that's fallen into the water on more than one occasion because I legitimately feel bad at the thought of a bug drowning.
This page is under construction, and will be for a while...