Explaining War in the City

Idea
I was 17 when I started this next plot line, and my political opinions were beginning to firm up, and were beginning to resemble the politics I would have in college.

I had come to the conclusion that war was wrong, and had adopted a pacifist position. This was obviously a big change from when I started the Dishon story 3 years previously.

I wanted to write “The Great Anti-War Novel”, and I wanted to do it continuing the characters and settings I had established in the previous stories.

This was an ambitious project, and ambitious projects tend to either succeed or fall flat. The fact that I was 17 and had not yet fully developed my narrative skills probably ensured that this would fall flat.

But the other big problem was that the setting and characters I had thus far established did not lend themselves to this kind of story.

In the Watcher city, when we last left it at the conclusion of “The Four”, there was no war, and there were no hints of a coming war. Therefore before I even got into my anti-war themes, I had to first establish a war. And that took a lot of set up. About 19 chapters of set up actually, before I even got into the subject I wanted to deal with. “The Four”, by comparison, was only 14 chapters in its entirety.

Secondly, outside of some civil war, it was almost impossible for The Watchers to be seriously engaged with any sort of outside enemy. With their superior technology, no other nation in Fabulae could stand against them. Also no one else could enter The Watcher city, so they were not in danger from anyone.

The solution I came up with was to have the gods arrange an invasion of The Watcher city, using the army of Marram, and aided by a couple turncoat Watchers.

But what could be the possible motivation for those Watchers to betray their city? It could not be material gain, because they have everything they ever wanted provided by the replicators in the city. I reasoned that it must be for the promise of power. After all, has not the love of power caused many people to go to extreme lengths throughout history?

The problem was then the main villains became one-dimensional characters driven only by their lust for power. This was added to the army of Marram, which had been shown in previous plot lines to seek nothing less except conquest for the sake of conquest. And the return of King Azom, who had always been portrayed as evil incarnate.

Thus I was trying to take on the issue of war in a serious way, but using a bunch of caricatures that were right out of a comic book.

I began to realize this even as I started writing. I justified it to myself this way: It would be very easy to take a war like Vietnam, and show that it was a wicked and immoral war. But what would that prove? That would prove that the Vietnam War was immoral. That wouldn't prove that all wars are immoral.

Rather, if one wishes to prove that all wars are immoral, one should start with what would appear to be a justified war, like for instance World War II. And besides, it was my experience that most conversations about the justification of war (especially at the high school level) quickly dissolve into theoretical “what ifs” anyway. “Okay, what if American soil was being invaded, and everyone was being killed, would you still be against war then? What if mindless killer robots came from outer space?” (No kidding, actually had that last one come up in a debate at high school).

Therefore, the only way to write an anti-war story is to take a situation that, to most people, is clearly justification for war, and somehow still be able to show that violence only makes the situation worse. The challenge was to show that even if an army of bloodthirsty conquers like Marram, lead by an evil genius like Azom, attacked in a war of pure, unjustified aggression, violence would still not be a way to respond.

That’s how I justified it to myself at least. But in the back of my mind I always had the feeling that I was just making up excuses to cover what was a terribly cheesy plot about what I intended to be a serious issue.

There was also another problem. In the previous plots, it was established that the Watcher City was filled with monitors, and anyone could observe anything happening at any time. Or in other words, no one had any privacy.

This was a bit of a problem in some of the previous stories, but I worked around it as best I could. During a war however, especially during the guerrilla campaign once the city had already been conquered, the monitors became a bit of a nuisance. I tried to work around this by having the characters theorize that they were safe, because just because their actions were recorded on the monitors, it didn't necessarily mean someone was watching them. After all, who has time to watch all the monitors all the time? Odds were that at any given moment they weren't being watched, and this assumption allowed them to make plans and hold war meetings. It did feel like I was stretching things however.

Structure
I only got 19 chapters into this story, and those were mostly 19 chapters of set up. I needed to establish how this war began, what the sides were, introduce the characters, et cetera. So the plot never really had a chance to take off. But this is what the plan would have been:

There were two main characters in this story: Peter and Pompey.

I was now 17, and had learned about some literary devices, and was trying to imitate them in my writing. I wanted to make Peter and Pompey “foils” for each other. Peter would represent the anti-war side, Pompey would represent the pro-war side. And they qualified as foils because…um…their names both started with the letter “P”. Okay, maybe I didn't think this through too well, but I was still learning at the time.

Peter and Pompey start out on the same side, but Peter favors a humane approach to warfare, in contrast to Pompey’s “take no prisoners” approach. The difference between them widens and widens, and eventually they find they can no longer work together, and split into two separate camps.

Peter at first believes that if he can simply conduct the war in a humane manner his conscious will be saved. But gradually he comes to the conclusion that the whole business of fighting and killing is wrong, and he renounces all forms of violence and drops out of the war completely. Meanwhile Pompey continues the fight.

But I never got that far. By the time I stopped, Pompey and Peter had met each other and became friends, but the rifts in their relationship had not yet started to emerge.

Chapter 1
Chapter 1 is a council of the gods, establishing how the gods plan to make war on the Watcher city.

As noted during my explanation of “The New Era”, the gods are heavily based on Greek mythology. Each god takes on the characteristics of the realm assigned to him or her.

Subtlety is once again out the window. The name of each god is simply the Latin word for whatever realm they hold rule over (or in the case of Regile--king god, and Nuntius--messenger god, the task they perform).

Chapter 2
The evolution of Paper: The character Paper first appeared in The New Era chapter 28. He was the one who refused to help Akristh take care of the wounded. He only appeared very briefly so I couldn't be bothered to sit down and think of a cool sounding name for him. I just looked around the room and my eyes saw a stack of paper so…I named him Paper. It was really cheesy, but it was okay, because Paper’s name only appeared once as simply a face in the crowd of the many people who refused to help Akristh.

In The Four Chapter 5 I needed a character to test Romulus’s patience on the Kalka project. Since the little we had seen of Paper in the New Era was not complimentary, I figured I could develop his character a little and make him into even more of a jerk.

So, when I needed to find a Watcher who was capable of betraying the city to the Marramiane army, Paper seemed like the man. Of course it was another jump in his character development. He went now from just being a jerk to being really evil, but it seemed a natural progression.

Paper’s obsession with power for the sake of power, similar to Gaius perhaps, seemed reasonable at the age of 17 because my view of history was that most historical figures were driven by the same obsession. Looking back of course, it seems very poorly written and one-dimensional.

And from a stylistic approach, Paper becoming a main villain was a problem as well. Having a character named “Paper” was cheesy enough to begin with, but it was all right before when he was just a minor character. Now that he was the main villain, his name was popping up all the time.

Chapter 3
Roc was a character I created at the same time as Paper and for the same purpose. He was also a very minor character who appeared briefly in Chapter 28 of The New Era simply to refuse help to Akristh. He also appeared briefly in The Four chapter 5 with Paper. Neither time was any sort of connection to Paper explicitly stated, but I always associated the two characters together.
Paper was always portrayed as a jerk. Roc had been previously portrayed as kind of a neutral character. I figured he would always be more reasonable and moderate than Paper, although essentially inclined to take the same sort of actions.
Again, as with Paper, having a character named Roc was okay when he was a minor character, but it got really cheesy once he became a major character. Fortunately I never got around to creating a character named “scissors”.

Chapter 4
I don’t really remember what I was thinking when I decided to name a character “To”. I guess I thought it was okay, because he was only around for a short while before he died. And I was developing an interest in odd names.

Chapter 5
In his history of Hannibal, the Roman historian Livius calls experience the teacher of fools. I modified this quote slightly by having Scientia say that history is the teacher of all fools.

The problem of the monitors is a problem throughout this story, but it is particularly evident in this chapter. The Watchers really should have been watching everything on their monitors, and should have seen that the returning ships contained Marramiane soldiers.
I tried to explain this away by having the gods explain that the Watchers had just gotten lazy, and had no reason to watch the monitors anymore.

Chapter 6
Although I wasn't bothered by it at the time, in retrospect “Kialka” is another unfortunate choice for a name of character, simply because I had already established that "Kalka" was a country in Fabulae, and this was only one letter off from that.

Locom Park: This has come up several times before in this story, but this is as good a place to address it as any.

When I first started writing “The Watcher” series, I envisioned the city like the inside of a Star Trek or Star Wars space ship-long white hallways, lots of beeping computers, et cetera. That got a bit depressing after a while, so I decided that the city, although underground, had the technology to produce a fake sky and under this fake sky plants could grow. So many of the scenes in the Watcher city take place in parks with grass and rivers and a blue (fake) sky above.

WIN: At around this point in the writing process, I’m beginning to realize a serious flaw in my intended structure.
I was intending to have Peter initially split with Pompey because of Pompey's insistence on waging total war, versus Peter's insistence on waging civilized war. Peter would eventually repudiate all war, but that would come much later in the story.  The initial conflict would be between Pompey's approach of take-no-prisoners kill-everyone versus Peter's version of a war with laws.

The problem was that, with the exception of Paper and Roc, all of the enemy were invading Marramiane soldiers, and thus legitimate targets. Because Peter doesn't reject war in its entirety until the end of the story, it is hard to imagine him and Pompey would have much of an argument over the war conducted on invading soldiers.

Therefore, once I had already set the wheels of the invasion in motion, I decided to add as a last minute addition a subset within the Watcher community who would aid Marram. This would turn the war into more of a civil war than simply a war against an invading army. It would also bring up the question of innocent civilian casualties, and the children and families of WIN. This would provide plenty of opportunities for conflict between Peter and Pompey.

The late addition of this caused a lot of problems however. For one thing, with WIN in the picture I had to spend several chapters re-arranging the bad guy hierarchy. How would Paper feel about having to share power with WIN? How does WIN relate to the gods? Et cetera. This was yet more set up that I got bogged down in, keeping me away from the story that I was interested in telling.

Chapter 8
It seemed a bit sudden to introduce two new main characters out of the blue, so I tried to cushion Peter’s introduction by introducing his friends first.

Again, I was learning new things from my literature classes at school, and trying to play with them in my own writing. In this instance I was playing with foreshadowing. Although Peter and Pompey travel along the same path for a while before they split, the differences between them are introduced right at the beginning. The first time the reader sees Peter, he is pleading for peace. The first time Pompey is seen, he is killing someone.

Chapter 9
There are a lot of names introduced in this chapter. I was trying to avoid a repeat of the lazy writing which caused me to wait until the very end of “The New Era” before all of Jistap's team was identified. Therefore I listed all the names of Pompey’s men at once, and just figured I’d flesh out their characteristics later.

The character of Pompey was based off of the historical Pompey, and I was highly influenced by Colleen McCullough’s portrayal of Pompey in her “Masters of Rome” series. In that series, Pompey is portrayed as a brilliant general, but with no social skills or common sense, and it is his assistant Varro who is constantly talking Pompey out of crazy ideas.

I borrowed (slash plagiarized) this interaction between Pompey and Varro for my own story. Also, as I was beginning to play with symbolism, I wanted Varro to represent Pompey’s good and noble side. Aesych, Pompey’s other right hand man, represents Pompey’s brutal and egotistical side. Sometimes Pompey listens to Varro, sometimes he listens to Aesych.

Pompey gets along much better with Varro, than with Aesych, but my intent was to show that Pompey and Aesych were too much alike, and so their egos kept clashing. The more Pompey fights with Aesych, the more it shows he’s becoming like Aesych.

Chapter 13-14
Superbus-Bree: A continuing theme throughout this entire series is the staleness of Watcher History prior to the New Era. This was mentioned as Ak's principle in the beginning of War in the City Chapter 2, and it was also mentioned by the Renegades during their meeting with Hans in The New Era.

In the later chapters of War in the City I began to allude to a democratic Revolution that had taken place in the city.

Obviously when Haket and the first Watchers entered the city, they had still carried with them the old world ideas about royalty and monarchy. Haket was the king of the early Watchers.

Somewhere along the line, they obviously made the transition to democracy. How and when this happened was never fully explained, but I always imagined it happened much like the formation of the Roman Republic. As with Roman history, Haket and the rest of the early kings had all been good, but then a really bad king had turned The Watchers against the idea of kings forever. I figured this would have to take the form of some sort of violent revolution. Kings never voluntarily give up power, they always have to be forced out.

The parallels with Roman history are again reinforced by the names. Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud) was the last king of Rome. He was overthrown by Brutus (a different Brutus than the one that kills Julius Caesar).

So...in Watcher history I slightly changed the names, and a character named Superbus was overthrown by Bree.

Now again, this could be looked at as a continuity error, since it seems in violation of the idea that, prior to the New Era, nothing exciting ever happened in Watcher history. But I just thought it was assumed that this principle meant after Watcher society was fully established. Of course they had a few bumps getting started.

The Tunnels:
Obviously I’m being somewhat deliberately mysterious in these chapters when I talk about the secret tunnels.

The mystery behind the secret tunnels actually has nothing to do with this story. I was setting up for another story.

Again, this kind of layered writing is probably another example of how I advanced as I wrote. The problem with a lot of groups like WIN is that they seem to come out of nowhere. I tried to compensate for this by making WIN only 10 percent of the population—big enough to be a force, but small enough so that it is reasonable they might have gone un-noticed during the previous stories. But it was a plot hole. One can’t help but wonder why didn't we hear about WIN during Jistap's New Era, or during the set up of the Kalka project?

To try and avoid this, I was actually thinking ahead to the next story, and trying to lay the groundwork of a secret society that might become the basis of the next plot. Grechal and Judas may find themselves on opposite sides of the present war, but they both belong to an ancient secret society inside the Watcher civilization. Since I never even finished this story, much less got started on the next one, all this groundwork is really pointless, except to provide a setting for the surrender of the city.

The obvious problem is that this is more complication to an already too complicated plot. The reader is still sorting out new groups like WIN, and Pompey’s Resistance, and now they have to worry about some new secret tunnel group. And again, my excuse for this bad writing is that this is a result my sense of timing being off because it took a lot longer to write this thing than it does to read it. In my mind WIN and the other groups had already been established for a long time.

Now, as to the big question of what was actually supposed to be in these tunnels: I actually hadn't figured that out yet. I was figuring I would flesh all these details out when I got to the next story, and for now just establish the fact that there is something mysterious lurking in the tunnels beneath the city.

In vague terms I was thinking perhaps that some of the old heroes of the city had found a way to cheat death, either by being kept alive in suspended animation, or by having found a medical way to extend their lifespan indefinitely, or something like that. This would mean that Haket, Daved, Bree, and the rest had not perished long ago, but were actually still alive, and could interact with the present day Watchers in future stories. Grechal and Judas would be guardians of their secret.

But as to why it was such a big deal that the tunnels be kept secret, I had yet to flesh that out.

Chapter 15
This is the start of the re-shuffling in the bad-guy hierarchy that I alluded to earlier. It continues in the following chapters. By the time everything is done, the reader hears a lot more about the bad guys then they do about the good guys.

This I regarded as a necessary evil. I had to make it believable that all of these diverse forces (the gods, Paper and Roc, Marraim, WIN, and Gaius) would be in the same coalition, and that required a few chapters of allowing them to organize. Once this was all finished, I planned to put all the focus on Peter and Pompey instead, and use the bad guys only as antagonists.

Why I Stopped Writing

I had long ago made my peace with the limitations of my writing. I realized I was never going to be a famous novelist or make my living doing this. I also realized that by now my story had become so convoluted, and taken so many ridiculous plot twists, that no one would have the patience for it except for me, and I was now writing solely for myself. I came to those realizations a long time ago, when I was still writing “The New Era”.

I continued writing for myself because I enjoyed writing for myself. I enjoyed reading comic books and fantasy literature, but I felt like the story and characters I loved where always under the control of someone else. I wanted to have a story I controlled even if it were only for myself.

I was also coming up against the limitations of my own plot structure and setting. The fantasy setting made it hard to tackle serious themes without making it seem ridiculous, and the last story line “War in the City” is an excellent case in point.

Also, because the Watchers have no privacy, it was difficult to write about anything that required plotting or deception. This was again something I ran into in all the stories, but especially the last one. When organizing the Tigers, Pompey and his men have to rely on the assumption that no one is watching them simply because the odds are against everyone being observed at all times. But the whole thing seemed like an unnecessary risk to have long planning meetings. To a certain extent I thought I was reaching the limits of what stories I could do in a city where anyone could observe anyone else at any given time.

But at the same time I had sort of made my peace with this as well. I was determined to plow ahead, and if I got sick of The Watcher city there were all sorts of other places in the Fabulae world I could explore.

If I had time enough, I think I would have plowed on through despite all the problems I just mentioned.

But the big reason I stopped was simply time. I worked on Fabulae through the summer, and a couple weeks into my Freshman year at Calvin, and then I decided I didn’t want to spend the time on it. Previously I could always find a little time to work on the story even if just a little each week. But at the Calvin dormitory, it seemed like every moment I spent on this was a moment I wasn’t spending socializing with friends or enjoying dorm life. And time all of a sudden became a lot more important to me, and I felt I couldn’t waste time on this stupid hobby anymore.

Where I Was Going
Given how far I tend to stray from my original ideas anyway (see the original outline for Dishon), had I actually continued writing this story it may or may not have continued the way I was planning it. And I didn’t have a detailed plot outline, but in general terms this is what I was planning on doing (see also original planning notes here):

Pompey and Peter, and the others begin the resistance. At first everything is going well. Gradually the lines between Pompey and Peter become more obvious. Pompey is in favor of attacking all the WIN settlements, including the families of WIN who live there. Peter is opposed to this. Pompey also is in favor of executing prisoners. Peter is not.

Gradually Pompey and Peter agree that they cannot work together anymore, and split into two opposing camps. Some of the resistance follows Peter, some follows Pompey. At first the split is amicable, but friction soon develops between the two factions.

Lauto is caught passing information over to WIN. Pompey wants to execute her. Peter and his followers move into save her. The two camps almost forget about the greater enemy and start fighting each other.

(I wanted to use Lauto as the catalyst for this because I felt that, after downplaying her role in the previous story, I had still not resolved questions about her true nature. This would establish once and for all that she wasn’t a person who could be trusted).

Meanwhile, Gaius, once he gets in control of the city, wants to begin a reign of terror against his supposed enemies.  First on Gaius's list is his brother.  (I had never established before that Gaius had a brother, but I planned on introducing it here.)  Gaius's brother, it turns out, is the exact opposite of Gaius.  He is a pacifist and a firm believer in non-violence.  Gaius hates him for this.  Gaius has always resented his brother for having principles--it has fed into Gaius's inferiority complex, and Gaius has always suspected that his brother thinks he is better than Gaius.  (Possibly this was going to be a twin brother--I'm not sure I decided that point.)
Gaius's brother lives in the outskirts of the city in a sort of wild nature preserve that exists at the outerlimits of the city.  (And yet, is still part of the large underground bubble that is part of the city.) 

So when Gaius becomes one of the rulers of the city, he has his brother arrested and publicly tortured.  Gaius wants to torture his brother until his brother renounces non-violence, but his brother refuses to do it.  Pompey and his group end up saving Gaius's brother from the torture by fighting with Gaius and Gaius's soldiers.  Gaius's brother is, of course, not happy that his life was saved by violence, but Pompey doesn't listen.
Once Gaius's brother is rescued, Peter meets him, and Gaius's brother teachers Peter about non-violence as a philosophical principal.  

Eventually Peter comes to reject war in all its forms. 

Peter drops out of all Watcher society, and goes to join a group called “The Waiters”. “The Waiters” are yet another sub-group within the Watchers, who live out in the nature preserves in the outskirts of the Watcher city.  They believe that Watcher society has become hopelessly corrupted, so they have gone out into the nature preserve to live a pure life.  They are "waiting" for Watcher society to reform itself, and while they wait, they simply do a lot of meditating and focus on peace and harmony. 

Meanwhile Pompey and his team go on to win the war. 

(I was planning on writing some sort of dramatic juxtaposition--where the narrative would cut back and forth between Pompey and his soldiers fight the final battle, while at the same time Gaius's brother teachers Peter about meditation.)

In the final battle, Aesych shoots and finally kills Azom. Pompey is infuriated by this because he had specifically told Aesych that Azom was his to kill. In response, Pompey kills Aesych, and then, once Aesych is dead, Pompey takes credit for killing Azom. (I don’t remember how I planned to get around the problem of the omnipresent monitors for this plot point.)
I intended this to be symbolic of Pompey's final corruption.  By killing Aesych, Pompey had become Aesych.

(I was planning on writing some sort of dramatic juxtaposition--where the narrative would cut back and forth between Pompey and his soldiers int

Pompey is regarded as the liberator of the city, and installs himself as president for life. He marries Diana, and the two reign over the city almost as King and Queen. (I was planning on developing Diana’s character as aggressive and similar to Pompey, and then making a romance between them.)

Further Stories
With Pompey installed as President for life, the era of democracy in the city officially comes to an end. However despite his dictatorial tendencies, Pompey reigns as a primarily benevolent monarch, although he does not tolerate any dissent.

Since I never finished the current story, I only had vague ideas of plotlines I wanted to explore in future stories. Of course the plot about the tunnels, and what secrets they held.

I also wanted to get outside the city and explore plotlines in the rest of Fabulae. These could be done by having Watchers make various excursions outside of the city.