The Forging Earth

I came up with this concept a while ago, developing from my growing distaste in the torture/horror genre, perhaps in combination with my continued fascination with apocalyptic fiction. 

It's true - the skew of Hollywood horror has progressed past simple schadenfreude, cathartic reaction, and inventive methods of simulating violence and devolved into torture-porn. Movies like Saw (a movie named for the fact that, in order to attempt a proper escape, the main character has to cut his foot off with a rusty saw) and Eli Roth'sHostel (famed for a gruesome scene where, as a brand of torture, an eyeball is extracted and severed while the victim is awake) capitalize on this continuing trend. Normally, I don't object to gore or violence in movies - I've always felt that it's never about what's used, but how it's conveyed to the audience. And, the current trend has turned to a horribly misogynistic conveyance. It's called torture-"porn" not just because there may be gratuitous sex involved, but because it conveys violence in a sexual manner by presenting a dominated party (typically attractive, female, usually white, and often blonde) and, literally, orchestrating scenes so that torture is dolled out and screams are uttered in the framing of someone forcing an orgasm (an obvious logical fallacy). Consider the social repercussions in a concept where a woman is violently subjugated in a forced, erotic fashion, presented to a crowd of people who are supposed to think the experience pleasurable because, well, it's not happening to them. The marketing ploy for the film Hostel II epitomizes the concept by presenting women-to-be-tortured as desired (we'll avoid a rant about the many things wrong with how the highest priced "item" on the menu features American women, making them  the  most "desirable" to see in this fashion).

Continuing on, I read a blog post a while ago written by Buffy/Angel creator Joss Whedon discussing the Death of D'ua Khalil titled "Let's Watch a Women Get Stoned to Death." It's a disheartening tale of a woman "honor" killed by being kicked and stoned by a group of men, made exponentially worse by the fact that it made itself around the globe, not for awareness or alarm, but because it was something people just wanted to see. The equivalent of a joke e-mail. Seriously, it's depressing - and it proves that this kind of thing is not just present in one culture, but nearly all that use technology. Yay. And, then I watched Tim Burton's Batman Returns and something clicked. Remember the scene where the Penguin tries to kill Catwoman by dropping her through a Greenhouse? And she gets back up, "revived," and she screams and the glass falls around her? Although, I'm not sure if Catwoman is the perfect feminist metaphor (then again, is there one?), wasn't it cool having a female figure who rose from trauma only to come back stronger (albeit, somewhat stressed psychologically, but rightfully so) and kick more ass? Remember how I said I was fascinated with apocalypse fiction?

So - I came up with an idea for a story. Essentially, a young orphan girl with no ties to her biological parents, living alone, has the amazing ability to revive herself after she dies. She can die a total of 7 times. The kicker is whenever she dies something bad happens nearby and each time she dies, the severity of the after-event increases exponentially. Assumedly, her final death would cause a world-wide disaster that ends the world. What backstory we know is provided by the opening monologue and it would start at the image at the first time she dies - on her 18th birthday. We learn that she never knew her parents, that she was kicked around orphanages and group homes her entire life. No one wanted to adopt her and she feels that anyone who came by as potentials never went through with adoption because they thought there was something "wrong" with her. By age 16, she legally emancipates herself from the foster system and gets her GED. At this point, she implies that her last group home had a detrimental environment. She lives in a small apartment in a college town. She makes a living working under the table at a dive bar and pays her sketchy landlord in cash, who happens to co-own the bar, but doesn't run it. We learn that she got the job and the apartment from the other owner, a 22 year-old who manages and bar-tends full time. She sees him as a brother figure while he may have a crush on her. When working on her birthday, a fight breaks out in the bar and a gun goes off, which shoots her in the head and kills her - matching the original image. Brother-figure drags her away from the burning bar to the alleyway, where he witnesses the miracle of her revival. She freaks out and runs home and leaves him bewildered. The next morning she wakes up to a knock on her door, revealing a lawyer with a lockbox key. Grabbing brother-figure, they go to find the lockbox, containing only a piece a paper with a symbol on it. They travel across the continent, adding friends to the group along the way, researching the origins of the symbol, how it's linked to her new-found ability, and, possibly, her own origins.

Meanwhile, word of a girl who dies and comes back to life has reached the undercurrent of America. Using cellphone pictures to identify her, twitter to communicate her coordinates, youtube videos, and other internet-based communications, a growing society interested in killing her to see what happens follows on her heels during their journey. Of course, they eventually learn that horrible things will happen whenever she dies, and that only serves to full the fervor. They could be anybody, making allies hard to come-by and providing a slew of adventures while dealing with some of the issues I mentioned feeding into this idea.

Sine Qua Non is a latin phrase, meaning "without which it cannot." It's a legal term describing a "cause-in-fact" relationship or an essential action/condition preceding a given result. It has a certain layered nuance in the story above and it's the perfect title for this set of stories

I think it will work best in graphic novel format.