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I had so much fun making the last moodboard that I thought to make one for my main WIP, the love of my life, my beautiful kids, Cynical Chaos! =D
It’s a YA novel I’ve been writing since I was in middle school/high school. Cynical Chaos follows fifteen-year-old Ariana Salem and her group of rebel friends, The Unseen, a year after they’ve declared war against the corrupt government organization, Panacea. The novel takes place in 2005, in an alternate timeline where an alien race called Chaos Powers attempted to destroy the world. Panacea was created in order to defeat them, but have turned corrupt since their victory, conducting human experiments and other terrors under the guise of Earth’s protection. When Ariana and her friends are discovered as human hosts to the surviving Chaos Powers, and one of their own is taken by Panacea, the kids are forced to fight for their lives and their freedom in a world that has deemed them too dangerous to exist. Ariana is left deeply damaged from the stress of war, and throughout the novel, has to come to a decision about the fate of their cause: will she continue to demand their right to freedom, or will she submit to the pressures around her before she loses anyone else, including herself?
Cynical Chaos is where I first played with the idea of “empowerment through negative traits” that follows most of my writing today. We’re all familiar with the Christopher Volger quote, “Every villain is a hero in their own story”. When I first started writing about these characters, I decided to take that quote a step further and actually make protags that would otherwise be depicted as the villains in any other story. I found myself identifying more with villains as a teen—and even as an adult—because typically those are the ones who are depicted as disabled coded, racially coded, or simply unwilling to yield to their oppressors. Normally, in social justice circles, we’re told to push back against those stereotypes, but I decided that it was much more empowering for me to embrace the darkness in myself and the “less desirable” traits, instead of trying so hard to be a “good example” or whatever fighting against stereotypes is supposed to prove. I created characters like Ariana, who were unapologetically angry, and violent, and spiteful, that would hear “You acting that way will only justify that they should be afraid of you!” and respond with, “Yes, because they should be”.
TL;DR: If you prefer wholesome stories where the protags make friends with, or wrestle with the morality of fighting their oppressors, this will not be the story for you.
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, please feel free to ask me about it! I live to talk about these wild children of mine ^_^
