witch of space

Yokohama, Japan

X-S10

Reverine -  Nell Kerr

British , b. ?

I’d been interning with her as an artist/executive assistant for some time. To put a long story short she’d developed a tremor that kept her from doing a certain amount of studio work, so in between sending emails and invoices for her I’d chip in and help with line art or drafting on longer projects. A lot of it was the two of us sitting in her basement studio, doing our own thing, waiting for the phone to ring. We got to talking a lot. I’d just moved across the country and was still finding my footing.

There was a handyman she had over occasionally — he was a personal friend who enjoyed her company more than she enjoyed his. She didn’t dislike him by any means, but he definitely had feelings for her that she didn’t reciprocate. One day, after he’d come over to repair something-or-other and left, she and I started talking about relationships.

She asked if I had a boyfriend. I told her I wasn’t interested in being in a relationship with anyone and that I’d never had a desire to be in a relationship. Admittedly, I was bracing for the “You’ll meet the right person someday” response. I knew it generally came from a place of care, but it never changed how much I dreaded to hear it. I really respected my mentor and I was prepared to nod along to whatever response she gave me. Instead of anything I expected her to say, she just kind of nodded and said, “Me neither. I think I’m — what’s the term — asexual?”

I was ecstatic. I told her I was asexual, too. I saw her sigh in relief, the same way I did. I couldn’t believe it.

We didn’t get much work done that day, we just started talking about our experiences. She’d been married once when she was younger and even during that period of her life her disinterest in a sexual relationship didn’t change. She had a roommate after graduating college who confessed to having feelings for her and she had to tell her “It’s not that I don’t like girls, it’s that I don’t like anybody.” The roommate harbored enough bitterness over this that they had to split ways. Her mother told her that she would quote “rather have a gay daughter than a daughter who didn’t fancy anyone at all” unquote.

I didn’t have nearly as many experiences as she did, but I was able to share my own for the first time. I shared how it was easier to say I was taking time to work on myself than to say I had no interest in being in a relationship. We talked about the words “You’ll meet the right person someday” and “You’ll know when you’re in love” and “Don’t worry, one day you’ll meet some guy that changes everything.” As if something was broken.

“I’ve been alive for sixty five years,” my mentor told me, “and I’ve never felt like I was missing something, even if everybody told me I was.”

Currently, my mentor lives with her parrot, her cats, and her backyard-wildlife pals in a house that she owns. She makes art and hosts community art groups and volunteers at care homes and is the most self-fulfilled woman I’ve ever met. And she loves her life. She loves the people she knows and they love her, too. If I could be half as cool as she is when I grow up, I think that’d be pretty amazing.

I’m working on an MR iceberg and would really like to know if anyone has ideas for additional entries.

SOF Soundtrack. Released in a few different ways, all of which were free, but some required entering a contest. Had to change the download link, let me know if it's not working.

The Concept Farm. Ad agency that did a bunch of fun alternate-reality-style ads, and was responsible for writing at least the Blogspot edition of Fang's blog.

Videos/trailers. Most are on YouTube, but the very first one on that page was a RealMedia file I had to convert to mp4.

A little bit about ghost-writing. Gabrielle Charbonnet certainly worked on the first four books, and likely continued working on the series thereafter, but IDK for sure. Like she definitely worked on HAWK but other than that I can't be sure.

Various ephemera. In this tag on this blog, and this one on my old URL, there's a random scattering of various things. Interviews. Screencaps of old Flash games. Things I saw on Ebay, including Advance Reading Copies. Some "leaked" pages from the third book that were posted on the blog. Pics from some of the apps that existed. When I get around to it someday, this stuff will end up on this page.

There is a "secret chapter" of additional material that only appears in full in certain editions of the first book.

Something similar appears in the form of material related to ITEX, released on the website and also in certain editions of the second book, as part of the marketing for the third book. (There is something of a story about Roland ter Borcht that runs through these snippets of fake newspaper articles and ticket stubs.)

There is a skeletal list of official sites here. Any of the old official websites could fuel an entire iceberg of its own. Maximum-X, later Max-Dan-Wiz, is the best archived and I believe it had the highest population. MaximumRide.COM was the very first official website, and had its own dedicated forum, but it's all poorly preserved. Maximum Ride.CO.UK was somewhat popular in the time between MR.COM going down and MX coming online.

Reading guides. At least six of the books had reading guides composed for them, intended to be used by educators.

Concept art for the FANG trailer can be found here.

A comprehensive index of Fang's blog can be found here. Organized by topic, then chronologically within each topic.

A purely chronological index of Fang's blog (and other character blogs) as seen on MX/MDW is here.

Max's Tumblr account is still online here. Ran for just a few months in 2012, from March 29 through August 5.

Fanfiction.net's section for Maximum Ride was an extremely active place between at least 2005 and 2011, which is when my own activity there began to taper off. It's been a long time and my memory isn't getting any better, but I recall PhoenixFanatic and StFangOfBoredom (old tumblr account) being well-known writers at different times. If you can get the website to load, sort for "most reviewed" fics and you should get at least a hint of what was best-known.

The Cafepress store functioned for almost 20 years before beginning to crumble. You should still be able to view the designs here.

There were a couple of flash games over the years. There was a platformer-type game on MaximumRide.COM at one time. Something different on MRUK that I don't remember well.

The last thing I'll mention is that there was a very active Maximum Ride/Maximum Ride-adjacent roleplaying scene, beginning on MaximumRide.COM and continuing through the end of MDW. Not always the same people involved, but anywhere Maximum Ride got discussed, someone would be interested in roleplaying there. I've never been a roleplayer so I don't really know what they got up to, but I know it was a lively sub-community.

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.