#atrbook

USA in a Civil War? Journalist Robert Evans has an Answer by Lone Star Plate

i bet that some readers unfamiliar with robert’s other work who stumble across it from the other side of that funny little political punnett square might genuinely struggle with understanding the fact that the heavenly kingdom was BAD bad early on, even with the references to fascism. in the US, there are a lot of people who really do view those kinds of sentiments in bits and pieces as harmless, backwards “redneck” idiocy.

that sneaky aspect of ATR reminds me of how i wanted to write a weirdly similar story when i was a kid and struggling with religious issues. i’m sure a lot of people raised extremely conservative+christian who swerved very far left and secular as they grew up probably also struggled to describe their situation and anxieties to any secular friends, and telling a story about warring nations is an easy way to frame it when you’re raised to see the situation as literal war. i know that some other people who were raised with the same impressions also find ATR and It Could Happen Here to be uncannily and hauntingly familiar. the speculative stories robert tells make me feel like i’m being turned inside-out.

the sasha-equivalent of the story i imagined wouldve been raised in my heavenly kingdom-equivalent, and my SDF would’ve been more closely tied with my NAF— and it would’ve had one ideology rather than several. i didn’t understand how diverse the secular world was, even then. i wouldn’t say that my NAF would’ve been GOOD per se... but i didn’t understand the issues with capitalism when i was a kid. so the moral greyness of my NAF equivalent would’ve been horribly similar to the way Sasha in ATR sees it. i mean, i was like 14 at the time i thought most about writing this story. i was very much not “out” of the belief system of my upbringing. i was just “struggling”.

i didn’t end up writing it. it turns out that expressing that kind of situation as morally blurry (and for that matter, writing a story about war where empathetic characters are on both sides) is very difficult for a teenage tumblr user with that kind of upbringing and a bad case of black and white morality. lol

also, i didn’t know how my story would end. i still don’t. if i were to write it now, i think it would end badly. i think it would reflect my anxieties, and go so horribly wrong. my NAF/SDF equivalent would not be equipped to put up a decent fight. my UCS would be home to plenty of influential capitalists as well. they’d protect themselves well with that doctrine, and plow forward, full steam ahead. and the world would end miserably.

The Seeds of a Thousand New Worlds by Firestorm Coop

FRAGONARD, Jean-Honoré. L’Escarpolette - 1766

TANGLED - ARTBOOK

FROZEN 1