#hannapocalypse

The way the apocalypse itself is treated in the narrative is sort of interesting. In masculine fantasies of apocalyptic survival, violence usually does get valorized. There’s this emphasis on the ability to take (usually what the villains do) and defend (usually what the heroes do), and the struggle for resources with robbery and cultlike monopolies dominating the economical scene. Look at Zombieland for an example of what was popular around this time—no one makes anything, they just wander around the ruins of an empty civilization, scavenging whatever they need. Doomsday preppers, which were about to break into the mainstream within a year or two of UIS coming out, overwhelmingly focus on 1. Hoarding supplies 2. Planning how to defend those supplies. It’s all MRE’s and canned food and fantasies of shooting other people who desperately want your MRE’s and canned food.

Hannapocalypse isn’t like that. While Hannapoc isn’t exactly focused on crafting and making the way that a more solar punk take on post-civilization recovery would be, it’s also not interested in hoarding or defending resources. It’s mercantile, honestly—by the third installment It’s the life of a traveling tinkerer, a service-based economy, in which you provide a service (exorcisms, magic, courier services) or you provide goods (scavenged, admittedly). There are many bases of stable civilization with which to trade. Hannapoc, in contrast with shows like The Walking Dead, offers a decentralized but ultimately capable view of human society. Instead of inevitable entropy and dissolution, communities look toward their local leaders for guidance and pull together in such a way that they survive and build new isolated governmental structures. It happens all over, and it doesn’t involve a lot of mass refugee movement. Neighboring towns consolidate and band together in every region. Sometimes the new power structure is bad, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s neutral.

But violence itself… violence is deeply rooted in hannapoc in a way that goes beyond just “action based plot, fight the bad guys, save the good guys”. Violence is not social power—as stated before, aside from CMC, violence isn’t really the principle that society organizes upon. Violence here is personal power.

The moment that Conrad’s entire character begins the shift from being “helpless, confused, passive” to “formidable, capable, active” is the moment in the gas station where he either kills or very seriously injures another man in order to protect Worth (and himself, but Worth is the locus of the action). Conrad uplifts himself through violence. The basis for Doc Worth’s respect of him in canon is his lashing out at Worth in violence, and that trend only carries forward in hannapoc.

Yes Hanna Cross values negotiation and compromise, empathy; yes the social structure of the world values community recovery. But the two main characters at the center of this world are building not only their value (as guards) in the little economic unit of their traveling family but also their value to each other in a language of violence. They communicate on their very first road trip (and later) through outbursts of violence where words seem to fail them. Conrad’s fear, as well as his grief, are expressed through physically fighting with Worth. At the same time, Worth is struggling to express his compassion and care for Conrad by initiating violent interactions in which Conrad can express himself this way. It’s cathartic, but deeply dysfunctional. Maybe it’s inevitable for the situation—how can anyone hope to grapple with a meaningless and terrifying die out of their species without retreating into some mad urge or another? But it certainly isn’t wholesome.

This is where Fight Club’s influence really shows through. Because all of this? This is what Worth brings to the narrative, and the single greatest influence on the writing of Doc Worth is Fight Club. Fight Club (the novel) deals in themes of isolation, alienation, problematic coping, and most of all, masculinity as monolith. Tyler Durden famously states that “self improvement is masturbation”: self destruction is cleaner, more beautiful, more meaningful. It’s a nihilist view that idealizes the ugliness of permanently open wounds on a living-but-dying body. When you first meet Doc Worth, he is masochistically reveling in his own rock bottom life. He is a Tyler Durden without the cult, or maybe he is a Cult of One. He loves exactly two people, and only grudgingly. His ideal state is one of having nothing to lose. It takes the end of the world to make him admit that maybe he cares for Conrad, too.

The narrative never actually questions whether Conrad becoming more comfortable with violence is good or not. When he’s introduced he is repressed, afraid of his own strong and negative emotions as well as--it seems--his more positive ones. Does he get better at expressing himself once Doc Worth has provided a pressure release valve on his darker side? Debatable. Defending himself, Defending Worth, and contributing meaningfully to the family unit as physical support all make him marginally more confident as time goes on, but Worth continues to belittle him regardless of the ways in which he has improved. He takes Worth at face value throughout all of this, barely entertaining the idea that Worth might even be capable of warm feelings. The violence might help Conrad cope with his grief, and it might provide a basis for communication with Worth that augments their extremely limited verbal dialogue, but it does not give him the tools he needs to make this place--make this person--a home. He becomes very good at killing, which is a useful skill under the circumstances, but there’s not much room in the bedroom he shares with Worth for him to grow.

For a long time, antagonism remains the main way that Worth initiates connection with Conrad. There’s an uneasiness between Worth’s rock solid life philosophy and the story of survival/recovery that the overall series is trying to tell. In a Cowboy Beebop fashion, Worth seems to regard himself as someone who is already dead, and so whatever happens…. happens. It isn’t until his death and last minute resurrection by Conrad that these two poles are brought into alignment. It’s worth noting that the battle at the barricade where Doc Worth dies was written years before the fic containing it. It’s a specter that looms over the first era of the series, while also drawing out the uncomfortable disharmony for a very long time.

I have to talk about POV distance here. Even though all the parts of hannapocalypse are technically close third person, there are things both accidental and intentional that strip away the intimacy of reading Worth pov. The deliberate thing is the avoidance of using any clear emotional descriptions at all. Worth reacts to emotional stimulus in purely physical ways—his fists clench, teeth grit, his stomach sinks. He never describes his fear or anger or anything more delicate, leaving all of it in a kind of primordial stew of impulses and reactions. It is almost as if he doesn’t have the language to describe his internal state. The reader is forced to interpret his emotional core without much help.

But the accidental technique is the dialogue. The funny thing about transcribed accents is that usually they have the side effect of putting distance between the audience and the reader, because of the effort it takes to decode them and also because of the othering that happens when the narration looks one way and the dialogue looks the other. Doc Worth’s accent was inherited from a comics format, where accents are still pretty common in the mainstream and less othering because of the lack of frame narration, so it’s interesting to look at what it might accidentally be doing on the page. Doc Worth is your narrator, but he’s also sort of resisting the ordeal of being Known. I’m not saying the accent has aged well—honestly I think the writing would probably be better off without it, or at least with a much more toned down version—but it does cause some interesting effects. (Also, what the hell is this accent. It’s some hellish mish mash of whatever Tessa Stone was writing and I think a southern accent I was channeling. Trading “can” for “kin” definitely feels southern in the mouth.)

So what's the take away here? We have Spike Speigle’s dreamy nihilism, Fight Club’s empowerment through violence, a community-based social philosophy. Worth’s suspicious nature and cynicism are validated in almost every installment right up until it kicks his ass and causes him to self-sabotage in the death/resurrection arc. But in a way it’s been undermining him all along, putting Conrad in the position where he cannot safely make any overture of open friendship or care without being afraid of the punishment he will almost certainly take, even though what Worth wants most deeply is the security of Conrad’s affection. When you consider that Worth starts the story with only two relationships, both of which he maintains through antagonism and gestures of service (like a distant father, or a confused bachelor) a structure of themes starts to come clear.