#✧˖*°࿐ Francis Epsilon // always just NEVER good ENOUGH.

[voidfell]

Venn diagram with Francis Hunter and Adrien, Dani is between Francis and Adrien, Surge is between Francis and Hunter, Dudewhap is between Adrien and Hunter, and the RRB are in the middle, do you see my vision???

[rhythmantics]

Wow, see your thought process is so interesting! How did you end up coming up with the details surround Francis and his people, we don’t get many details in the show due to their very nature 

@skiboop​

First, I started with what the original writers had in mind. We could piece together a few things based on what Jay Stephens has said on the Toonzone forums and what we’ve seen in the show

Keeping with the theme of “all myths are real” in TSS, it appears that the People are a reference to a couple things in real life:

The Men in Black. These are a supposed group of people (or perhaps aliens? O: ) who are seen in connection with UFO sightings or other such paranormal phenomena, for the purpose of covering them up. Some believe they’re a governmental organization full of secret agents, some believe they’re aliens themselves, taking on a human guise, etc. etc. This connection is the most evident one - Epsilon outright says “my People have experience with... coverups” at the end of Paris is Melting, and every member we see dresses in a uniform color, with eyewear that hides their eyes. We only ever seem to see “agents,” and have yet to see any civilians.

The Illuminati, or secret societies in general. The general vibe of these kinds of mythos is that there’s some shadowy cabal of rich assholes who secretly control the world, and have access to advanced technology and/or supernatural powers. Epsilon’s people are clearly a society of some sort, given they have the resources to build a whole-ass space station that no one else knows about, and they’ve been explicitly stated by Jay Stephens on the Toonzone forums that they’re kind of their own thing - not actually members of the Scientists, not exactly government agents. Plus, they had the ability to take something out of Doyle’s Swiss safety deposit box without alerting anyone, meaning they’re either really, really good thieves, or they have enough political and economic sway to get an incredibly secure organization to do whatever they want.

Now, as for how they function internally, our main hint is just that Francis is a clone, they’ve been cloning for a hundred years or so at least, and they don’t really treat him well! This reveals a few things:

They’re very traditional. You could say conservative. They value stability, conformity, uniformity, and consistency. The very idea that a “perfect agent” exists is flawed, even ignoring that 50% of how a person turns out is the environment they’re raised in - the same agent will not be the best fit for every situation. Epsilon can’t squeeze into small areas, and while he’s good at keeping cool under fire, he’s not exactly going to win someone over with his charming smile and gregarious personality. But they’re so steadfast on this idea of achieving consistent and predictable results that they’ve clung onto this flawed system for at least 100 years.

They care more about group identity than individual identity. Adding to this is how much pride Francis takes in his People in his first episode, despite what we find out about how they treat him later. They brainwashed taught this kid that their organization is great, fantastic, he should be happy to be there, while regularly stamping out his individual thoughts or feelings. Plus, you know... the fact that Francis's name isn't even his name.

They value personal gain over morality or ethics. Francis outright says this (”good guys, bad guys, you always know their next move. Victory goes to the gray men in the middle, because you never know how we'll surprise you.”), and it’s pretty clear from their actions - they want Zak not for the good of the world, but because he’d make a valuable asset if they manage to control him.

They’re pretty cruel! They’re willing to force a child (!!!) to go through extremely harsh training - given that out in the field, Epsilon is already berating him for having thoughts of his own, one wonders how much worse it gets behind closed doors. They were also totally willing to kidnap an 11-12 year old boy and subject him to the same abuse training as Francis for their own gain.

If you start combining some of the later implications with what the People are based on, you start to get this picture of a small, secluded group  who split from regular society more than 100 years ago, developed hyperadvanced technology within their own circles, and came into this idea that they’re separate from and better than the outside world. They potentially see themselves as peacekeepers or guardians for when regular society goes south, “only intervening when necessary,” but the reality is that they’re more like parasites, manipulating the outside world for shortsighted personal gain. Power is likely incredibly stratified even within their ranks - Epsilon and Francis, who are mere agents, can’t do anything about their fates. Francis’s reaction to Zak feeling bad for him is “I don’t need your pity,” because he’s resigned himself to his place in his Peoples’ system. Since some people in this society have absolutely 0 power, it’s very likely that some others have absolute or nearly absolute power.

Then if you know how these kinds of systems develop and evolve in real life (sociology FTW) you can infer several possible origins - maybe a leisure club for rich assholes who already had a lot of power, which is what most modern-day “secret societies” actually are.

But more importantly - what I write is there because it’s good for the story I’m trying to tell! What I prefer is the idea that they actually started out idealistically - maybe even as the Secret Scientists of their own time, in the late 1700s/early 1800s - a group that gathered up humanity’s best and brightest, possibly under the banner of “providing a safe haven for visionaries” etc., who made leaps and bounds in technological development. Over time, they grew arrogant and prideful, believing too much that their increasingly amoral actions were for the greater good... like what happened with the actual Secret Scientists in season 2.

So first of all, I did not know you had a tumblr??? Second It Will Not Obey You SLAPS. And third my question: How in god's name did you do so much research for your fic??? What is your secret. How do you go about organizing or even knowing where to start for that matter. I struggle with research cause I never know where to start or stop and often I'm really uncertain if the info I'm gathering is even needed or if it's extraneous. I am both stupid and a perfectionist HELP ME

Hi Anon, thank you so much! I always appreciate viewer support and I hope you're enjoying all the art on this blog that isn't in the fic. In any case, I don't know if this method will work for you, or if it's how other authors do research, but here's my process. It's pretty long, so I'll put it under a cut for you:

First, I start with a story. When I say story, I don't really mean a beginning-middle-end, this happens and then that happens; it's a little more vague than that. For me, a story is more like a feeling, some truth or impulse, and all the writing or plot structure or everything else is built around it. I don't generally bother with things like plot structures (which I think should be descriptive and not prescriptive anyway), and I do make outlines, but you'd be surprised by how barren they are. Here's the original from 2016, with some spoilers blacked out:

And as you can see, I threw about half of it away during the writing process, haha. A surprising amount remains, though!

Something that comes about from approaching the story as a single entity is that oftentimes, things just fall into place. A big fight taking place in the congo where most of the cryptids from the Kur flash-forwards get called up, or the gang getting shot down over the Amazon like in the first two episodes of the show - little coincidences like this happen all the time. I think it's because, while writing, my brain starts making connections that I'm not consciously aware of - I often go by what "feels correct," and I've rewritten whole chapters multiple times before to chase that feeling of "correct."

How that ties into research is twofold: first, I'm a naturally curious person, and I'm constantly reading about stuff like mythology or ancient history or science etc. on my own. I like to have an approximate knowledge of many things - that way, there's more for my brain to make connections to. For example, I already knew about the chinese five-element system (wuxing), and remembered mystic hotspots from the show, and Excalibur, and video games, so when I decided on a plot device to keep Zak and Francis together during the main story, it was fairly easy to land on the idea of a quest to power up a special weapon only Francis can wield by hitting up mystical hotspots, each one themed after one of the wuxing.

The second part of the process is this: I have the general vibe or concept of the story in my head, and now I've settled on something concrete plot-wise - the magic weapon wuxing powerup quest. That makes it really easy to start researching specific details. I know I need a magic weapon, and I know this magic weapon has to be tied to Sumerian mythology, so I start digging around in Sumerian mythology for magic weapons, and find Sharur, the talking mace wielded by the Sumerian god Ninurta. Then I do some more research into the wuxing and see that each element is attached to a color, so those are the colors Sharur changes into. Now, a big part of the original show was its globetrotting nature, so obviously, I need to make each of these hotspots a different part of the globe. (And incidentally, "mythic hotspot" doesn't really roll off the tongue, so I rooted around myths for power spots etc. and found the Quechuan word "huaca," which has a meaning very similar to what I'm trying to make each huaca out to be).

So I scatter the huacas out so they're all roughly equidistant to each other, and none are too similar in geography or concept, and we go back to existing connections: I want to have one in China, because 1) I'm Chinese, 2) there's plot reasons (Sharur uses the wuxing because it was enchanted by a Chinese guy), 3) China has a long history comparable to India, the latter of which already featured extensively in the show. So I root around for the "secret science" parts of Chinese history and stumble across this semi-mythical Xia dynasty with its emperor who may or may not exist. That feels very Secret Saturdays to me, so Yu the Great and his tomb are now the second huaca. Now, we know so little about Yu the Great that there's not too much to draw from for how his tomb looks, but I already know about the tomb of Qin Shi Huang - his tomb's excavation was put on pause because ancient records spoke of him having a scale mercury replica of China complete with flowing mercury rivers, and while these claims were initially considered massive exaggerations if not outright lies, they DID find a TON of mercury in the tomb, making them go "unless..."

Mercury obviously fits right in with this huaca being "metal"-themed, so it's a perfect reference. The idea of a scale replica of China was blown up into the idea of a magically-powered VR simulation of ancient China. Now I need a cryptid for this arc, and hey, howdy, turns out Yu the Great has a serpent-slaying myth, Xiangliu! And what's this? Xiangliu's blood was so virulently poisonous that after it was slain, when the floodwaters came, the land became barren! There is such a strong pro-environement and pro-taking care of animals even when they seem monstrous vibe in TSS that if this story is seen through the lens of TSS, it looks a lot like a cautionary tale for why you don't just murder rampaging animals - they're natural parts of their natural environments, and there are repercussions for messing too much with the food chain.

And hey, doesn't that sound like a lesson Francis should learn? The last huaca, we got as far as Francis going from "I don't want to be here" to "I guess I'm stuck here." This huaca, we need to highlight how different he and Zak are, and how shortsighted - and human - Francis's ideals are, where he repeats Yu the Great's mistake, and humanity's mistakes as a whole.

Again, a lot of these connections aren't necessarily being made consciously. In the moment, they just sort of "feel right," which I know is unhelpful, but I can't really explain it any other way.

For an arc that had more secondary research than already knowing things ahead of time, the arc in the Congo took the longest to write (there was a two-year hiatus between it and the previous arc), in large part because I had so little to go off of. Myths from the Congo area are fairly sparse on the ground (for many reasons), and the ones I did find didn't really feel very TSS or IWNOY. I knew that this was the arc where everything went to shit - that we'd been building to that for a while - but I didn't have in my notes exactly how things went to shit, or even what the huaca was going to be. I knew it would be wood-themed, but this being the Congo Rainforest, pretty much anything I did would count. I knew I wanted to do something with the origin of humanity and/or the lemurians, because Africa was where humans first evolved.

So, actually, I wound up doing research into pretty much everything - all the cryptids from the area, all the myths from the area I could find. Previously, in my research on lemurians when working out what their Deal would be, I found out that a lot of writings on lemurians came from occultists in the 1900s, who also had many (racist and misogynistic) writings about where THEY think the first humans come from, about mystical ancient societies that were hyper advanced, etc. etc., which fit with the way that the lemurians seemed to have a veritable magical paradise in Shangri-La before the nagas massacred them. I could at least use the names from these hippies, because I couldn't find comparable mythology from the actual area, but I stripped out the... less savory parts.

I wanted to use the eloko/biloko when I found them, because their myths give them magic bells that compel people who hear it to do what they want - much like how the lemurian's charisma was set up (this being one of those interesting little coincidences that happen when the story "feels right.") Doubly so when I found out that eloko/biloko sleep in trees, which - wood-themed huaca. But I still wasn't really... piecing anything together.

So I switched tracks and started looking into Gilgamesh, the man, the myth, the legend, at the center of this all. Read the Epic of Gilgamesh (or, re-read, rather), and found the myth regarding Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh's quest for eternal life. An old man gifted by immortality from the gods? Given that I already had in my notes that the lemurians struck a deal with the devil with Kur and became what they are, and the eloko/biloko were a failure as a result of the lemurians going "wait, not like this" halfway through, Utnapishtim sounded like he could fit in as a lemurian from this original hullabaloo. And in the original Gilgamesh myth, the plant Utnapishtim points Gilgamesh to, which would grant him all his youth and vitality back, gets stolen from him by a serpent. Hey, nagas!

Okay, so now I had the origin of the lemurians, Utnapishtim's character being involved, even a hook for the nagas, and thus Argost, but it still wasn't coming together. SO...

... I gave up and started looking at biblical stuff. I'm a sellout hack. BUT, at least you can argue that biblical stuff is always potentially relevant, because the Saturday line has biblical names (Zakariya/Zechariah, Solomon, Elijah, Samuel) and Zak is set up with a minor Jesus reference (sacrifices himself for the good of mankind, is dead for 3 (minutes) and is resurrected). Specifically, I started looking into the "secret science" part of biblical stuff - apocrypha, or non-canonical texts. There's tons of interesting stuff in there, but it turned out to be mostly useless, aside from the chapter titles, but it did help to form this idea of making deals and regretting them - and I'm realizing now as I'm writing this that this was another one of those unconscious connections - ch12 is literally named after the part in Goethe's Faust where Faust makes his deal with Mephistopheles ("Die Wette biet ich" - "the bet I offer").

So now that I'd been freed to do biblical stuff (which, hey, also fits in with the wood theme, because Garden of Eden, get it?), I had access to the imagery of the snake tempting eve with fruit. And suddenly, everything started to come together. Themes of trying to defy what you are by nature, the nagas as betrayers, Kur and its entourage as demons, getting what you wished for but at what cost, a fall into darkness as the major players fail to defy their natures (and the consequences that result) - once I started, I couldn't stop.

So it's a bit hard to answer your question because it's all so intuitive, but I guess if I really had to say, the real answer to where to start and where to end is to just pick a topic you like so much that you wouldn't mind doing tons of research on it, even if most of it winds up being unusable. I LOVE ancient history and mythology, so even if nothing I read is useful, I don't mind reading. And not minding the reading means I have so much already floating around in my head for when I need to write something new. If you forced me to write, say, a crime drama or sci-fi story - two fields I have much less interest and much less knowledge on - I would also be pretty lost! At that point, I'd have two options - either I write something by the numbers just to get it done, or I do enough reading on the topic that I find something about it to love and care about, and then write based on that.

I think more is always better. Anything you don't immediately use becomes a potential connection for something else down the line. I'd say a good 30% of weird little factoids featured in IWNOY are things I knew before I did research for it, and now, for other projects I'm doing, the stuff I learned for IWNOY sometimes becomes relevant.

And I would always try not to worry too much about overstuffing or making your first draft bad. The secret is, most of the actually good writing happens in the editing. Your first draft exists for the purpose of existing. It's fine if it's riddled with holes, if the dialogue sucks, if there's way too much exposition and "essay-style writing" (what I like to call it when you randomly infodump all the research you've done - I've done this sooooo many times), or if it's so bad you have to delete the whole thing and start over (this is a regular part of my writing process!). The point of draft 1 is to throw the damn spaghetti against the damn wall. Edits and revisions are where you tastefully arrange it so that it's good and an art piece, haha.