Without Markup

There is a man in a lost country. A king in black and white. He sits and waits. He is the last man. On his throne alone. Or perhaps he is a woman. Androgynous features and a rose in his lapel. Surrounded by the remains of those who have fallen to the darkness.
His mind roams the landscape, checking for those who remain.
Come, we shall delve into his psyche.


His mind roams the landscape, checking for those who remain.
Come, we shall delve into his psyche.
(perhaps in the end he is a kid in a coma. Suffocated by darkness as those who love him watch on)
He looks for the slightest motion. For a sound.
He hears a sob, a crying. A crack in the darkness that focuses him. There is murmuring there too. But for noW let us focus on the crying.
A figure is trying to crack out of the darkness. (the mother)
The darkness perhaps lets it.
Or perhaps it breaks free. We do not know. (the mother rushes the boy)
A crying twisted figure that perhaps was a beautiful woman. It breaks free then rests.
It rushes the king.


the (mother’s) eyes are a link to the “real world”
Under the king is another layer.


the child lying on the bed as the mother sadly watches on.
Then the doctor comes in and stares at the child. Stares at the child as he withers away. Death personified. The inevitable waiting to happen.


It hungers. (the doctor) It eats.
We focus on it masticating. On the masochistic food beneath its teeth.
(of the gum, all that remains is the kid?)
The kid who as he moves, everything goes into chaos.
chaos turns into dust turns into the frightened child on the bed


And then a beast. It hides in the shadows. It strikes here and there. Ripping the flesh from the bones.
The monster that hides under the bed. Slowly caressing the child as he cries softly. Going inside of him. Entering him.
Shifting under the surface of the skin is the real you. The self that explodes form the self. It is the fateful trap.
The tear that falls from his eye falls from the kings.


And then a darkness comes again from the king. From his sword from his face from his hand from his eye. To smother it. And engulfs them all.

discarded ideas:


It is the frightened child. In his crib, knowedgable and impotent. As he observed the world, knowledge slips away. Large clumps and blobs flying free from his head. Bludgened out by the truth of his circle.
Under the kid is an old man. Feeble and strong. Watching the world through eyes of gold.
(a tear of darkness to link to a tear of light in the “real world”)

// Essentially the split between reality and reality.

There is the reality you imagine you are in… and then the reality that really is. You are constantly constructing a false reality for yourself. (The fact that I call it a false reality is somewhat misleading. No matter how false it is, as long as it is real to you, then it remains a reality).

What truly goes on, if realized in a way that you could understand, would destroy your reality and create a new one. Humans are, after a certain age, more and more resistant to this rather personal destruction of a world they’ve long struggled to create. And so when presenting ideas to them, the best way to do it is through abstraction and fantasy.

You must lead them to these new realities by introducting new ideas in ways that do not hammer at them, but rather present themselves in ways that allow them to occur as if the subject has thought of them as his/her own.

It must, in essence, become “unreal.”

(see freud’s ideas of ‘the umlaut’)

When we seek, when we look inside ourselves to see… “this is what I think, this is what I feel” it is… painful! It is scary. Even when we truly wish to do it, still we shy away. There is something there that is so real; so blantantly in-your-face-real that it would shatter our realities without a doubt. Deep down we know this. We use terms like “facing the darkness within” or “descending into ourselves.” Some train themselves through meditation or what have you to look at it as “revealing” or “ascending” or “enlightenment.” But no matter the terms, it is essentially the same.

You are taking what is real and changing it to something else. You go through your reality to fantasy (or un-reality) which brings forth this reality again.

It is these moments of change – of mental shift – that I wish to incite/investigate/release/demand… call it what you will. I attempt to create these moments in all that I do.

What is the mood I seek? That is a fairly hard question. One might say, I seek the macabre. To disgust, shock, scare and horrify. But that would be untrue. The mood I seek is that of revelation. Of truth. My mental model of the world is based on what I consider irrefutable, sometimes harsh, truths. Truths that people do not want to admit to, but exist nonetheless. I like, admire, and seek to exemplify those works which dig at the so called “dirty” heart of humankind or indeed of life in general.

But, to do so is difficult. One cannot just say “such and such a thing is true” or “this is what you must believe.” People do not respond well to that sort of diatribe. You have to coax them, startle them, or somehow guide them along a path to an idea. You must force them to reveal the idea to themselves. Only then will they know it is true. Writers have been doing this since before we can remember. The world of literature has been exposing these truths time and time again. But in animation… it is rare that I see this happen. Sometimes it does. Don’t get me wrong. But not nearly as often.

And this is what I wish to do. Almost all of the stories I tell (written or digital) has dealt with something along this line. Though really, I don’t think of it in such terms. In my head, I usually think: “This is what I think and this is what I feel. Now how can I abstract it so that others may draw the same conclusions.”