End Behavior (Sahar Kashayar)

End Behavior
Sahar Kashayar

End Behavior (Digital Comic Download Link)













Reflection:
I really like apocalypse stories, and I really like stories about the people left behind after the apocalypse. I wanted to highlight that theme the most, focusing on people struggling to live in a collapsed world of their own making, on people working with what they have after the end of the world. I also wanted to deal with human agency in the apocalypse, especially since it is a climate apocalypse I’m dealing with.
I don’t really like stories that have an explicit agenda. I think storytelling should be about posing a question rather than proving a thesis, and that the most successful stories are the ones that let the audience come to the thesis on their own. I really like stories that focus on something small and metonymize them into something big – I really enjoy Bradbury’s ‘There will Come Soft Rains’ (based on the Sara Teasdale poem) for this exact reason. There’s a quote by Richard Price that goes, “The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. you write about a kid’s burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.” And I think when it comes to something like writing the apocalypse, writing the end of the world, that’s what I wanted to do. Pick something small – a storyteller, a collection, a scientist – and work off that. So we get this narrator chronicling just that, preserving the small things, collecting what’s left of humanity.
Originally, the story dealt with a lot more. I wanted to show the Narrator arguing with some others about the importance of small things, wanted to show Eden giving them a name, wanted to talk about the liberative aspects of the apocalypse, the collapse of oppressive social orders, but ultimately I brought it back down to what it is now (also, my wrist was already dying at the thought of just fifteen pages, so I didn’t want to make it any longer than I had to). So instead we get ‘End Behavior’ as it is now.







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