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Part 158 of Behind the Gloves
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Published:
2021-04-21
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2022-01-22
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Another Attempt At Fixing Kevin Vacit's Backstory

Summary:

Edit: These are just my notes and musings - the first novella covering Kevin's backstory is here, and the second novella (a work in progress) is here.

Kevin Vacit is Bester's grandfather, and director of Psi Corps for over forty-five years. His story is important because it sets up for a lot of later things in canon, but his backstory remains the Gordian Knot of canon backstory writing disasters.

Chapter 1

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Three and a half years ago, I tried to fix Kevin's backstory in the second half of the post here.

Nah, it's worse.

The short version of the problem is this - JMS gave Gregory Keyes an outline with which to write the book. Somewhere, it seems, they miscommunicated.

  • We see Kevin at four years old when his mother dies in the cave, but the child's name isn't given, so it's not clear Keyes knew this was Kevin.
  • We see what appears to be a different kid that Monkey "adopts" off the street - Blood/Desa can feel his blocks, and they call him "James."
  • We never meet a character named "Kevin Vacit" till he walks into Senator Crawford's office, at almost twenty-four years old. While "James" was a street orphan raised by an outlaw/terrorist, "Kevin" is a highly successful young attorney who previously earned a prestigious undergraduate degree and high grades from Harvard.
  • Then on pages 122-123, Keyes suddenly got the memo that "James" was "Kevin" - so suddenly, in the scene where they meet again, Monkey speaks of having raised him (and he says Blood/Desa couldn't sense him as a telepath), and what should have been the Big Dramatic Confrontation between these characters falls completely apart.
  • This scene comes out of nowhere since the last we heard of James/Kevin (known only as "the kid") is when Monkey leaves Desa around 2121. How Kevin gets away from Monkey and becomes a super successful scholar/lawyer/political aide is missing from the story.

But it's worse.

Because in the meantime, when Kevin was "not the same person," he starts working for Crawford while Desa is still working for Crawford, too, and they run into each other, but only know each other from a few years prior, when Kevin was working as an attorney in Houston and Desa was working at the same office as a court telepath. And they're not just pretending not to know each other, in front of Crawford - when they're alone, they also talk to each other like they don't know each other.

So how to fix this? One way is to say, "since Money took Kevin on the run with him away from the others when Kevin was about nine (the scene before seems to take place in 2121), and so much time has passed, Desa doesn't recognize Kevin, and he doesn't recognize Desa either." Maybe he's also changed his name. The other way is to say "there was a mistake, Kevin didn't start working for Crawford till a few weeks later, after Desa was killed. They never met."

Path 1: He's grown up, he's going by a different name, and she never would expect that "the kid" who Monkey ran off with would be the same person as this lawyer she used to work with. Drawbacks: Kevin has a unique-feeling mind, something that Desa comments on. I could believe that she doesn't recognize his appearance, but I think she would recognize him telepathically. So, Path 2: Did they even meet at all? If I move the date when Kevin started working for Crawford by only about three weeks, then we've avoided all of this (we have to retcon those scenes out, and get key information into the book some other way, but it avoids these other writing problems).

But we're not done. Then there's Desa's daughter, Brenna.

Brenna's supposed to be fifteen and on the playground watching the younger Teeptown kids when Kevin and Lee and Desa are talking, in 2136. That means she's born in 2121, making her nine years younger than Kevin. If these ages are correct, and we go with the first correction above (Kevin left with Monkey at nine), then they never knew each other (and so she would not recognize him, and he would not recognize her. It also explains why Monkey doesn't know Brenna is his (Desa left without telling him she was pregnant/before she knew she was pregnant). I think this was the writers' intent.

But then we have an age problem for Brenna. The youngest that Michelle Alexander, her daughter, can reasonably be in 2156 is twenty (she's working for Crawford), and that means she was born in 2136, when her mom would be fifteen by canon's dates. Even making Michelle eighteen still makes her mom giving birth at seventeen. I don't think these ages were intentional! No one gets married that young in the Authority. Michelle is engaged to be married in 2156. I think no one paid much attention to the timeline and to ages. We see similar problems elsewhere.

If Brenna was older, Monkey would know about her.

The solution here, I think, is just to ignore the problem and to drop a note at the end acknowledging the dates don't work, similar to the problem I encountered elsewhere when trying to determine the date of WWIII. It may not be possible to fix, and Brenna doesn't otherwise come into the story, so I think it can be left alone.

As a side note, the Corps' genetic matching algorithms didn't work out so great in Lyta's family. Desa and Monkey are P12s. Brenna is a P10. Michelle's rating isn't given, but I think given her lack of a more prominent role in the story, it's not high. Natasha is a P5. Her unnamed daughter is a P2. Lyta, finally, is a P5.

I'm pretty sure this is not how it is supposed to work! (Regression to the mean is a thing.)

In conclusion:

Since it would be really hard to explain Desa not recognizing Kevin's mind, and it would be very complicated for the story if Desa recognized Kevin/Kevin recognized Desa - this potentially would change a lot of plot - I think I have to retcon out those scenes and say he started working for Crawford a bit later, with a link to this essay to explain why I'm making that change. Kevin does eventually figure out that this was the same Desa/Blood that he knew as a child - so I don't need to change him seeing how Brenna, Michelle and even Natasha resemble her.

Am I missing something?

Notes:

I've worked as a professional editor (for both fiction and non-fiction), at all levels from line editing up to developmental editing, for short works and for long works, even academic works. I've got paid to fix non-fiction that's such a mess, it's not just a matter of fixing sentences - the paragraphs don't work internally, the paragraphs don't work together, the chapters don't work, the ideas don't flow... you get the idea.

And nine years into trying to fix Dark Genesis and I am still finding new, major problems. The usual approach I take - reverse engineer the outline it as written, fix the outline/timeline, rewrite - doesn't always work here, because the problems are that bad. Even reconstructing the "outline as written" is a challenge because of scattered writing and internal consistency problems.

Chapter 2

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

I then went back and tried to fix the writing problems from Kevin's early childhood.

So it turns out that the cliff he and his mom hide in is an actual real place. It is not, however, a place where the Zuni hid but where murdered anyway. They survived (several times). This is a real place that is visible from the Zuni Pueblo (3.1 miles away).

But it's over 7,000 ft. tall, and even assuming they made it to a cave part of the way up... how does anyone climb this after being shot in the chest, imminently dying of their wounds?

So putting aside all the other copious amounts of fail and vagueness here, we have mom and four-year-old child making it three miles (apparently on foot), pursued by men with guns (and dogs), and scaling these cliffs even though mom is dying from having been shot in the side of her chest.

The scene takes place during the years of the first telepath panic (2116), but on top of that we now have what appears to be white folks/other non-Indian folks coming to the Zuni reservation and massacring telepaths there, too... which gets into a much more complicated racial/ethnic conflict and opens up far more questions than it answers. Kevin doesn't appear to have any family left to go back to (or else they would have taken him in), but it gets worse, because what happened to the rest of his tribe, and why didn't they take him in? How does he end up "wandering alone in the desert" and then in Flagstaff, two years later?

Whatever happened there requires a much more complicated story than just "normals were out killing telepaths because politicians hyped this up." I get that Kevin doesn't understand it at the age of four. He would, however, understand it when he got older.

Ironically, the least messed up part of this is how he survived alone at the age of four - he is canonically the strongest telepath ever, so basically "this kid has super powers," plus he has super intelligence, as in, it's not implausible at all that at the age of four he has already taught himself to read at the third grade level (or even higher). At his level, telepathy isn't just "telepathy" as people think of it, because it's also:

  • Can understand any language spoken to him
  • Can quickly learn to reply in any language spoken to him by pulling the right words and grammar from the other person's mind
  • Can incapacitate or kill man or beast with a thought
  • Can change other people's senses to make them see/hear/etc. illusions, such as "I make myself appear to turn into a fire breathing monster" or "I make someone hear their name called from behind them, so they turn around" or "I make myself (or others) invisible" etc. etc.

And maybe more!

It's terrible writing to establish "this kid is the most powerful EVER" (until Lyta, and she wasn't born that way) and then not show him use his powers over what a P6 could do with little effort.

Come on. Most powerful EVER. We have to see that in action.

[Edit: We were supposed to see that in the battle in the Yucatán, but that was done so badly I literally forgot about it.]

Notes:

The only solution I see to mom's super strength is "Vorlon powers." Clearly scaling that cliff after having been shot in the chest (and coughing up blood), and then still living several more hours, means she has super powers - and the only possible canon explanation for that is because she is carrying some sort of gift from the Vorlons. So I have to wave my hands and say "because Vorlons" (even though this is kinda dumb).

Chapter 3

Chapter Text

After Monkey takes Kevin away from Blood and the others (when Kevin is about nine years old, in 2121), canon says absolutely nothing until many years later, when Monkey kills Crawford and Kevin is there, and he has a conversation with Monkey.

That means that canon establishes that Kevin was literally raised by a terrorist, but somehow, and for no reason given in canon, left/got away and then suddenly ends up at Harvard, graduating top of his class, and then in law school, graduating top of his class, etc. And before he's twenty-four, he's become the top aide to one of the most powerful senators in the Earth Alliance.

"That's one hell of a story you never told us."

I have a cynical explanation for the lack of this story - the writers' anti-Corps agenda. Until that is addressed, this story (whatever it is) can't be told. And I really don't know what the missing story is here - my goal is to write a compelling, coherent, logical story that sets up for what I do know happens later. That's the best I can do with the resources I have.

The central problem with this plot arc (that necessitated it being skipped entirely... weakening Dark Genesis even more) is that Monkey is the villain, but the writers have to do backflips to keep the narrative away from this... because "he's fighting the Corps."

When we first meet him, what's he doing? He and the others have formed a literal cult in Alaska, convincing the locals they're gods (and stealing their money). When others catch on and try to stop him (portrayed as evil bigoted locals who are persecuting them for being telepaths, as opposed to maybe the police and other locals who are trying to stop this abusive scam), what does Monkey do? He blows up all of his followers - a hundred or two hundred people. Just blows them up with explosives, and then he's like "OK, it's time we moved on now."

Only one of the telepaths in his group even sees something wrong with what he just did, and she's by far the weakest telepath of the group. Personally, she looks to me like as much of a victim of Monkey (and Blood)'s abuse than everyone else - just she's a telepath so they're not shown physically hurting her. But it's not clear to me she can actually leave them.

Anyway, when the first thing your character does on screen is run a cult, blow everyone up, and then not give a shit, this is your villain.

(And to be clear, he does this before the Corps and before the MRA... he does this because he really likes manipulating people, and killing people with explosives.)

Pretty much everything we see him do later on screen is the same - he never changes and becomes a "good guy." He takes Kevin away from the homeless Indian woman he's been living with - whatever happened between Monkey and this woman, I don't think Kevin had a choice. He just gets taken away. After that, Monkey never calls Kevin a name (Kevin, James, etc.) in the whole book, he's just "the kid." He takes "the kid" away from the other telepaths in his group when Kevin is nine, and goes off with Kevin on his own. Blood even says "since when do you care about the kid?" (Or any of the other telepaths you pretend to care about?)

To try to justify this, the writers have to make this about fighting the Corps (which doesn't exist) or the MRA (which is literally in its infancy), this being only a few years since the whole Telepath Panic in the first place. "We have to make Monkey not a villain! We have to make this sound noble somehow!"

So he says to Blood, "I won't let you drag him off to some fascist training camp." The writers are saying "the Corps = Nazis!" to cover up the obvious kidnapping... and hoping no one realizes that there are no fascist training camps in the MRA - now or ever - and even if Monkey believes this about the MRA in later decades, this makes literally no sense in 2121. That's how they cover up a kidnapping. "Because the Corps = Nazis!"

(The MRA functioned as a "clearinghouse" to identify and register telepaths, and to track them into "telepath jobs" - while a slew of other mundane laws banned them from other parts of society. There's also a small school in Geneva. And that's literally all they have by 2136, let alone 2121.)

How about... Monkey was pissed off that Blood was switching from chaotic evil to lawful evil, and he's like "fuck this, I'm taking the kid so I'll at least have him to control"?

The writing is all like this - whatever he does is excused by the writers because "hey look over there, the Corps is evil!" He sets off a roadside bomb and kills Crawford (himself a problematic character, but still... this is a roadside bomb that probably hurt or killed others, too) and it's fine "because the Corps = bad." The book even has Kevin, standing over Crawford's dead body, asking Monkey to kidnap his daughter "to keep her out of the Corps, because the Corps = bad." (I've discussed some of the many things wrong with that scene in other places.)

Later, Monkey sets off a bomb that takes out a whole city block in Kuala Lumpur, but again, that's OK "because the Corps = bad" and that was the only way to keep himself from getting captured by the Corps. He's not a villain even though he just blew up a whole city block.

Honestly, I'm tired of all this. I'm not going to dodge the obvious just because it's also true that normals "regulating" telepaths is evil. Absolutely none of what normals believe or do has anything to do with the Monkey himself being a villain - yes, a story can have more than one villain.

Kevin, meanwhile, is a complicated character who sometimes does the wrong thing for the right reasons (or maybe even the right thing for the wrong reasons). Monkey wanted to raise Kevin to be like him, and something critical happened that caused Kevin to break from Monkey, run away, and make his own path in life. Monkey, the villain, wants revenge. He also enjoys controlling people and killing people, and wants to fight anyone who would stop him (like the law, in all forms). He is pure chaotic evil. Crawford, a different sort of villain (lawful evil), wants power at all costs, and he gets it.

Kevin hovers around lawful neutral - he follows a personal code. He is obsessed with work, power, and climbing the social ladder, and we watch as he sometimes struggles to find his moral compass - over the course of his life, he sometimes does bad things because he thinks he has some higher imperative. His moral compass is "whatever the Vorlons in my head tell me to do." Sometimes that works out well, and sometimes it doesn't.

(Fwiw, even though Blood's character development is also seriously broken and I don't think I have a stake in fixing that writing, she seems to me to be a character who starts out chaotic evil and one day decides to become lawful evil. That why her death by self-sacrifice doesn't follow from the earlier writing of her character - all of her motivations seem to be in the "evil" alignment, at least neutral at best. Did she somehow become a character who would sacrifice for others (and if so, how did that happen?), or is she really only "sacrificing herself" to achieve a different selfish motive? Why would she kill herself so telepaths could keep being oppressed? None of that makes any sense.)

Chapter 4

Chapter Text

I think Kevin's mother personally touched Vorlon artifacts, and that's how she ended up with the Vorlon "spirits" or whatever in her, and how this got to Kevin.

The canon book says "Things tumbled out of Mama, then, [when she squeezed his hand] a whole lot of things he didn't understand. Some were shiny and made him want to cry, others just scared him." The next sentence shows him feeling her wounds (she's been shot).

Of course, canon is extremely vague. There is another vague reference later, when Kevin and Natasha find a Vorlon artifact in the Yucatán (in another scene that has writing problems):

"It was like metal, smooth and hard, but with a faint shimmering and shifting that was not like metal at all. He recognized it instantly as being like the artifacts from Mars. When he touched it, he felt a vague shock, and for an instant he was back in the storm of his mother's death, staring up at the Shalako in fear and wonderment."

And he could be reminded of that moment because it's a Vorlon artifact and he had a vision from Vorlons when he was a child, or he could be reminded of that moment because his mother had touched a similar artifact. But the book only says he recognized it as being like the artifact on Mars, not like the "things" that tumbled out of his mother's mind that day.

If the book had wanted to be clear, this would have been how to do it, but instead they go with "he doesn't know what these things are because he's four, and then he doesn't recognize these artifacts as being the same things his mother touched (if they are) because he was four, and so he forgot the things he never understood in the first place."

I think his mother touched Vorlon artifacts. There is no explanation of how any such pieces ended up in the Zuni Pueblo, but there is no other plausible explanation for her Vorlon connection given in canon - it makes more sense that she touched these artifacts than she or her ancestors went on a cruise to Antarctica and got Vorlons in their heads.

I am also super unimpressed at Kevin's psi battle with the cultists in the Yucatán. I know I've been binge-watching My Hero Academia, but you're seriously telling me that that is the Epic Psi Battle between canon's strongest telepath and a group of pissed off telepath cultists in the jungle? (Plus we have a psi nose bleed, even though this isn't even a canon thing, just 'cause?)

In the "anticlimactic battle," the cultists telepathically band together to kill Kevin, Natasha and the Psi Cops who came along with them. Kevin's like "OK, this pisses me off" and telepathically starts dropping them like flies, one Psi Cop gets off a shot and kills the priest, Natasha's standing there doing nothing (she's a P5), and after a moment, the cultists who are still alive are like WE GIVE UP!

Then Kevin confesses to Natasha that he's been a telepath all along, and "they agree to keep this a secret" even though all the Psi Cops who are with them literally just watched him take down the whole group, and then talk about having done so. But Kevin's like "this is just between you and me" or something to that effect, as if no one else is there. Um...?

This would be a more dramatic battle if the cultists are able to kill or knock out every single Psi Cop in the first round (even though one of the Psi Cops does manage to shoot the priest), and then Kevin (who absolutely no one knew to be a telepath) kicks everyone's ass single-handedly, while telepathically protecting Natasha. That's why the Psi Cops don't see what he does, or hear him talking about it afterwards. And that's how we know Kevin's an Epic Badass. (Actually, we should already know that from his backstory, but that backstory is missing.)

The cultists pull one of those "hold hands/merge psi powers and attack!" moves, taking out the Psi Cops and assuming Kevin's a normal who can't put up a fight at all, and Kevin's like "dead, dead, dead, dead, dead..." with his usual precision - even though he's never used his abilities to that degree since childhood.

"Wow, I'm out of practice!"

And Natasha's like "ZOMG" and "...so that's why my mom was in love with you."

Chapter 5

Chapter Text

After working more on the missing early pieces of Kevin's story, I don't think it's possible for me to do certain things. Maybe there is someone else who can do it, or maybe it really just can't be done, for reasons I will explain, and I know that this will result in an incomplete story with obvious holes, but I really don't see another way.

1. Canon has given us a Native character, and it would be highly problematic to change that for any reason (not that I would never consider doing so);

2. Canon also gives us a "supernatural" premise, centering a hyper-scientific and Western view of such awarenesses and abilities, something I object to anyway for all sorts of reasons, including personal ones, and would like to subvert and challenge in my writing as I go... but doing so in the context of Native characters and cultures is complicated;

3. Non-Native writers writing about Native characters (especially spiritual beliefs and practices) is fraught with Problems, and Native people writing about other Native cultures' spiritual beliefs and practices is also fraught with Problems;

4. And said problems are complex and multidimentional, involving misrepresentation (which can be mitigated with sensitivity readers) and financial exploitation (not an issue in fanfic, which is noncommercial by definition), authors who falsely claim to be Native (a serious issue that persists to the present day), and perhaps least obvious to non-Native readers and publishers - respecting the privacy and sacredness of Native stories and knowledge and not disclosing that which is not meant to be disclosed (a concept which itself is wholly foreign to the world's dominant cultures).

So I'm in an impossible situation - if I don't fill in the gaps, I have engaged in Native erasure, and if I try to write about how, in Kevin's early childhood, his people or other Native peoples with whom he had contact understood the apparent "emergence" of telepathy (and the whole spectrum of abilities that that represents in this world, which includes abilities to make oneself "invisible" or appear to be a non-human form), then I'm either going to totally misrepresent Native beliefs and cause harm, or I run the risk of revealing something I should not, and causing a different harm. Even having Native beta readers from the respective nations in the story (if I could do this) doesn't solve the problem, because People Are Individuals and so points of view and connection to traditional life will vary, so someone might think something is OK to share, but others in their nation might strongly disagree.

See this essay here by someone whose work I greatly respect, but the problems run much deeper than any one essay can ever sum up. It gets to the essence of "what is a story and what is its place and purpose" in the meaning of peoplehood, history, culture, tradition, knowledge, and individual and collective identity.

And then on top of this, the canon story itself is one that is fundamentally about dispossession and de-personhood, of the magnification of taboo against certain people that it literally leads to worldwide murders for generations, about (as I have detailed at length) the literal legal "dehumanizing" of a group of people and the creation of a sub-caste - something so apparently "acceptable" and "obvious" to the show's creator and writers that it's embedded in and reinforced in the writing itself at every turn (and which my project exists to challenge).

So it would be super wrong and ironic for my project to inadvertently engage in present-day colonialism as I try to challenge "colonialism" in a sense in that world (because the reification of "telepathy" as a distinct social and political category, used to dispossess people of their rights, while not an exact parallel, does have those notes... seeing especially as the justifications for this reorganization of society are entirely Western and "scientific," and created to give one class of people (almost) every sort of power over another).

What I seek to do, of course, is to challenge canon's framework - both "in-universe" and the assumptions in this culture that have given way to that. I also would like to contrast Kevin's background - as an actual Native person who was traumatically cut off from his people and his culture - with the fake-ass "Native" cults run by Monkey and Blood, two power-tripping non-Native people (Monkey is white, Blood is maybe Hispanic, maybe mixed race?) who were impersonating Native gods in order to steal people's money and "for the hell of it" - until things went south and Monkey literally KILLED EVERYONE.

It is a horrifying story that this is the man who (basically) kidnapped Kevin (who was living with homeless Native woman in Flagstaff), though of course Monkey says she handed him over and didn't care. And maybe Kevin came to accept that story, because he was so young at the time, and memory is malleable. But maybe it's another lie. And Kevin's family (at least his mother, maybe more people) was killed because Crawford, a powerful white politician cooked up this "telepath panic" as a way to get power for himself - and suspected "telepaths" all over the world were hunted, or suspected "witches" (because the propaganda tied all this together), and so of course there would be Native healers and others targeted in this mess. So the story includes that sort of trauma as well.

And the on top of all of this, as if this isn't complicated enough already, we have Kevin at times (mostly) denying his background and becoming part of the system that created this mess - so that's another complicated issue to write about, the challenges of Native children who have (sometimes non-consensually) been "adopted out" and who have lost connection to their peoples and the trauma from that - and yet, at the same time, he does not entirely reject his background.

Interestingly, we see how he chooses to keep his personal spiritual knowledge (imparted from his mom, from the Vorlons, etc.) a secret not because because "he's secretive," but because it's not to be shared. He won't even share this with Natasha, even though she's closest to him, and even though as a telepath, he could. Even after they've both literally been on the Vorlon ship, what he carries is his, and what she carries is hers. He tells her some things, and as a telepath she senses other things, but he never actually shares some things.

That is one thing he does remember from his youth - some knowledge is private, and it's private for a reason.

So I'm going to try to write this book anyway, with this chapter posted as a caveat and explanation for the gaps that will remain. If there is some way I can manage all of this better, or accomplish the book's goals better without being disrespectful and hurting people, please do let me know.

I have been saying since the start of Behind the Gloves (ages ago) that it's not possible for me to do this project alone - not because of my lack of drive or writing talent, but for various circumstances outside of my control. My role in the project as a whole is defending Bester. This background book (Orphans) is written to fix some of the problems with the story's set-up, so that later events - in Bester's life - make sense narratively and emotionally. There will be times, outside of my central role in this project, where the best I can do is lay out the meta-pieces.

Chapter 6

Chapter Text

OK, mystery finally solved - Keyes did intend "James" to be Kevin, and just never introduced him as Kevin (or followed up on Kevin's story till he walks into Crawford's office).

While working on a different story, I found these lines in the book:

"Somebody noticed the kid, and a social worker came by. They told him he was Blood's sister's son, which seemed to satisfy, but they had to put him in school.

"He seemed to improve a little, after that, though he was in special classes. [Here and elsewhere it's implied because he's not speaking, although they just show him not speaking, and never afaik explicitly say 'the kid didn't talk'.]

"Mercy made her announcement at the dinner table. It was clear that something was bothering her. Her shields were up - they were as thin as paper, of course, and Blood could have poked through them anytime she wanted, but the family respected privacy. If Mercy wanted to shield, they let her.

"But then she told them. 'They tested me today.'

"Blood froze with the spoon halfway to her mouth, as the table became a sudden whirlwind of silent panic.

"The boy, whom they had taken to calling James, cringed."

-----

So... he never told them him his name (or never spoke at all), and "James" isn't just the name they gave the school, that's what they've been calling him. And we don't even know that "Kevin Vacit" was his name back in the Zuni Pueblo - we have no idea if he made that name up when he ran away and took a new identity.

I also ran the math with the dates elsewhere in this section (Kevin shows up with Monkey when the DiPeso episode episode aired), and yes, there's a missing year and a half where he was... somewhere in the desert, before he ended up with an old Indian woman, doing something.

OK, that's a different problem. At least I know he was never called "James" back at the Pueblo - they just made that up. He didn't speak, and had tighter blocks than anyone Blood had ever telepathically touched, so they just made it up. And when he first meets her, she's reaching for the gun. ...Great.

Chapter 7

Chapter Text

You know those lollipops that change flavors as you go through them?

This writing disaster is a little like that - each time you get past one layer of writing failure, you get to the next layer of writing failure.

I've untangled the disaster up to 2121, when Kevin is ten years old, Monkey "takes the kid" and the group splits up, with Monkey going off on his own and Blood and the others joining the MRA. Here we also show Monkey "finding his purpose in life" - to fight Crawford with all he's got. So we set up for the final scene decades later when he finally kills him. Done.

Canon also says there are three other attempts on Crawford's life before Kevin begins working for him in about 2136, so here again is plenty of opportunity to show Monkey trying to kill him (and failing).

(Canon can also be read that there were four attempts on Crawford's life after 2121 - not even counting the first one! I wonder if that's the right interpretation!)

I may be able to get around the "Desa and Kevin don't know each other?" problem: Kevin could actually start working for Crawford a couple weeks after he meets him and tours Teeptown (maybe that was the final interview, not his official start date... why would he start the same day as he meets Crawford for the first time? Tom could stick around for a week or two (even though this is awkward, since he's been having an affair with Crawford's wife), allowing Desa to get killed before Kevin shows up for work, and avoiding that awkward writing mess.

I think. This may not actually work when I write it.

The other possibility is that he does know who she is, and she doesn't recognize him, but that would be hard to write and I don't think it's entirely plausible she doesn't recognize his really unusual mind. And if Kevin was around during this time, then he's doing nothing in the narrative with his presence ("standing around with his thumb up his nose") - and this is bad writing.

I have one storyline written for Kevin to connect these pieces and another separate mess to untangle about Desa's death. In canon's version, Kevin does... what? Speculates that Laimust have some secret plan, when he has "no plan" in canon's version, and it's Monkey who has the plan? Kevin's not trying to stop the attempted assassination plot, he's not trying to kill anyone himself, he's not the one feeding Lai information on Desa's past - Monkey's doing that - so he's got no role in the events there at all. (Did Keyes not know this was the same character?) He doesn't even react when he sees Desa shot, and feels Monkey in the Senate. (He wouldn't be Crawford's new closest aide and not there.)

So I don't think he was there.

I'm also stuck with Kevin lying about his age by a year or so to cover the date inconsistencies... but that's doable.

Chapter 8

Chapter Text

Let's see, where did I leave off...

Everything about the Kevin & Monkey backstory is missing or broken.

We've got a broken story from literally the first scene with the two of them together, when Monkey "brings Kevin home" and spins the story like he didn't really just kidnap this kid. I get that Monkey would lie, but the book also makes literally zero attempt here or elsewhere to make it clear Monkey kidnapped him because, uh, we're supposed to think Monkey is "kinda a good guy" because he later fights the Corps (or because the writers didn't care).

He's not a "good guy." The first thing we see him do on screen is set up a cult to steal every penny they have in a small Alaskan town, and then kill almost the whole town with a bomb when the plan goes south.

That's clearly the introduction of a villain. /smirk/

So first we have the kidnapping that "wasn't," and then we have nothing till the second kidnapping that "wasn't" - when Monkey declares that he's "taking the kid" after the others join the MRA. But again, it's "whatever" - we never see this having any effect on Kevin.

Then we see literally nothing for decades. We don't see Kevin leaving Monkey, or what happens that makes him decide to leave. We don't see what Kevin experiences that leads him to say that Monkey "cares about nothing so long as [he] can blow stuff up." We even have Kevin and Monkey in the same room when Desa dies, and Keyes seems to forget Kevin is standing there.

This affects him how...? All we see is him sitting by the river with Crawford on their vacation after these events, asking if Desa's death could be used to launch a new push for a universal MRA, and Crawford saying no, it's too soon, and she's not popular enough with a wide enough segment of society.

Then we finally see Kevin and Monkey together again, when Monkey has just killed Crawford in a roadside bomb, and literally nothing that happens in that scene makes sense... so much so that Keyes literally has Monkey saying so HIMSELF. Monkey also thinks Kevin is going to try to kill him now (maybe in revenge?), but we don't know why Kevin would do that or why Monkey would think this. Is Kevin supposed to want revenge for Crawford's death, and why? We don't see him ever looking for revenge, before this scene or after.

Then it gets even weirder, with Kevin supposedly letting Monkey go around killing people (including other telepaths) because this is supposed to be "good for telepath evolution." (I already addressed this issue in my fix-it of Natasha's story.)

This leaves me with a lot of missing pieces to fill in, which is fine, but I don't have solid canon hooks for them - I have reconstructed scenes and overarching canon themes for vectors. I need a story showing Kevin's experience growing up with Monkey and what happens that makes him decide to leave. I need to show the conflict that arises when he leaves, to set up for later events. I need to connect this to the reconstructed scene of Desa's death, and use that scene to connect us to the one canon scene we do have - when Kevin confronts Monkey in the streets of Geneva, over Crawford's dead body. And then that scene, in turn, needs to reflect the themes we've set up so far and set up the plot for the next generation (Fiona).

I don't like making stuff up. I like telling the story as it happened, connecting the pieces that were there - but that they never bothered to actually write as connected - because they were lazy or didn't understand what the heck they were writing about. Along the way I also include material I know happened, that got left out of the story. But here I just have to make something up, especially that whole missing section where Kevin decides to leave Monkey, and why. There are dozens of ways that story could go that would still take us from known Point A (when he's kidnapped for the second time) to Known Point B (Kevin goes to college at about age fifteen, excels in school, goes to law school, and so on), while Monkey is furious about this betrayal - especially when Kevin joins Crawford - and wants revenge.

Kevin could just leave for no real reason at all other than "the Vorlons in my head told me to." He could leave because he wants an education. He could leave because Monkey is immoral or because life with him on the run is unstable. He could leave because something dramatic happens that shows Kevin that he needs to leave Monkey - that Monkey cares about nothing so long as he can blow stuff up.

I'm just going to have to make something up, drop a footnote that I'm making it up, and hope for the best. Then I can return to the rest of the novella (that I know more solidly), and finally move on to the next section of the project, which takes place a generation later. I've already written some stand-alone fix-it fics for the later parts of Dark Genesis, I've already written a bunch of essays on what's broken in the later parts of the book (but which I have no need to fix in any detail, because there is far too much attention paid to the Dexters anyway), and I've already fixed the big picture story with Natasha's fic.

The next part of the project focuses on Bey - his relationship with Vacit, the transition from Vacit to Johnston, and the reign of terror Johnston causes in the Corps when he takes over. In my head the book is something like "A Man for All Seasons: Psi Corps Edition."

And that's a far more important story for what happens later in Psi Corps history than any of this crap about Monkey.

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