So, I was talking with someone about the series that I have planned for Project Ouzel and they said something that struck a nerve with me.
Dealing the deck and letting Melody pull her own Empress. Sitting with some future kid at a bus stop who doesn’t know yet why the patient woman next to her feels familiar. The scale of the gift doesn’t have to match the scale of what she received, because inheritance isn’t a debt ledger, it’s a fire, and fires propagate at whatever size the next hearth can hold. The predecessor gave her a universe.
… That sparked something in me. I was singing a particular beat in my head reading that. It was these lines from Charlie Brown from Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto album. Verse 2… and the following interlude, but with a special emphasis on this part:
Light a fire, a fire, a spark
Charlie Brown by Coldplay
Light a fire, a flame in my heart
We’ll run wild, we’ll be glowing in the dark
My history with Mylo Xyloto
Honestly, I didn’t find the Mylo Xyloto through Coldplay’s albums. Sure, I loved the song “Speed of Sound” from their X&Y album and I think I came to love the song “Fix You” when I watched the Newsroom. But, honestly, I found Mylo Xyloto through the six-issue comic series of the same name back in 2013. The comics were a collab between Mark Osborne and the band. At the time, I was newly initiated into the O.T.O. as a Minerval and I found the whole idea meaningful.
Yeah, I have a weird relationship with music
One of the weird things about me is I tend to attach significant moments in my life to musical tracks. My first web development job is inextricably tied to the free U2 album everyone got in their iTunes account: Songs of Innocence. Hell, I can’t listen to Every Breaking Wave without thinking of the commute up to Fort Collins on the FLEX.
Try by P!nk dominated the time in my life where I was working in the height of my career as a web developer, working at a job with six figures while also interviewing at Mozilla. Those were good times. Also, challenging times as I truly didn’t know C++, which is why I ultimately fucked up the Mozilla interview. Still not that great with it, if I’m going to be brutally honest. But the official lyric video is deeply attached to my love of the web, and my efforts to find work that was more mission-aligned.
But we’re getting off topic here. I promised we’d talk Mylo Xyloto so I’ll get back to it.
So, what about the comics?
Well, the comics really spoke to me. It’s the classic story of the forces of the Old Aeon, embodied in the Irdoks, turning music and colour into crime. Our protagonist in the comics is one of the silencers working for the Irdoks to silence music and mask colour with what looks like black paint. This is revealed to be solely for the benefit of the Irdoks as the nature of this world is colour and music. It’s in the nature of the people the Irdoks dominated. The people who disrupt this enforced silence and bleakness are the sparkers: the people bringing colour and music into the world. This is the means of the rebellion.
Similarly, in our world, we have people who are trying to silence and flatten our world back to an unnatural state. Repression of the rights of minorities (the attacks on trans rights and the empowering of ICE come to mind), repression of the media (like the book bans and the crackdowns on libraries), this is to maintain an illusory world that exists only through the effort to keep the real world at bay. They insist that it is natural, even optimal. However, this is the thing about nature: it doesn’t need to be actively repressed. It tends to crack through even concrete, if given the chance.
A YouTuber named Brooke made seven videos about the whole Mylo Xyloto comics with the first video talking about the comics’ relationship with the album. This shows how the comics and the album tell similar stories. Where the album tells the story of a larger motif, the comics land it in a more concrete narrative. Where Major Minus in the album is a vague “they” that has “one eye watching over you”, so you need to be careful of what you do, Major Minus in the comics is an actual individual.
“The Eaters” in the Vault
Major Minus in the comics threatens to open the vault in Issue 2, to let “the Eaters” loose on the planet as the Irdoks fly away. But the thing is, we learn in Issue 6 that this is a game of chicken. Major Minus is banking on the threat drilled into these people from generations of propaganda. He doesn’t actually want the vault open. When the vault is finally opened, we learn that this vault doesn’t contain “the Eaters”. Instead, it contains sparks of colour and music confined by the Irdoks.
And the ending… l’dor v’dor.
The thing about the ending is that it’s not a happily ever after ending. The children of Mylo and Fly turn out to be swept up into a false rebellion where they are silencers. In the final scene, we see them talking to Major Minus in a hidden place. He is shrivelled up, a shadow his former self stripped of his authority. But the threat of repression… this is the true threat that exists long past Major Minus the individual.
The Nature of the Fight
Sure, the first novel has an identifiable antagonist. A fight in the real world of the protagonist that everyone can see. A fight that happens that disrupts the quiet of Rocky Mountain National Park and the streets of Boulder. But, there is another antagonist, a larger one that only my protagonist can see: a fight against herself. And in Project Ouzel, the mentor Élodie jokes about it. She gets serious about it. And she gets sincere about it.
But the thing is, how do we ensure that the ending of Mylo Xyloto… the children who grow enamoured with the oppressors… doesn’t happen? My idea of why this happened (even though it’s not explicitly written in the comics) is inertia. We see the joy and hope in the society post-Minus, post-Irdoks, a world with buildings… but also with colour and music and joy. The critical error is that the generation of Mylo and Fly think that this is enough. After all, they grew up in a world without this. This is what they’d kill for, to risk themselves for. This is why vigilance is necessary. So that we, as a society, keep valuing what we fought for and won. So that the appreciation itself becomes the fuel for the world to come.
You see, this could be paradise… but we need to work for it. Someone might ask me the world we have at the end of book 4. The world that we see a preview of Project Ouzel’s Epilogue. At the risk of cribbing Benjamin Franklin, “we have a paradise, if we can keep it.”
… Not bad for a story that I developed from a short story I started working on in response to a prompt on Reedsy, eh?
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