quote:
Originally posted by The Eurostar:
Just, Walker is written as an amoral character with a total disregard of the law and of social issues, so I don't get why you (and Av) keep saying he and his team are not bad. [Smile]
Alright, I suppose I now need to explain part of my motivation behind writing Walker the way I have.

For about three years, I wrote the TOMB character known as the Chewy Walrus. While, at first, he was a fun character to write, he later became very stagnant and static as far as I was concerned. He was always fighting for the side of right, always making the right decisions, and always attempting to do the right thing. He fast became both boring and predictible to me, so, as a writer, I did the only thing I could do with a boring character: I killed him off - several times - in hopes that something in death would give him more diversity in life. Nothing really worked. I tried to make him seem more human in "Walrus Reborn," but that came off as very hokey and campy, in my opinion. In short, I very quickly became ill of writing characters that were always on the moral up-and-up.

Which is where Walker comes in.

As much as it might pain me to say it, the Chewy Walrus character was not human. He was uber-human. He was incapable of most of the things that make human beings truly human.

Volition - He always made the right decisions, like he didn't even have a choice.

Sin - As a Christian, I feel that man is inherantly evil, born into the world with sin in his life. Chewy didn't have any sins, at least not when I wrote him.

Basically, Walker is everything that the Chewy Walrus isn't. Not that he's evil. Not any more so than me or you or the characters that we, respectively, write.

No. Walker is human, in the purest sense of the word. He makes bad choices. We've seen him do it. He has a dark side to him, which we've seen as well. However, he is not intended to be immoral (or amoral, as Euro said). Rather, he is intended to have the same questionable morality of any man who does not yet know his own place in the world.

I'm having a great deal of fun writing Walker and discovering new ways to make him "bleed" (in the literary sense). Mortals bleed. Humans are mortals. I want to make Walker "bleed". I want him to be so human that when the posters on this board look at him, they can't help but see some of him in themselves, even if it is deep down. Because, in reality, I think we all have a bit of Dr. Charles Elias Walker in us.

As for the group being "villains," well, I can't see how you can read the EPS portions and still consider them foes and nemeses. The Side-Show was not a bloodbath until Lochlan made it one. The Zoo was a simple recon mission. The only reason my characters were brought into the story was because Euro brought them in (not that I'm complaining, mind you). Walker's intervention in the 'revolution' will be explained later, where I hope to reveal a bit more about his ever expanding character. However, the only reason I agreed to a 'revolution' at all was because I felt it would "blur the line" that had been established that suddenly made the EPS evil. Gooz's first post in that arc, in my mind, does the PERFECT job of that by showing Turner's nonchalance about killing a rampaging metahuman and "mercy-killing" a group of dying children. He did something similar in the Side-Show, which I thought was absolutely brilliant of him. However, if all you can see is villainy in that, than I can't change your own near-sightedness.

I've said all that, essentially, to say this: Walker is ten times more dynamic than the Chewy Walrus ever was. I hope to write him for a very long time. Granted, Avatar, Gooz, and I might disagree on a lot of things, but the ONE thing (there may be others... I don't really know) is that the EPS is an organization that is neither good nor bad, black nor white. We exist and operate in shades of grey (hence the color of Walker's jumpsuit, for those wondering).

One thing that Gooz and I talked about early on (and I'm talking early on... like Issue #0 and the founding of the EPS) was the basis of a character on the contents and ideas in Machievelli's classic, The Prince. Originally, the idea was for Turner to be driven by the words of the book, but soon, it became incredibly evident that Walker and his EPS were, collectively, very Machievellian. When Avatar suggested the Side-Show mission, he said to me (and I quote), "The EPS needs to do something Machievellian nasty." The genocide idea was his own... I only provided the necessary backdrop for it to take place.

Which brings me to what I wanted to say two paragraphs ago (writing as I think always gets me rambling [Wink] ): If Walker ever stops being a dynamic character or if I ever get bored with him, I'll stop writing him altogether. That's my promise and pledge to you all right now. I'll drop him and start developing a new character. However, with everything accomplishable in Walker's character at this point in time, I can see myself writing Walker for a very, very long time...

I hope my little "apologetic" rant helped clear some things up a bit...