oh, man. bostonians. why do we always have to do this the hard way?
So I would just like to take a post to talk about some of my Andromeda headcanon, because sometimes I like to ramble about shows that have been off the air for almost eight years?
(Has it really been almost eight years?)
I have a lot of headcanon about Harper and his childhood and post-Fall Earth in general. Some of it has decent canon support, some of it is completely invented, and some of it I think I borrowed from other people and then forgot which probably makes it more stolen than borrowed.
So, you know. You've been warned.
Roughly in chronological order:
When the Commonwealth/Nietzschean war started going truly bad, Earth declared independence and started trying to assemble their own army; being majority-human, this mostly meant people-still-on-Earth trying to convince their family members who'd left to join the High Guard before shit went down to come back and help defend the homestead. This worked to an extent, but mostly with newer recruits and people who hadn't really wanted to be High Guard anyway; a large portion stayed with the Commonwealth.
So Earth had a somewhat half-assed militia, a mix of deserters from the High Guard and people who would never have passed any decent military screening, and they had plenty of shipyards staffed with experienced engineers and shipwrights, and they managed to keep their planet from being claimed by either side for a while.
Then the Magog came, and all that went to hell.
The militia essentially collapsed, mostly due to the Magog ripping their way through it but also partly due to people deserting to go protect their families. (Some people left Earth altogether during this period, while it was still an option.)
During the Drago-Kazov/Jaguar civil war of 9787CY, the Drago-Kazov, seeking to expand their territory, seized Earth -- at least the parts of it that weren't completely infested with Magog, which is to say, mostly largish cities. They set up defenses around those cities and basically offered the people still managing to live there two options -- either you live in our cities and pay us respects as your lords and masters and basically give your lives to us to do what we will with, or you can take your chances with the Magog.
Some people picked option A, some people picked option B.
For the people who chose option A, travel essentially ceased at this point. You were born in a city, you lived in that city, you died and were thrown in a mass grave in that same city. Gang allegiances became the most important group identifier among urban human populations.
For the people who chose option B, travel became an incredibly important part of life. Settlements, in which four or five families would make camp somewhere and try to look out for each other, generally had a shelf life of six to eight years, maximum; then the Magog would come, the settlement would get torn down, and everybody would flee to find another place a suitable distance away to start over. For the traveling human populations, families became the most important group identifier.
Harper's family was, for the most part, in the second group, but he himself never actually experienced much of that lifestyle. They started the Dunwich settlement outside of Boston around the time he was born (and either called it Dunwich after a suburb that existed before Earth went to hell or else called it Dunwich because one of the settlers was a Lovecraft fan, depending on how I feel at the time) and stayed there until the Magog attack that killed Declan and Siobhan, when Harper was somewhere between the ages of five and seven.
Due to a combination of losing the twins (fatalities were usually older) and less-visible casualties (the twins' father went a bit mental after the mercy killing), Harper's family opted to seek refugee status in Boston rather than start up a new settlement.
(Not everyone agreed with this decision; part of the family continued to travel the non-protected parts of the continent. Harper's mother was initially against moving to the city, and while she was eventually persuaded to go along, the disagreement continued to cause friction in Harper's parents' marriage until their deaths.)
So: Boston.
Most of the human population of Boston lived underground at this point, in abandoned subway tunnels. Harper's family, not having spent any time in cities in the past 300ish years, was not initially aware of this. They also had no gang allegiances for the same reason, and none of the kids in the family spoke Common, having instead learned both English and a form of Cant.
So the family bounced around Boston for a few years, pretty much constantly getting settled in one place and then getting thrown out by whatever gang called territory on that area. During this period several members of the family died of illnesses brought on by suddenly being in a denser population center and increased starvation, and one of Harper's cousins was murdered by a local Nietzschean patrol for not being able to respond to their questions in Common.
The kids started to learn Common pretty fast after that.
Finally, someone in the family managed to get in with a gang enough to be allowed to live in Andrew Square. They stayed above ground at this point, using a mix of shanties and bombed-out buildings for shelter, because the older generations were not comfortable with the idea of living underground. Around this point the kids all started getting more involved in the gang scene, particularly Harper (who started his black market career of fixing and reselling junk) and Brendan (who got very caught up in the romanticism of fighting back against the Nietzscheans). This had its own effect on the mortality rate amongst the family, in addition to some people just going off and doing their own thing and losing touch with everyone else.
By the time Harper was in his early teens, the family was no longer so much an institution as a skeleton crew of people related to each other who saw one another sometimes.
When his parents died (murdered by Nietzscheans looking for Harper himself due to his gang-related activities), that gave Harper all the impetus he needed to completely cut himself off from the nomadic population's way of family-first and switch fully to Boston's gang-first approach. He and Brendan still stuck together, but that was a combination of being aligned with the same gang and also just being close. They moved down into the subways and befriended Isaac; it was Brendan's idea to start guerrilla attacks on the Nietzschean garrison, something all three threw themselves into wholeheartedly.
Isaac died in a raid a few years later.
At that point, Brendan and Harper went separate ways, idealistically speaking. Brendan dug himself deeper into the revolutionary role, while Harper bailed on attacking the Nietzscheans and instead focused his energies on trying to find a way out. He got the job helping Woody out with virtual porn; while his natural talents and his gang connections helped him get the job, Woody mostly hired him based on his being able to read, since there weren't a whole lot of literate kids running around Boston. Shortly after, he started taking on jobs with spacers in the hopes that one of them would eventually offer him a full-time position or at least a ride off Earth; he did odd jobs, played go-between when they needed to deal with one of the gangs, played tour guide when they needed to actually go into Boston, etc., etc. Meanwhile he was studying everything he could find to hone his skills as a mechanic and as a programmer.
When Harper was in his late teens, Bobby Jensen offered him some cash in exchange for helping him steal missiles from the Nietzscheans, and we all know how that ended.
(By that point, most of Harper's family was dead. Of the ones still alive, Brendan was the only one he still knew the location of. He still had some friends among the gangs, but they would all be dead or gone by the time he returned in "Bunker Hill".)
Other bits of related headcanon that didn't fit into this recounting of events:
- Harper and his sisters and cousins were better-educated than the kids who grew up entirely in Boston, due to an oral history tradition that persisted outside the cities but had largely been killed off in Nietzschean-controlled areas.
- That doesn't mean they were well educated. Harper actually was taught the version of the Battle Of Witchhead that he recounted in "Angel Dark, Demon Bright", and even after he stumbled upon the real/official version while working for Beka, he preferred the one he grew up with. Mostly because the good guys won.
- This oral history the kids were taught also included a disproportionate amount of rock and punk songs. Harper and Beka were both extremely surprised to find out that they shared a love of The Pogues, The Clash, and The Sex Pistols.
- Harper's literacy was largely self-taught.
- The guy Harper watched being crucified in Fenway Park was a friend from the gang Harper was aligned with at the time.
- The 'human ghetto' Harper references in "Be All My Sins Remembered" refers to all of Boston south of City Hall. The human population was technically not allowed to go further north than that. (They did anyway. But it was risky. And since you could easily get your throat cut just crossing Dot Ave, 'risky' was probably an understatement.)
- Harper's romanticization of Earth's pre-First-Contact era comes from a combination of the oral history he was taught as a kid, things he learned about history after leaving, and feelings of intense loyalty/homesickness that he feels the need to justify somehow. (Which is an entire post to itself and I swear I will finish writing it someday.)
(Has it really been almost eight years?)
I have a lot of headcanon about Harper and his childhood and post-Fall Earth in general. Some of it has decent canon support, some of it is completely invented, and some of it I think I borrowed from other people and then forgot which probably makes it more stolen than borrowed.
So, you know. You've been warned.
Roughly in chronological order:
When the Commonwealth/Nietzschean war started going truly bad, Earth declared independence and started trying to assemble their own army; being majority-human, this mostly meant people-still-on-Earth trying to convince their family members who'd left to join the High Guard before shit went down to come back and help defend the homestead. This worked to an extent, but mostly with newer recruits and people who hadn't really wanted to be High Guard anyway; a large portion stayed with the Commonwealth.
So Earth had a somewhat half-assed militia, a mix of deserters from the High Guard and people who would never have passed any decent military screening, and they had plenty of shipyards staffed with experienced engineers and shipwrights, and they managed to keep their planet from being claimed by either side for a while.
Then the Magog came, and all that went to hell.
The militia essentially collapsed, mostly due to the Magog ripping their way through it but also partly due to people deserting to go protect their families. (Some people left Earth altogether during this period, while it was still an option.)
During the Drago-Kazov/Jaguar civil war of 9787CY, the Drago-Kazov, seeking to expand their territory, seized Earth -- at least the parts of it that weren't completely infested with Magog, which is to say, mostly largish cities. They set up defenses around those cities and basically offered the people still managing to live there two options -- either you live in our cities and pay us respects as your lords and masters and basically give your lives to us to do what we will with, or you can take your chances with the Magog.
Some people picked option A, some people picked option B.
For the people who chose option A, travel essentially ceased at this point. You were born in a city, you lived in that city, you died and were thrown in a mass grave in that same city. Gang allegiances became the most important group identifier among urban human populations.
For the people who chose option B, travel became an incredibly important part of life. Settlements, in which four or five families would make camp somewhere and try to look out for each other, generally had a shelf life of six to eight years, maximum; then the Magog would come, the settlement would get torn down, and everybody would flee to find another place a suitable distance away to start over. For the traveling human populations, families became the most important group identifier.
Harper's family was, for the most part, in the second group, but he himself never actually experienced much of that lifestyle. They started the Dunwich settlement outside of Boston around the time he was born (and either called it Dunwich after a suburb that existed before Earth went to hell or else called it Dunwich because one of the settlers was a Lovecraft fan, depending on how I feel at the time) and stayed there until the Magog attack that killed Declan and Siobhan, when Harper was somewhere between the ages of five and seven.
Due to a combination of losing the twins (fatalities were usually older) and less-visible casualties (the twins' father went a bit mental after the mercy killing), Harper's family opted to seek refugee status in Boston rather than start up a new settlement.
(Not everyone agreed with this decision; part of the family continued to travel the non-protected parts of the continent. Harper's mother was initially against moving to the city, and while she was eventually persuaded to go along, the disagreement continued to cause friction in Harper's parents' marriage until their deaths.)
So: Boston.
Most of the human population of Boston lived underground at this point, in abandoned subway tunnels. Harper's family, not having spent any time in cities in the past 300ish years, was not initially aware of this. They also had no gang allegiances for the same reason, and none of the kids in the family spoke Common, having instead learned both English and a form of Cant.
So the family bounced around Boston for a few years, pretty much constantly getting settled in one place and then getting thrown out by whatever gang called territory on that area. During this period several members of the family died of illnesses brought on by suddenly being in a denser population center and increased starvation, and one of Harper's cousins was murdered by a local Nietzschean patrol for not being able to respond to their questions in Common.
The kids started to learn Common pretty fast after that.
Finally, someone in the family managed to get in with a gang enough to be allowed to live in Andrew Square. They stayed above ground at this point, using a mix of shanties and bombed-out buildings for shelter, because the older generations were not comfortable with the idea of living underground. Around this point the kids all started getting more involved in the gang scene, particularly Harper (who started his black market career of fixing and reselling junk) and Brendan (who got very caught up in the romanticism of fighting back against the Nietzscheans). This had its own effect on the mortality rate amongst the family, in addition to some people just going off and doing their own thing and losing touch with everyone else.
By the time Harper was in his early teens, the family was no longer so much an institution as a skeleton crew of people related to each other who saw one another sometimes.
When his parents died (murdered by Nietzscheans looking for Harper himself due to his gang-related activities), that gave Harper all the impetus he needed to completely cut himself off from the nomadic population's way of family-first and switch fully to Boston's gang-first approach. He and Brendan still stuck together, but that was a combination of being aligned with the same gang and also just being close. They moved down into the subways and befriended Isaac; it was Brendan's idea to start guerrilla attacks on the Nietzschean garrison, something all three threw themselves into wholeheartedly.
Isaac died in a raid a few years later.
At that point, Brendan and Harper went separate ways, idealistically speaking. Brendan dug himself deeper into the revolutionary role, while Harper bailed on attacking the Nietzscheans and instead focused his energies on trying to find a way out. He got the job helping Woody out with virtual porn; while his natural talents and his gang connections helped him get the job, Woody mostly hired him based on his being able to read, since there weren't a whole lot of literate kids running around Boston. Shortly after, he started taking on jobs with spacers in the hopes that one of them would eventually offer him a full-time position or at least a ride off Earth; he did odd jobs, played go-between when they needed to deal with one of the gangs, played tour guide when they needed to actually go into Boston, etc., etc. Meanwhile he was studying everything he could find to hone his skills as a mechanic and as a programmer.
When Harper was in his late teens, Bobby Jensen offered him some cash in exchange for helping him steal missiles from the Nietzscheans, and we all know how that ended.
(By that point, most of Harper's family was dead. Of the ones still alive, Brendan was the only one he still knew the location of. He still had some friends among the gangs, but they would all be dead or gone by the time he returned in "Bunker Hill".)
Other bits of related headcanon that didn't fit into this recounting of events:
- Harper and his sisters and cousins were better-educated than the kids who grew up entirely in Boston, due to an oral history tradition that persisted outside the cities but had largely been killed off in Nietzschean-controlled areas.
- That doesn't mean they were well educated. Harper actually was taught the version of the Battle Of Witchhead that he recounted in "Angel Dark, Demon Bright", and even after he stumbled upon the real/official version while working for Beka, he preferred the one he grew up with. Mostly because the good guys won.
- This oral history the kids were taught also included a disproportionate amount of rock and punk songs. Harper and Beka were both extremely surprised to find out that they shared a love of The Pogues, The Clash, and The Sex Pistols.
- Harper's literacy was largely self-taught.
- The guy Harper watched being crucified in Fenway Park was a friend from the gang Harper was aligned with at the time.
- The 'human ghetto' Harper references in "Be All My Sins Remembered" refers to all of Boston south of City Hall. The human population was technically not allowed to go further north than that. (They did anyway. But it was risky. And since you could easily get your throat cut just crossing Dot Ave, 'risky' was probably an understatement.)
- Harper's romanticization of Earth's pre-First-Contact era comes from a combination of the oral history he was taught as a kid, things he learned about history after leaving, and feelings of intense loyalty/homesickness that he feels the need to justify somehow. (Which is an entire post to itself and I swear I will finish writing it someday.)