My original thought for Ocean was a girl who was more animal
than human. I’d envisioned her scurrying
through the wreckage of the city: grunting , growling, and occasionally scrambling
along on all fours. Her hair was to be a
wild, unkempt mane and her fingernails long and sharp, like talons. Everything about her behavior and appearance
was to be animalistic. While she ended
up being somewhat different, some of those initial characteristics carried over
into the finished product. They can be
seen when she sniffs the air in an attempt to detect the stench of nearby
rotters and again when she eats a dead rat simply by biting into its corpse
with no preparation, cooking, etc.
The problem was, I just couldn’t connect with that
incarnation of Ocean. I think maybe
there just wasn’t enough humanity left there.
However, she made her true self known to me when I pictured her as a
younger girl, forming pictures from the bloodstains on the sidewalk as if they
were clouds. To me, this is the essence
of Ocean. She’s surrounded by a world of
sorrow, suffering, and destruction. She’s
so malnourished that she’s nearly a walking skeleton and most of her hair has
fallen out. But she makes the best of it. (Incidentally, I pictured her as the
bizarre lovechild of Dakota Fanning and Golem from Lord of the Rings.)
As the series progresses, we’ll see the toll her world takes
upon its inhabitants, the sacrifices demanded by survival, and the moral
ambiguity of a world that is pure survival of the fittest. A person can’t go through experiences like
that without being changed. And not
always for the best. For her to live,
she’ll have to become somewhat calloused.
Desensitization would dictate
this. What would be unspeakable horrors
in our reality are Ocean’s norm.
So anyway, there’s my thoughts on Ocean…
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