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progressive-waves-art · 3 months

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A Very, Very Unfinished Pile of Theory of Everything Headcanons (Ayreon)

Last semester, my English final was a presentation relating the overall theme of the Forever saga to that of the more popular works of H.G. Wells. Details of that argument aside, the thesis was that Ayreon’s emotional core was the presence of small-scale acts of love juxtaposed against large-scale existential tragedy, balanced in their individual power. That we are messy and self-destructive, and in the grand scheme of things we mean very little in the universe, but we are resilient and alive and human and that has to be worth something.

I really like this aspect of the main story, and it got me a perfect score on that assignment. It had a ten minute time limit and I was fighting for my life to stay under it. While I was downsizing the script, I couldn’t help but think of an earlier idea I had drafted about how The Theory of Everything on its own was a really incredible example of the mad scientist archetype turned completely on its head (it was a science-fiction analysis class). Specifically how that script was almost three times longer than the original H.G. Wells one, that took me a solid twenty minutes to read aloud.

I literally wrote an hour long lecture about The Theory of Everything. No headcanons. No extra theories. Literally just picking apart its canon plot.

I think this is why I have so little extra writing for it. The story as its given is airtight and just…fucking incredible. Arjen wrote it with a very clear theme in mind like he did with Transitus, but TToE isn’t missing half of its story because he couldn’t pull in the cash to make a movie out of it. You can feel the intention behind every single character, they feel like real people, it has so many layers to it and it is literally, objectively, the greatest prog album ever made. Fight me.

But anyways: For lack of better phrasing, there isn’t much to “fix” in that sense. Almost all the headcanons I have for The Source or Transitus boil down to a few things:

I was being self-indulgent with a favorite character and it snowballed into a genuinely informative trait/subplot that informs the main story (a certain hc I have where Henry just fucking shoots Daniel in the back by mistake sometime between Two Worlds and Talk of the Town, turning into this weirdly effective commentary of how Daniel is conditioned to his brother’s shitty behavior and Abby hauling ass to get him out of that headspace)

I am curious about aspects of an album’s worldbuilding and get a little excited while filling in the blanks that were perfectly fine being left alone (doing mental gymnastics trying to build a version of The Source where these five academics, three politicians, two religious figures, one robot and one random spaceman viably know each other)

The rarer option that I am genuinely disappointed by how a part of the story was handled and completely ignore this small part of canon to make the overall story be more effective. Or attempt it, at least (Lavinia’s entire character undermining Transitus’ themes and her contradicting her own motivations, and me, in turn, just writing her character from scratch while keeping with the basic story beats [her seeing ghosts, doing shady shit with Henry, etc.])

But with TToE I’ve felt very little need to do any of these. If I were to really dive into it with intention I think I would start building off of the whole bank robbery plot in Phase III (just a slightly weirdly framed plot point for me), but I haven’t thought about it. It’s not that glaring of an issue and there’s few other places in the story where I think adding anything would make it more effective.

This isn’t to say that Transitus and The Source are objectively worse in any sense, but they leave a lot more up to interpretation, allowing me to write so many add ons that they become structured and essential to each other’s function.

It’s fun with those two albums. With TToE I really have to look for cracks to fill and it’s kind of useless.

Not entirely, though. I’ve got a few hcs, and maybe they’ll warrant dozens of google doc pages of context one day like the other two albums:

Two central things sparked curiosity. Setting, and how the parent characters came to hate each other that much. Naturally.

This started four-ish years ago when I was pacing around my parents’ house with TToE on the mind (as it often is), and my brother put on this show called His Dark Materials. I watched the intro to it all of one time and just…knew this was the aesthetic TToE should have.🔗 At least combined with dark academia. It’s an album about physics and ghosts, that seems reasonable enough.

…funnily enough, as I later found out, His Dark Materials itself has a very dark-academia-esque vibe, and the plot is entirely based upon the intersectionality between science and mysticism and trivial human attempts to make sense of it.

So. Pretty fitting.

This really stuck with me, and a handful of the characteristics of the show and books became the basis for the way I picture The Theory of Everything. Mainly the visual aesthetic, like I said, but also the fact that the story starts at a parallel version of Oxford University. I don’t have some giant case study for this like with Transitus/New England. I just think it’d be a cool and vibey setting. Maybe it’s the American in me but there’s something about a thousand-year-old college with a campus made of literal goddamn castles that borders on the fantastic.

From there, you have a decent excuse for The Prodigy to run off to Ireland, where you can choose from one of like 200 different pretty little isolated lighthouses for him to lose his mind in, far enough away for him not to be found as long as he did. Not to mention it lowkey matches with the overt Celtic influence of the music. Or Scotland, if you want some weather symbolism from the North Sea.

Solid setting, if I say so myself, and it actually influenced the family’s whole situation. Here, The Father (Mike) is a physics professor at Oxford, and The Mother (Cristina) is the director of the Bodleian Library. It’s how and where they meet in 1991 (though the mother is in an attendant position at the time), as shown by the only part of this I have drawn out:

They hit it off, and marry in 1993. Their first and only child is born two years later and they love him half to death. Everything is more or less nice and normal.

In 1996, Mike stumbles into “proof,” more or less, of the theory of everything being a singular, solvable equation through his work, practically by accident, and begins focused work on it with enthusiastic support from his wife. Life is going great, Cristina is promoted and the two are balancing things well enough.

The boy shows little to no social development into his toddler years, but his parents don’t think much of it. His father was similar at his age; they’re not worried. They even go as far to say he’ll turn out just as ambitious and smart as his dad and relatives, coworkers and family friends go along with it, setting insanely high expectations for this literal three year old. Mike keeps working on his theory.

The boy enters preschool at age four; still no improvement. Just isolates himself and draws indiscernible patterns on everything you put in front of him. His parents finally try to intervene to some degree, hiring private instructors and talking with some other psych/child development people they know through the university, to no avail. Nothing changes. He just stares off into space, doesn’t interact with any of them and supposedly doesn’t pay attention to lessons. He still isn’t speaking. Cristina is finally concerned

Around the same time, Mike makes a significant breakthrough in his work, gaining worldwide attention. He receives massive grants from in and outside of Oxford to continue his work, and quits his teaching job to make more time for the endeavor. Cristina is left as the family’s sole provider. She understands and is in agreement on that decision, that’s not the problem yet. The problem is that Mike is becoming more or less indifferent to their son hits five, not seeing any previously projected greatness he was supposed to have in his father’s footsteps. Cristina, much more conscious of balance in her life and how having kids works, isn’t sure what to make of that. Their relationship starts to strain.

From there, as Mike keeps working, Cristina takes the kid to all sorts of specialists around England but none of them can pinpoint what’s “wrong” with him. She tries much more actively to connect with him like they’re telling her to (though she still enrolls him in the university’s affiliated primary school program, against their suggestions), bringing him everywhere. Buys him little memory games since that’s all that seems to hold his attention. She’s past any belief of him being some secret genius like his dad, not that her opinion of her husband is super positive at this point anyway. She’s just dead-set on her son having some sense of normal in his life.

By 2002, Mike has completely secluded himself and works nearly constantly. He has made no progress on his theory since 1999 and the fame garnered from his breakthrough has faded. The family is running out of money and Cristina is exhausted. The boy is ostracized at school and still (almost) totally nonverbal. Her coworkers keep suggesting these weird holistic remedies that she refuses. She knows better than to fall for all that new age, pyramid scheme bullshit.

The son’s condition, whatever it is, worsens until mom, desperate, puts her foot down in 2008 (or “gives up,” if you wanna put it like that) and drags her husband and son to this private practice in Scotland she was told about by a friend, suspicious but ready to put up with anything at this point.

😐👍

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