Zula Hendricks and Developing Aliens: Defiance, etc
This is Zula Hendricks in the VR game Rogue Incursion.
Tristan Jones and I created Zula for Aliens: Defiance, once upon a time. Since then she’s become part of the overall Aliens universe and has shown up in more than one of the novels. This post is about how she came to be, and what she was before she wasn’t.
I was approached in March of 2015 to write an ongoing Aliens comic book series. At first the mandate was to write an Ellen Ripley story. Then that was changed to an Amanda Ripley story. The entity making these preliminary decisions was Fox Interactive.
This is from my very first document, when these decisions were in still undecided. I was writing this to my editor.
Also thinking about your comments to me (“DMZ meets Demo”) and I think using Amanda and the fact she’s a blue-collar type worker helps. It’s also a nice parallel to the first Alien movie and Ellen Ripley’s character, a regular person taking control in a crisis, calm and cool but not always so tough. I always loved that Ripley, as capable as she was, also got really, really scared. That made her relatable.
I think Amanda fits that role as well (I’m sure she was designed to).
So I’d like to address the bad side, or the ‘real’ side of a manual labor/ engineer character like Amanda, and add in some social politics. She works for Weyland-Yunati. She’s just been through a terrible ordeal; possibly something Weyland either doesn’t want to deal with or its infrastructure isn’t really equipped help her with. She’s without services, she’s adrift.
This is the risk of the laborer – not getting shifts, inadequate medical care; low pay, union dues, a corrupt union. Amanda living in some one-room berth trying to make it through each day as it comes, picking up shifts when she feels up to it. Real blue-collar worker woes, a call back to the 1970’s, the tone of those times that made the Ripley character so great.
…she’s offered some shit work – a derelict hauler is in a decaying orbit over some valuable installation, and a team is tasked with boarding it and regaining control. It would occupy her time for a few days, and with hazard pay. She accepts.
…
They jump to the job site, cut their way into the ship, and it’s all creepy, signs of Aliens – bodies, acid on the panels, and so on.
The initial premise that will come to be Defiance is here - the derelict ship, the Marines, the down on her luck character.
But what is her goal, besides just survival? I don’t know if she’s trying to make it home, because what is there waiting for her? I wonder if its interesting to have her trying to just get further and further away, away from earth, from Weyland, from the Marines, from her memories, to someplace where no one knows her, and no one is trying to use her or kill her, where there is just nothing, no burdens at all.
Also this. This is Zula.
But onwards w Amanda.
We were full speed ahead with Amanda. Until June of 2015.
I think I must have composited that image with some random photo I found. Anyway, you can see the story is the same, just with Zula subbed in for Amanda. If I recall, I believe Fox pulled Amanda back because they thought they might make another game with her.
Possible names for the derelict ship, in the Joseph Conrad tradition: Europa, Typhoon, Otago, Rescue, Freya, Karain, Celestial.
I used several of these in later Aliens comics.
Enter Tristan Jones, the only logical choice for this book. He’s always posting stuff from our time on Aliens, and you can see that here.
Zula’s appeared in a novel called Alien: Inferno’s Fall, Alien: Isolation (the novel), and Alien: Prototype. Our synthetic character Davis has appeared in Alien: Colony War.
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