Splinter of Chaos is the comic from where I got me username which I have used ever since. It was actually my comic that I was planning to write and draw myself. The reason I'm posting this here is that I cannot really draw at all, and the original script got lost in my computer's death, but I wanted to share my thoughts and ideas.
It was based on my discovery of philosophies like solipsism, nihilism, and existentialism. The idea, which was based on the principles of each of these philosophies, was this: reality is a composite of rules that everyone agrees on such as gravity or time--although, solipsism would say I agree on. So if we collectively begun to disbelieve each of these and substitute our own systems for these, we could shape the universe by our own imagination.
The plot (although practically non-existent) focused around the main character's friend going to school one day and committing suicide. He goes back the next day and does it again. Both times he dies for real, but he had altered his reality to the point where he could come back. He gathers other people up and starts a cult of serial suicides. As hard as it is for one to suspend their disbelief for this, it only strengthens his following.
From there the plot dies and the rest is just a series of random events centering around the denigration of society (but focusing on the high school as a microcosm of the larger society) as more and more join in. The cult setting supplies ample space for mind control which leads to an ease for changing the common reality concerning death. For example, if everyone starts to believe that death isn't real, than no one dies in the story. And they're controlling their environment and themselves to uncanny levels, so when they come back, they can be what ever they want. Their favorite TV show character or maybe themselves only stronger. They could come back as anything they want!
Thus everything including their own facial structures would be works of art. Life itself would be art, and all Earth's inhabitants: artists. However, the actions too are art (always were, actually), and because repercussions are now meaningless, anyone can do anything including rape and murder without a scar on their conscience. So human art would be much less beautiful. A small section would be done to focus on a contrast between nature's meaningless and beautiful art and mankind's disturbing, but meaningful art.
Many questions come up considering the above. What does it mean to be you when you can change to what you want? Are you on the inside what you are on the outside? Would this lead to a new and more extreme form of unconformity or actually more extreme forms of conformity despite the new added freedoms? If people can wear convincing masks, could they lose themselves in the mask and never come back? What would happen to the most beautiful aspects of mankind such as love and kindness?
I saw love going in to separate directions. The first is of it becoming stronger. When bound to flesh, poetic gestures of compassion are limited, but how many people could say they'd die for you and could prove it! But there's also the concept of the Romeo and Juliet death experience and turning perpetual team suicide into a romanticism. It's sharing pain and doing things that neither party would do alone so it's showing each other what the allow the other to do. Although I might have made this seem healthy and beautiful, note: it's bondage. But is it less beautiful? The second direction I saw love going in was based on the freedom that death, rebirth, and transformation led to. Hate, deceit, masochisms and sadism. The classical unromantic bondage. Deeply rooted seeds of conflict blossoming into savage flower. (Relating back to the meaningless art of nature.) Power struggles could fester into hideous wars, and only making it worse is the ability to morph into whatever anyone wants so that people could transform into manifestations of their need for rage or pain.
But these manifestations don't just stick to anger and pain; a whole array of emotions exist here to manifest. Puberty, from my understanding and experience of it, is an overdose of whatever chemical you're producing in your brain. So high schoolers, the demographic of whom the story revolves about, become, would have more extreme manifestations. It would be, in every terrible connotation associated, a little bit emo.
Could people die and come back as a transformation of what they want to be, what happens to what they are?
If a human could be thought of as a mamushka doll, the outside would be formed to artistic perfection. But pull off the first layer and then the next and keep doing this and you can see the metamorphosis from demigod to a fetus in the womb. But the question is, does that fetus eventually grow into the outer layer in time? But first, does the outer layer stay consistent? If the middle truly is just a scared baby, I have a feeling that the outer layers would be fickle and constantly changing depending on what the doll thinks it needs or wants. So how could the baby grow into an ever-changing perfection? In fact, it's far from perfect, isn't it? Basically, because at the crux of the doll, it is weak, it cannot be satiated by pretending to be strong. No matter how strong it feels, it quails because it lacks mental strength. It quails, it reforms, it gets its next fix of power. Then it fears something else and quails again.