Darth Wiki / The Sattva Survivors

" It's a story about green and gold."

—Danny, Introduction

The memoir of Darren O'Doherty, one of the few survivors of the crash of Sattva Airlines flight 1616. The first complete account, compiled from his recollections and interviews with his fellow survivors, of what really happened to the mysterious group of teenagers from a small Irish town who spent two months stranded on a desert island.

(It's a character-driven story so there'll be better info on the character sheet once it's written; any tropes associated with particular characters I'll move there)

Tropes

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: there is absolutely no way twenty-something kids could have survived the plane crash the way it happened, a bamboo stake probably wouldn't snap in two just hitting a guy with it, Joshua probably would have died of other injuries from the royal beating Darren gave him before ever being stabbed in the chest and the most glaring of all, the human mind does NOT work that way.
• All Love Is Unrequited: Darren loves Andrea but isn't able to make it happen, Emma loves Darren but is completely unable to cope with her feelings, Kate loves Frank but he's (very) secretly gay (though that doesn't stop her for a while), happens to a few others.
• An Aesop: on the one hand it's a story about identity and human nature, which is occasionally discussed by Darren, Danny or Emma. Less directly (though more importantly) the story is very much about family and how people start to fall apart in the absence of family bonds (on several occasions the characters pointedly avoid talking about their families, and most of the characters personalities are shaped by their relationships with their parents).
  writer: (pointing giant cartoony gun at random nuclear family) "Be more intimate DAMN IT!"
• Angst? What Angst?: Andrea after the death of Paul, her best friend with whom she shared unresolved romantic feelings. Instead of dealing with the loss of someone she depended on, she just moves closer to Darren and puts all her faith in him.
• Anyone Can Die
• Arc Words: "Emma's fault..."
• Awful Truth: when Darren discovers just what made him the way he is. Also a Despair Event Horizon.
• Backstory: Oh, there's a lot of it.
• Bookends: A pretty depressing example. The story opens with Darren waking up alone in the jungle after falling from the plane; it ends with him throwing himself off his apartment block and dying alone on the pavement.
• Character Alignment: A couple on the Character Sheet
• A Chat with Satan: a lot of Darren and Danny's conversations, especially inside the cave
• Chekhov's Gun: Darren's spear breaking —>(a third of a book later)—> Joshua's gruesome death
• Cluster F-Bomb: out of curiosity I word-searched "fuck" in one chapter (only 6 pages long), coming up with around 40 counts.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Darren vs. Joshua
• Dark and Troubled Past: Frickin' everybody, but special mention goes to Darren and Emma
• Don't Go in the Woods: Or the cave. Brrr.
• Downer Ending: Darren commits suicide, Emma's released but has no life to return to, Andrea still has feelings for Darren that she can never resolve now
• Dysfunction Junction
• Enemy Within
• Epigraph: every chapter opens with at least one, setting up either the theme, direction or mood of the chapter.
• Establishing Character Moment: Darren swimming out to the sinking plane to save Andrea, Emma (after Darren introducing her as the strong and self-confident born leader) limping bloodied and hysterical to him for protection.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: it's a story about the survivors of the crash of Sattva Airlines Flight 1616
• False Start: after he rescues her from Joshua's camp Darren is all set up to confess his feelings for Andrea ... but for some reason he just can't, instead saying that Emma sent him (when she had actually given him specific orders not to go). It's only when Emma explains the situation to Andrea that the latter figures out what's going on and straight-up asks Darren to confess. Cut-and-dried account notwithstanding, it's actually pretty touching.
• Fauxlosophic Narration: Darren occasionally gets into this and Danny breaks through in green text to call him out for being pretentious.
• Fetus Terrible: Danny turns into a weird version of this near the climax, covered in blood, amniotic a mysterious clear fluid, naked and with empty black eyes. After savagely beating Darren for a while, he wraps the thing up with an Eye Scream and sends Darren into the chapter-long flashback.
• Fighting from the Inside: Darren does this the first time Danny takes control of his body, involving a lot of thrashing and screams (considering Danny is trying to force (or allow) Darren to rape Andrea in her sleep) and some delusional Body Horror thrown in for good measure.
• Foreshadowing: quite a bit. For instance, Darren and Emma first becoming friends as kids working together on an art project in school, specifically a poster drawing of a big red rocket in space. Extremely creepy in hindsight.
  • Other examples include Darren breaking his bamboo spear in a fit of rage (payoff: he later does the same thing to kill Joshua); Paul getting hit on the back of the head by a falling branch; a few small scenes of Darren watching Andrea (who for the first half of the story he describes as immensely strong and independent) hint at her vulnerability; Darren feeling a sudden spike of revulsion when Emma touches him and when he almost sees Kate naked.
• Golden Moment: Darren and Andrea get exactly two, and he warns the reader to enjoy them while they last.
• Guilt Complex: it's pretty much Darren's defining characteristic. Whether he deserves it or not is up to the reader.
• His Story Repeats Itself: When Darren was five, he violently molested his neighbour. Twelve years later on the island he almost ruins his life because of the self-loathing the memory causes. Twelve years after that, he finally kills himself after finishing the story.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: a whole island full of them. It's awesome for a chapter or two, then it gets worse
• Humanoid Abomination: Danny, especially towards the end. Also Helen at first.
• Humans Are Bastards
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: the conflicting accounts of Darren and Andrea's, uh ... "lovemaking"
• It Got Worse: once Emma begins to feel like someone is watching her in the jungle, things go into a nosedive
• Love Dodecahedron: Emma loves Darren who loves Andrea who might have mutual feelings for Paul who has been in a relationship with Deirdre who might love Darren who has awkward feelings for Kate who pretends to be a lesbian because she loves Frank who is actually gay.
• Machiavelli Was Wrong: Played with. Emma doesn't resort to using fear but her leadership is somewhat morally loose — she is willing to go behind character's backs, withhold information from the group and considers leaving those kidnapped in the beach invasion for the sake of everyone else.
• Madness Mantra: "This isn't fair ... this isn't fair. I shouldn't have to die."
  — "And I don't think you need me to point out, "I shouldn't have to" is a far cry from "I don't deserve"."
• Magnificent Bastard: Either Darren or Danny, depending on which one's behind everything. What else do you call a man/mental construct who runs a twenty-four year Batman Gambit, involving making yourself fall in love with the Broken Bird, rooting out her deepest personal issues just by observation from a distance, adjusting your own behaviour to perfectly accommodate those personal issues so she'll fall in love with you, building a perfect relationship then destroying it spectacularly with an act that's a twelve-year-old Call-Back to what turned you into such a self-loathing bastard in the first place, to drive yourself into suicidal despair, *inhales deeply* and carrying on with life for another twelve years before finally committing suicide, and all the while doing this by proxy of a split personality so you never realise you're doing it!
• Mary Sue: arguably Kate, who is beautiful, smart and well-adjusted, andsubverted in that Darren doesn't feel anything for her
• Meaningful Name: despite drawing a lot of inspiration from LOST, this is generally averted. Only two cases: "Darren" means "great" and "O'Doherty" means "hurtful" or "obstructive". Secondly "Sattva 1616" references Chapter 16 Verse 16 of the Bhagavad Gita:
  Afflicted with innumerable fears and anxieties,
  enveloped in a net of illusions,
  engrossed in gratification of the senses
  they glide down into abominable hells.
  • Subverted with Danny. Darren, being a little too Genre Savvy for his own good, spends a lot of time desperately trying to figure out the significance of Danny's name. Where does it come from? Darren's mother had terrible handwriting, and as a kid people thought she was writing "Danny", so it became a nickname. Just one of the many instances where the line between Darren and Danny is blurred
• More than Mind Control/ Not Brainwashed: Danny takes control of Darren's body twice — the first time just to fuck with his mind and the second when Darren deliberately lets him out (his mind had been thoroughly fucked at the point) to prove to Andrea that Danny exists (and disprove his own culpability for killing Joshua) — and Danny attempts to rape Andrea both times. Afterwards he taunts Darren that he can't control anything Darren does, just give him the freedom to do what he wants.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: a possible explanation for Paul's death. True, he had been struck on the head by Joshua and knocked unconscious, but Darren later notices strange dark bruises around the neck of Paul's corpse ... and his memories of that night are hazy.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown / Extreme Mêlée Revenge: you know how bad Joshua gets it from Darren? Emma tells everybody he fell off a cliff and they buy it completely. Chilling.
• Noble Savage: subverted hard. After the attack on the beach Darren and Emma argue over whether the natives could actually be this trope. Turns out they're a community of xenophobes and Self Made Orphans.
• Painting the Fourth Wall: you might have noticed a splash of green text here and there, which are Danny's interjections on the narration cutting through Darren's bullshit.
• Parental Substitute: a squicky example with Andrea, who unwittingly falls in love with Darren because he fills the father role her dad never did.
• Pastimes Prove Personality: a lot of Andrea's small habits reveal her need for order and security
• Please, Don't Leave Me: Andrea suddenly becomes more intimate with Darren after Paul's murder.
• Please Wake Up: Darren when he thinks Andrea is killed by Joshua
• Rape as Backstory: Emma as an abuse victim, Darren separately as an abuser. It puts their relationship in an extremely creepy light.
• Precision F-Strike: Darren: "Fuck off, Emma". Said right after Emma calls him out for disobeying her orders and rescuing Andrea and the other captives (at the risk of provoking Joshua's people into something worse), when all he cares about is having Andrea safe — even more than hurting his best friend's feelings. Doubles as a Wham Line, triples as a What the Hell, Hero?.
  • Comes back to haunt him when he visits her in the asylum while still trying to deal with his resurging guilt over what happened. The last thing ever said between them after years of nursing betrayal and regret: "Fuck off, Darren".
• Reference Overdosed, Fountain of Memes, Shout-Out and Take That! aplenty, mostly to 2000-09 pop culture and Irish society. Comes almost exclusively from Emma, mostly to affectionately insult Darren.
• Robinsonade
• Rule of Symbolism: the colors green and gold show up a hell of a lot in this story without anyone ever remarking on it except Danny. Do they mean anything? That's up to you. Rule of thumb: if Darren's bad side is showing through the cracks, we'll spot green somewhere; if a moment pops up where Andrea reciprocates Darren's love, look for gold (it happens about three times overall). And if they occur together there's a whole other mess of crap it could mean. There's also something significant about Danny's narration being written in green, whereas gold ink never appears.
• Switching P.O.V.: considering Darren wasn't around for everything that happened on the island, he occasionally fills in the gap with written testimonies from other characters. Emma also writes the epilogue in first person.
• Tear Jerker: Emma's fate — abandoned by Darren, locked up in a mental hospital for twelve years and generally forgotten by everyone she cared about.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Towards the climax, Darren's
  self-deceptions and cowardice
  narration becomes a little
  honest for the first time in the bastard's life

  chaotic.
• Title Drop: from the very start. The group themselves are nationally known as the Sattva Survivors
• 20 Minutes into the Future: Darren is writing his memoirs/confession in 2021 (age 28) reflecting on events in 2009.
• Unreliable Narrator: we get two accounts of Darren and Andrea's sex scene:
  • the way Darren tells it, good people have good sex.
  • according to Danny things are a little more aggressive, suggesting a hell of a lot more depth and conflict to their relationship
• What You Are in the Dark: Darren addresses this early on and warns the reader of the inevitable answer: not pleasant.
• You Are What You Hate: Danny is pretty much all of Darren's self-hatred manifested.