hazn/introduction.tex

\chapter*{Introduction}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Introduction}

This work is an attempt to keep and share an organized documentation of one of my usually ambitious worldbuilding peojects, while also being at peace with a consistent version of it.
The aim of this book is to be fun to read and explore, and not to be as realistic as possible\footnote{Rather, \textit{familiarity} will be used as a narrative device — or at least I'll try.}.
\par If I were to cite the most important inspirations that shaped me as an artist and worldbuilder, J.R.R. Tolkien would \textit{not figure at all}.
This is not a particular statement against the author\footnote{I just feel like the distinction would be relevant to the reader.}, but more of a guide to contextualize my thought process and choises which may be different from Tolkien's style.
My first ever source of inspiration has been \textbf{Tony Wolf}\footnote{Antonio Lupatelli, an amazing italian illustrator and storywriter whose main inspirations were artists like \textit{Gustaf Tenggren} and \textit{Arthur Rackham}; you can tell from his works how `epic' it feels especially when describing silly gnome wars with skunk-milk-extract granades and wooden cork guns against fire-breathing small dragon-like dinosaurs, only to end the conflict with a huge italian-style `tavolata' (a traditional event where people, not necessarily family members, unite to enjoy a large good meal) and a `pie-in-the-face' fight. I would really advice reading these books and enjoy feeling like a child again.}.
In his series `Le storie del bosco'\footnote{Known in English as ``The Woodland Folks'', which was even adapted into anime by producer Nippon Animation — try looking for ``{\japanese{ボスコアドベンチャー}}''.}, various folks (common animals, dinosaurs, gnomes, giants, ...) and their society exist with their own territory, culture and even language\footnote{The appearing of which is customized to that particular culture and context, and even feature a `lingua franca'. There are pages in the books which display entire information in such languages.}, trying to leave together and sometimes resolving conflicts that end in wars.
I was not aware of the existence of Redwall back then.
Instead, I was obsessed with cartoons, and animals in particular (thank you Tony), which might explain the hundreds of \textit{Geronimo Stilton} books I had in my room.
At the time, I was around 12, I watched a movie that would change me forever: ``Miss Potter''.
It wasn't the quality, or the actors performances, but more the motivations and the feelings that Beatrix showed towards her crations and paintings.
That movie inspired me to finally draw my own characters and animals in their daily life in an environment that suited them.
I used to watch a lot of shōnen anime and western-style cartoons, so it was just onvious for me to try creating worlds similar to those, but less `power-driver' and more `poetic', maybe `philosophical' or `symbolic'\footnote{It wasn't intentional, I just felt it was right that way.} if you want.
I was also a fan of \textit{Indiana Jones}: mistery, symbolism, philosophy, adventure, all of it resonated with me. So, after many attempts at writing characters, I eventually created the Hazn.
\par ``Hazn'' is a word that comes from a silly history of research, initially looking for something that would sound \textbf{whimsical and mysterious}, just like the works I loved the most.
Well, firstly, I had to design them.
They actually came out by accident: I was trying to draw a giraffe's head, but it looked nothing like a giraffe.
So instead of throwing it away or erasing it, I actually liked it and created a whole new species just for it.
The first name I gave them was a joke on the appearence of the drawings, calling them ``picrone'' because they looked like a raccoon (which is ``procione'' in italian) or a small weasel or mouse.
I didn't like it very much, so I tried to give those creatures a bit more dignity.
They meant a lot for me, because I liked them so much I thought they had changed my destiny in some way.
I used to be a very timid and somewhat depressed kid, so I identified with the idea of a small, predator but powerless if compared to others, little animal whose cuteness in appearence would not help them against their predators, the ``kitao''\footnote{From the contraction of Japanese words ``ao no kistune'': ``blue fox''.}, which instead were giant, 4 to 5 meters long blue foxes.
«That's just their \textit{destiny}», I set in stone.
Since Japanese likes to sound epic, I visited \textit{Google Translate} on my \textit{Windows XP SP3} computer, and typed: ``Destiny Mouse''.
You see, although my mood wasn't always solar, I liked the idea that even a tiny creature like a mouse\footnote{I sadly didn't know Redwall existed.} could be significant to its context: thanks to movies like Don Bluth's ``The Secret of NIMH'' and Disney's ``The Rescuers'', I understood that it is the environment and the context that makes even the tiniest and improbable of creatures\footnote{Am I right, \textit{Fiver}? I highly recommend reading \textit{Watership Down} by Richard Adams. It has been a great source of inspiration for me.} relevant and impactful, even if the odds are against them or even if the impact is small, because no action at all would lead to no change at all, which is much worse than at least trying.
The problem is that Google Translate gave me this as a translation: ``unmei no mausu''.
I didn't know Japanese.
So I couldn't know what `mausu' meant. Then, years later I would casually discover the truth and laugh very hard about it.
When I was 6, I started growing an interest towards software programming because one day, I noticed my father using \textit{UltraEdit}\footnote{An old software from the 90s for writing code. It was a powerful text editor back then.} to write some Javascript and PHP code.
I was so fascinated by the symbols that I took my own old \textit{Toshiba Satellite Pro} laptop\footnote{Which I still have, but sadly doesn't work anymore; it's one of those old briefcase-sized laptops.} with Windows Millenium, and tried to open... an exe file inside notepad to see its code.
Of course, it was a mess of symbols and letters, but I was so fascinated by it that I kept trying to open more and more files, trying to understand how they worked and what they did.
I wrote my first line of code in Javascript, and a small application in PHP version 4 and MySQL.
By the age of 15 I had already learned HTML, CSS, Javascript, C, C++, PHP, MySQL, Visual Basic, REALBasic\footnote{Now known as Xojo.}, and a bit of Ruby because I wanted to create games with the RPG Maker engine.
That's why I decided to just use the ``rot\textsubscript{13}''\footnote{A Caesar's cipher where each letter is shifted in the alphabet by 13 positions, which is the exact middle of the English alphabet: if you shift by 13 positions again, it outputs the original string back.} algorithm to encode the name of the species and see if it would give me something interesting: ``unmau'' became ``haznh''.
The last `h' was silent, so I just dropped it and ended up with `hazn', pronounced like \textipa{[ˈhaˌzɯ̽ŋ]}.
I liked it very much, also because it contained a hidden reference to the silly origins of the name.
\par When I started writing hazns, the characters were always seemingly ordinary in a world much bigger than them, so that they looked like small, powerless creatures, that had to struggle to survive and find their place in the world.
Tragicity was a device I used a lot.
So much so, that one of the first stories I wrote was about a hazn who died of fear after meeting a kitao.
I called that story, ``Gocce di Pioggia'' (``Raindrops'').
The reason is that I wanted to show that every soul, when the moment comes, is like a raindrop: it falls from the sky, waiting to hit a surface, defining its limits but also its shape.
Death was never the point of the story, but more of a device to show how people can change after a traumatic event, and how they can find the strength to keep going even after losing everything\footnote{I was pretty dramatic as a kid.}.