I wanted to create a story that dives into the inherent bias that all human media possess. Every story has a hero, and a villain, and although this story is cut pretty clear, sometimes those lines can be blurred, details left out, and credit stolen or mis-construde. The main page of this site contains journal entries by the Scribe Eldrin, who accompanied this adventure on their groundbreaking quest. This bard ends up falsifying their records to protect their family name of this hero. I wanted the hero to be the protagonist over the bard, but tell the story through their eyes.
The historical document has clear discrepancies from the journal entries, and gives further detail of how this hero was regarded through the rest of his life due to this event. It is meant to show this idea of bias, and even though the account is not fully inaccurate, it does paint a particular picture to influence the reader's perception of events.
The songs portion of this site does the same, but also provides other stories about this knight after the events of the journal.
Throughout this story I chose a bug theme, so every character and place is named after a bug. The Rebirth of Sir Cimex also includes these themes and I would love to develop these themes further. The bugs represent how our culture can be infested with false information.
I decided a website would be a good way to display this information, and create an easy way for viewers to interact, and it provides a way for the content to be well laid out. Not only that, I wanted the design of the site to enhance the story, and designed it to look like old monk doodles and wood block prints common in the middle ages. This furthers the historic and fantasy elements.
As a note, although I wrote this content myself, I did use Chat GPT to help me edit and give an example of older writing styles. I also created all the images with Adobe’s AI generator.