I’m building Fatherless as a combined book + movie trilogy: fatherless.ryanjennin.gs
I wanted this post to explain three things clearly:
- how I came up with the idea
- what shaped and influenced it
- why it matters to me
Before that, quick status:
- The book is still in progress and nowhere near complete.
- The movie side is currently a scene-by-scene script description, not a final screenplay.
How the idea started
Historical and spiritual roots
The starting point was historical and spiritual at the same time.
I have been fascinated for most of my life by Roman culture, especially three threads:
Spartacus and the slave rebellion. He rose as a slave gladiator, defeated multiple Roman armies, and then after capture, his army was crucified mile by mile on the road to Rome.
Julius Caesar as a paradox. He can be read as someone trying to challenge Roman vanity and indulgence, but also as someone who became tyrannical himself.
Early Christians as a persecuted cult. I keep returning to the reality that early Christians were a minority sect facing imminent, unrelenting death under imperial power.
Those events felt like civilizational trauma to me.
I kept wondering what that kind of brutality and hypocrisy does to a culture, and whether that kind of environment creates a deep social hunger for a new god, a new story, or a new moral center.
Great Ages and civilizational transition
I was also pulled into the idea of Great Ages and historical transitions.
If the current age began with Jesus, did Jewish or other religious people at the time sense they were in an age shift? Were they watching for someone to usher it in?
And if the Age of Aquarius arrives around ~2150, what does that mean in a world where technology is advancing fast enough to threaten everything we know about human life while also opening unimaginable upside?
What influenced it
Personal context
I am also deeply influenced by years of reading psychology and spiritual books.
For a long time I did not find comfort in Christianity as it was presented to me.
Then life hit hard in sequence: COVID, job loss, more job loss with the AI wave, then my mother died.
My life had already been hit hard, and I reached a point where I needed spiritual structure.
I started seeking out church partly because I lacked a strong spiritual alternative.
I fell in love with many of the people I met there. They were imperfect, like all of us, and sometimes dramatic, but very human and often sincere.
At the same time, I found myself constantly reinterpreting church teachings through a more spiritual and psychological lens:
- The kingdom of heaven as the inner self, not a place in the sky.
- God as living energy in us and around us.
- Prophetic stories as persecution in unstable times, and as necessary pressure against egoic structures.
Reinterpretation thread
That reinterpretation also became more provocative and uncomfortable over time.
It went like this:
The idea that Mary was a virgin did not make sense to me. I began asking whether violence was involved, including the possibility of rape under imperial conditions.
Then I pushed the question further into taboo territory: what if the conception was incest?
That was connected to another Roman fascination for me: elite decadence, large orgies, and records of incest among powerful families.
- Then I pushed the boundary even further: what if the son later procreated with the mother, making him his own father?
I know these are extreme speculative questions.
In the project, they function as a narrative pressure test about power, taboo, trauma, and how myths can be re-read through psychological and historical lenses.
That was enough to plant the seed of a story.
With help from AI, I started drafting a simple scene-by-scene screenplay description.
I chose to keep it fictional so it could explore hard ideas without directly targeting real people or communities.
Broader story interpretations
From there, the story evolved into a few broader interpretations:
Illegitimate conception as an explanatory key As I kept writing, the concept of an illegitimate incestual conception between son and mother started explaining more of the theology inside the story, including the “God as father” paradox.
Christianity’s valuation of life Another idea became clearer to me: Christianity values life. In this frame, Jesus is not introduced as an alien being, but as a seemingly normal child like others, which makes the moral message feel more radical.
Specialness, tragedy, and forgiveness This frame also explains both Jesus’s specialness and his ultimate tragedy, and why forgiveness becomes central rather than optional.
Empire brutality as self-destruction The brutality and shame of the empire become part of its own undoing. Jesus is the peak point in a much longer series of violence, sexual extravagance, and greed.
The human contradiction I am also exploring the contradiction that humanity can crucify abominations while also loving and revering them, like personal slaves within families and gladiators in public spectacle.
- Repetition across eras Across timeframes, I see these patterns repeated in crises. The prequel, main story, and sequel let me test that repetition across different civilizations and technologies, including the AI-centered moral tension in The Fatherless II: Neurion.
I wanted to see if the same moral argument could survive huge changes in era and context.
The themes carried across eras more cleanly than I expected.
Why it matters
This trilogy matters to me for two main reasons.
It may help people who feel a lack of truth in Christianity. If someone feels disconnected from the way Christian teachings are often framed, this story offers another way in: through suffering, contradiction, redemption, and sacrifice expressed in human terms.
It feels increasingly relevant in the age of AI and advanced technology. As we become more augmented and begin sharing life with intelligence that may surpass us, I think stories of redemption, sacrifice, and moral responsibility become more important, not less.
For me, Fatherless is one attempt to carry those questions forward without pretending easy answers.
If this resonates with you, you can explore the project here: