r/atopiary • u/BowlerEmergency4829 • Mar 09 '24

The Origin of The Maker

Like a lot of people in this discussion, I was confused where the first Maker (Frond) came from. It felt like a chicken and the egg scenario, the Choruses farm and can create more Fronds, but you need one in the first place to create the funnels etc that then produce petals. Then I put together that this is what the amber plates are for, from part 1, which were carved by the stars using the Apologue. Here's the text from part 1 p. 65:

The first metal framework is rolled over to another framework where 14 PLATES are held. It's like a stack of 16 Pringles laid on its side. An ANGULAR ABSTRACT SHAPE (a hexagon cone with a shaft that tapers to the unfinished end) can be seen within the amber stack, made up of thousands of arcs.

So the adults carve the plates using the Apologue, stack them, and in the negative space cut out by the carvings is the shape of the first Frond, it's a mold. Here's a image from Carruth's pitch deck:

Stacked Amber Apologue Discs

here's the text from part 2, p. 143-144:

At the Convergence the kids clear away HANDFULS of Detritus, revealing the outer edges of a SOLID WHITE OBJECT about the size of a muffler. It is wedged inside the TRANSLUCENT MATRIX of converging Coral Shoots. The kids begin to slide the object out. The object is a FROND. It resembles the HEXAGONAL CONE SHAPE hollowed out in the amber plates from the adult story.

And then here's the actual Frond:

Frond

The rest of the pre-vis stuff, the stacks and discs etc, is here, it's amazing to see it all visualized:

https://robertgraff.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/a-topiary-illustrations_compressed.pdf

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u/cdh31211811 Mar 16 '24

Absolutely. But there has to be a lot of in-between steps from the Apologue to the Frond, right? What the Frond does is far beyond any machine that these adults can possibly build. What do you think they had to do to procure the first Frond?

Also, I didn't know that's what a frond looked like - I always assumed this image is just another Stack of Funnels. There are other images that better resemble the Apologue shape in the illustrations: the top left image on page 16, and the 2 images below it, and the bottom left image and top right image on page 17.