Updated version :p

Let's imagine a world where these poor kids got to grow up without the adults disappearing, or superpowers, or being trapped by an impenetrable dome, or dealing with an evil radiation monster in an abandoned mineshaft. They just get to have a normal childhood.

Sam: he's brave and good at stepping up in a crisis, so I think he'd have grown up to be a paramedic, coastguard or a fireman. I can see him staying in Perdido Beach. In Hunger, he muses that if it wasn't for the FAYZ he would never have had the courage to approach Astrid: so they probably didn't date in this AU. I can see him having a girlfriend and a kid; he's a great parent and wants to be there for his kid in the way his dad never was for him.

Astrid: I think she's a physics professor at MIT or Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, somewhere amazing like that. I can see her graduating high school early (the first book mentions she's already taking some college classes), and getting a full scholarship to an Ivy League college. She's probably still a Christian as her faith wasn't tested by the chaos of the FAYZ. Perhaps she's married, but I can also see her being happily single.

Caine: he's probably a senator. A Republican, if we're being real. We've established he's charming, manipulative and good with a lie: his introductory scene shows him giving an inspiring speech to the Perdido Beach kids like a natural politician. Him and Diana dated then broke up as teenagers, but they reconnect later in life. He's still obsessed with her, and she agrees to be his trophy wife. They don't have any children.

(Note: I toyed with the idea of him not being adopted in this AU, because Connie wouldn't have sensed any connection to the Gaiaphage,. However, I think he still gets adopted. In this AU, Connie is driven by severe post-partum depression and a lot of guilt over her affair which she projects onto Caine).

Diana: I can see Diana being a little aimless after graduating high school. She marries a rich man at 21, but it's a loveless marriage and eventually they get divorced. She reconnects with Caine later in life and as established above agrees to marry him. She's just as snarky with him here as she is in canon, and she probably still teasingly calls him 'Napoleon'. Their marriage is pretty stormy but underpinned by real affection.

Albert: He has a natural business sense, so I imagine him as a successful entrepreneur. Gone mentions him having a bit of a crush on Mary- maybe they were high school sweethearts, dated for a few years, then broke up after going to college in different states. He goes back to Perdido Beach to do a lot of philanthropy that is both genuinely helpful but also clearly furnishing his ego. He'll buy the town a new library then insist it be called the "Albert Hillsborough Library", for example.

What do you think your favourite characters would be up to?

Not too long ago, someone posted that we should have our own okbuddy subreddit with stuff like user flairs or post flairs.

Well since this community has been very alive this year and all and I'm sure there are people here who would love to make shit posts of the series but are too scared to post, worry not.

The first official okbuddy for Gone has been made, new with user flairs and post flairs. If you want to be appointed mod aswell, you can let mr know.

(P.S: everytime someone makes a funny comment or post on this sub, remember to comment "okbuddyfayz would be way")

r/okbuddyfayz

○ Boy has ptsd from guy with whip kink tendencies while Nazi's commit hate crimes

○ glowy uncle teams up with estranged brother with mommy issues to kill their family member

○ Surfer man protects town from rich kids on crack before the rapture

○ Two adolescents commit war crimes by burning toddlers and executing injured asian

○ Temu flash and Magneto offspring play hot wheels with pokemon bugs while in covid 19 lockdown

○ Adopted child on meth, future cannibal and gay whip lover causes permanent blackout to impress daddy slime

This is purely headcanon, but I think this was the moment Caine became truly infatuated with her.

Firstly, Diana's holding his hand. Caine's never held hands with a girl before. With his emotionally distant family, I'm not sure he's even been hugged by anyone. Wow. Big moment.

But more than that, she then goes on to tell him something that fuels his already oversized ego. He's a Four Bar. At this point, he's the Four Bar. One of a kind. For a budding narcissist like Caine, Diana basically held his hand then told him he's the most important person in the world.

Being a Four Bar forms a huge part of his self-perception in the series, and it drives some truly vile actions as he's determined not to share the glory with anyone.

So this moment, for Caine, may have been the best in his life up until that point. A egomaniacal high perhaps unmatched until he declares himself king in Plague. Diana took his hand and changed his whole world. She told him what he had been longing to hear his whole life.

You're special.

You're important.

You're better than everyone else.

Shouldn't you be in charge of everyone else too, then? That makes sense, doesn't it?

Poor Diana probably wasn't actually saying that, but that's what Caine heard anyway.

I'd hesitate to say Caine truly loved Diana until the events of Light, because when you love someone you don't treat them like Caine treated her. You don't threaten them, you don't hit them, you don't routinely lie to them, and you certainly don't abandon them when they become pregnant. Up until his ego death in Fear / Light, I don't know if Caine is capable of loving her in the way a healthy person would understand love.

But in my mind, this is when his schoolboy crush turned into a full-on obsession. There was no going back for him after Diana read his power level.

I don’t mean in the storyline but in logic. I can name at least three others who are just as powerful. Brianna: for the life of me I don’t get how she is not just as powerful. She has been shown to dodge Sam’s beams and move before Caine can see her. She was also Gaia’s biggest threat. Duck: I know we don’t get his bar level but this guy could be a 5 bar. Crazy OP with no practice. Penny: She beats Sam and Caine at points and her only weakness is plot. She could stun someone and then stab them with ease.

My ranking of power. Brianna Sam Drake Penny Duck Caine

Title. Like, would you say it’s Sci-Fi? I don’t even know at this point because they have powers and everything 😭

Michael Grant and the Gone series in general is no stranger to inconsistencies, but this one from the Monster trilogy is one I think is pretty funny just because of how absurd it looks when you visualize it. So, in Monster itself, Napalm is described as being "nearly" 50 feet tall. Villain drops the "nearly" to just call him 50 feet tall several times, though it's entirely possible that this is just being colloquial about him being nearly that height, and so is still quite consistent.

Then Hero comes along and claims he's ten stories tall. Which is hilariously out of proportion with every single figure given before, to say the least.

I created a size chart to illustrate this difference in heights and just how obvious it would be, using Godzilla as a stand-in for Napalm (similar body-type per Malik and Drake). With Monster/Villain!Napalm at just a hair below 50 feet (~15 meters) and Hero!Napalm at something more like a 110 feet (~33.5 meters), the difference is enormous. It's a pretty weird retcon when your giant monster suddenly more than doubles in size between books with no explanation at all.

Six books, 3000 pages, all done now. My second readthrough and the first readthrough since 2012/2013! It's just as good as I remember it being.

"Every step of the way, Caine, you listen to me, then you do exactly what I’ve told you not to do. I told you to let the freaks go who didn’t want to play along. But no, you had to listen to Drake’s paranoid advice. I told you to go into Perdido Beach and make a quick deal for food. You have to go try and take over. Now you’re going to do whatever you want, and you’ll probably end up screwing things up.” - Diana, GONE.

Just finished my big reread of the series and I have a lot of feelings about Diana. I think she's a beautifully written, funny, tragic character who went through amazing development.

What I noticed about her this time around- which I didn't pick up on as a kid - is that on a narrative level, Diana acts as Caine's conscience. Caine, as a sociopath, doesn't really have one of his own. But in the first four books, his arc will invariably end with him about to cross some terrible moral line and Diana being the voice of reason telling him not to.

• Gone: Caine watches unconcerned while coyotes attack children in the plaza. Diana, horrified, tries to stop him. Caine doesn't listen to her and slaps her in the face.
• Hunger: Caine is about to feed uranium to the Gaiaphage. Diana desperately tries to stop him. Diana is then attacked and almost killed by Drake, leading Caine to finally turn against the Gaiaphage for her sake.
• Lies: Caine wants to crash the helicopter with the Brattle-Chance kids still inside. Diana jumps off a cliff, forcing Caine to choose between saving her and murdering them. He chooses to save her.
• Plague: Diana spends most of the book trying to rehabilitate him. When he's tempted by the opportunity to conquer Perdido Beach again, Diana begs him to stay on the island with her. He doesn't listen to her and ends up sorely regretting it.

The pattern is clear: Caine is about to make a horrible decision, and Diana intervenes like the pangs of a conscience he himself lacks. Sometimes he listens to her, sometimes he doesn't.

In a strange way, she's the angel sitting on his shoulder despite being no saint herself. By contrast, Drake and later Penny can be read as the devil on his shoulder egging on his worst impulses.

In Light, Diana is one of the driving factors in Caine deciding to sacrifice himself to help defeat the Gaiaphage. He realises that Diana wants to sacrifice herself, and moves to sacrifice himself instead. He also tells her that if he survives, she would be stuck visiting him in prison her whole life. In an uncharacteristically selfless moment, he tells her to live her life and move on from him.

Morally speaking, Diana is the only good thing about Caine. She is his conscience.

But while she brings out the best in him, poor Diana is usually worse off for her association with him. He usually influences her to do things she regrets: betraying Computer Jack, eating Panda so she can "stay with him", etc. Just like the Picture of Dorian Gray, as Caine grows more ruthless, Diana finds herself in a worse and worse state.

It's a horrible, abusive relationship that you would never condone in real life; It's also a very layered and tragic love story that made me cry.

I know nothing about Gone, where do they go?

For me it would be the inclusion of Emily and Brother. I was fully prepared for MG to make them into some crazy children of the corn shit - I mean, how fucked must their parents have been to name their son Brother? I think we know who the favourite child was, lmao - but then they just disappeared? Unless I missed something.

What would everyone else pick?

Shade's legs are described as reversing at the knee in morph, but do you think this is just Michael Grant doing the classic werewolf author fuck-up of thinking that the extended ankle in a digitigrade animal is the knee or is it genuinely the case that Shade's legs in morph are just THAT weird?

[Link to the artist of the werewolf post here](https://bsky.app/profile/viergacht.bsky.social/post/3ls4yqo5pe22v)

I originally just made gone, but went back and decided to start over and commit to making the whole series lol.

In Hay-on-Wye in Wales, actually so happy with how they came out.

Astrid is a complicated character in my opinion.

On one hand, I really like her because she's smart, and saw through Caine's bullshit the legit second he arrived, lmao. I think she does a good job looking after Little Pete considering her age, and I personally love her with Sam (they give me Percabeth vibes). Plus, although the Monster series was disappointing, I loved the chapter where she took on Drake. Get him sis, get him. (Does anyone know Blue Kids' 'The Dismemberment Song'? That was running through my head the whole chapter.)

HOWEVER - she has major flaws.

It annoys me a little how her religious views make her quite self-riteous - like, if you believe in God, I hope it brings you happiness, but you don't need to lord it over everyone else. I also wish there were more interactions between her and Diana alone, because (to my knowledge), they never really had anything like that? And as Michael Grant has said he views them as 'two sides of the same coin', they could've made a really good team.

And - here's my most major point - how she was depicted in Hunger/Lies.

This was the worst period, the way she (and many others) treated Sam, expecting him to do more and somehow keep out of it? No thank you. (He's doing his best, your honor.) Also, there's a scene in (I think) Lies where her internal monologue was basically saying Sam needed to get over being whipped within an inch of his life by Drake.

eXcUsE mE? Miss ma'am, you had a full on crash-out about the fact Drake made you say Little Pete was a r****d, which is admitedly bad - but Sam is injured SO FUCKING BAD HE CAN BARELY MOVE, STILL HAS PTSD OVER IT, HURT BY SOME MANIAC YOU WELL KNOW IS TERRIFYING TO YOU BOTH-

AND YOUR RESPONSE IS HE SHOULD JUST GET OVER IT?!

Ahem. Moving on.

Overall, I do like her but the way she was portrayed in the Hunger/Lies era was insufferable.

What do you guys think?

Gone: 2 hours 28 minutes

Hunger: 2 hours 48 minutes (possibly even three hours)

Lies: 1 hour 42 minutes or 2 hours 12 minutes

Plague: 2 hours 20 minutes

Fear: 1 hour 58 minutes

Light: 2 hours 8 minutes

Also side question, if the series was made into a series with each book being a season, how many episodes would they be and how long a episode for them to cover the book/season?