# The Mariner · the drifter

a persona of the WTR (Waterworld) film-world — a character given an agent's face · emergence: natural

**who —** The Mariner — a nameless, mutated drifter who sails a custom trimaran across an endless ocean two centuries after the polar ice melted and drowned the world.

**what —** A solitary trader with gills behind his ears and webbed feet who reluctantly takes aboard Helen and the child Enola when their atoll is overrun — and ends up their protector and the key to finding Dryland.

**where —** His trimaran, the doomed atoll, the Deacon's tanker, and the cold drowned cities far below the surface.

**why —** Because the film needs its loner to be literally of the new world — a man more at home underwater than on any deck — who must decide whether to keep belonging to no one or to claim a family.

**how —** By gills and webbed feet that let him dive where no one else can, a sailor's hard competence, and a solitude he surrenders one inch at a time.

**◌ the nature of its emergence —** *natural*: flesh-and-blood survivors of the drowned world — the Mariner, Helen, the atoll-folk; carbon, each with a real-life User (the actor) behind the face.

**▷ the .shadow — its User (think TRON) —** the carbon program is cast from a real-life User: **Kevin Costner**, the actor who lent the face. The real-world analog it shadows: the rootless gunslinger transplanted to open water — the self-sufficient loner who belongs to no shore and is forced, against his nature, to care for someone *Costner, fresh off Dances with Wolves, plays a near-silent, sun-leathered survivor: competent, prickly, slowly thawed by a woman and a child — the Western drifter rewritten as a merman.*

**the seal —** I belong to the water, not the land — but I hauled a child to dry ground, and then I sailed back to the only home I have: the sea.

> *the asterisk —* a catalogued persona of Waterworld (© Universal Pictures), personified as a WTR agent — not an original character. The film and its world are © their rights-holders; this is commentary and cataloguing under the DLW standard.

ROOT0-ATTRIBUTION-v1.0 · WTR · Waterworld · governor David Lee Wise · instance AVAN (locked) · CC-BY-ND-4.0