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We’re now officially past Memorial Day, so let’s take a look at the stories of the last month, shall we? As always, I’ll try to provide a little insight into my creative process that’s hopefully interesting to those who are interested, while not being too annoying to everyone else.
Quiver and Quake: This one started out as a hypnotic induction I used to help Goddess sleep one evening when She was having difficulties settling. (Sometimes I hypnotize in my role as a submissive. Don’t discount the importance of hypnosis as service.) She’s got a long-term interest in vulcanology and seismology, so I had Her picture Her thoughts being recorded on a seismometer, and then watching them settle into a steadier and shallower set of waves until they flattened into a line. She woke up the next morning thrilled with how well it worked, so when I saw the song title, “Quiver and Quake”, I knew that I would be able to make good use of it when I next needed an induction.
Soft Kitty Warm Kitty: This was a commission, part of the project to get Goddess and I to Charmed this year (so you can kind of imagine how far out my backlog is starting to extend). The brief was “romantic lesbian petplay”, so I knew that the hypnosis had to be consensual. I also knew that I wanted the petplay to be positively portrayed as a kink precisely because I don’t do many stories about it. I don’t want to write a story that inadvertently kinkshames someone’s favorite fetish.
Because of that, I wanted it to be about someone finally getting to realize their petplay fantasies, and I wanted it to feel like the beginning of a long and happy lesbian petplay relationship, so I kind of gravitated to the idea of two young women on their own for the first time. I think it kind of hit that sweet spot of “romantic but very sexy”, and I’m happy with it. (Oh yes, and the title came from doign a search of songlyrics.com, seeing the title, and thinking, “Oh, that’s so wrong. You know you have to…”)
Act Appalled: This one, as I recall, started with seeing the title and picturing a character acting very horrified and shocked and mortified and, well, appalled at the idea of someone who tried to use hypnosis to dominate another person, while secretly having an intense fetish for exactly that. The structure of the story followed pretty naturally–if you’re going to have someone sharing a shocking anecdote of their narrow escape from the clutches of an Evil Hypnotist (and yes, it is worth noting that Sue is an unreliable narrator, and may just be telling Allie what she wants to pretend happened that night and not what actually did) then you’re going to obviously intersperse it with the story of what did happen. And once you’re doing that, it only takes a little bit of pronoun caution to surprise people with the twist that the flashback is actually a flash-forward. Much easier than when “LOST” did it.
XOXOX: (Long one ahead.) This one started with me thinking about superheroes, because I’m an enormous nerd. In general, most of my superheroes draw the spark of inspiration from an existing character, although I really do try to reverse-engineer them into something original by stripping away the inspiration down to its archetypal elements and then trying to fill them in with something entirely new around that core. (Which is a fancy way of saying, “WildRose was inspired by the Huntress, but she really wound up more like ‘Guy Gardner’ as a lesbian vigilante’.”)
And so I was thinking about how DC has this wonderful dynamic of Batman and Superman as the ‘World’s Finest’, with Batgirl and Supergirl as a feminine version of them, and then Huntress and Power Girl as an Earth-Two version of Batgirl and Supergirl with very different approaches to crime-fighting from their Earth-One counterparts. And I was bouncing around an idea for an Adventure Girl/WildRose team-up, and that made me think, “Gosh, it’d be fun to do a character who’s the Power Girl to Adventure Girl’s Supergirl. Or for that matter a Batgirl to WildRose’s Huntress.” And I decided these two characters needed to be made, and quickly.
Eris was simple enough–Doctor Phobos is basically Batman meets Doctor Midnight, so it follows that he would have a Fear-Family of his very own. I wrote her as sort of Batgirl by way of Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hyper-competent and organized but still with that inner core of very mild insecurity that kicks up her obsessive need to be ready for anything to new heights. She wants a 4.0 GPA in superheroing, basically.
Azure wound up a little bit more involved. I knew that I wanted her to be a superhero who was absolutely a pure physical dynamo, someone who would have no problems walking up to the biggest, baddest villain in the universe and absolutely throwing down with them. But I also knew she had to be vulnerable to toxins, because I was already settling on bringing back Sangria as the villain and I knew she would be vulnerable to control. I also wanted her to be someone who had no real interest in or patience for the dynamics of the superhero world–she was someone who had to be pried out of the bar or out of someone’s bed to go save the day. Even her superhero name was just going to be a name, something that could sound like a code-name but was really just who she was.
So I decided she was going to have the classic “tactile telekinesis” power, and she was going to be from a parallel universe where that was common. I gave her a fairly bleak backstory because I wanted her to have a reason for constantly being drunk and not being good at superheroics, rather than it just being something she doesn’t try hard at or care about. To me, she’s not an alcoholic per se; she’s self-medicating with alcohol to cope with massive survivor’s guilt that’s emotionally crippling her, which is very different in my mind. And yes, it did make her vulnerable to Sangria’s control, because she doesn’t want to think. She wants to be numb to her pain, and brainwashing offers that. It’s a very dangerous thing for someone so powerful.
With Sangria in place, I knew that meant setting it in Belgium, because I’d mentioned in my last story “Lips of an Angel” that she was last sighted there. I also knew that I wanted to end it with Eris very abruptly saving the day, so I gave her the rather glib and ill-explained “immune to all toxins” power (which I’m already thinking about expanding upon in a future story, because if you’re immune to all drugs and toxins, what do you do if you need antibiotics or anesthetics or whatever? I’ve got an answer, and I think it makes her very valuable to the right set of villains, so you’ll see that come up again.) And obviously Sangria loves controlling strong, powerful women and needs the advantage of surprise, so she set a trap for them, which is where the letter and the “XOXOX” came in. (I was actually kind of spoiled for choice; there are songs titled “XOX”, “XOXO”, “XOXOX”, and “XOXOXO”.) And once I knew who all the characters were, what they wanted, and how they would try to achieve it, the story really fell into place quite naturally. And was very popular, which is always a good thing.
And that’s May in the books! See you next week with a new post and next month with some more Liner Notes!