Not every villain, not every time, and certainly not to everyone at once, but there should be moments. We should, occasionally, be able to see ourselves in the bad guys, be able to understand how they got there.
Becauseit reminds us not to fucking go there.
Antis who get upset about villains having relatable qualities (often couched as being “romanticized” or “woobified”) are people who cannot bear to ever think of themselves as having the capability of being wrong.
Every human alive is capable of being a horrible person. Relatable villains remind us to keep an eye on that shit.
This is literally half of what makes me write Vulpes and Joshua so much. It’s delightful to make them into people instead of just generic “bad guys.” I want you to love them, hate them, love hating them, and hate loving them.
There’s something somehow odd, and downright difficult, about writing Vulpes in a domestic setting.
Istruggled with this chapter. Not only was there the “oh lord these introductions are taking forever, part 5 is gonna be a mile long,” but on top of that… I’ve written a huge number of scenes ahead that have more of a “this is a family” feel to them (super spoilery so I won’t get into detail). But writing him with his wife? His kids? It’s weird.
Writing the scene with Calista, Vulpes, Spes, and Corvus was an absolute breeze. That chapter pretty much wrote itself. Spes’ voice needs a little tweaking, but that’s mostly my failed attempts at making her a little BAMF wastelander with a hint of a Mexican twist. I’ll get it right eventually.
That scene though was just… It’s the family he wants. A gorgeous wife that is both into him and severely independent all at once, a son who he can be proud of and who is also respectful to him, and now he’s finally got his daughter back and she’s this wild nostalgia trip in the weirdest way for him.
But now writing him sitting down to dinner with his actual family. Eugh. A wife that is batshit insane and incredibly clingy. A son who barely respects him, a son who is going to make an excellent Frumentarius but you can never figure out what he’s up to, and one who is pretty much outright timid by Legion standards and is more a lover than a fighter. Two well broken in slaves, but they are at minimum a decade older than him, and he barely needs even one himself. (Please read “needs” in the way HE is looking at things, thank you. You all know I don’t support this horseshit, right?)
It’s a lot of mouths to feed, a lot of back-talk, a lot of “get yourself together” in four different ways. And now two of them blatantly despise his prized daughter, one who the hell knows, and one is just “ooh traveling must be fun, I want to do that.” And his one slave who can talk is just bringing up all these dreadful memories of his first wife that he’s not mentally ready to face and probably never will be.
So while he has this dream family with Spes, he also has this real family with Lavinia and it is probably more frustrating to him to have that than to not have the one with Spes. So when he’s home he’s just simmering all the goddamn time, and now he feels obligated to be home to protect his daughter suddenly.
This man has a whole spare bedroom just so that he has a place to sleep if he doesn’t want to deal with his wife.
Poor dear is a MESS.
And then there’s Calista.
Calista is pretty much feeling like a moving target in a bad part of town. Ajax wants her gone, Lavinia probably wants her dead, Janus is a wildcard but she expects the worst, Lex is a weird kid but at least he seems kinda normal, Europa is seemingly contentedwith being a slave somehow, Petrus literally had his tongue cut out by someone and is still just running around being a middle-aged errand boy, Spes is a firecracker and telling her she needs to be in some man’s shadow or she’s never going to be safe, and Corvus clearly has some daddy issues and Cal’s got enough of those to cover the whole damn army.
So all through this her brain is just singing this little chorus of
Should I stay or should I go now? Should I stay or should I go now? If I go there will be trouble, And if I stay it will be double, So come on and let me know!
Poor dear is ALSO A MESS.
Does she stick it out and try to learn more about her biological father? Does she run back to Joshua at Dead Horse Point? Does she flee to New Vegas and hope Awkward Science Daddy can help her sort her shit out?
No idea. This has evolved from fight VS flight to outright freeze.
Now, freeze is one I can understand. I am a long-time sufferer of freeze. Shitty job? I CAN’T LEAVE, I WON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. Shit living situation? I CAN’T LEAVE, WHERE WILL I EVEN GO? Shit abusive guy? I CAN’T LEAVE, IF I DON’T KEEP HIM HAPPY HE WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING. Hell I had all of that happen in the first six months of 2021 alone. So on the one hand, writing it in Cal is easy.
On the other hand, having her come to decisions? Even though I already know what she’s going to do, it’s actually much harder to write her taking action than I anticipated. She needs this struggle though, to overcome it and start to become her own person here and not let everyone just keep jostling her around like a package no one wants to open.
On a final note, I just want you all to know that the “Janus Inquisition” line was totally accidental but I love it and now I just keep repeating NOBODY EXPECTS THE JANUS INQUISITION over and over in my head and it’s making me uncontrollably giggly.
So what happens when you write half a chapter and then come back to finish it 7 years later, is that you find you have new and different ideas. In some cases, it just means you have ideas at all, where you didn’t before.
This is what happened with this chapter. I was very, very stressed about what to do to introduce all the members of the household to Calista. I knew Petrus and Europa would be first - the slaves would be up earlier than the rest of the house to ready the family for the day. Ajax had already met her the night before, so that was one more slotted into place. But then who? Lavinia? Janus? Lexarius? Spes? Corvus?
It was absolutely a daunting task. I didn’t want them all coming down the stairs like the Brady Bunch to find and meet a new person. But one by one didn’t seem like a good read either. I originally wrote what I had of it simply because it was willing to be written, at least up to that point - I was actually working on this somewhere between the posting of chapters 15 and 16 (so right around this time in 2015, actually). There were a lot of snippets I wrote “ahead” like that, simply because if I wrote those it meant I was writing SOMETHING instead of staring blankly at parts that refused to be written.
So along comes me a few days ago wanting to get this going again, and I thought. Hm. There’s a good chance Lavinia gets up before her boys do. That means she would meet Cal first. Lavinia gets violent when she’s jealous. We need to take our time introducing her, Vulpes has to talk her out of the gun safe first, so to speak. How do we get Cal out of the house for a bit?
Why would Corvus, an adult, still be living at home with his adoptive Uncle? Let’s move him out. But if we move him out, there’s no valid excuse for Vulpes to keep Spes around anymore either. Let’s move them both out, into a separate home. And then have Cal start her day there.
It ain’t rocket surgery, but it sure as hell felt like it.
This also gave me significantly more opportunities to have Cal and Spes interacting, another place Cal can spend some of her time at Fort City, and much easier ways to get her and Corvus the ability to have private conversations. Win, win, win.
The only thing it sacrifices is the scene where Vulpes explains Calista to Lavinia. We get to see its aftermath at the end of chapter 43. Unfortunately it means a lot less show and a lot more tell about how precisely “buckets o’ crazy” Lavinia really is, but I think there’s already so much going on in these chapters that adding that heavy action there would make it just overpowering.
I might still write this scene and post it in Stories for the Road. We shall see.
There are a few things that happened in the writing of these chapters that I am immensely proud of.
The biggest one, I would say, is the editing I did to the scene where Europa is meeting Calista for the first time. Initially I had Europa and Vulpes being much more familial in their interaction. Almost like a grandmother in the scene. That was how it had been written in 2015. But Europa is only a handful of years older than Vulpes himself, and is still his slave.
Now, I am writing it that he is far kinder to his slaves now than he used to be - but we have to remember that this is still the woman that before (and occasionally even while) Vulpes had Sylva he would bend over his desk or bed and take his frustrations out on. I remember one scene in particular where he’s sitting at his desk and she is on the floor, leaning against his leg with her head on his lap like a dog. He’s absolutely raped her before, he’s likely beaten her as well, and before all of that she belonged to the previous head of the Frumentarii - a man I’ve called Cerberus. And that’s the man that cut out Petrus’ tongue to keep him quiet. So it’s not exactly likely he was particularly nice to her either.
I’m trying to keep her in a balance of still having that ‘snap to it’ response without being fully afraid of Vulpes now. He has both Lavinia and Spes to sleep with, and she does what she’s told well enough that he has had no reason to want to punish her in many many years. But that does not erase the trauma she’s dealt with. So a good bit of editing made their interaction much closer to that of employer/employee than anything else. This is the dynamic I would like to maintain for Vulpes and his slaves from here on out. Maybe not anyone else’s slaves, if we see them, but definitely with his own.
He has also, to put it bluntly, run out of energy and interest in abusing them. He’s never been particularly cruel to Petrus. He’s had no reason to be. Europa though… has seen some shit.
In that editing I said to myself “I want him to be a changed man, not a different man.” And honestly being able to tell the difference is something that came from a lot of personal growth (and trauma) I’ve had in the last year or two. I’m glad it paid off somehow? If nothing else, it helped this scene a lot.
Another thing that took a lot of work was finding the lost voice of Corvus. I’ve got two scenes written that Corvus is in with Calista (for future chapters, again old writing from 2015). And I’ve written scenes with discussion of him and his behaviour as well. So I needed to make sure that when I wrote him in chapter 43 I didn’t upend all the work I’d done to build his character already. It took a good couple of hours to find all the scenes I needed to reference and then read them, but I’m pretty convinced I’ve done it.
Corvus is a character I am really fond of. He’s got that classic Inculta trait of family is everything, but also the issue that the Brothers don’t want this orphan in their family to begin with. It’s going to be a good bonding point for him and Cal - the simple fact that they’re Incultas that certain members of the Inculta family want nothing to do with. For a family so focused on family, they sure do have a lot of drama.
In going through and writing these new chapters I’m also trying to keep up with the other parts of the series. I’ve begun adding more to A Lake of Ashes (which actually has another 20 chapters, and is technically complete, but will need to be edited as the plots get modified along the way), and will only add chapters to it as the related material in RH is posted. They will stand side-by side until the end of RH.
I will also continue to post in the V6 Files, and try not to go past what’s current in RH either until V6 runs out of content. From here on out V6 will be far less smutty and far more plotty. One important thing to note however is that with V6 I am placing the chapters in chronological order by timeline, but that does not in any way mean I am writing them that way. Right now anything I write for it will get slotted in to wherever it should be in the timeline, so “new” chapters might not be the most recent one chronologically. In this case, I will update the chapter summary of the 'last’ chapter in the list to say what chapter to go to to read the new content, since I don’t think it will update correctly to show you that chapter automatically.
I will also likely be adding more Ghoul stories as we go (to Don’t Go Gentle into that Good Night).
Blessedly, at least Memoriae is a completed work. I do not plan to revisit it with the possible exception of maybe doing some editing at some point, but that is very low priority at the moment.
So all in all, we are making progress again for the moment. This story comes to me in fits and bursts, even though I have a massive outline/timeline to work from and know how the story ends. It’s the getting there that keeps changing. Only yesterday I had an idea that seriously changed how certain things will happen to reach the end of the story that made them make far more sense. So hopefully the time this is taking will be worth it!
“Sure, you’re allowed to like a character who did Bad Things if you must, but first you need to write an essay acknowledging the Bad Things every time you talk about the character who did Bad Things, and–”
There were a few different designs considered for my cover, and by a few I mean these:
It was a VERY close call between the first and third options, but I ultimately went with the third because I already have “big vertical object as point of interest” planned for a different cover down the line and I didn’t want to be too redundant. The second option was deemed too difficult to execute well, and the fourth was just so perfect that I didn’t want to make the whole rest of the comic seem less good by comparison.
The third design is actually an homage to the cover of the Batman comic Three Jokers, a comic that isn’t particularly good or notable in my opinion but is so absurd in concept that it’s sort of become an inside joke that I have with myself. Here’s the original:
Anyway, after deciding on the third design, I had to make a full-size version based on my original half-size thumbnail:
As you can see, I drew the background and foreground separately, and Victor was made bigger in the digitized version of the art than he is here. I also wound up switching the side that Agnes is holding the chip in! I had already drawn the hands, like that, but I wanted her scarred side to be in the reflection of the chip. I’m glad I drew them separately because it was very easy to just mirror that layer when it came to the final cover (and the charming doodle at the top was just filling empty space while watching a music video).
As for the variant cover, please give a huge glamorous round of applause to my guest artists! When I needed a pair of glamorous Vegas-ready outfits for Agnes, I turned to @theyoungbuck immediately for consultation and costume design, an absolute expert in this field.. He was also the artist who designed the composition for the variant cover, and you can see the original costume design and drafts of the cover here:
All of this was designed in early January when I was largely between issues of the comic. We ultimately decided against the second draft, because if we went through the trouble of designing these outfits for Agnes and Cass then by god we were going to show them off.
With the recent finale to Volume 1, over the last few days me and @tarberrymentats teamed up to bring that original draft to life, and viola! You’re looking at the glamorous results!
It’s always a tremendous pleasure to collaborate with guests artists on issues of the comic, but I’m especially hoping to have a variant cover for each volume going forward because it’s just so much funto do the artistic equivalent of taking a photo of somebody, then excitedly saying “alright, now let’s do a silly one.”
