Protagonists

My first question to throw out to the group, I just want to know about your protagonists in your works.

How did you come up with them? What were your goals for them in your story? I'm going to throw it to you, Clam.

I feel like I'm a weird one to start with because my protagonist situation is kind of topsy-turvy where I've got the kind of flagship character who is the quote-unquote visible hero of the story who is Phaedra.

and she's a princess.

She rules over a world that is super cursed, but she ultimately falls victim to a curse herself and becomes a ghost and has to find a way to either resurrect herself or something else out there.

So she's the one who receives the quest initially to go and do the thing and proceed with the plot of the story.

But she turns out to be kind of a Not the greatest protagonist in terms of agency at first.

Part of it is because of time shenanigans with the story, but I found it very funny to have her get the quest and then immediately just be like, my situation is bad.

I'm going to be sad and depressed for two months, which... a lot of people are kind of like, wait, what? I'm like, yeah, she is the protagonist, but she's just suddenly been dealt a terrible hand, and she is not prepared for whatever has been kind of given to her as a quest.

So she gets sidelined for a little bit in favor of another protagonist, who is Pavel, who's a boy who also bears a kind of a similar but adjacent curse regarding this world, and He gets thrown into his own little arc.

And eventually, the plan is to make them both meet up.

And he essentially, not necessarily becomes sidekick, but kind of gets her back on her path.

So it's weird having two kind of... initial sources of story momentum, but I found that I wanted to kind of explore this idea of what if the hero is so incredibly hurt by what happened to them? What if the inciting incident basically incited too hard and kind of messed with them for a bit? How do you get off the ground and how do you get moving? It's about people around you.

It's about looking and seeing who has the same goals as you, looking for inspiration in other people, and hopefully having them come to you and be like, hey, it's not all that bad.

Let's go.

Let's get on the journey.

But I also have, I find that I, both of them are protagonists of this story, but I find that the true protagonist is actually the character that I introduce as my villain first, who is Cheth, who is basically the source of the world's curse.

And you see him initially and you're like, this is a bad guy.

This is the force of evil that has hurt these characters.

But then you learn slowly, like, he doesn't want this world to be cursed either.

He does not want this situation to happen.

He does not want to necessarily hurt these people and be the source of all this misery.

So you kind of have this split perspective of like, these three characters want the same thing, right? They all want some sort of like salvation or healing or the theme that I went with was when you're hurt, how do you heal? And there's lots of different ways to kind of initialize that journey, that concept.

And you have the one that stumbles at first, you have the one that's like, okay, I'm plucky and I'm ready to go.

Then you have the one where it's like, everybody thinks I'm the bad guy, but I'm not that bad.