Chapter 12, Page 8: And they will ring the bells

by on September 26, 2021 at 1:38 am

Ararchnophobia warning

  • Octavian and Akila are both names from a graphic novel I read around the time I started my comic concepts. I feel they both fit their characters well.
  • Orion, Circe, Chris, Lars and Andromeda are all names chosen for their characters in particular. Andromeda started the idea of mages having anglicized biblical and mythological names, which I quite like.
  • Ezra, Violet and Ethan are all named after people I knew to some extent in real life. They for the most part only resemble their characters in appearance.
  • Davis is the one case of a character’s name being changed and it actually sticking. His original name was Martin, and I don’t know why I changed it.
  • Katrina, as you probably know, predates the comic entirely, and is in fact the character whose mental stories became the comic itself.
  • Edythe is the pen name of the author whose book introduced me to urban fantasy, and is such a cool name I had to use it.
  • The Lady in White’s real name is both of a friend IRL who she somewhat resembles and was chosen for her character due to the origins of it. No more info, sorry.
  • Theo’s name was a working name that I just couldn’t separate from him, and kept it. The thing is, and I’ve been cagey around this fact for years, Theo… shares his first name with me. This isn’t normally an issue, but given this is a fantasy story, the genre is rife with amateur writers putting themselves into worlds both of their own creation and as fan work, and due to them being amateur they aren’t always of the best quality, and as such having a “self-insert” protag has a stigma to it. And now that I’ve said that, I can finally explain how Theo relates to me as the author. Theo is… the best of me. Not that he’s all my good qualities – he’s just the personification of my curiosity, my optimism, and the like – me when I was, for lack of a better way of putting it (and sorry if this sounds really brooding), blissfully ignorant. Just as Violet and Kat are both variants of my depressed self (Violet being the recovering half), Theo’s my pure, ideal self. None of this was on purpose, I just took from my experiences and used them to make characters – for example, Vi was always meant to be sad and moody, so I used my sad and moody self as a basis. So when it comes to it, I have no self insert, or I have multiple. Both are equally true.