Vote Now! Matchmaker: Chapter One Basics

Note: As part of the new rewards coming out this month, supporters at the $45 tier or higher will have triple vote power! Full details coming soon!

Alright! If you haven't seen, I've posted the Outline for Matchmaker to give you a bit more context, but there are a lot of little details with these first characters I've been deliberately leaving up in the air because I wanted to try giving you guys control and see how it turns out! Now it's time to start production and I need to start nailing these things down. So I'm hoping lots of you will check in and vote pretty quickly!

Before you can do that though, you need a little more context on these characters in particular, which I haven't really given in the Outline. So let's do a quick round of introductions so you can understand who we're working with here!

The Chairman's Child
A man or woman in mid-college years, this character has been dragged out of their attempt at having a normal life despite the fame of being the only child of the planetary chairman. Now, because of strange politics, they have to immediately marry a creature from the alien race his or her people have been at war with for years, and it has to be a healthy marriage if peace is going to have a chance. The Chairman's Child didn't want any of this, didn't even know it would be happening yesterday, but now that there's no choice... they aren't very enthused, but they're gonna try their best to make things work.

Their species is basically some kind of "space furries." Not directly the same as a typical furry, but obviously pretty close. The planet may be diverse or just have one "race" of furries. The Chairman's Child has lived in the shadow of their father for a long time, trying to set their own identity and prove their own talents on some path outside politics, but they're already rather spoiled from their father's money, and reluctantly going to college in politics on his dime. For now.

The player will see things from this character's perspective, so they should feel fairly "normal" and relatable, to let the player focus on everything else happening in the introductory chapter.

The Prince(ss)
A creature of similar age, this character has grown up in a society closer to our medieval era. All of his/her kind have an intense sense of order, loyalty, and hierarchy compared to us or the Chairman's race. They all obey the Emperor without question. The Prince(ss) is one of the Emperor's many children, once thought a promising talent, but when they started acting a little strange, amused with the idea of flipping the roles of dominance that so strictly define their culture, he or she quickly lost the interest of the court and became one more "not quite perfect" child to marry off for political purposes.

Their species is alarmingly different from anything we've seen, some kind of tentacle creature that attaches to larger animals and taps into their nervous system to control them. They evolved to survive purely by turning various less intelligent creatures into their livestock and beasts of burden, and are almost helpless without a creature to ride and control, called a "thrall." They live off the blood of their thralls and mold them to be all but helpless on their own, standing inertly until one of these creatures needs them.

The Prince(ss) starts off very uncomfortable with all of this and unsure how to proceed, and it may be up to the Chairman's Child to draw them out, maybe even seduce them. But with the right stimulus, especially given their interest in flipping the roles of control, the Prince(ss) may come to accept an intensely submissive role beneath their new spouse, or to take control of the situation and dominate them with their thrall, or even connect with the furry's nervous system directly to control them. The Chairman's Child might be... kinda into that...

This character will largely be the focus of the player's discomfort early on, and it will be a hard journey coming to understand how this character acts or thinks, but hopefully, with time and exploration, the player and the Chairman's Child will come to see that even a creature as strange as this can be vulnerable, and caring, and loving. It's up to the player to see if something meaningful can happen between them. The creature will look bizarre at first, but hopefully with time the player can come to see them as "cute in a strange way."

The Thrall
This is a vat-grown clone from the same species as the Chairman's Child. They are the same gender as the Prince(ss) and carry him or her for the duration of this encounter, acting as the Prince(ss)' arms, legs, mouth, and maybe more. At times, it may feel like the Thrall is really who the Chairman's Child is talking to, almost to the point they can forge the creature lurking between them. Depending on how things go, the Prince(ss) may even encourage this: to him/her, the thrall is an extension of his/her body, an adapter to make things easier between the two of them. But that may also help cement the prince(ss)'s quietly held beliefs that the furry species is inferior and should all be made into thralls...

The Thrall has a peculiar role to play and should be both attractive but able to fade into the background. They act as the body for the Prince(ss) in many scenes, at once a "humanizing" (furrifying?) element for the creature but also underlining just how bizarre he/she is.

Okay! That should be all you need to know to make some basic decisions about how these characters should look! I've prepared a form for you to fill out, maybe open it in a new tab so you can check back to this as needed?

Vote Here!

I'll be interested to see how you guys can mold the specifics of these characters! It's kinda like leaving things up to fate: I can work with whatever you choose here, and riff off it as part of the process of writing these scenes out, but I need to know these details before I can really dive in. So get your votes in today!