Weekly Update - 240 - 10/14/24

Is Pyre my most hated character yet? Will you hate her more or less after this upcoming page?

I dunno! I guess we'll find out on Friday because...

Comic this Week? Yes!

Drawing: Page 209-211, SkyexKiva fanservice (I know I'm slow! I've been trying to come up with a cute pose for them that's both spicy AND cute AND like... not TOO spicy, ya know? Jalapeno level spice, not ghost pepper spice. I've done like 3 sketches so far and I'm still not 100% sure which one I wanna go with, and I want to challenge myself by drawing something I don't typically do, so... yeah! It's slow. But I AM trying different things and hopefully something clicks soon!)

Playing: Satisfactory, WoW

Ramble (because sometimes the brain just needs to take a text dump):

I still feel bad for Pyre. Would you know with as much as I am fascinated by psychology, I was always hesitant to write a true psychopath character in my stories. Riley suffers from psychosis, that is to say, hallucinations and a confusion of her perception of reality (among her other symptoms), but she is still able to make personal connections to people and feel normal emotions and empathy. She can be reckless sometimes, but that's probably Kiva's influence. I was always scared to write a character like Pyre because I was worried I wouldn't be able to do it properly. Psychopaths are very difficult to write properly, and I was worried she'd end up being like a lot of "crazy" characters that get depicted in other media, writing and games where they're just portrayed as a terrifying agent of chaos and where there isn't any consistency, internally or externally, in how they behave. (Or worse, they make a joke out of it, "look at my rubber chicken, I talk to it, aren't I just so craaaazzzy, ima kill you now and giggle as I do it, teehee!")

Readers pick up on that sort of lack of understanding on the part of the author though. Even if not everyone is necessarily able to explain the specifics of what's wrong, they will still notice that SOMETHING is wrong. And frankly I think it's insulting to the audience any time the author thinks they are fooling anyone writing on a topic if they lack an understanding of the topic themselves.

So... when Pyre fell out of my pen for the first time alongside Ember and Ash, and my brain just kinda told me their story, I admit didn't fully understand Pyre at first, it actually took a few weeks and a bit of research before I think I finally understood WHY she was like this, and she finally started making sense to me. She's still an agent of chaos, make no mistake, and she's a dangerous one at that, but hopefully you'll all notice that her behavior is (or should be, if I'm doing my job right) internally consistent with her personality and thoughts.

Now I'm a bit obsessed, because I have ended up becoming fascinated with her story, and she's also fun to draw... so she's ended up having a much bigger part in this chapter than she was ever supposed to have. THAT might end up being a mistake, but as long as we're all having fun still, it's probably fine?

Well, by "we" I mean you and me. Max isn't having any fun. Poor Max.