Thoughts regarding Amelia.

It's been 6 months since this story started, and what a wild ride it's been!

I was reading through old posts, thinking about the rewrite. The thing is, there's a lot of things in the early parts of the story that need more thought put into them. 

Cue item 1: Amelia.

To understand Amelia as a character, you have to go by my thought process when I started writing. Once I explain it, you'll go back and re-read the story and be like "Oh, wow, that makes perfect sense." Amelia started off as a gag character, as did the weird statue, the orb, etc. I didn't have any plan for the story, so the plot was basically nonexistent. I originally just planned to have a creepy little girl show up and taunt the protagonist, then bounce away and never be seen again. But the instant I wrote that cliffhanger where she says "Will you play with me?", something felt wrong.

Up until that point in the story, I hadn't yet tied much of anything together. Stuff just happened... because. Jason found an orb... just because. He had powers... just because. There was a creepy little girl... just because.

See where I'm going with this? Things needed to change. At that exact moment, I re-read the entire story as it were at that moment, and made my first basic outline.

Originally, Amelia had nothing to do with that statue of the woman. The orb was creepy, but I planned to initially have Jason merely wrestle with the fight between using the power of good or evil for a while. The thing is, it felt really generic and cringey, and thinking back on it, that direction for the story would have been cringey indeed.

Shortly before writing the very next part with Amelia, I had watched the RedLetterMedia reviews of the star wars prequel for the umpteenth time. (Seriously, I LOVE those videos, go check them out if you haven't already.) The bit where he talks about Yoda though... it really got me. He inverted the trope by making Luke's image of a 'powerful warrior' fall flat on its face. Instead, the mightiest Jedi was a little green gremlin looking creature.

I decided to take that path with Amelia. Keeping in mind that up to this point, aside from skeletons and generic monsters, I had not yet put demons or especially angels into the story, the barometer for Satan/Raphael/Gabriel/Zeus's power levels was not yet set.

So I decided on a whim to make up the bit of the story about Amelia being inside the statue that Jason had smashed, and if that was her, then it followed that by holding Blaarjiim, she must have some special relationship with him. Thus was born the greatest love story since Twilight... the queen and her loyal servant.

Next though, we need to understand my thought process after this. Up until I finished off the Three Rings/Bahamut Arc, I still hadn't sat down to really outline the world I had created. People were still showing interest in this silly story, so clearly it needed some actual thought put into it...

So this is where it gets interesting. I took a shower, and I still remember when it hit me. I was letting the water run down my back, and a literal showerthought occurred. For real! Showers are truly the greatest gift to Cryopod, because all of the best moments (Including Amelia's chess scene) were borne from showerthoughts.

Anyway, it occurred to me that Amelia was sort of a bad/evil character, so I should make her into the final villain of this arc, but only after upgrading 'Hero' to a level suitable to fight her. But more importantly, I needed to tie her into a more important story, 'the big picture' which was what I did immediately when starting Chapter 2. But let's keep with Amelia for right now.

First, I had an 'accident' occur where she just about fucking killed Jason, then she left for a while and devoured an entire goddamn planet. During the year or so that she was gone, I evolved Jason by having him grow tremendously in power, if not so much in wisdom. Jason's stupidity is honestly the biggest reason I can hand-wave away so many plotholes, especially in the early parts... but I digress...

Eventually, Jason fights Amelia, and he does not actually kill her, Hoarhiim does. This is somewhat important, because Jason is prevented from feeling the guilt of taking her life. Her death is incidental to his actions. Would he have been able to kill her? Who can know.

But that was it for Amelia. I had no intention of writing her back into the story. I did and do have plans for Hoarhiim still, but Blaarjiim was also gone for good. I do not believe in or like resurrecting characters for any arbitrary reason. With the exception of Marie and Clarence (Both of which were resurrected in the very next part... I didn't drag it out) no character I've killed off has ever returned.

Well, at least they wouldn't have returned. Then came the time travel. See, if I'm going to send Jason back in time and have him interact with the past, and these characters I've killed off exist in that timeline, then it makes sense he might interact with them.

So here's the thing: Up until this point in the story, Amelia was just bad. That's it, no good, just bad. Maybe kinda cutesy with how bad she was, but basically she was a violent immortal trapped inside a child's body. Her character depth was, in all honesty, not that bad, but once I realized I had to reintroduce her into the story, I thought it would make more sense to give her a deeper character backstory.

As well, I was wrestling with how to integrate Hoarhiim and Blaarjiim and the orbs into the story. I'm not going to sugarcoat this, guys... I screwed up when I put the orbs in the past. I never originally was going to do that, but in Part 116  I screwed up and wrote about 'two orbs of energy' being rolled around in Gabriel's hands. One of the commenters was upvoted and... fuck. Welp, I could have just ignored him, but what was supposed to be my imagining of Gabriel having so much energy that he could condense it into solid form became an accidental reference to the White and Black orbs.

Remember: In the early part of the story, Hoarhiim and Blaarjiim specifically mentioned that they condensed themselves into orb form to concentrate their powers. That doesn't really add up, does it? Not if the orbs already existed millions of years earlier.

I'm not going to stay on this topic too long because it's spoilery, but you get the picture; I'm not a perfect writer, certainly not in the first draft.

In any case, return to Amelia. Once I wrote her back into Route A, it became clear that she needed to change somewhat. I was flirting with the idea of her being able to change her age somehow, or in some way... and fans didn't seem horribly disgusted by it. I also thought to myself "If she's going to be in constant contact with Jason, and we know that despite her childlike form she's thousands of years old, then they should probably have a romantic relationship at some point."

Jason didn't have a lot of conflict up to that point, so I decided it would be a good way to raise the stakes a little bit. Honestly, in the rewrite, I'm probably just going to make Amelia older, period, because her looking 12 makes the romance kind of creepy, even if she does magically age somewhat. Can we all just agree the romance is going to be awkward anyway? I hate writing romance, yuck.

Anyway, after this point, there's a lot planned, but as you can see from this wall of text, Amelia has had a very haphazardly written character arc and her backstory is rather cobbled together. I would really like to make her much more interesting in the rewrite, so we shall see how it all works out.

Sorry for the wall of text, but maybe this will interest the readers enough that they forgive me!

Jason dies in the end.