after reading that chapter I'm just imagining the Guide just... sitting there, casually reading his book, and then all of a sudden bURSTS INTO FLAMES ON THE SPOT
Now that most of the people who I think were really involved with the story and its background have contacted me separately and discussed it at length, I might as well drop a bunch of the hints I was leaving around prior to the story’s ending. ;> Just to be sure, I’ll cut them, but I want people to know just what I’d been doing all this time with the story behind the scenes.
Axl Colin Eyre - “Axl C. Eyre”
This was the major one. The entire purpose of the story. I’d made it known for a while that Excelsior was just a normal dude, and was hoping people would have caught the name-pun in the first chapter...when nobody did outright, I decided to make a big drama about the whole thing.
If people had caught it (and/or those that did had spoken up), I might not have, so I’m honestly glad it was just subtle enough. Again, it was an 80+ page pun reveal and I couldn’t be happier.
In chapter 2, when his “weeb”ishness was revealed (he’s really not that weeby, but it’s a fun silly quirk when you take into consideration who he became), I was hoping people’d catch it, as before the start of Fell, I’d given a link to the NPC infodumps on TCF, with emphasis on the fact that Excelsior got a full writeup when he originally didn’t have one (it came up right after a bunch of Asks/answers involved him). I was hoping people would draw the anime connection there, but when people didn’t (and continued not to), I started adding more and more to that bio with the intent to spoil things for potential readers who might’ve been proactive enough to look at off-blog supplementary stuff.
On one stream I brought up how his ‘boss form’ isn’t just him magically getting larger, but was actually a giant robot built with help from the Lihzahrd to help him fight the giant awakened Starfallen, which is a very anime thing to do. Stream ‘benefits’ lol.
The writeup itself also had the whole ‘voodoo doll’ thing (which even predated Excelsior getting a writeup at all, as Abomination selling the doll was part of the original Starfallen brainstorm), which I’d hoped to allude to with Axl obsessing over ‘holy’ things while drawing attention to his making a practice figurine of a suit of armor ‘like silver but better’.
Also, on a very obscured note, there’s this post. I didn’t expect anyone to get it (and nobody openly did), but the image on it is click-draggable. ;)
Anna Paulette-Rhodes “Aura” Anderson - A. P.-R. A. (or A. P. “Aura”)
Don’t get hung up on the name, it was thrown together at kind of the last moment to keep to the stupid “normal human names that break down into character names” convention I’ve been using (that technically started with Richard Brighton/”RB”/Arbeh).
The main part of the hints here were more on the plain side, with people left to simply draw the connection between bee armor and a connection to the dryad (and thus the jungle). A few people on stream did draw the bee armor connection, I simply threw it off as a fluke in an effort to keep the spoiler hidden.
The fact that she acquired a red scarf later in the story is more of a technicality.
...oh, yeah, and nobody questioned why she was holding a picture frame that one time.
Ren Gustav “Gus” Caris - R. “Gus” Caris
By contrast, this one mostly just came down to hoping people would catch the name, but I wasn’t expecting too many people to get it since Arguscaris is a painfully obscure character among the lot (he didn’t even have a proper bio! I’d actually added one part-way through in the same vein that I’d started adding to Excelsior and Abomination’s bios on TCF, but got cold-feet that people might see the spoiler and removed it. Speaking of, I’ve updated the page a bit to reflect the reveals and the completion of the story).
It largely came down to whether or not anyone remembered that Arguscaris was a horribly malformed victim of a pact with Abomination… though I did throw that gif recently in to see if anyone would find it curious that I’d suddenly brought him up again.
More people than I’d like to admit thought he WAS the Abomination, and not just a victim of it, so I feel that’s more a failure on my part to to telegraph that properly... Either that or people are just naturally inclined to fixate on major characters instead of minor ones.
Overall, though, I’m really happy with how this panned out, and even if only a handful of people really stuck through to the end and kept up with enough supplementary material to piece things together, that’s MORE than enough to make me extremely happy, and I can’t thank you all enough for all the support!
