How did you come up with the divine right concept? I mean you have a giant cast of characters and a reallly in depth world plotted out
The story started with Vanz making a series of AWESOME photo-sets that described fictional countries - I've looked for the originals but can't find them which is a serious bummer.
Then she took those awesome countries and started pulling characters out of them. The motivation behind it was all cultural melding, taking a bunch of historical and modern cultures and mish-mashing them together into interesting new shapes that didn't fit our own world's stereotypes of race, gender, and class roles. Sometime around then she asked me if I wanted to draw some of them (which holy shit I still haven't but it's not my fault art just isn't happening for me any more at all). And then we started talking about them more and more and the whole world and story started to come together. (and honestly still is)
We decided we wanted to do a story around the countries and the characters and started sending a lot of texts and talking about the plot and the characters all the time. She came up to visit me and I told her I was secretly desperate to write it in a novel-style since writing is what's always been easiest for me and I wanted to bring the story to life. And so we plotted more and planned more, and now we have the story.
We've been excited from very early on about creating a story that reversed the way stories are normally done. Normally you have a story, a story gets fans, and fans make fanworks. Vanz started by making fanworks for something that didn't even exist (GIF sets, graphics, etc) and then we formed a baby fan base around that and THEN introduced the story. We love how fan-communities contribute to stories and wanted to make something that really was made for a fan-community, based on breaking the tropes and limiting stereotypes that drag other stories down, and opening up a vast world and cast for people to explore and enjoy.
It's been over a year now since the first seeds were laid, and a lot of work, but it's great to finally be sharing it.
