#rainbows fade

[the-arigen]

Hi! Happy WBW! This week I've been thinking a lot about religion so... What is considered sacrilegious in your world? Is it common to encounter such a thing or is it punishable (or maybe both)? How do religious institutions react?

No matter what, it really depends who (in the worlds) you ask!

For Chroma (Rainbows Fade) the most common one is acquired superpowers (as opposed to inherited), along with certain kinds of magic- particularly those that subvert belief from large numbers of people or that control minds/souls as detached from the body.

People with acquired superpowers (an "empowered", distinct in universe from a "super") make up about 2.6% of the population, and most major religious institutions have basically given up on trying to call them evil, but it remains one of the most common targets of hatred for extremist sects. Some countries have tried to make it punishable, but this tends, for a few complicated reasons, to make even more empowereds. It's much more effective to just let them be.

The magic is a different story; many of the kinds that would be considered "sacrilegious" get their practitioners actively hunted down by the dragon clans. While religious orders typically lack the institutional strength to punish them, the structured belief does act as a shield against those kinds of intrusion (depending on the religion, sometimes just for believers and sometimes for friends/family/people nearby as well). There are usually 10-25 practitioners of forbidden magic per year. Typically, a maximum of 3 survive until the next.

[the-arigen]

"Revered Elder,

         I have begun the process of working through the information promised by my wife (and how strange to be using that descriptor– I remember how resistant I was to the idea every time we had previously discussed it! Her mortality helps immensely, as much as that she is genuinely interesting to speak with.) and have come to the terrifying conclusion that I have somewhat understated my case."

[the-arigen]

On some level I'm always aware of the "your experiences are not universal" truth to things, especially in relation to my own experiences, but the projects I'm working on right now really drive that home again.

Like, I've always wanted to write a character of the "me with better hair" variety, a tall order, my hair is great but even when I first started writing I took one look at the thing that results from that and had a moment of "yeah, this character is fundamentally unbelievable and extremely difficult to write into anything. So I just won't."

And so basically all of my characters, especially the ones I wanted (other) people to relate to, were actually built almost entirely on what I was able to figure out about other peoples' experiences, filtered through my own lens and brought to the page explicitly for the purpose of whatever piece I'm working on with very little relation to me.

Erin and Ophelia are both breaks from that, each in their own unique way, and that's... kinda kicking my ass a little, actually. Both of them are a lot closer to me than I've ever gotten before (though in different ways) and I'm really finding that I don't have the words or tropes or ideas of other people to lean on anymore. No longer standing on shoulders, let alone those of giants.

How do I define Erin's tendency to trust people who care about her as being as dangerous as it is before the horrible results? How do I balance her willingness to do specific terrible things with her categorical refusal to make things get generally worse? What would people expect from a character whose actions technically do more good than they cause harm, but who only uses that judgement as go/no go on what she otherwise wants to do anyways?

The only place I can find analogues to Ophelia's extremely common, very present, and barely-distinguishable-from-real-life hallucinations are in Horror or from characters who can't take care of themselves, but she just experiences it as a part of her life- and not even a particularly (outwardly) consequential one, because she can essentially always pick out what's real fast enough to prevent her from visibly responding to something that isn't. Is there some set of words spoken or actions taken that gets across a heroic motivation that's just... "what else would I be doing?" as a genuine, confused question instead of any sort of moral statement?

I don't really think there's an answer there, really, though maybe that's for the best. It's not like this is going to stop me, it's just going to take ages to muddle through alternate wordings and styles to get what I want across instead of getting easy praise from hastily thrown-together piles of what people expect to see.

... I should sleep.

[the-arigen]

The decision I made really early in the writing process to insert random bits of alternative styles of writing/media into Rainbows Fade is coming back to kill me

like it was all fun and games when I was writing court transcripts and AU social media responses and excessively flowery Fae letters and news reports but now I'm at 12/14 of the chapters with the things in them and need more random nonsense so I don't duplicate

ch9 can probably just be skipped entirely because it's A Lot already but chapter 6 won't beat me. I refuse.

[the-arigen]

benefits of writing from the perspective of a self-aware character: combining the imperfect knowledge of first person with the awareness of the consequences of their actions that third person's great at

downsides of writing from their perspective: no cheap shots from the narrative 😥 i need to be fair to my mc 😥