Hi! 1 and 6 for both Autumnleap and Slatewhisker/Salt?
Hi! Thanks for the ask! :)
(For this character ask game.)
1. What was the original thought that led to the creation of this character?
Autumnleap: "Frost's loving mate." Salt: "Character to bridge between past and present who can tell Frost the truth her father hides."
Autumnleap was a character who existed from the very inception of this story. I knew I wanted Frostmask to have a mate who loved her and their kits unconditionally, who would act as a direct foil to Paledusk's very conditional love for his mate and kits. I wanted Frostmask experiencing the unconditional love of her mate be one of the key things that ultimately led to her severing her connection with Paledusk, as she came to realize how horrible Paledusk really is. And I knew Autumnleap would be critical in helping Frostmask physically defeat Paledusk too.
As for Salt/Slatewhisker, he did not exist in my original outline at all and was only created much further into my writing process. Starting out, I knew Paledusk was a bad person, who was manipulating Frostmask to hide things about his past (like him neglecting and rejecting May and his kits of course, although I was still working on figuring out the other bad things he'd done.) But, since Paledusk is so good at hiding his true nature from Frostmask, I knew I needed a different character who would be able to reveal the truth about Paledusk's nature to Frostmask, once Frostmask did enough digging into it.
At first, I thought I could use Birdstrike, Paledusk's mother. She has dementia so I thought I could contrive a situation where she could let things slip about Paledusk on accident to Frostmask. But I couldn't figure out how to make that fit with her personality/motivations. Birdstrike would want to protect her son, not expose him, and she wouldn't feel pity for May at all. I really tried to get it to work but ultimately couldn't, so I knew I needed a new character-- someone who would be motivated to expose Paledusk, who would have known him and cared about May. Thus Slatewhisker was born. And his creation also presented a perfect opportunity to make Paledusk worse as I'd been itching to, and so I worked out his backstory with Paledusk's attempted murder. And I was still able to incorporate Birdstrike as well (albeit not in the way I originally planned) by having her be the one to accidentally reveal Slatewhisker and Pepper's existence to Frostmask.
6. What was the thought process behind their appearance? Did you go mostly for the aesthetic or are there other reasons they look the way they do?
All aesthetic for Autumnleap! I honestly don't think there is much more that I can expand upon for him lol. For Salt, since he was a character established later on, I knew I wanted him to resemble Paledusk (big, fluffy, green eyes) but not that they would look so much alike that Frostmask would clock their relation immediately. And of course, since Paledusk badly attacked him, I wanted him to have a lot of physical scarring to show for it.
