Chapter 1, scene 5
I’ve been thinking a lot about Rosa.
For a proper enemies-to-lovers arc, she needs to be hateful. I’ve been thinking of Harrow from Gideon the Ninth as a reference point.
And she needs to make sense. She must be redeemable.
Last week, I watched the new Russell T Davies drama Tip Toe. It really got under my skin. And now I’ve solved Rosa.
Okay. So. Separated parents, and a bad father. He’s obsessed with internet arguments. When she’s with him, he’s on his phone, typing furious messages on social media. In the evening, he makes his way through a bottle of red wine, and believes it’s ESSENTIAL to win fights. Rosa can’t get his attention.
I read the second Animorphs book, where a character’s parents have been replaced by alien imposters. The most harrowing part is when we realise this character’s broken - not because her parents are aliens (she doesn’t know that), but because she just knows they’ve stopped loving her.
Rosa’s father doesn’t love her the way she needs him to. She’s not his priority. He’s disappointed in her, because the interenet’s taught him to condemn the younger generation.
In spite of this, Rosa HAS absorbed his worldview. She believes the world’s out to get her, and sees an us-and-them divide in society. She can’t trust.
The story won’t use these words, but Rosa sees Carmen as a symbol of bleeding-heart wokeness. And Rosa needs to reject this. If she’s gay, she’ll be right-wing gay, to earn the respect of her father. No rainbows. Certainly no sense of community. Rosa doesn’t want queer friends, she wants to be accepted by a world which will never truly respect her.
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I’ve been thinking about Team Star.
Here’s my idea: the bases have been taken over, the team replaced by Team Constellation. Or ... maybe I choose a specific constellation. Some options:
Team Scorpio. That would be Gareth’s sign.
Team Crux. Catchier. I like that it’s one syllable.
Team Scutum. I like that the word means “shield”, both because of the word’s history as a Pokémon title, and because I can believe Gareth would use a team as a shield.
I’m leaning towards Scutum. If so, I wouldn’t name the teams after its stars the way Team Star’s are named after the stars in Cassiopeia.
Maybe initially, the team’s bosses deny that there’s a boss above them - but eventually let slip that there is one.
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I need a name for my villain.
Something else she can represent is the way all pleasures are co-opted by capitalism. Like gamers who stream as a way to turn their hobby into a business, my villain is turning the Academy’s treasure hunt into something that exists for a function. It’s changed the incentive. You’re not trying to discover something for its own sake, an inherent value. You’re doing it to try and win the competition.
This makes me think of Dan Olson’s video on NFTs - the way video games that can “earn” “money” are played differently from games that “only” offer fun. Or CJ the X’s videos, which regularly come back to the difference between instrumental and intrinsic value.
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I wrote 174 words today - Carmen photographing Mateo as he works on his "bike", DeCati the cyclizar.
Words Written:
1297 / 150,000
0.86%
Chapters Completed:
0 / 52
