A to Z: Zenais!

 

    I am so excited for today's post!  Not because it represents the successful conclusion of the challenge, but because it's about Zenais!  😁

    She's a character I added to the new draft of The Martial Maenads, and I am super-proud of her.  (Even if she is rather blatantly, erm, inspired by someone else's character...)

    But first, a little background on the situation in which Atalanta and Ariadne meet her.  They've been sent to Thrace to deal with the threat of Bromalios, an imposter god claiming to be equal parts Dionysos and Ares.  (Hence the title of the novel, lol!)  After they're accepted into the cult's headquarters--which is more the ancient version of a cult than the modern version, I hasten to add--the girls find they're required to be given lessons in "dance" and song in order to be capable enough to be properly initiated into the cult itself.  And one of the "dance" instructors is Zenais, granddaughter of Heracles.  (Her name essentially means "daughter of Zeus," though in this context it's obviously not strictly literal.  (She is genuinely the great-granddaughter of Zeus, though!  Because these are novels in which the Greek gods are very real...))

A to Z: Y?

 

    It's kind of funny, actually.  I have a decent number of Y-named characters, but they're none of them much to talk about.  (Once again proving that I did not really give "characters I have written about" enough thought as an April A-to-Z theme...)  For lack of any stronger choice, I'm going to go with the various members of the Yu Clan who show up in the massively long (and currently unedited) Mo Dao Zu Shi fic that I spent nearly a year working on. 😅

    Ideally, it'd be great if I could also talk about the canon Yu Clan (ex-Yu Clan?) character, Yu Ziyuan.  Unfortunately, most of the fics I've written so far started after her death.  😰 The sole exception to that--no, there's two exceptions.  The first one, the 1980s AU, has her only vaguely present because I did not think I could write her the way she was written in canon, nor did it seem appropriate to do so anyway, and I wasn't sure how she should behave in the modern setting, so she's more of an off-screen idea than an actual character.  And in the recently written "Last Loop," she's still alive, but none of the scenes are at Lotus Pier, so there would be no reason for her to show up. 😅

    Instead, I'll just have to talk about the OC family members I gave her.  😅  Though in my own defense, at least two of the four named Yu Clan relatives I introduced existed by definition:  when Lotus Pier is attacked, Yu Ziyuan tells her son to flee to Meishan to his grandmother so Yu Ziyuan's mother is canonically still alive at that time, and one of Yu Ziyuan's other names means "third daughter" so she must therefore have two older sisters (though I only used the elder of the two).  The further two Yu Clan OCs I introduced are Yu Ziyuan's nieces, though only one of them is even the slightest bit fleshed out.  (All of this post is talking about the still untitled Jiang Cheng fic that I spent most of the last year writing, btw.  I gave Yu Ziyuan a different OC relation in another fic, but he's not really worth talking about.)

    To go by order of age, let's start with Yu-zongzhu, Yu Ziyuan's mother.  (Who isn't quite a full "named" character since I didn't pick a given name for her. 😅)  Given that Jiang Cheng was told to go to Meishan to his grandmother rather than his grandfather, most fans have assumed that the Yu Clan is matriarchal.  This is epic, so I went with it.  😆  Therefore, Jiang Cheng's grandmother is the leader of the Yu Clan during the massive fic.  She doesn't show up all that often in the fic, though, as Jiang Cheng mentions to the other leaders early on that his grandmother and aunts tend not to pay much attention to the other clans and anything they happen to get up to.

A to Z: Xue Yang

 

    Yeah...this was...I mean, he's the obvious choice because X-names are kind of few and far between in European languages (unless I want to dedicate a post to one of Achilles' horses) and there's not actually a lot to say about Xiao Xingchen (other than that he deserved the happy ending that was denied him) so...I guess we're goin' yandere today!  (Because yes, Xue Yang is absolutely a yandere.  I am intractable on this point.)

    Xue Yang is a very popular character with Mo Dao Zu Shi fans, which I suspect is largely due to the fact that the actor playing him in the drama is extremely hot:

It was quite hard to find an image that captured both his hotness and the character's obvious mania (played by Wang Haoxuan)

    He gets a surprisingly large amount of time devoted to him in volume one of the novel, but despite his tragic backstory there's not much depth to him as a character, in my opinion.  Where he has depth is his role in the story:  he actually is all the things that Wei Wuxian's enemies think Wei Wuxian is.  Thus, Xue Yang's fingerprints are all over an assortment of terrible past events, especially things related to demonic cultivation, so despite that he dies in volume one, he keeps coming up as a concept (and is present in a certain flashback) throughout the rest of the novel.  (He also features in a bonus side story that's centered on Jin Guangyao, but that's another matter.)

    I know I've expressed this basic idea somewhere in text before (not sure if it was on this blog or in an author's note on one of my fanfics on AO3), but I'll try to go into more detail here to justify the repetition.  😅  There's a fantastic line in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Belloq tells Indy that "I am a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light."  And that's what Xue Yang is:  he's the shadowy reflection of the already shadowy Wei Wuxian.  They're both skilled at cultivation and swordplay, they're both capable of showing great ingenuity, and can think quickly on their feet, coming up with new plans and schemes as the need arises.

    Their past histories have remarkable similarities, but also major differences.  They were both homeless orphans whose life was changed after an encounter with a cultivator at similar ages (8 in Wei Wuxian's case, 7 in Xue Yang's) but the actual change wrought was significantly different:  Wei Wuxian was taken home and raised in luxury by the cultivator he encountered, while Xue Yang was tricked, beaten and had his hand crushed, resulting in the loss of one of his pinky fingers.  They both single-handedly commit a horrific mass slaughter through the use of demonic cultivation, but in Wei Wuxian's case, the slaughter is of Wen Clan soldiers who had taken part in the massacre at Lotus Pier, whereas Xue Yang slaughtered not only the cultivator who had maimed him as a child but also his entire household, from his family to the servants to their dogs.  (Okay, technically, Wei Wuxian was definitely single-handedly responsible for more mass slaughters than that.  But the massacre of the Chang Clan by Xue Yang is very deliberately an echo of the slaughter of Wen Chao's men by Wei Wuxian (despite that the reader/watcher encounters the death of the Chang Clan first) so I still feel the comparison works.)  And they both become obsessed with a white-clad, pure cultivator, but Wei Wuxian's obsession is expressed first as teasing then as friendship and finally as love, whereas Xue Yang's obsession is variously expressed by seeking vengeance against, tormenting, controlling and then attempting to revive in order to further torment and control Xiao Xingchen.  (And yes, I am of course aware of the romantic/sexual component of Xue Yang's obsession with Xiao Xingchen, but as I'm not sure Xue Yang is consciously aware of it...)

    Anyway, moving from "describe the character" to "talk about how I've written about the character" (since my April A-to-Z theme is "characters I've written about," after all).  While I get his purpose in the original story very well, Xue Yang's character is a hard one for me to work with, so I have a tendency to try not to have any of his scenes be too long or too filled with dialog.  Not so much a "less is more" situation as a "fewer opportunities to get him wrong" kind of thing.  😅

A to Z: Wei Wuxian

 

    The most obvious of obvious choices, to the point that I've already outright said this is who I was going to be talking about today. 🤣  Because I can't help loving this adorable little gremlin.

Just look at that cute little gremlin face!  (played by Xiao Zhan)

    So...as per most of my other Mo Dao Zu Shi-related posts this month, I won't bother trying to explain the plot of the original novel, and will just give a brief encapsulation of the character and how I've written him in my fan fiction.

    Being the lead of the original novel, there's obviously a lot to say about who Wei Wuxian is and what he's like.  And I won't do a very good job at summing that up, because I have a tendency to fall flat on such matters. 😰  Um.  Anyway.

    Wei Wuxian is his courtesy name, and his birth name is Wei Ying.  To describe who he is kind of requires talking about where he came from and how he was raised, so prepare for a long diatribe that MDZS fans already know all the details of. 😅

    His parents are the wandering cultivator Cangse-sanren and Wei Changze, and even before he was born he was already causing trouble, in a way, because his mother's arrival at Lotus Pier made the young Jiang Fengmian (who was either the heir to the Jiang Clan or its young leader at the time, not sure which off-hand, if we even know) fall in love with her, despite that he was already engaged to Yu Ziyuan.  We don't have the full story on what happened, but at some point after Jiang Fengmian broke off his engagement Cangse-sanren eloped with Wei Changze (whose position in the Jiang Clan is translated as being a "servant" but I don't think it's quite as low a position as the word "servant" would indicate in, say, a Medieval Europe setting) instead, despite that (or maybe because) both of them were likely 100% aware of Jiang Fengmian's feelings.  But then Cangse-sanren and Wei Changze died when their son was very small.  (The live-action drama specified that he was four; I don't recall off-hand if the book gave an exact year, but probably in that general age range there, too.)  With no relations around, little Wei Ying ended up living in the streets of Yiling and having to fend for himself, including living off of scraps of food out of the garbage.

    Around the time he was eight, Jiang Fengmian found him, though by this point he had been living alone in the streets so long that all he could remember was that his name had a "Ying" in it.  😭  Jiang Fengmian brought him back to Lotus Pier, where he raised the boy alongside his own two children, Jiang Yanli (then about twelve) and Jiang Cheng (then about eight), though since he had ended up married to Yu Ziyuan anyway, he wasn't allowed to officially adopt Wei Ying, because she was punishing the child for problems caused by his mother.  😰  Jiang Yanli took to her new not-quite-brother straight away, but Jiang Cheng was bitter after having his three puppies taken away (because Wei Ying had become deathly afraid of dogs after being bitten by stray dogs so many times as they also wanted the scraps of food in the garbage) and only after nearly driving Wei Ying to run away from Lotus Pier did he finally also accept him as a part of the family.  Yu Ziyuan never did accept him, though, forcing Wei Ying to address her husband as Jiang-shushu rather than as his adoptive father, or even as his clan leader or teacher.  (Because the teacher/student relationship is an inherently paternal one (in terminology, if nothing else) that would have meant she was accepting a maternal position in regards to the boy if she allowed him to address her husband as his teacher.  And she was having none of that.)

    However, despite Yu Ziyuan's animosity, Wei Wuxian grew up happy at Lotus Pier, and as soon as he started his cultivation training, he proved himself not only the best of his generation at Lotus Pier, but one of the best his age in any clan.  That gave him a decided arrogant streak, on top of his self-indulgent whims, his competitiveness, and general happy-go-lucky attitude most of the time.  However, he also has a temper, which at first is only vented at anyone who would dare to insult his precious shijie, Jiang Yanli.  After the plot gets going, his temper turns from minor fights with Jin Zixuan to wreaking bloody and sometimes outright horrifying revenge on anyone who dares to harm those Wei Wuxian cares about.  In the final year or so of his life (the life he loses at the start of the novel, only to promptly get a new one in the next chapter, though that's over a decade later), he spirals into some very dark places, mentally, and his behavior can be exceptionally off-putting in that period.  (Fortunately, that period is a pretty short part of the novel...)

    He likes to style himself as a "bad boy" (especially in the second life that is the novel's present, where he seems to delight in the fact that many of his past actions are "nefarious") but he's actually quite dutiful (eg when returning to Lotus Pier for the first time in roughly fifteen years, one of the first things he wants to do is to go to the Ancestral Hall and pay his respects to Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan as if they were his real parents (despite the way Yu Ziyuan treated him his entire life)) and very concerned with doing what's right and protecting the innocent.  He's friendly and outgoing until someone crosses him, and then look out!  Up until he realizes he's in love with Lan Wangji, he's a terrible flirt with almost every pretty girl he sees, though he never attempted to do more than flirt with any of them.

    Okay, so I think that managed to sum up most of his personality and the situations that led him to become the way he is.  So that means I can finally discuss my own attempts to write about him.  (Though I still struggle to get him characterized correctly...)

A to Z: Very Vexing, Verena

 

    You would think that with fairly common names like Vincent and Victor out there that I wouldn't have any trouble finding a V-named character for today.

    Problem is, in an older phase of my writing journey, I used to write fan fiction for certain JRPGs like Final Fantasy VII and the Suikoden series.  In the former, one of my favorite characters was Vincent Valentine, and in the latter one of my favorite characters was Viktor.  Consequently, I wrote about those characters a fair amount, and it's made it between hard and impossible for me to use those names (or variations on them) in other contexts.  So, I don't have any characters by those names, and I really didn't want to have to cite any writing quite that old, because it was really, really, really, really not good.

    That's left me with the character of Verena to write about.  She's from the untitled novel I wrote for 2012's NaNoWriMo.  Which I posted in entirely unedited form on AO3 a few years back just as a way to preserve it.  Because in many respects it is utterly awful--I hated it so much that as soon as I finished writing it, I never even opened the file again for almost ten years--but in some respects it's actually better than what I write now, because at least things actually happen in it, and with a lot less chatter in between events.  I think some of the pacing is due to the narrative style, actually, that and I was thinking of it as a JRPG.

    Somewhat hilariously, considering what I said just two paragraphs ago, the novel is actually a rewrite of and expansion on an unfinished Final Fantasy VII fanfic.  I had written a very brief story wherein Yuffie Kisaragi ended up transported into the real world, where she kept finding all these signs that maybe her world was just a dream, but they didn't quite add up, and then some FBI agents visited her about some attacks in her area, and she reluctantly told them the whole story of FFVII, since she shouldn't have known their faces for them to be in her dream.  (Her telling of the story was of course skipped over, and the narration merely said that the tale took her several hours to relate.)  But then I didn't know how to handle the final confrontation as Sephiroth attempted to enter the real world, so the fic just sort of died unfinished (as is not unusual for such things).  Anyway, so in the NaNo novel, it was standard third person narration for the plucky young girl being dragged into the ocean by monsters and emerging inside a bathtub in our world, then most of the novel was first person narration as she tells the tale of the grand adventure that had taken place prior to her dunking to the two agents who came to her door.  In addition to borrowing liberally in terms of story elements and character types from Final Fantasy VII (though the one filling Vincent's story role didn't really have much in common with him aside from being hot and taciturn) a lot of the characters were painfully blatantly based on Suikoden characters...though mostly characters from Suikoden III, so Viktor wasn't one of them.  (One other borrowed thing, which I think was unintentional, was that when I needed a name for a water buffalo-like animal, I ended up calling it an armu.  That, it turned out, was the name of a large grazing herbivore in Xenoblade Chronicles, but I guess it had been long enough since I had played that on the Wii that I had forgotten.  😰  Having not too long ago finally gotten around to playing the HD remastered version on the Switch, I now remember that name. 😅)

    Anyway, long story short, it was really bad and excessively derivative.  I don't think I was wrong to just dump it as unworthy of the effort of rewriting.

    But it is something I can talk about and say "here's a link to it" at the end, so...🤷🏻‍♀️

A to Z: Umbra the Unknown

 

    Yeah, this one's weird, but really!  How many names start with U?  (And yes, I do know that "Umbra" is not usually a name.  But it's what I had.)

    So...I wanted to make a quick visual novel for Winter Jam 2022, but I didn't want to have to deal with artists, because I don't work well with others.  Fortunately, there are plenty of artists who sell (or sometimes make available for free) their work on itch.io for people to use to make games.  And after looking around for a while at my choices, I decided on a pair of little cuties...

Character art by Minttydrops

    But the names they came with didn't fit what I was going for, so I wanted to give them new names.  And I settled on Lux and Umbra.  The plot of the game is quite simple:  the two little girls are on the wrong side of a forest and it's almost dinner time, so they decide--or rather Lux decides and drags Umbra with her--to pass through the forest instead of going around it.  It's a menu-driven exploration game, essentially, with a few adventure game-style item puzzles to proceed (though hopefully the puzzles don't quite exhibit the full moon logic of some of the classic adventure games of the 1990s), and it's impossible to lose, because the girls aren't in any danger.  (Plus they both pick up and use the necessary items automatically, so even if a player feels stuck, all they have to do is visit every single location and something will happen.)

    Umbra is an oddity of a character.

    On the one hand, she is serious and often left extremely alarmed by the actions of the zany, flighty Lux.

    On the other hand, she talks exclusively in emojis.

A to Z: Teukros and Tekmessa

 

    Technically, I was also considering Thetis, but I decided I had slightly more interesting content for Teukros.  So, starting from the top:  Teukros (better known by his Roman name, Teucer) is the son of Telamon by a concubine.  In the Iliad, the identity of that concubine is not specified, nor are her Trojan origins mentioned (though they can still be surmised even there), but in all later works his mother is specifically Hesione, elder sister of King Priam.  (Which actually makes for one of the spots in the mythic chronology of Troy that feels off.  But that would take several posts to go into in any depth, so I'll leave it for some other time.)   The name Teukros proves his Trojan ancestry pretty efficiently, because Teukros was also the name of one of the mythic founders of Troy, hence that "Teucrian" is one of the words used to describe people or things as being in some manner Trojan.

    Although Teukros features prominently in Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, there's also nothing particularly exceptional about him there; he pretty much just follows the standard "devoted brother of Aias" routine that's set out in the original myths.  Which is not to say that he deviates from that in the Atalanta and Ariadne books!  Far from it!  It's just that being set almost twenty years after the war's end, I get to portray an older Teukros, king of a prosperous realm (and particularly wealthy and powerful because he controls copper mines that were so important to making bronze for weapons and armor!), father of a teenage daughter, and proud uncle who had raised Eurysakes to be his father's equal in just about every way.  (Which is only deviating from the myths in that there he would not have gotten to raise his nephew in the original version.)

            “Certainly, [the events in Egypt that were just under discussion] happened long enough ago that the princess wouldn’t know anything about it,” the king added, with a chuckle that made his nephew blush.
            “What, another fiancée?” Atalanta asked, laughing.
            “Of course not,” Eurysakes answered instantly.  It was quite possibly the fastest speech that Ariadne had ever heard from him.  “Egyptian royalty can only marry Egyptian royalty.”
            “That’s the only thing stopping her, from what I’ve heard,” King Teukros confided in the girls, making Eurysakes’ blush grow deeper.
            “I’d never have guessed you were so popular with women,” Ariadne teased him.
            “It’s not that,” he insisted, somewhat weakly.
            “I fail to see what else it could be,” the king laughed.  “You have a gift with the ladies that your father lacked.  Probably because your face looks so like your mother’s.”
            At the moment, Eurysakes’ face looked more like a pomegranate, it had turned so dark.  Ariadne actually started to feel a little sorry for him, so she decided to change the subject.

    Just being devoted and loving doesn't mean he can't do a little teasing. 😉  However, there's actually not much I can quote about Teukros in the present of the novels, because his sole appearance is so deeply mired in the overarching plot of the series that his scenes wouldn't make any sense out of context. 😅  So I'll just talk about the prologue to book five, since I omitted it from the post on Patroclos.

A to Z: Strangely Superfluous S

 

    Again, my writing is weirdly low on S-named characters.  It's not that there aren't any, it's just that somehow they fail to be significant.  (This is made all the more frustrating because apparently "Sally" is my go-to random female name the way "Freddy" is for random male names; I found at least four of them just in looking over everything I had written in the last 10-12 years, and I'm quite sure there were more I just didn't stumble across.)

    So, like I did with Q, I thought today I'd just provide some quotes and tidbits about various S-named characters.  For whatever reason, they're all fan fiction characters.  Not sure why my original works don't feature any major characters with an S-name, but...🤷🏻‍♀️

    Anyway, the first S-named character I can talk about is Shannon Hazelbourne from Velvet Goldmine, about whom I ought to have a lot to say, yet somehow I don't really?  (Doesn't help that it's hard to treat her consistently...)  Any discussion of Shannon is going to be rife with spoilers for the movie, so tread carefully beyond the "read more" tag!  (After Shannon, there are MDZS characters (and spoilers) to be found...)

A to Z: Randomly, Ramses II

 

    Okay, not exactly "random," but...I admit that it's a pretty weird choice.  Only strangely enough I don't have very many characters of any note whose names start with R.

    He's also a weird choice in that most people would not put the Trojan War as during the reign of Ramses II, but I do.  Or rather, I did for the Atalanta and Ariadne books, which then bled over into Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, albeit only slightly.  (He sends troops to aid the Trojans in year...seven or eight I think, though he's only identified as "Ramses" so it could be Ramses III, who's more in the time frame typically associated with the Trojan War.  In any case, it's a one-time event with minimal repercussions no matter what you do...unless the feud between Odysseus and Palamedes is still going on at the time...)  There are reasons for my placing the date of the Trojan War when I did, and as I'm trying to be more relaxed about these posts now, I'm just going to quote what I had to say on the subject in the timeline section available at the end of the interactive version of Scions of Troy:

         So, there’s a lot to say here, and much of it could be spoilers for later books in the series, meaning I can’t say a lot of what I would ideally want to. There is a “traditional” date for the Trojan War: 1184 BCE. This would have the war either beginning or ending (depending on whether you see that as the start date or finish date!) less than a decade before the Bronze Age Collapse.
         I couldn’t use that for obvious reasons! Even more so than the “having the girls travel through what would be their equivalent of a post-apocalyptic wasteland is not what I wanted” reason, there’s also the fact that the myths firmly establish that a good deal of time passes between the fall of Troy and the fall of the other citadels. (Though the ancient texts are not consistent about just how much time, to be honest. And of course they had them all fall to Dorian invaders when most of them seem to have fallen more to earthquakes than to warfare.)

    My original drafts had assumed "about 1250" for the fall of Troy, but that meant that the girls were going to arrive in one of the locations for the later books at a time of great upheaval, and I preferred to avoid that.  So I shifted things around a little more, and put the start of the Trojan War at around 1267 BCE...which is about the same time that the Hittite Empire was going through upheavals as Hattusili III was overthrowing his nephew, Mursili III.  Meaning that the Hittites would have been much too busy to send aid to Troy!  I was so pleased by that coincidence that I decided that, as far as my personal headcanon is concerned, that simply was the date of the Trojan War.  (The deposed Mursili III fled to Egypt, btw, and the political wrangling and threats of war as Hattusili III demanded he be returned lasted for nine years, thus handily both proving that the Hittites had too much else on their minds and that Ramses would have been unlikely to get involved.)

    Even better than the upheaval among the Hittites was the earthquake that struck around Mycenae in about 1250.  This earthquake forced the rebuilding of the citadel walls and was when the grave circles famously looted excavated by Schliemann were brought inside the walls.  Which made for a perfect time for, say, Orestes to carry out his act of vengeance for his father's murder.  And more importantly made an excellent opportunity for Korythos to oust Aineias as the post-war king of Troy.

    In other words, I ended up with a time that fits the larger picture of the war's place in the Late Bronze Age world really well (aside from making the Dorian invasion take place several decades before the Bronze Age Collapse 😰), so I was extremely pleased with it.

    Corollary to all this, because Ramses II had an incredibly long reign (1279-1213 BCE), that means he's still seated on the Egyptian throne when Atalanta and Ariadne first escape slavery around 1239 BCE.  And that means if I wanted them to visit Egypt--and of course I wanted them to visit Egypt!--then he's the man in charge when they get there.

    And when they get there is in book five, so it'll be a while before it's been rewritten...and it's probably going to change a lot in the rewrite.  (Partially because I didn't put in as much research as I should have at the time. 😅)

    That's not the only reason, but I'm going to talk about that after I address how I characterized Ramses in the original draft.  (Which will probably not change too much in the final draft...)  Obviously, it's a tricky thing, trying to write fiction involving a real historical personage.  Even more so considering that the ancient Egyptians did not keep the kind of records that tell us much about what their rulers were actually like as people.

A to Z: A Quirky Quartet of Qs

 

    Ahem.  Yeah.  Q is not easy when you're dealing with character names.  Though, somewhat absurdly, it would be easier for me if I was trying this at some future date after I've written a couple of other fan fiction projects I have planned.  But I haven't, so...I'm having to cobble together a post about characters who have been quite minor in what I've written so far.  Even worse, one of the characters is exclusively from something I haven't edited and posted yet, and two others get a lot more for me to talk about if I use their appearances in things I haven't edited and posted yet. 😰  (More and more proof that I may have decided on this theme without quite enough due thought...)

    Oh well.

    Let's get into it, then.

    I guess we can start with the one that's oldest.  In 2012, I hated my NaNoWriMo project so much that upon its completion I closed the file and didn't open it again for almost ten years.  At which time I read it to comfort myself that my new project was better than it was...only to feel like in many (most?) ways my new project was actually worse.  To provide myself a constant reminder that my skills seemed to be atrophying rather than improving, I posted the whole novel, unedited, to AO3.

    In that novel, the heroine's culture is kind of a hybrid of Chinese and Japanese, but the names are all Chinese, sourced from a writer's aid book on character names from different cultures/languages.  (Though rereading bits and pieces of it now that I have more knowledge of how Chinese names work, I'm not sure if I should say "I made mistakes" or just that I had that fantasy world's names work differently than Chinese names do, despite the names being linguistically identical.)  The heroine's childhood friend and kinda/sorta childhood sweetheart is named Qiu Yun.

    He's a sweet guy, a bit ruled by his passions, and gets himself killed in battle for the heroine's sake.

    There's, uh, not really a lot more to say about him than that.

    So...

    After that, chronologically, there's no other Q names until I started writing Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic, since Q names are not common in most languages.  (Unless one wanted a character (nick)named Queen.  Which technically some of my Suikoden fanfics had, since Queen is the name of a character in Suikoden III, but I'm endeavoring not to go back that far in selecting works for this.)

    As to the MDZS characters with Q names, unfortunately my own rules prevent me from using Wen Qing, about whom there's lots to say, since I'm going by the "whatever name is used first in speaking about them" meaning that for MDZS characters you have to use their family name, unless they haven't got one.

    Which is why I can use a-Qing for this, because she only has that name.  (Why MXTX put two different women with the given name Qing in the same book is a question, but not one I have any answer to.  Though the Netflix subtitles on the live-action version decided to get around that by changing a-Qing to a-Jing.)  Unfortunately, though I have some fics planned where a-Qing will play a much larger role, she basically only has cameos in the ones I've written so far, and one of the ones she cameos in hasn't been edited and posted yet.

    In canon, a-Qing is a fun character, and very much the type I've always enjoyed.  She's a smart-mouthed teenage thief, but also something of a con artist, in that she tricks people into believing she's blind, so she can also get hand-outs as well as using her alleged blindness to avoid (at least some of) the suspicion whenever something she's stolen is noticed to be missing.  The way she accomplishes this is that, somehow, she was born with pure white eyes, so she looks blind even though she can see.  (This was not the case in the live-action version.  For some reason, there she had normal eyes, so it's unclear why in the world she would have chosen the blind routine.)

A to Z: Perfect Patroclos

 

    Today's choice is going to be particularly obvious to anyone who knows me well, as I am a self-described Patroclos fangirl.  I actually have a surprisingly varied selection of works I could talk about, too.

    On top of the prologues of the Atalanta and Ariadne books (the prologues are always set in and around the war), there's Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, the failed yandere visual novel I talked about with Deidameia, the play "Pyrrha," the visual novel set in the 1980s I talked about as the origin of Grant Nemo, the failed sci-fi novel I talked about (in the same post about Grant), and all its incomplete spin-offs.  There's also Ilios, my 2011 NaNoWriMo project, but...it's problematic.  😅  In the interests of not stressing myself out, gonna limit myself to just a few sources.

    One of my favorite parts of Better General is that Achilles has a madness meter (though it's a hidden stat), and for the most part the way you increase his madness meter is to separate him from Patroclos.  This can lead to him butchering you, or even the whole camp if the final blow to his sanity is Patroclos' death.  So there is actually a lot of material in there about them (though it's never enough!) and they can have some pretty romantic endings if they both survive the war...

Enraged at having had his concubine taken away, Achilleus left the war in the ninth year.  By the time the Achaian fleet returned to Hellas, Achilleus and his Myrmidons had unified the Hellenic people by conquering them all while the majority of their warriors and kings were still at Troy.  (This saved his descendent the trouble of having to do so nearly a thousand years later.)  Though Achilleus took several wives over the course of his long reign as King of Hellas, he had no children other than Pyrrhos, the boy he had fathered while he was hiding in disguise as a woman on Scyros; it was often said that his wives never conceived because he so rarely went in to them, preferring to spend his nights--like his days--with his faithful Patroclos.  The only serious threat to Achilleus' reign was the arrival of the Heracleidai, who attempted to take Hellas for themselves, but he was able to muster the survivors, sons and grandsons of his allies from Troy (even those who had initially fought against him) to work together to fight them off.  When he eventually died, his bones were enshrined in the same vessel as those of Patroclos.  Pyrrhos inherited his throne.

    ...or...

Outraged that you felt he was ruled by his desires, Achilleus returned to Phthia in a fit of anger, along with Patroclos, who had to spend days of intimate private time to convince Achilleus to spend even one evening in the company of other people, leading the gossip all throughout Thessaly to speculate that Achilleus had no use for anything other than his lover's bed.  Peleus was greatly distressed to see his son behave in such a childish manner, and swore he would not permit Achilleus to inherit Phthia if he did not begin to behave more appropriately, so Achilleus set off to the north with Patroclos to prove himself by conquering Hyperborea.  He never returned.

    ...or...

Achilleus returned to Phthia after the war's end, with many ordinary slaves, but no concubine to keep his bed warm.  Peleus set about trying to find a bride for his son, but Achilleus consistently rejected them all, and by the time Peleus died of old age, it was clear even to him that his son refused to take a wife because he wanted no one who could come between him and Patroclos.  Once his father was gone, Achilleus sent to Scyros for the son he had fathered there, and made him his heir.  When they eventually died, Achilleus and Patroclos were buried in the same grave.

    ...and a fairly romantic one if Achilles dies and Patroclos lives...

Patroclos remained behind when the rest of the Achaian army sailed back to Hellas.  He continued to tend to Achilleus' tomb until his own death, at which time a friendly local obeyed his wishes and placed his bones inside the tomb along with Achilleus'.

    But maybe what's most interesting is what can happen when the Trojan army is rampaging through the Achaian camp in the ninth year if you forced Achilles to be the first to disembark on the Trojan shores, and thus got him killed on day one.

A to Z: Odysseus, Obviously

 

    Honestly, who else, right?  I mean, he's already come up quite a bit as-is.  And I actually have a whole lot more to say about how I've written him, despite that I actually don't like the character.  (What with him being a serial adulterer who claims to be a devoted husband, etc.)

    So, there are three main works I can go to for talking about how I've written Odysseus.  (Unless I want to also talk about the version of Odysseus that is Grant, lol.)  But I can't really go all-out anymore on any of these posts, because it turned out that there was enough "timed pressure" element to April A-to-Z to trigger my heart palpitations.  😭  So, gonna be lighter from here on out.  (Also doing the bulk on my phone and only grabbing the quotes on PC.  Somehow my heart doesn't flip out as much when I'm on the phone.)

    So, those three works are Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, The Martial Maenads (which I had hoped would be released by now, but it turned out that I got so involved in writing these posts that I've barely worked on finalizing it for release 😰), and book six of the Atalanta and Ariadne series.

    Going in that order, Odysseus naturally gets a lot of unique text in Better General, for example the bit I mentioned about Aineias when I was talking about Idomeneus.  But perhaps the most unusual and truly unique sequence is his feud with Palamedes.

    In the actual myths, as is well-known, Odysseus was in some respects responsible for the Trojan War, because it was his idea that all of Helen's suitors should swear an oath to fight to reclaim her for her husband should anyone steal her away.  Also generally pretty well known is that when the time came, Odysseus did not want to obey the oath that had been his own idea, and tried to get out of it by feigning madness, hitching up a horse and an ox to a plow and then plowing his own garden, only to have the person who came to get him prove that he was faking it by placing Odysseus' infant son in front of the plow.  The man who thus exposed Odysseus' act and forced him to join the Trojan War was Palamedes, and naturally enough the traditional myths established that Odysseus took lethal revenge on Palamedes during the long war.  (Though other traditions held that Palamedes survived, and some even claimed the Trojan Horse was his idea, rather than Odysseus'.)

    The thing is, there are actually a few couple ways that Odysseus was said to have done away with Palamedes....so, since I was working in an interactive medium, I figured "why not do both?"

A to Z: Nie Huaisang

 

    Again, probably not a surprise to anyone following my April A-to-Z journey who already knows Mo Dao Zu Shi.  (W will also not surprise you, in that case.  🤣)

    It's hard to know how to talk about Nie Huaisang, for spoiler reasons...which in itself is a spoiler because from his early appearances in Mo Dao Zu Shi you'd think it impossible that he could even tangentially be involved in anything that could conceivably be considered a spoiler.

    ...

    Somehow, that seems very like him.  😅  I'll just throw down a "read more" tag and get on with it, then, shall I?

A to Z: Medeia

    It may look like a typo, but it's not.  Many of the Greek names that are typically transliterated as ending in -ia or -ea actually end in -eia in the original Greek.  (eg Deidameia, Iphigeneia, Penthesileia, etc.)  That may thus leave you wondering why I chose to use a spelling that will make people do a double-take and/or think I've misspelled it?

    Well.

    That's because.

    Um.

    I could say that it was to free her of the negative associations people have with the Medea spelling.  (Like my decision to spell her aunt's name Kirke instead of Circe.)

    I could say that.  But it wouldn't, strictly speaking, be true.

    I think, at the heart of it, I went with the -eia spellings across the board because it's hard to draw a line of "here's as far as I go in trying to use the original Greek spellings."  I tried to be even more accurate in Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, to the extent of using "Achilleus" and "Alexandros," but even my own fingers kept rebelling against those more-accurate spellings, so I pretty much had to not try using those again.  But as to the others, like the -eia spellings...for one reason or another, I decided to adopt them.

    Anyway, that's all beside the point.  Medea's story is pretty well-known...or at least, one version of it is.

    She was the daughter of King Aietes of Colchis, and when Jason came to steal away the Golden Fleece, she helped him out of love (or the illusion/delusion of love, anyway) and helped him escape, even going so far as to murder one of her brothers in some versions.  {Jason should technically be Iason, but again, my fingers rebel if I try it...}  Then after they get back to Iolcos, the pair--or Medea alone--trick Pelias and his daughters, leading to Pelias' death.  They're exiled for murder, and King Creon of Corinth purified Jason of the murder, then promptly starts trying to set up Jason with his daughter.  Realizing she's being thrown over, Medea murders Creon, his daughter, and even her own sons by Jason, and flies off in a chariot pulled by dragons, then goes around being blamed for any number of other unpleasant events across the Mediterranean.

    Well.  Part of that is the case in all versions.  The part about helping Jason obtain and escape with the Golden Fleece.  Pretty much everything else is not.

A to Z: Lan Wangji

    Given my post just a few days ago, I'm sure today's post subject comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Mo Dao Zu Shi.  For those not familiar, a crash course in the character in the original work before I start talking about how I've handled him in my fanfic.  (Oh, and there is now a glossary page on the side bar if any of the terms in this post need explaining!  😁)

    Lan Wangji, birth name Lan Zhan, sobriquet Hanguang-jun, also known as the Second Jade of Gusu (with his elder brother Lan Xichen collectively referred to as the Twin Jades), heir to the repressively strict Lan Clan cultivation sect based in the isolated Cloud Recesses, twenty li from the city of Gusu.  (A li is a distance of measure which I believe I read somewhere is about equivalent to a kilometer.)  As the love interest of MDZS, Lan Wangji is over-powered, being good at absolutely everything, and his character flaws are somewhat hidden.  The only strictly obvious flaw in him--the only reason he ranked second on the eligible bachelors list rather than first--is that he's very serious, almost incapable of having facial expressions, and that he doesn't talk much, so he has an icy air to him, unlike his brother, who projects a friendly warmth.  His hidden character flaws include massive jealousy issues, and being surprisingly horny.

Lan Wangji in the comic adaptation of the novel

    As a character, he's something of a mystery.  The author of Mo Dao Zu Shi, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, writes in a style that feels very unusual to me, though it may not be unusual for her genre.  (I haven't read enough danmei other than hers to be sure one way or the other.)  What strikes me as odd is that the narrator is omniscient except having little to no knowledge of what the love interest is thinking; this has been the case in all three of her novels.  (Maybe it's not that the narrator's omniscience fails there so much as that the narrator peevishly refuses to tell us.)  Combined with the fact that Lan Wangji does as little talking as he can and even when he has to speak he uses as few words as possible, it's sometimes hard to get a read on his personality beyond a few key aspects.  (It's slightly easier in the live-action drama, since the actor can't have a genuinely immobile face the way the character tends to be described in the novel, so he does have some expressions to read...also he manages to emote surprisingly well even without the broader expression changes available to his co-stars.)

The perpetually unamused Lan Wangji (played by Wang Yibo)

    Anyway, although we're never told directly what he's thinking the way we are with Wei Wuxian, the object of his affections, we do pretty quickly catch on to just how massively in love he is.  (Far more quickly than Wei Wuxian does, that's for sure!!)  And yet, we don't know quite when he fell in love, exactly, and since his love for Wei Wuxian seems to be his motivation for about half of what he does in the novel, it's sort of frustrating how hard it is to pin down exactly when and why he fell in love.  Was it a crazy-shallow "love at first sight?"  Did he not realize how he felt until Wei Wuxian was leaving Cloud Recesses again, or even later than that?  Did he have "lust at first sight" followed by months or even years of trying to deny his desires and the genuine feelings they were growing into?  There's really no way to be positive, and the few details we have that give us any insight into his thought processes are still vague up until a certain point in the story, by which time they had known each other for about three years in the novel. (Only about 7-9 months in the live-action version, because it compressed time a lot, partially because no way could those actors pass for being only 15 years old.  Even claiming they're 18/19 at the earliest point of the story is pushing it.)

    So, all that being the case, I have to admit that I don't feel like I have a very good grasp on the character so far as I've worked on my MDZS fanfic.  (Although possibly the biggest problem I have writing for him is that when there are large scenes of people talking, he tends to fade into the background and go unnoticed unless it's a rare case where he actually has something he wants to say.  Or unless someone seems like they might threaten and/or make advances on Wei Wuxian.  Then he leaps to life to intervene.  🤣)

A to Z: Korythos

 

    I know I've already presented some Greek mythological characters as being quite obscure, but no one takes the cake for being an obscure mythological figure more than Korythos, son of Alexander and Oinone.

    Alexander (better known as Paris) of Troy, son of King Priam and Queen Hecabe, actually already had a wife before he went off to make Helen of Sparta his own.  Her name was Oinone (also spelled Oenone), and she was a nymph, daughter of the River Cebren.  Oinone comes up periodically in the ancient literature--Ovid wrote about her a couple of times--but their son Korythos is a particularly infrequently mentioned figure.  (He is so obscure he doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page, instead being on one of those list pages that talks about multiple minor characters who share a name.)

    His limited mentions in myth are rare, and follow a basic formula:  he's sent to Troy during the war by his mother (either to help his father or to break up his relationship with Helen) where he falls in love with Helen (or she with him) and is killed by his jealous father, who doesn't even know who he is.  That's the extent of it.  No impact on anything else, he just goes to town and dies, ceasing to be relevant.  (Or rather, he was never relevant to begin with.)

    What that means, of course, is that if you take a version of the myth where he didn't show up in Troy to be killed by his own father, then he's still out there somewhere when the war is over!  (Or that he never existed, but that's boring.)

    So, when I was writing the first draft of what is now titled Scions of Troy, I decided who better to put on the Trojan throne than Korythos?  He's a blank slate for me to work with!  😆

A to Z: Jiang Cheng

    😆 Finally reached one of the posts dedicated to my fanfic involving a character from Mo Dao Zu Shi! 😆

    I have been obsessed with Mo Dao Zu Shi since watching the live-action adaptation in 2022.  🥰  (I have since read the original novel twice.  Also read the first five volumes of the comic adaptation...which is not quite through volume one of the novel... 😅)

    Anyway.  What can I say about Jiang Cheng before needing a spoiler tag?  (Since it's hard to talk about him without spoiling the plot of the original work...)

Jiang Cheng in the live-action adaptation (played by Wang Zhuocheng)

    Well, to start with, basics.  Jiang Cheng is his birth name (and almost the only name used in canon, as the omniscient narrator always refers to him that way), while his courtesy name is Jiang Wanyin, and his sobriquet is Sandu Shengshou...though I don't think anyone in canon ever used it.  Maybe the omniscient narrator used it in his first scene in the novel, but otherwise...it's pretty much only to be seen in the glossary at the back that tells you who the characters are, what their names are, and what their names mean.  As to his personality, he can be quite blunt and brash, and has a decided sarcastic side.  He probably thinks he's pretty cagey and subtle, but actually you can read everything he's thinking just by looking at his face.  (Especially in the live-action adaptation!  His face is marvelously expressive.)  He's devoted to his family, but also quite proud, and wants to make sure both his reputation and the reputation of his clan are spotless.  Definitely a spoiled young master, but also a hard worker, at least as far as bettering himself (or avenging his family) goes.  Starts turning into his mother in his later years, though... 😰

EDIT:  In looking through the novel searching for a specific passage, I spotted what may be the only actual use of his sobriquet in the text.  There's a scene in the novel's present where Wei Wuxian witnesses a bunch of little boys playing "Sunshot Campaign," and the boy who decided to play Jiang Cheng's role identified himself as Sandu Shenghsou.  That's literally probably the only place it gets used.  (It would be a weird thing to address him by, tbh:  it'd be like addressing King Arthur as "Excalibur's Wielder.")

    His father, Jiang Fengmian, is the leader of the Jiang Clan, a cultivation clan based in the idyllic Lotus Pier, just outside Yunmeng.  ("Cultivation" in this meaning is...uh...hard to explain.  It's a magical practice rooted in Daoism.  So a reductionist way to look at a cultivation clan is a magical martial arts school with a certain amount of baked-in nepotism, given the importance of inheritance along bloodlines.)  His mother, Yu Ziyuan (known as Yu-furen), is a powerful and often terrifying force of nature.  And not shy of unleashing her terror on all those around her, including her own son.

    However, her son is not the lead of Mo Dao Zu Shi.  The lead is Wei Wuxian, an orphan brought to Lotus Pier by Jiang Fengmian when the boy was about eight or nine years old.  (There was massive past history there, something of a dual love triangle (or maybe it's a love quadrangle?) involving Jiang Fengmian, Yu Ziyuan, and Wei Wuxian's parents...)  Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng are only a few months apart in age, with Wei Wuxian being slightly older.  Though Jiang Cheng's angelic elder sister, Jiang Yanli, adopted Wei Wuxian as her new brother immediately, there were a few rough spots between him and Jiang Cheng before he, too, accepted the newcomer as his brother.  Not that he can ever admit that he genuinely views Wei Wuxian as his brother.  (Jiang Cheng is something of a tsundere where Wei Wuxian is concerned, tbh.  It's kind of adorable.)

Illustration of Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli from the back cover of volume 4 of the official English translation of the novel

    As they got older and started training in cultivation, Wei Wuxian became Jiang Fengmian's first/eldest disciple, and Jiang Cheng the second, setting the tone for their training overall.  (Technically, Jiang Yanli is his actual first and eldest disciple, but she's barely trained in cultivation so she somehow "doesn't count"...or it's just because she's a girl.  😣)  No matter how hard Jiang Cheng works and trains (and that's very hard!) he always comes up second to Wei Wuxian, because Wei Wuxian is just that good.  To make matters worse, he's naturally just that good, and often slacks off on his practicing, but still outperforms Jiang Cheng in everything.  And they're both very competitive, always trying to outdo each other.  And when Jiang Cheng inevitably fails to come out on top, his mother lets him have it for not working hard enough, because she hates Wei Wuxian and refuses to believe that her son could really be less talented than he is.

    When I described that much of Jiang Cheng's backstory to my brother, his response was that I was describing the origin story for a super-villain.  (He even described a Bond villain whose origin story was remarkably similar, in fact!)  But the thing is that Jiang Cheng is not a villain.  He is antagonistic to Wei Wuxian for a large chunk of the story (larger in the novel than in the live-action adaptation), but not because of the simple jealousy that their childhood naturally inspired in him, but for a very different, more direct, and more understandable reason.  Though that's in the later portion of the story, and not where I prefer to focus.  (And, even in that late portion of the story, he's still on the "good" side of the equation, and assists the heroic side in the final confrontation.)

    However, I prefer the earlier portions of the story (earlier chronologically, that is) when the Lotus Pier trio are still a happy trio and most of the tragic deaths haven't happened yet.  (And yes, there are so many tragic deaths.  Mo Dao Zu Shi absolutely a story that will make you ugly cry.  Over and over again.  But at least most of the tears are over long before the finale, so you don't end on a sour note like a certain other cdrama I watched, which I will not talk about here.)

The Lotus Pier trio when they're still very young 

    But I'm not supposed to just be talking about characters I like:  my April A-to-Z theme is "characters I have written about," after all!  So that means I need to discuss how I've written about Jiang Cheng, and that means I'll need to discuss spoilers for the original story, so if you don't already know the story of Mo Dao Zu Shi (title translated into English for the novel as The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, and The Untamed for the live-action drama) then stop reading here.  (Unless you're positive you'll never want to read/watch it.  Then you can do as you please.)

A to Z: Idomeneus

 

    Hmm.  You know, I bet I did an earlier April A-to-Z entry on Idomeneus.  (It's hard to come up with I-names, after all!)  Oh well.  This one is categorically different, as a good chunk of it will be talking about something I hadn't written yet the last time I took part in this challenge!  😆

    So.  Basics.  Idomeneus is the king of Crete at the time of the Trojan War.  He's a grandson of King Minos, and a cousin of Agamemnon and Menelaos.  He's a pretty tough warrior, but not quite in the top tier.  Frequently accompanied into battle by his nephew Meriones, who is particularly accomplished as an archer as well as with a spear.

    The main place he stands out in the Iliad is during the battle when the Trojans are burning the Achaian camp, when he pretty much stomps all over Deiphobos (who is both frightened of him and trying to dismiss him as irrelevant at the same time), only to be wounded by Aineias, who at least respected him as an opponent.

    As to what happened to him after the war, let's go straight to the quotes for that, because today I want to focus on my interactive fiction game Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon? in which you play a random, generic king no one's ever heard of, who is for who-knows-what-reason offered the reins of the Achaian army when Agamemnon suddenly drops out right as the fleet is about to sail from Aulis.  There are ten decision points for each of the ten years (though some of them lead to further decisions within the decision point), and I'm sorry to say a lot of them actually don't matter in the least.  😰  (Even sorrier to say that by the time you get to the last two or three years, the game is buggy as heck.  It was doing all sorts of strange stuff like forgetting Achilles was alive and sending Odysseus on missions when he'd been sent back to Ithaca in disgrace. 😰  I had to replay the whole game to get quotes for this post, 'cause trying to extract them from the Twine program files is really awkward considering how much code some of the text is buried under.)  Anyway!  I tried my best, back when I was making the game, to give a lot of alternate possibilities for individual events, leading to some very different outcomes...meaning that when the war is successfully won, the game gives you a long scroll telling you what happened to each character in your playthrough, and what happened to them when Agamemnon was running the show.  And this is what that said about Idomeneus' original fate:

         Under Agamemnon, Idomeneus returned home safely, but traditions vary as to what happened next: some say he made a foolish promise to sacrifice whatever first greeted him (which ended up, of course, being his child), others say that his wife betrayed him and he had to flee, and others say he ruled on in peace. Whatever the truth of his fate was, more than a thousand years later, the locals would point out a building they said was his tomb at Knossos.

    Yeah, not terribly exciting.  (Strange side note:  those same locals also claimed his nephew Meriones was buried in the same tomb.  I'm not sure why.)  That level of variation in post-war fates is strangely not unusual.  A lot of the others who fought in the Trojan War had both "happily ever after" and "ran fleeing from an adulterous wife" endings.  Large numbers of the latter ended up in Italy, for whatever reason. 🤷🏻‍♀️

    Anyway, the difficulty of writing about someone like Idomeneus is that he hasn't got all that much personality in the original work.  (By which I mean the Iliad, of course.  Most other ancient works that mention Idomeneus are mythographic works that don't go into detail about anyone's personality.)  Still, since he's one of the bigger players, he comes up pretty frequently in the game.

    The first major event involving him is almost immediately after the Achaian fleet lands on the Trojan shore.  At that time, in the original myth, Menelaos and Odysseus went to the city to make one last try at diplomacy.  It, needless to say, did not work.  😅  Anyway, in the game, you choose who accompanies Menelaos on the expedition, and Idomeneus is one of the options.  This is the first part of what happens if you select him...

        As Menelaos and Idomeneus prepare to depart, you call Agamemnon's herald Talthybios over and instruct him to attend upon them in their errand. He swears to report to you immediately upon his return to the camp and faithfully relate everything that should happen in the city.
         They are gone overnight--as you were expecting, given how long it would take them to reach Ilios on foot from camp--and it is late in the day when Talthybios finally returns to your tent.
         "We have returned from the city, Lord Creon," the herald informs you.
         "So I can see. I do not hear any jubilation in the camp, so I assume the mission did not succeed?"
         "Indeed not, my lord. We arrived at the city gates shortly before nightfall, and were admitted into the home of Antenor, one of King Priam's trusted advisors. First thing in the morning, he accompanied us to see the king, and Menelaos stated his case, requesting the return of his wife, and promising to do without the gold that was stolen along with her, in recompense for the lives taken on the beach. Idomeneus also spoke, as Menelaos' kinsman, and [as] he who had been host to the funeral games that had given Alexandros the opportunity to thus rob Menelaos of gold and wife. His words were measured, just and wise, and I was certain they would sway the Trojan court to agree to Menelaos' requests." He sighs sadly. "We were sent back to the home of Antenor to await Priam's decision. Much time later, Antenor returned, full of worry. He reported to us that Alexandros arrived in the council chamber with Helen at his side, and that the prince's honeyed words convinced the Trojan elders to turn on us with a murderous attack. Antenor came to warn us and help us escape the city alive."
         "And?" you prompt, when he does not seem to want to continue.

    Thus far, aside from Idomeneus' contribution, this follows what happened in the actual myth.  But--even though this is still super early in the game--there are actually two possible outcomes to these events.  In most cases, this would be the result of sending Idomeneus along with Menelaos:

         "Idomeneus said that he felt a measure of blame for what Alexandros had done. If he had followed what his deceased uncle would likely have desired, and not invited the sons of Aerope to his funeral games, then Helen could not have been stolen away. So he did not wish to run, but to stay and fight. Menelaos did not want to see his kinsman risk his life, and they argued long enough that we could hear the approaching princes in the street. Antenor urged us to flee at once, and Idomeneus insisted that Menelaos and I leave, while he remained to delay the enemy, promising he would escape on his own as soon as he was able. Alas, though we waited long in hiding outside the city walls, he did not emerge. Antenor sent word by one of his children that Prince Hector, though grievously wounded by Idomeneus, succeeded in killing the Cretan king."

    However!  The first (proper) decision you make in the game is who to have be the first man to disembark when the fleet arrives.  (Due to the fact that Thetis had warned/commanded Achilles not to disembark first, as the first to disembark would be the first to die.)  If you order Achilles or Aias of Salamis to disembark first, they're still the first to die, but they take Hector with them!  In which case, the result of sending Idomeneus with Menelaos is drastically altered...

         "Idomeneus said that he felt a measure of blame for what Alexandros had done. If he had followed what his deceased uncle would likely have desired, and not invited the sons of Aerope to his funeral games, then Helen could not have been stolen away. So he did not wish to run, but to stay and fight. Menelaos did not want to see his kinsman risk his life, and they argued long enough that we could hear the approaching princes in the street. Antenor urged us to flee at once, and Idomeneus insisted that Menelaos and I leave, while he remained to delay the enemy, promising he would escape on his own as soon as he was able. After we waited in hiding quite a long while, Idomeneus finally emerged from the city, supported by one of Antenor's sons. He is badly wounded, but he proudly reported that he had killed Deiphobos, the second most powerful of Priam's sons."

    To be honest, until I replayed it to get these quotes, I had forgotten just how much variation I had managed to put in this game.  I really need to give it a proper glow-up at some point.  (And make it actually keep track of troop numbers and rations and such so that the smaller decisions will actually matter...)

A to Z: Hermione and Her Household

    So, today I'll be talking about my take on yet another traditional Greek mythological figure:  Hermione, daughter of Helen and Menelaos of Sparta.  Also her husband, her son and a bit about her mother.  (Technically, I toyed with choosing Helen for today, but...the two most unique and interesting things I've done with her are in the unfinished reincarnation-and-giant-robots piece that I mentioned in talking about Grant, and some of the late spoilers in book six of The God Killers, which definitely won't be out for a couple years (possibly more than a couple at the rate I'm going) so...talking about those two would be awkward at best.  Though it's still awkward since Hermione is also only in book six.  But at least her material isn't a spoiler.)

    Anyway.  Hermione is probably not numbered among the best-known women in Greek myths.  (More likely the opposite, in fact...)  However, the antiquity of her character is undeniable:  in the Odyssey, Telemachos arrives in Sparta just at the end of the wedding feast as Hermione is on her way to Phthia to marry Neoptolemos, son of Achilles, so she's mentioned in one of the oldest of the Greek texts.

    Some basic backstory on Hermione in the original myths:  she was just a small child when her mother was taken to Troy.  (I've seen six and nine given as her exact age, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️)  Like Sparta itself, she was left in the care of her not-actually-grandfather Tyndareos, the previous king of Sparta, during the war.  (Since Helen's father was actually Zeus, not her mother's husband...)  That much is always the case.  As is that she had two husbands, one of whom is Neoptolemos, to whom she was promised in the final days of the war, to reward the boy for coming to finish the fight his father had started.  But how that second marriage came about varies wildly in ancient sources, sometimes from the same author.  (Euripides has some enormous variations in his plays touching on Hermione.  Also those touching on Helen, for that matter...)

    Her other husband, you see, is her double-cousin Orestes.  (He being the son of her father's brother Agamemnon and her mother's sister Clytemnestra.)  Why anyone would think that was a good pairing is beyond me.  (In fact, I have Menelaos being rather put out that his grandson is technically also his grand-nephew.)

            “We shall finally be able to proceed once my nephew arrives,” Menelaos said, nodding.  Then he winced.  “I mean, son-in-law….”  He let out a wordless cry of aggravation.  “This is why I wanted her to marry Neoptolemos!” the king shouted.  “I don’t know what my brother was thinking, wanting his son to marry my daughter…”

    In the ancient texts, there are two primary versions regarding how, when and why Hermione wound up marrying Orestes.  Either she married him while her father was away at the war (either at the command of Tyndareos or because of a prior engagement her father had set up, or even at the will of one or both of the couple actually getting married (gasp!)) or she marries him after Neoptolemos' death (though even in the former scenario, she still ends up with Orestes even if she was with him before Neoptolemos).  In fact, sometimes competition over her is the reason Neoptolemos is killed.  You see, Orestes is usually said to be the one to have slain Neoptolemos, sometimes acting alone, sometimes acting with the aid of the people of Delphi, and sometimes acting as a vessel for Apollo (in just the way Apollo used Paris/Alexander to kill Achilles).  Though sometimes Neoptolemos is killed without Orestes' involvement, either by Apollo acting alone or by the people of Delphi unaided, or by Apollo aiding the people of Delphi.

    With so much variation in the ancient sources, I obviously had to make some decisions about which would be the case in my own novels!

A to Z: Ganymede and Grant

    This is a weird one.  I was torn between these two characters for today's post, and decided to do both, in part because I don't have a huge amount to say about either of them.  (Also, I like the way their names sound together like that.  🤣)

    So.  Ganymede is not who you're thinking of.  Probably.

    See, the Ganymede I'm talking about today is a very important member of the Trojan court when Atalanta, Ariadne and Eurysakes arrive in Scions of Troy.  He's very handsome, but very mysterious.  He's also quite ambitious, and doesn't seem to get along well with the king.

    He doesn't make a very good first impression on our young trio (or maybe I should say they don't make a very good impression on him?).

         The herald led them across the agora to the palace, where a number of well-dressed Trojan men were waiting for them.  “Are these the visitors from Cypros?” the wealthiest-looking of them asked, addressing the herald.  The man speaking was quite the prettiest man that Atalanta had ever seen, which made her wonder if that meant he was King Korythos himself.  And yet, he didn’t seem to be any better dressed than her former master, even though surely the king of Troy should be wealthier than the king of a little port town like Methymna.  He didn’t even have a diadem, but maybe kings didn’t wear those except for special occasions?  (Atalanta had rarely seen her master outside of major religious ceremonies, after all.)  And yet, how many girlishly pretty men could there be in a single court?
         “Indeed they are, my lord,” the herald replied, with a slight bow.
         “Hmm.  Well, one of them certainly matches expectations,” he commented, his critical gaze settling on Eurysakes for a moment, before moving on to Atalanta and Ariadne, prompting a disapproving look on the man’s face.  “As to the other two…”  He frowned, and shook his head.  “It would not be proper to present them in such a begrimed manner to his majesty.”  So he really wasn’t King Korythos, then…
         “You’re quite right, my lord Ganymede,” another man standing near him said in a foul, toadying manner.
         “Ganymede?!” both Atalanta and Ariadne chorused at once in their shock.
         “It’s an old family name,” the man told them, with a smile that struck Atalanta as being rather vain.  “I assure you, I’m not the one you’ve heard of.”
         “I should hope not,” Ariadne chuckled.  “Zeus the thunderer would surely be much aggrieved to be without his cup-bearer.”
         The man called Ganymede laughed, but he seemed angry rather than amused.  “Zelotes!” he snapped.
         “Yes, my lord?” the sycophant at his elbow oozed, bowing deeply, even though his lord wasn’t looking at the gesture.
         “Take these three boys into the palace and see that they’re thoroughly washed before they’re presented to the king.  Washed and perfumed,” he added, waving a hand in front of his face as if in objection to their stink.   Personally, Atalanta thought they didn’t smell badly at all, especially considering that they had walked for two days straight before reaching the campsite last night.