#anyways really posting a lot maybe i should make a neocities so i can just post a lot of my thoughts without worrying about a post limit

[what-if-doctor-who-was-yuri-yaoi]

btw i have a couple rss feeds on my neocities ^^ u can check em out if u want :3

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Reworking Pride

BTS Series: ⬅ Table of Contents - Reworking Justice ➡ Also available on Neocities! P&J Taglist (Check out my Google form to get added): @elegant-paper-collection @auroblaze @zeenimf @vacantgodling @foxys-fantasy-tales Banner art by @auroblaze

The first thing I decided needed a rework was, no surprise, the protagonist. Pride would need to change significantly, and not just for the obvious reasons. I needed to have a different visual for him so I could more easily create a separate personality and motivation from scratch, instead of constantly associating him with his alternate fanfiction self. I can’t draw, so I went onto this Picrew and threw together an initial appearance I could work off of.

I wanted to keep some of the punk elements like piercings and alternative dress, both as a kind of homage and to put a big neon sign over his head that reads HAS PROBLEMS WITH AUTHORITY. Same thing with the eyeliner—explicitly not conforming to gender norms, both signaling a problem with authority and implied queerness, which is intentional. The goatee was for fun, since “haha goats and Satan,” but I liked it so much I kept it. I did decide to make him white, instead of Japanese like his fanfiction counterpart, which is a change I did make with a purpose (I’ll get into it). The horns and tail being the classic cartoon devil were the only options available. It wasn’t the look I was going for with the story, but I added them anyway because they were cute.

One big deviation I decided on right away was that this isn’t going to be a stolen body, for Pride or Justice. Their appearances are what they look like, all the time, and Pride will ferry the soul for his contract without hijacking their appearance. I actually changed the way the whole contract thing works, too, but that’s a story for another post.

From here, I began brainstorming his personality. The fanfiction Pride & Justice was very short, so there wasn’t a whole lot of room for character development or action. In fact, Pride has a static character arc through the whole story. The only thing that changes by the end is him admitting that he’s scared to go back to Hell, and the rest of his personality remains exactly the same. That isn’t going to fly as an original character in a longer story.

In this new story, Pride as a character needs to be a shithead, for lack of better description. Not only is he a demon, he’s the embodiment of hubris, self-importance, and the root of all sin. He needs to be loud, obnoxious, arrogant, and outraged, if not violent, when he doesn’t get his way. Paradoxically, he also desperately needs people to like him. It’s well-documented that people with healthy relationships with their pride don’t do the grandiose “look at me, I’m so special” thing—their pride is self-evident, and exudes naturally. The people who do act incredibly shitty like this are compensating for a low self-esteem, declaring that they’re the best, that everything they do is the best, and that everyone should like them for being so obviously the best. This, of course, turns potential friends and companions away, and sends them further down into their spiral.

I took a great deal of (mostly tongue-in-cheek) inspiration from a Tweet by Sarah Hagi (that I can unfortunately not find the link to): “God, give me the confidence of a mediocre white dude.” I want Pride to be a critique of that guy you know, the one who acts like he’s the best thing since sliced bread, but isn’t really as great as he claims, and deep down he knows it. He hurts people to boost himself up, using his position of power over others to make himself feel more secure. Sure, he’s had pain, maybe even trauma, but he doesn’t want you to know that. It would be weak, in his mind, to admit that he has wounds so deep he can’t even look himself in the mirror.

So, as my protagonist, Pride needs to be fundamentally self-absorbed, taking pleasure in the pain of others, because he’s compensating for and masking a very deep emotional pain. I don’t want to be so black-and-white as to make the entire concept of “having pride” a strict evil, so over the course of the story I want to develop him into a healthier version of it. This would give him a very fulfilling arc—he begins the story as the negative expression of pride, hubris and self-importance and viciousness, and ends on the positive end of the spectrum, with genuine self-respect and confidence without needing to harm others. That’s a whole dang character with flaws and potential for growth if I do say so myself!

Obviously, I wasn’t quite done. Pride needed a pain to endure, something that would turn him into the vindictive little asshole we see before us. What better pain for a demon to have, what better way to turn them bitter against all of humanity and virtue, than to be cast out of Heaven by God for questioning His authority? Not only is Pride a demon, he’s one of the fallen angels who rebelled with Lucifer when he fell from Heaven.

My wonderful girlfriend, AuroBlaze, helped me solidify Pride’s appearance so I wouldn’t have to use the Picrew forever. The idea of him having the blond roots of his hair exposed was played as a joke, at first, because how funny would it be for him to always look like he had a shitty hair-dye job? But while we were talking, I realized it could be a brilliant metaphor for the very shoddy mask he wears to hide his aforementioned bitterness and trauma—especially if those exposed roots are the color his hair used to be as an angel, that won’t stay covered up, no matter how hard he tries.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The blond roots are still the color his hair was as an angel, but the reason they stick around is because it's essentially a magical scar. His dark hair stops right where it meets his horns, his broken halo. His former-holiness is burned into him, and can't be transformed or dyed away.

While we were discussing what I actually wanted his horns to look like, I solved a few world-building birds with one stone. The demons in this story, instead of just being goth angels, have their wings cut off by the other angels when they fall. Their halos are cracked in two, jammed into their heads, and become their horns, eternally smoking with once-holy fire. They grow tails from the trails of fire they leave as they fall to Hell, like the trail of a comet. They have several permanent reminders of the grace they lost.

Lo and behold, we have our final design:

[Tumblr version] [Instagram version]

Welcome to the world, Pride! You are a menace to society and will cause so much distress to everyone around you.

A few other details that I want to mention before we go: All demons have a secondary beast form they can transform into, either fully or partially (i.e. Pride can summon one monster arm if he wants). Compare this to angels having a human form and a “flaming wheel of eyes and fire” form. His horns and tail are also optional in this way—he can hide them from humans entirely if he wants. I won’t get deep into his powers or how this story’s version of magic works, but there’s a good chance I’ll make a separate post about it later.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You can see his beast form here, also drawn by AuroBlaze!

Also, for those of you waiting with bated breath for this: Pride will be explicitly bisexual in this book. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to bring it up yet, but I am very excited to populate this story with a lot of queer and trans characters, so it’ll be a topic at some point for sure.

On that note, there’s an internal war waging within me about whether or not I should make Pride trans. I’ve been on the fence about it for a while. Since he’s a multi-dimensional immortal creature who chose every detail of his body to his exact specifications, he wouldn’t need top surgery, hormones, or anything like that. It would just be the lower half that’s the contested zone. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal, but this story is a romance and there will be sex in it. So it’s unusually pressing!

The arguments against? I don’t want to perpetuate any harmful assumptions by making a trans character literally on the side of the devil. I already have more than a few trans side characters in the story, but I still don’t want to make any unfortunate comparisons in today’s landscape. There’s the whole “indoctrination” thing, tempting others to sin is a big part of his personal magic arsenal, don’t need to make too many jumps to get disingenuous there. There’s also the matter of my intended commentary—the “mediocre white man” stuff. While being trans wouldn’t make him less of a man, obviously, the kind of behavior I’m trying to critique is seen most often in cis white men. They use toxic masculinity as a shield because they’ve been told all their lives they aren’t allowed to show “weakness” in the form of emotional vulnerability, and hurting others is how they feel strong—like a “real man”—in the face of their pain. I don’t want to mess with the foundations of that critique, risk muddying it, or accidentally send a completely different message than I intended with such a delicate subject.

The arguments for are more self-indulgent. I am a huge fan of adding things to a story just because you like them, and something about Pride screams TRANS! at me. Trans men aren’t seen often in media, especially trans men who are visibly, vocally, and proudly gender non-conforming, and that representation is personally important to me. Also, trans men who don’t feel the need to get surgery are plenty scarce in the media landscape, which is again important to me personally. Beyond my personal investment, the metaphors I could play with regarding transness and fallen angels, and how toxic American Evangelical Christianity is to queer identities would tie in with a lot of other themes in the book. For any other story, that alone would be enough for me to shrug and make the change, but still I hesitate. Thoughts? Feelings? Advice? I’d love to hear it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In the time since I wrote this post, I did decide to make Pride canonically a trans man. Once I started viewing him as trans, I couldn’t un-see it, and it became an inextricable part of him as a character. I do plan on tying in all of the above-mentioned metaphors into his character, and more. One of Pride’s arcs in the book is about his self-discovery—about becoming someone he actually wants to be, not tied down to anyone’s opinion of him, and growing into a person who doesn’t need to identify himself with his past trauma. It moves him so powerfully, he genuinely wants to be a human by the end of the book, something he once reviled because of how they stole God’s love from him. I think the growth, metaphor, and representation all come together to be more important than the “mediocre white man” thing, or any possible bad-faith readings of a trans character (which the inevitable dipshits will do no matter what).

WHEW, this one was a doozy. I guess I was really excited to introduce this story officially! Thanks for reading this ramble all the way to the end. And as always, thank you for your continued support!

See you next time for more Behind The Scenes action!

— Annika