#body horror buff men with fat tiddies blind devotion....

[akoumi]

I have to ask--mwad is a pretty dark book, right? what kinda inspired you/made you want to write it? did you kinda go "i wanna see how dark it can get and how ppl fall" or are you still trying to make it hopeful, or like... I'm just curious if there's theoretically anything you would want to see readers getting out of your book

my thought process @ every other fantasy protagonist:

slightly longer answer: i just. really enjoy dark books. they don't even have to have deeper meanings about humanity or people or whatever i just really love violence and evil people. honestly it was inspired by me going "i want to write a high fantasy book", and nah i don't really plan on making it hopeful. i really enjoy how i can be unabashedly gory about it, without having to tone anything down because "my character wouldn't do that".

i guess i just got a little tired of reading fantasy with main characters that could easily be interchanged for each other without changing the story at all, too. they're all naive and goodhearted and plucky orphans with powers too great for them and a heart of gold or whatever, and as much as i love them, sometimes you need a change of pace. it all seems to end the same way too - they defeat the clearly evil king/sorceror/emperor who is ruining the country/city/world and as the new ruler they rule justly and everyone lives happily ever after.

so mwad is kind of my way of exploring how what could very easily be a typical fantasy story can be turned on its head with a completely different main character. which is why i included typical fantasy elements such as a king, a rebellion, a prophecy, and magic. if sascha had been just a bit different, a bit more of a classic fantasy protagonist with different values and belief systems, this could very much be a conventional fantasy story (maybe with the slight advantage of being russian fantasy). in fact, if i chose to make it from the pov of the enemy characters, sascha would VERY much be a typical bad guy character.

instead, as the protagonist, he single-handedly turns the whole archetype onto its head - the main character doesn't believe in saving everyone, he doesn't believe in diplomacy over war, he doesn't believe in fighting honorably, he doesn't believe in loyalty, he very very much believes in the ends justifying the means and the "greater good" (and the greater good means whatever's best for HIM, instead of everyone).

in fact, it's most of the enemy characters that embody traits like loyalty, honor, kindness, sincerity, etc. if these enemies were the main characters rather than sascha, it would be such an archetypical fantasy story - plucky goodhearted teenagers protect the country and their king from an evil rebellion and win and rule happily forever after, but instead, it's the other way around: sascha, with his murdering and lying and cheating and violent genocide ends up winning, killing everyone in his path, and gets to become king. he doesn't learn any wise lesson, he doesn't get any punishments for the terrible things he's done - instead, he gets everything he wants after betraying everyone on his side and killing everyone who isn't. he doesn't face ANY consequences for the things he did.

i didn't really write/create this to push any moral lesson or to impart words of wisdom to anyone who potentially reads mwad. so really, you're free to get whatever you want out of it, but there's really nothing that i want everyone to understand. other than that i modelled sascha after my ideal man and want him to rail me <33