#clem is the kind of trembling chihuahua that hides in ur purse while rohan is the kind that bites your ankles

[northern-passage]

clem is such an interesting character and so different from what i usually see in IFs like I've yet to see an RO who is scared of everything? in a world of girlbosses and mansplainers we need the clems

thank you!

i'm glad that they feel different :-) when i started tnp, a lot of romance stories, especially fantasy or supernatural, tended to put the mc in Clementine's role. there are exceptions now, of course, i'm not trying to make a broad statement, especially since within IF that's actually something that's changed a lot over the years, but i definitely wanted the mc in tnp to be the competent, protective, "mysterious stranger" type, which is an archetype that used to (typically) go exclusively to love interests.

which means that we get to have poor little meow meows like Clementine as our love interests, instead :-) i also really like having Clem as a bit of balance, because they're life has been so different from everyone else's - Merry is a career criminal, and we've seen that she has no hesitation getting nasty and violent, while Noel, Lea, and the hunter have all been entrenched in the Order for their entire lives, with all of them also being very familiar with violence and comfortable with it or at the very least indifferent towards it.

even though Clementine is running from something, and is just as much as a fugitive as Noel, compared to the others, they really are the "normal" one, who just had their life upturned by running into a group of hardened fighters and criminals. or at least, upturned in a different way than it already was.... we'll get to see their reaction in the second half of chapter 2, but Clementine deals with what happened in Blackwater very differently than everyone else, because it's not like something they've ever really experienced before.