#i'm gonna focus on character scenes first and foremost and use my hours and hours of clangen playtime to inform how they are shaped

[phoenix-clan]

currently, i have exactly half of the pages done. i've been busy with irl arrangements but i should be free tomorrow and the next day so i will be working hard to finish the remaining pages :)

[chemighoul]

I find being a fan of these two blogs extremely frustrating in these times. Both you and Crane chastise and condemn your readers each time Isley shows up, because we're not interacting with your blog the "right" way. We just don't "get it" when we see the initial scene, and the actual truth gets revealed later, while you tell us to "calm down" as if we should know the whole time that we're overreacting or misinterpreting. We see you unconscious on the floor with no explanation but somehow we're supposed to know this wasn't an attack and then you say WE are the ones overreacting for thinking she's done you harm!

I don't get why it's so hard for you to understand. We don't LIKE her. We like YOU, and each time she shows up, one of you gets injured and/or incarcerated. So of COURSE we're going to act antagonistic toward her! It doesn't take a psychologist to guess that's how these scenarios are going to go.

Then afterward you both get all pissy and lecture us because we're not "doing it right" (i.e. the way you want) when it comes to interacting with her. It all comes off as pretty scummy, like you're purposely setting up scenes so you can insult us with the big reveal at the end, like "Aha, you guys were so dumb for thinking this was an attack (when that's what it looks like) because obviously I was just having a reaction to an injection! Why can't you calm down and just be cool?"

I'm so pissed off that this is how you treat your fans, who obviously care about you, that I'm going to stop following these blogs for a while. I need to go cool off. Ciao.

And now, a word from the writer.

First and foremost, I am sorry to have brought you this aggravation. It's not the intention of the blog to play games like that, and given this response, I understand I haven't made that crystal clear, and hope to make things make sense with a bit of background explanation from this side of the blog.

First and foremost: Ghoul is a scrungly 19 year old runaway from the streets, isekai'd, and under no circumstances is he willing to admit to moments of peril being out of his control. This is the face of a guy built like a dowel rod who is entirely confident he can throw hands with Batman:

More below.

You can't always trust that what he says is a fully accurate picture of his scenario. He's not lying, per se, but he's also not going to post anything he hasn't curated. Such is the way of a grumpy teenager: sometimes his takes are bad and his presentation is trash. This doesn't reflect on the audience at all: this is just standard with fallible DC villains. He's gonna be a grumpy gus, but he wouldn't be responding at all if he didn't care about the people writing him letters, and I wouldn't be drawing all this stuff if I didn't think it was mutually fun.

The problem is that two days after the incident, I got a really gnarly ask about burning down Pamela's garden house, well after Ghoul was confirmed safe, and punctuated by calling her something pretty misogynistic/slut-shamey. Plausible deniability in wordplay aside, it was a wildly excessive response to a ten-hour event, and definitely not something I was going to post directly to respond to, hence his statement to cool it: both for the sake of his own advocacy, and also because he thinks people are being very harsh on what was clearly (in his eyes) not a crisis. He's a lil' stupid, he's a lil thoughtless, and he doesn't always think every side of things through, even though he tries.

On my part, I had a stupidly huge writing project that I needed to focus on over the weekend, so I handed off my tablet to my partner, who writes Jon as well as Pammy, and we agreed it'd be fun to give Jonny a scare and show that his spooky not-son can be trusted to make choices about who he associates with and where he puts his trust. They got to have fun drawing a plotline, I got my writing project done, and there was a learning experience for all of the characters involved concerning communication, trust, and misunderstanding. This is also why I didn't post anything myself until Sunday or so, because my brain was gelatin.

At no point was any of this meant to bait any of you, and I am sorry that it upset you.

We were just trying to give a little thrill, and the reaction was more explosive than anticipated. We're not DC, we're not going to fridge our characters, and we're trying to have fun alongside you while balancing our characters' expressions of their boundaries with the variety of people who write to them. They're not always going to be forgiving, they're not always going to be nice, and they are, at the end of the day, villains. This is as nice as they can be when someone's threatening their ally with arson over a misunderstanding while someone else is soliciting fetish material at 9 am.

Their writers, however, do want you to have fun and enjoy the story...so, please understand, it's not anything personal from the writers' desks when the characters are cranky about something.

We're trying to give you a genuine experience, promise.