#idk maybe itll help to think things from sammie's pov

[microwaving-my-ocs]

i'm probably going to keep sammie though, and just transpose him into a new fantasy setting. his general settings/traits that make him him are:

backstory & angst over his sister and the tension between wanting to preserve her memory in a very tangible way (living AS her, or the live he thinks she would have wanted to live) and living for himself & in the present, where the past isnt a shackle but just a part of him

crossdressing / being androgynous. bc i want to draw a char like that

being generally smart in his late teens / adulthood (both IQ and EQ)

i also want to give him a romantic partner, but it becomes unnecessarily complicated in the original setting; where the FL is a disadvantaged noble who has to bow to society's demands, and sammie is influential enough to deflect judgement from her recent divorce but also not powerful enough to make the plot irrelevant.

sammie pretty much can only flourish outside the eyes of society's elites. if he's powerful enough to shrug off the disdain of any conceivable competition, then it's a situation like Hades/Aisha (Married the Male Lead's Dad) where it's a power fantasy. which can be a very satisfying story, but i don't think it's one i'm interested in telling.

i want sammie's story to be one about the past/present. about living in the past and living in the present. about being unable to get to know others bc of how guarded you are, about losing your faith in people, and gradually coming to trust at least a few people and having some faith in the future again.

i think i can probably do this while keeping his original story, just changing the FL's settings and how they meet. maybe sammie isn't trying to take over the duchy anymore. he isn't suave and he isn't ambitious, he just wanted his sister to live but she didn't, and now he has a new sister he never knew and he somehow needs to keep the both of them (and samantha's friends) alive.

altho tbh, one thing i will miss is the process of how FL discovered sammie's past in the original plot. i like the idea that you need to peel him like an onion. that the people you meet in adulthood have so much history to them that you usually are not privy to and may never know. that the people they lost and whom you never personally knew are also lost to you forever (the idea that we never see samantha's POV; we only see the other chars' recollections of her and their interpretations of her, and they all kind of conflict w each other in tiny ways)

i think i can possibly make FL a rival spy. maybe the one that was supposed to be sammie's bestie, but then i realised she had better chemistry w sammie than his supposed fiance. either way, i think their chemistry would be more important than the premise. which is quite funny, because my unhappiness w how the premise usually folds out is why i started writing this story in the first place and now i'm ditching the premise entirely