Feo Takahari
Auror
5: Charity Merritt. A perpetually perky would-be mage who shrugs off almost everything. She's generally well-intentioned, but she doesn't have much in the way of a filter, and she gets the line that has made more of my readers laugh than anything else I've ever written. (Explaining the upside of magically swapping sexes: "Horace, I found those books you hide under your bed, the ones with the drawings of girls having sex with each other. Now that you look like a girl, you can get girls like that to go to bed with you.") She's not a major character, but she makes every scene she's in a little lighter.
4: Maria Rodriguez. A xenobiologist with a tendency towards idealism. After discovering a new intelligent species, she becomes determined to protect it from fearful humans, no matter what the cost may be. She's both a genuinely kind and helpful person and the closest thing the story has to a villain, and I created a lot of tension in how those impacted.
3: Judith. Once a religious fanatic and living embodiment of everything sick and twisted about this sermon, Judith died and went to Hell for some truly horrible things she did in God's name. She became a powerful demoness in the underworld, and her goal is to redeem herself by conquering and Christianizing Hell. It was quite fun to see at what point readers lost sympathy for her--one still saw her as basically decent after she tortured a prostitute, but started to hate her after she made misandrist remarks.
2: Alex "Melody" Smith. A twelve-year-old magic-user who wants to be an anime-style magical girl. Melody is clever, creative, and has a good grasp of tactics, and she'd function quite well in her chosen genre. However, she repeatedly fails to recognize that she's not in that genre, and because of this, she makes some very bad decisions. She flips quite easily between comic relief and a serious heroic figure, and she has very strong chemistry with . . .
1: Penitence Price. Having witnessed the murder of her parents, Price consciously modeled herself after her favorite superheroes, trying to become a heroic crimefighter in the same vein. By nature, she favors emotion over logic and tends to see things in very simplistic terms. However, the more she plays the role of a gadgeteer hero, the more she thinks like one, becoming oddly logical in a very self-contradictory fashion.
Price gets to be #1 for being a walking paradox that actually resolves itself. Her superheroism is both illogical and founded on the principles of logic she claims to revere, but rather than ceasing to be a hero, she simply reframes herself. She's the only character in the entire book who can recognize when her life isn't going according to genre and act accordingly, and this allows her to be heroic in situations where Melody fails.
4: Maria Rodriguez. A xenobiologist with a tendency towards idealism. After discovering a new intelligent species, she becomes determined to protect it from fearful humans, no matter what the cost may be. She's both a genuinely kind and helpful person and the closest thing the story has to a villain, and I created a lot of tension in how those impacted.
3: Judith. Once a religious fanatic and living embodiment of everything sick and twisted about this sermon, Judith died and went to Hell for some truly horrible things she did in God's name. She became a powerful demoness in the underworld, and her goal is to redeem herself by conquering and Christianizing Hell. It was quite fun to see at what point readers lost sympathy for her--one still saw her as basically decent after she tortured a prostitute, but started to hate her after she made misandrist remarks.
2: Alex "Melody" Smith. A twelve-year-old magic-user who wants to be an anime-style magical girl. Melody is clever, creative, and has a good grasp of tactics, and she'd function quite well in her chosen genre. However, she repeatedly fails to recognize that she's not in that genre, and because of this, she makes some very bad decisions. She flips quite easily between comic relief and a serious heroic figure, and she has very strong chemistry with . . .
1: Penitence Price. Having witnessed the murder of her parents, Price consciously modeled herself after her favorite superheroes, trying to become a heroic crimefighter in the same vein. By nature, she favors emotion over logic and tends to see things in very simplistic terms. However, the more she plays the role of a gadgeteer hero, the more she thinks like one, becoming oddly logical in a very self-contradictory fashion.
Price gets to be #1 for being a walking paradox that actually resolves itself. Her superheroism is both illogical and founded on the principles of logic she claims to revere, but rather than ceasing to be a hero, she simply reframes herself. She's the only character in the entire book who can recognize when her life isn't going according to genre and act accordingly, and this allows her to be heroic in situations where Melody fails.
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