This question should really be a very hard one, considering that all of my characters are little pieces of me, and it feels a bit like picking your favorite child or, in my case, my favorite cat*, seeing as I don't have any offspring (yet). It's odd to experience fictional people becoming more than just ideas in your head; maybe I'm crazy, but these little puffs of imagination have developed their own voices and desires, and dammit if I don't have arguments with them whenever I'm trying to work a scene and they're not cooperating. Some are more entertaining than others, as I'll get to on Day Four, but on most days, I feel like I'm herding spectral toddlers.
But if I'm being honest with myself, my favorite is Kira Larai. She wasn't introduced in my first two novellas and won't be appearing until I publish the second arc, but she is, without a doubt, the apple of my eye. She's definitely a foil to Ren: she is a demon hunter of her own volition and spent years training, much to the annoyance of her mother who just wanted her to get a respectable job (or get married) in accordance to her societal position, as opposed to Ren, who was forced by fate (among other things) to fight demons. Larai is kind of like the Batman of The Legion universe, where she wasn't born a superhero like Wonder Woman or Superman but focused all of her efforts and intelligence on getting her to the point where she could be a key member of a crimefighting team. I mean, her mom is alive, and her childhood wasn't depressing like Bruce Wayne's, but you get the idea.
Admittedly, Larai kind of popped up out of nowhere. One day, I was working on some dialogue between Ren and Captain Koca, and suddenly, this other voice just chimed in, introduced herself, and sat at the table like, "Well, I'm here now." It took me a minute before I realized it wasn't Tulay-brin, whose youthful sarcasm and tone resembles Larai's, but she had such a distinct way of speaking that I knew she just had to stay.
Larai's character arc (and I promise not to get spoilery here) is very much defined by her desire to be accepted by her family as she is. She's a very out lesbian, and she left her home city-state of Aperthai when she was around twenty or so after a major fight with her mother about her sexuality. It's not that homosexuality is immoral in her culture, but it's definitely not commonplace or encouraged. They may not live the dangerous tribal lives of their cousins, the Amir'Chavi, but the Apertha still live in an area of the continent that is still very volatile and unpredictable, so their survival is dependent upon creating future generations. As a bisexual woman who only came out to my parents in recent years, I really did want to explore that side of my personal history, and Larai really fit the bill there, and while it's not remotely close to my experience - I mean, I'm not a demon-fighting lesbian, so ... - the core of it is.
I wanted to make sure, however, that I didn't focus solely on who she wants to sleep with because lesbians and bisexual women are already too often lumped into walking sex toys for the male gaze**. At first, I considered her to be a romantic partner for Ren, who is bisexual, but the two characters just did not cooperate; every scene that I tried to write was just unbearable with literally zero chemistry between them, but when they were just friends/coworkers, it felt so natural and the words just flowed out of me. When her girlfriend revealed herself to me, everything clicked; even Larai (in my head) was like, "OMG YUS THAT'S 100% IT RIGHT THERE."
She also has a very close relationship with Dahl Calder that begins almost as soon as the two meet. She's one of the only people who will call him on his shit and force him to face his personal demons. I'll definitely be getting to Dahl later on this month, but suffice to say, he is not the easiest character to write because ... well, he's a selfish asshole. I don't spend a lot of time redeeming him, but his friendship with Larai definitely goes in that direction. He doesn't really change her in the ways other characters do, but he rounds her out in a way that not even her eventual girlfriend does; she can be her brutally honest self without worrying that it will change how he feels about her.
Now, like I mentioned above, Larai won't be making an appearance anytime soon, but oh, trust me, I am so looking forward to readers meeting her. I am focusing on rewriting the first arc, but I am itching to get to the second one pretty much because of her. It's actually really hard to keep myself from jumping ahead (which was how I got to where I am right now, but I'll get to that later on in the challenge), but I must stay strong. Larai deserves that much.
** One of my favorite things about Orphan Black was how Cosima made sure to remark that her lesbianism was the absolute least interesting thing about her.
No comments:
Post a Comment