Dragonhunt logs
The latest Dragonhunt logs are up.
Some not un-powerful stuff in there, though I admit to having gotten a little overhappy with the exclamation points once or twice. The final scene, with Emil and Renate all but spitting on each other, is particularly nasty. (My esprit d’escalier moment: If I’d been on the ball, Renate would have shot back at Emil’s comment about childhood ambitions with a demand to know how long he had harbored the ambition of killing his father and his sisters.)
The two competitors previous to Emil in the tryout scene are Elder Brothers from previous incarnations of the campaign, just so y’all get the in-joke. It appears that Elder Brothers take much of their personality from the Noble Child who is their next-younger sibling (that is, Emil from Renate, James from Morgan, and so on). The variety is intriguing; one genuinely can take a character template in widely variant directions.
In Emil’s audition, one can see reflected Renate’s native politeness, her ever-present awareness of her own youth and inexperience (Alan was very clever there, turning that to good account), and the modesty she is still learning—the kind of modesty that lets him hide his real prowess behind practice swords and a rustic style. She hasn’t gotten there yet; she’s stuck at what Godfrey drily calls “self-castigation.” But she will.
Renate is a change for me, I’ve realized. She’s the first character I fully intend to play as a hero. (I generally do sidekicks, anti-heros, flawed almost-heroes, ordinary folks, or people who resolutely refuse to take on the mantle of hero.) I’m not entirely sure what sort of hero she will turn out to be, and even now when she isn’t a hero yet I constantly have to fight my own tendency to diminish or break her. She will be a hero, though, whatever I have to do to make her one.
Ah, well… everybody ought to play a hero once, you know?
Powered by FireStats