{"id":46735,"date":"2019-05-05T06:00:31","date_gmt":"2019-05-05T10:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=46735"},"modified":"2019-04-28T15:43:53","modified_gmt":"2019-04-28T19:43:53","slug":"20-girlfriend-please","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=46735","title":{"rendered":"#20 Girlfriend, PLEASE"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What a man says: \u201cThrough roleplaying, I want to explore the reality of the female experience and gain a better understanding of what it means to be a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

What he means: \u201cI like lesbians\u201d.<\/p><\/div>\n

Shawn Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Color! Look! Our heroes exist in a place with a sky and land, not some mysterious nebulous white void! It\u2019s very exciting.<\/p>\n

In the original script from Shamus, Ramgar was I think bowing to Lucretia. The change to a kneel and hand kiss was done mainly so that we\u2019d keep his pants hidden, because at this point the subject of whether or not Ramgar was wearing pants was something of debate among the fans. It brought about all kinds of mostly unintended repercussions. Was Chuck hitting on Ivy? Was this horribly out of character for Ramgar?<\/p>\n

I tend to think that Chuck reacted so negatively to Sapphire not because Marcus was playing a female character, but because the artsy new guy made such a ridiculous oversexed half naked female character. So he figured his barbarian would hit on her. Then once an actual female shows up, he\u2019s a perfect gentleman, because that\u2019s how you act around women. (The irony here, that fans picked up on but we never outright mention in the comic, is that Ramgar is every bit as ridiculous and overly sexualized as Sapphire. The guy\u2019s half naked and one big penis joke after the last.)<\/p>\n

So, would Chuck have groped Sapphire if Ivy was around yet? I don\u2019t know, probably not. And now it occurs to me that I have perhaps grossly overthought the motivations for characters that I wasn\u2019t even writing.<\/p>\n

Shamus Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t really thought about out-of-game relationships \/ tension very much before this point. At most, I imagined we\u2019d have a bit of unrequited flirting on the part of Marcus, like we see here.<\/p>\n

Shawn actually suggested that Ivy might dig Josh. I really liked this idea, since it set up a love triangle that goes nowhere: Marcus \u00bb Ivy \u00bb Josh. It also promised to give Ivy a bit more depth. She\u2019s otherwise strong and intelligent (The smartest person at the table, in my view.) and giving her a weakness for the \u201cbad boyfriend\u201d archetype would give me a convenient way to make her do foolish things if the need arose. But none of that thinking really went anywhere. I was also a little gun-shy and averse to trying new things after the rough start, and I\u2019d never written any romance before. Not even as a joke.<\/p>\n

And as Shawn says above, I think it was important to give a lot of contrast between how Ramgar treats Lucretia vs. Sapphire. And like snapping another dude with a wet towel in the locker room, I don\u2019t think Chuck would have launched ZOMGRAPEGATE if Ivy had been around.<\/p>\n

Shawn Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The other reason Josh and Ivy work for me is because iirc they\u2019re the two youngest characters at the table. Plus the love triangle would have been funny, had the comic lasted long enough to let it play out. (Also, if the comic lasted much, much longer than it did, I wanted to have Marcus\u2019s ex girlfriend show up, who would be a busty blonde with indie rock glasses who was completely bitchy.)<\/p>\n

Clockworks is going to have some romance, although it\u2019s going to take ages to play out at the pace the story goes. I\u2019ve already had a few fans commenting on who they want to hook up with who, which amuses me to no end. The fact my comic has shippers just makes me happy. As far as I know, Shamus has not yet added any romantic subplots to his post CB creations, although there\u2019s still time for Dr. Breen and Metrocop to admit their secret and forbidden love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46735"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46739,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46735\/revisions\/46739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}