Is he what the village thought was their patron saint?
Yeah - some of the greater mythological stuff I came up with while writing, so the plants weren't there like they needed to be. I'm definitely going to move the exposition of Hados and Briccius up - but yeah, Janos was St. Briccius, who was martyred and in doing so finally converted the villagers to Christianity. The idea being that Janos worked to get them to give up their pagan rituals and superstitions that actually had power over him.
Is it going to be clear which parts are her speaking and which parts are Janos, not quite dead yet? (We're supposed to be assuming she does actually go back and finish him off, yes?) Or was it just meant to be reminiscent of him?
Hmm - I hadn't even thought that maybe it would sound like she was actually channeling him or something. I was trying to work in the theme of possession throughout - each of the three vampires is obsessed with possessing Mira in a different way. Bathory as his wife/mother of his son; Janos as a companion; Erzsebet as her own mother. Again, something that came to me during the process. So I think I'll have each of them literally say the same line to her throughout - with the last one being Beta.
Have we seen before evidence of Bathory/Janos/Beta changing into an animal before? Maybe yes and I just forgot, but if not, the hawk bit seems a bit out of the blue, if really cool imagery.
We hadn't, but it was implied when Dominik was "seeing" what Bathory saw when he came to the village to feed - he said he wasn't man-shaped anymore. I wanted to save the actual shot of that transformation till the end. (Weird what things you work out early on - I've had "Beta turns into a hawk and flies away" in my outline from the beginning.) We see the blank-faced manservant and then his wolf-form, though the actual transformation there takes place off-screen, too.
But Samuel's death seems maybe a little pointless.
It's really interesting - and gratifying - to know that his character resonated this well, because he was pretty much canon fodder when I started writing. I'd always planned to kill him. Have you read/seen Bram Stoker's Dracula? When I first outlined this, I set up as the basic structure just a kind of gender reversal of that, so I thought of him as the Lucy character - close to the protagonist, and a way to show the stakes. Dracula isn't just a romantic figure - he KILLS people. Originally Samuel died much earlier in the story, to fulfill that purpose.
(And, you know, character-arc wise I wanted to kill him just so I could have the "Dominik has two mommies" thing at the end, which I was keen on throughout. Ho-subtext-yay!)
But I see what you're saying. Mira's already committed; there doesn't need to be additional shit driving her to do what she was already doing. I think the only place I'm getting hung up is when she returns to the castle after they escape with Dominik - I can't think of any reason she'd do that otherwise. Now, I could have her never able to escape the castle for some other reason, but then that makes her passive, and while that can fly in the first half, you really don't want your protag being passive in the second half, when it should be all about them taking charge and doing the shit they couldn't do earlier. Plus, she needs a nadir at the end of Act Two - that lowest moment, so that she can rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
So I'm not discounting Samuel-staying-alive or anything, but his death is intertwined with a lot of major structural elements. And I'm always kind of wary of genre pieces, especially horror, where there are no major character deaths.
no subject
Yeah - some of the greater mythological stuff I came up with while writing, so the plants weren't there like they needed to be. I'm definitely going to move the exposition of Hados and Briccius up - but yeah, Janos was St. Briccius, who was martyred and in doing so finally converted the villagers to Christianity. The idea being that Janos worked to get them to give up their pagan rituals and superstitions that actually had power over him.
Is it going to be clear which parts are her speaking and which parts are Janos, not quite dead yet? (We're supposed to be assuming she does actually go back and finish him off, yes?) Or was it just meant to be reminiscent of him?
Hmm - I hadn't even thought that maybe it would sound like she was actually channeling him or something. I was trying to work in the theme of possession throughout - each of the three vampires is obsessed with possessing Mira in a different way. Bathory as his wife/mother of his son; Janos as a companion; Erzsebet as her own mother. Again, something that came to me during the process. So I think I'll have each of them literally say the same line to her throughout - with the last one being Beta.
Have we seen before evidence of Bathory/Janos/Beta changing into an animal before? Maybe yes and I just forgot, but if not, the hawk bit seems a bit out of the blue, if really cool imagery.
We hadn't, but it was implied when Dominik was "seeing" what Bathory saw when he came to the village to feed - he said he wasn't man-shaped anymore. I wanted to save the actual shot of that transformation till the end. (Weird what things you work out early on - I've had "Beta turns into a hawk and flies away" in my outline from the beginning.) We see the blank-faced manservant and then his wolf-form, though the actual transformation there takes place off-screen, too.
But Samuel's death seems maybe a little pointless.
It's really interesting - and gratifying - to know that his character resonated this well, because he was pretty much canon fodder when I started writing. I'd always planned to kill him. Have you read/seen Bram Stoker's Dracula? When I first outlined this, I set up as the basic structure just a kind of gender reversal of that, so I thought of him as the Lucy character - close to the protagonist, and a way to show the stakes. Dracula isn't just a romantic figure - he KILLS people. Originally Samuel died much earlier in the story, to fulfill that purpose.
(And, you know, character-arc wise I wanted to kill him just so I could have the "Dominik has two mommies" thing at the end, which I was keen on throughout. Ho-subtext-yay!)
But I see what you're saying. Mira's already committed; there doesn't need to be additional shit driving her to do what she was already doing. I think the only place I'm getting hung up is when she returns to the castle after they escape with Dominik - I can't think of any reason she'd do that otherwise. Now, I could have her never able to escape the castle for some other reason, but then that makes her passive, and while that can fly in the first half, you really don't want your protag being passive in the second half, when it should be all about them taking charge and doing the shit they couldn't do earlier. Plus, she needs a nadir at the end of Act Two - that lowest moment, so that she can rise like a phoenix from the ashes.
So I'm not discounting Samuel-staying-alive or anything, but his death is intertwined with a lot of major structural elements. And I'm always kind of wary of genre pieces, especially horror, where there are no major character deaths.