This commentary covers the following posts:
Death Threats?Back to the Daily Grind
Only two posts this time because there's a lot of ground to cover.
"Death Threats?" requires a little bit of context. It was sparked by this comment:
Marnax May 25, 2011 12:33 AMBasically, he had entirely missed the point of what the character was saying, so I had the Messenger unload on him (and anyone else who might think that way). The Messenger was very much intended, even from that point, to be a sympathetic proxy. So I hammered the sympathetic proxy nature of the blog over everyone's head.Okay, you can either join us, or I'll have to kill you when I see you, and I WILL see you. Count on it.
I like the post for several reasons. For one, it allowed me to flesh out Hyde post-blog a little more, as well as reveal the name of "Girl" as Erin. It also allowed me to present my view of the "hallowed" form of proxies. It was also the birth of "William," an identity passed around from proxy to proxy. Who (or what) exactly is William? I'm not entirely sure. I like to think of it as a sort of an infectious identity. It gets passed on from one person to another, and then the original host dies. There's probably still a William around somewhere.
In terms of plot, the post didn't have much purpose. However, it set up the themes of identity I used throughout DSTM, and introduced the concept of Messi searching for answers about his place in the organization. In reality, this post is where the blog really starts.
Once I had an idea of what I wanted to do with the blog, I started asking around for ideas. I wanted to examine more proxies, and two blogging friends ended up helping me: Alex M (Dreams in Darkness, Watch this City Burn, Maleorderman, Deja vu Dreamer, and others), and AJ (It's All David's Fault, Throwing Voices, and others).
I asked a Skype chat of creators for a name, and AJ offered Poe. From there, we started chatting about how we could work the character into the story, and after a bit, AJ, Alex, and I split off to a separate chat to talk about it. I had an idea of a possible romance between a proxy and a runner, and Alex offered to involve an upcoming character he had planned to write. As a result, Poe quickly switched to being female (she had originally been male), the romance developed into a love triangle, and her character started developing.
"Back to the Daily Grind" was the post where I introduced Poe and Caper. Caper was originally named Eternity (or possibly Epitaph; though Eternity was how I remembered it), but I switched it when I realized that it was a terrible name for his character. His nature was cemented with the name change, and Caper became a larger-than-life character designed to steal the whole show. In fact, I purposely built Caper up more to hide Poe's importance. In fact, I edited the original post, which had subtly revealed Poe's gender, to make it even more ambiguous.
There's also still some "Early Installment Weirdness" going on here. Messi's talking about the Slender Man visiting regularly (or as he calls him, "The Boss"), when later on it was implied that Slendy doesn't really care much about what the organization is up to. I'm also a bit embarrassed now by the small-texted "safer for everyone" line. Really, all that did was draw attention to the line when it should have deflected it away. It's really not Messi's style.
Anyway, like the post says, this is really where I started finding my footing and realizing where I was going to go with the blog. I had some advice from AJ and Alex, and I was really excited to start putting it into action.
