#Basil of Sethwhile

[exileseverafter]

Commission of Ezra Kettle and Prince Basil by @odditiesofnicole navigating the difficult art of...selling to humans who are more interested in your large size than your baked goods. XP  

[exileseverafter]

Exiles Character Inspirations

Or, “Max, what are you doing? Are you putting off finishing the next chapter?” Maybe I am! Maybe.

Ezra Kettle: I make jokes about Grumpy Bear, but honestly I’ve always had a sore spot for the worrywart or sourpuss who cares deeply but can’t express it through sunshine all the time. The characters in Exiles aren’t supposed to be 1:1 parallels to classic fairy tale characters so much as composites. In Ezra’s case, the role he plays in the second chapter is inspired by more sympathetic portrayals of the giant’s wife in Jack and the Beanstalk. She’s someone who trusts Jack and gives him advice to hide him from her husband. As pointed out by Into the Woods, Jack’s actions wrong her when she’s done nothing to him. His actual background has much more in common with Cinderella, and indeed if you read him the stories of Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella he’d probably connect more readily with the latter despite the subject matter. 

While he’s not particularly feminine, Ezra is a male character who tends to take on narrative roles that are traditionally female-coded. His skills and powers are connected to the kitchen and the hearth. He falls in love with Prince Basil in a very deliberately blatant ‘rescue romance,’ tends to play an emotional support role among his companions, and is even in distress in Book One. I didn’t do this to be deliberately subversive in a ‘see what I did there? Feminism!’ way, but just to play around with gender in fairy tales altogether. Often stories will feature the ‘princess who fights,’ but not the ‘man who nurtures,’ and I like to see more of both. 

In retrospect, it isn’t that surprising to me that I started Exiles around the time I was starting to think about my gender identity. That said, no one in Exiles is a self-insert! If anything, I put some of myself in all of them. Yes, even the villains.

Marjorie Snow: Marjorie is kind of a slippery character, and not just in-universe. Sometimes she’s hard for even me to pin down! Book 3 has been difficult to write because she just slips out of the spotlight as if she wants to hide her true nature even from the narrative itself, and I have to prod her back into it. 

She’s partially inspired by the character of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, a self-serving trickster and social climber who uses manipulation to get her way. In earlier iterations of the character she was a lot more genuinely amoral. But I started exploring the idea of someone who had internalized the idea of immorality and being the ‘bad girl’ juxtaposed against some sense of ‘goodness’ that existed in her mind, and feeling she could never escape that badness, but using it in the service of something (or someone) she considered ‘good.’ In that sense, she doesn’t have much in common with Becky at all anymore! So it goes. 

Her fairy tale parallel character appears to be Snow White at first, but I mixed parts of the ‘wicked stepsister’ archetype or the ‘bad girl who opposes the good heroine’ to create someone who is really neither a pure heroine nor truly wicked at all. 

Philomene Marl Thumbelina: Did you know the original version of Philomene as I first imagined her had Basil’s curse and was human-sized? She came about when I doodled a princess in a dress made of quilts with a polar bear companion. Something about the character concept wasn’t quite working in my mind, so I gave her curse to Basil and made her a tiny little princess and the team scientist. She’s probably also the closest the foursome has to a leader, but she’d only admit it reluctantly. 

Her name makes it clear she’s a parallel to Thumbelina, albeit a very loose one. There was an actual in-universe person named Thumbelina who was the founder of the massive City-Colony that bears her name, and one day we may hear her story. Still, Philomene does deal with a frog who wants to marry her, and like all Flower Folk she was born out of a flower. The fate of Thumbelina Kingdom at the beginning of Book One is taken from Sleeping Beauty, and the Marl family has 12 sisters because of...well, the Twelve Dancing Princesses. That last one’s more of a shallow shout-out than anything else, I’ll admit. 

This is going to feel a little obvious to some of you, but she was pretty heavily inspired by Princess Bubblegum. I like princesses and I like scientists, what can I say? But I was also thinking about how someone who had political power and responsibilities would deal with a world that is mostly enormous and full of dangers, the World of Towers as her kinfolk put it. She tries to understand dilemmas as a problem that needs solving or a question that has a definite answer, and she seeks that answer through research, trial and error. Sometimes this leads to her taking a rather narrow view of the situation, but she may need to do so in order to avoid being overwhelmed. 

Oh, and she’s also got a little bit of Sailor Mercury in there. 

Basil of Sethwhile: Basil was always Prince Charming! Or a Prince Charming wannabe, at least. Granted as a reader pointed out, he grew up mostly isolated with fairy caretakers and animal companions, brave but naive about the world and eager to break out of his restraints and save himself. So in a way, he’s Prince Charming but also a Disney Princess, isn’t he? 

At his hammiest, Basil is invoking Amelia from Slayers, Prince Edward from Enchanted, or just about any optimistic shonen anime protagonist you can think of. I’m also pulling more than a little bit from the character of Utena Tenjou, someone who seeks to become the prince no matter how difficult that may prove to be. (There’s a reason the ‘original’ Prince Charming was a woman, and that’s because of Revolutionary Girl Utena.) 

He thinks only Prince Charming can break his life-threatening curse, and deep down he’s terrified of the idea of waiting/relying on someone else to save his life. So this is basically Prince Charming striving to become Prince Charming in order to save himself. He is both the prince and the princess archetype in those terms, I suppose. But it’s impossible for a person to be a perfect archetype...

Playing off that duality, his backstory is pulling from Sleeping Beauty, but the curse itself is more inspired by Kai’s condition in The Snow Queen. I suppose I could say Aurora comes from East of the Sun, West of the Moon, but truthfully I just like bears. 

[exileseverafter]

Exiles Ever After Excerpt:

This is a bit from Book One. It was neat going back to older writing and seeing how it all started! Characters: Ezra Kettle, a giant (minigiant, technically, 12.5 feet tall)  Basil and Marjorie, humans  Philomene Marl Thumbelina, a Flowerling (a few inches tall, Borrower-sized effectively)   The thick wooden table had obviously been built by the previous owner, a man considerably taller than Ezra. Marjorie and Basil needed to sit on top of cookbooks in order to reach. The tiny Flower being sat on the table with her dress puffing out around her, somehow dignified despite being covered in a dusting of flour. The moth, which Ezra now recognized as the one which had landed on him when he’d first arrived, was sitting on the kitchen wall and resting. It was a little hard for Ezra to see the princess. He could make out a humanoid shape with dark skin, black hair with purple streaks that must have been ribbons, and a purple gown with bell sleeves. Her face was too small to perceive. If he had to concentrate to notice a human’s eye color, he would need a magnifying glass to read her expressions. It meant he had to rely on her voice and broader expressions to communicate with her. And what if his voice sounded like an earthquake to her? If humans were enormous in comparison to Philomene, how must he look? Self-consciousness made him sink back into his seat. What nonsense! His was the default size, so why did it bother him now? It was Marjorie who spoke first, at the princess’s blessing. Her face was a little red and there was a hint of unsteadiness in her voice, but she otherwise hid any shame she felt at having hidden Philomene from them. “So! As I’m sure you have figured out by now, this is our true reason for hiding out here. In all fairness to me, and I think I do deserve at least some fairness, I did tell Ezra that I was here on behalf of my mistress in distress. And she is absolutely in distress.” “So it would seem, milady.” Basil was switching between studying the princess and giving confused looks to Marjorie. He seemed a little put off by the size of the furniture, insisting on standing on his chair. “But why did you tell me you had a sick grandmother?” Marjorie frowned and tapped her chin. “That was a lie, yes. My grandmother is dead. But you have to understand, we were out here in the middle of nowhere and it was quite a stressful situation. Very much a change from palace life. You’re a prince, surely you must understand that?” “Marjorie!” Philomene’s tiny voice somehow managed to fill the room anyway. She stood up with the help of her cane and managed to stare down Marjorie. “We misled that poor boy and our landlord. Even if it was fear of my own safety, that doesn’t justify it.” She turned towards Basil and Ezra, giving a bow. “As this was done in my name, I ask you to accept my apology. We will explain everything; we owe you that much.” Marjorie looked for a moment as if she’d been slapped. “Princess, you needn’t apologize for me. I-I mean…” She looked so much like she wanted to sink into the wood of the chair that Ezra felt it difficult to maintain his irritation with her. “It’s alright,” he mumbled. “Really. Mostly I’m just hurt that you thought I’d ever endanger Princess Philomene.” He glanced away, hiding a scowl. “I know I’m bigger than you all and must be a frightening sight sometimes, but I’d rather not be treated like a criminal down here before I’ve even had a chance to do anything.” Not that he’d done anything up there, he added mentally. At least he could understand why the humans might regard him with suspicion, though it was impossible to tell what the little Flower Folk thought of him. “Anyway.” He clasped his hands under his chin. “You can stay here as long as you like, if it’s still safe for you. I’m not sure why you call me ‘Landlord’ since neither of you pay any rent, but Marjorie did tell me about the Market. I wouldn’t be able to make a living without it. And a baker who can’t bake is like a…a…it’s a…I’m not a poet and I’m no good at metaphor. You know what I mean.” He heard a tiny giggle from Philomene. “That’s simile, Mr. Kettle. But thank you! It will be a great asset to have you on our side. Nobody threatens a giant…” At this Ezra felt himself blush and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You’d be surprised…” But even if it was only due to his relative size, it did feel nice to be wanted for once. Wasn’t he supposed to be angry at Marjorie for lying? He really was a pushover.

If you liked this and want to read more, check out the full story at The Exiles Ever After on Archive of Our Own! And let me know what you think!   

[exileseverafter]

Ezra and Basil, what is one thing that will never fail to make you laugh?

Ezra: It’s kind of strange, but I don’t always laugh when I see something funny?  I smile and mumble about how it’s funny, and it’s true, but I don’t laugh. Then I always feel awkward and rude. But when I’m overwhelmed and very emotional, sometimes I start laughing. I guess to relieve tension? Is that normal? 

I do like funny expressions or two-person comedy acts, though. And the way a goose’s face looks from the front instead of the side.Basil: I love wordplay! Puns, the worse the better, if we’re being honest. And, oh, whatever it’s called in a stage play when two characters are doing something funny in the background while characters in the foreground just ignore them. That gets me every time. And the way Aurora looks when she rolls on her back in the grass, though then I just laugh because it’s adorable.