#Despite (or perhaps due to) being the first of the cast created Ashan wound up being the most different from his initial draft

[autumnalwalker]

Hej hej! I poked around a little and Empty Names sounds really fun! Especially the rather grumpy demon in the beginning of the first chapter. They need like... a coffee or something. May I ask what inspired you to start it? I read you wanted to try and write more prose-like things, but what inspired this specific story?

So, it's actually a little embarrassing, but Empty Names basically exists because of Internet Discourse about a video game I've never played.

So, back in August of 2022, the character Bridget was added to the fighting game Guilty Gear Strive, and in that process was confirmed as being trans. For additional context for anyone not familiar with Guilty Gear (and please, take all this with the giant disclaimer that I haven't actually played the games myself), Bridget was first introduced back in 2002 or so as a boy who (for convoluted plot reasons that I'm not going to try to recap) was raised as and dressed like a girl but still identified as male. So, twenty years later and that bit of character development rolls around. Some people were happy about it, and some people were not.

One of the more interesting (to me anyway) things that it seemed I kept seeing in the resulting Discourse was the fact that a certain subset of people unhappy about Bridget being trans claimed they felt they'd lost the niche representation of "guy that presents in a feminine manner but is still secure and comfortable in his masculinity/gender identity." This got me on the idle thought experiment of "What if a story had a character like that, but then also had a trans woman?" This led to the prototypes for Ashan and Lacuna respectively.

I then took that a step further and went "Okay, now flip it and have a masculine-presenting woman and a trans man," and thus Eris and Sullivan. And then because the "five man band" trope is fun but I have perhaps too much of a love for organizational symmetry we then had Road being genderfluid and mostly-but-not-always going by they/them.

Now I had a bunch of characters I didn't know what to do with, but wanted an excuse for them to interact. The urban fantasy/"monster of the week" vibe seemed like as good an excuse as any to toss them into situations together and it was a different enough type of story from The Archivist's Journal that it seemed like good practice for expanding my range.

(Meanwhile, The Archivist's Journal exists because the password for my FFXIV account got stolen and I got locked out of playing it for two weeks, so I was bored and while doing the dishes one night I realized it had been a while since I'd done much creatively.)