#bc when the Sexy Charming Villain loses his cool its Extra Scary

[thewhumperinwhite]

🔨 Are there any whump tropes that you'd love to see your OC's reactions to even though you couldn't or wouldn't put it into your actual story for whatever reason?

✂ Is there a plotline that you'd planned to write but for whatever reason has been abandoned?

🥇 Pick one aspect of your story that you are particularly fond of. Anything at all.

OOH okay good question. Alright. So.

Hammer: I really really love mind control, and for some fucking reason I have written a vampire story where the vampires don't have mind control!!!! a perfect fuckin opportunity and I have wasted it!!! I think I wanted it to be clear that Karim is stuck with Micah because of Good Old Fashioned Emotional Manipulation and not because of magic, and also because i hate myself i guess.

(i do have a... maybe-canon-maybe-not post-story arc for ATTD that heavily features mind control, which i am Obsessed With, but it would be extremely difficult to write it without a Big Big Spoiler for ATTD so once again I have placed myself in a mind-control-less hell of my own making. 😔

Scissors: It's more of a scene than a plotline, but I had a whole scene plotted out for WKW where everybody's at like a grand ball and Morden tells Thorne to dance with Andry, and Thorne goes into Good Boy Mode and picks up on how funny (and maybe hot) Morden and all the rest of the Falconers think it is when he pushes Andry around in public, and he gets carried away and kisses Andry in front of everybody. Thorne is not thinking too hard about Why Morden Might Like That, he was operating 100% on Make Master Happy So Master Wants To Keep Me instincts, and he's confused afterward about why Andry, who has been starting to very cautiously open up, is suddenly cold as ice again. And then Endure happens before they actually Talk About It.

Buuuuut I couldn't find room for it in To Bid You All Welcome, which was already getting untenably long, and it feels weird to have two different Big Fancy Parties within such a short time span, so it never worked out. sigh

Medal: I really really like my villains, lol, and especially how they fulfill their roles in their various stories. in particular I think the contrast between Morden and Micah (the Vampire Daddy from atykm) is really, like. Funny???

Because, like, Morden is competent and sexy and like... a fairy tale villain? Honestly, he's just a few extra sex crimes away from being a disney villain. if you asked him what his alignment was he would say its capital e Evil. And I don't think he's like a cartoon, really, either! He's just a guy who has a lot of power and thinks he's entitled to more social status than he's been granted, and he thinks he Gets To burn the whole world down if he wants to, and he's having fun doing it. So he's always a balance between Genuinely Reprehensible And A Real Threat while also being, like... "likeable" is maybe not the right word but like. Fun To Watch, certainly.

And meanwhile Micah is like... the exact opposite of that. What appeals to me about him is that he is, stripped of all artifice, Deeply Pathetic. He's just a sexual predator with magic powers. The only thing he's good at other than Being A Vampire is sensing other people's vulnerabilities and exploiting them (and he didn't even get that right tbc: he has Deeply Underestimated most of his coven and they're going to fucking Get Him pretty soon). So he's a really fun balance too, because i get to figure out how to make it clear that he is Not A Criminal Mastermind, he's just privileged and confident, without lowering the stakes of the story--he's a pathetic old man, but he also has the power to Literally Ruin Everything.

...this got longer than i meant it to be lmao BUT basically the thing I am proud of is!! the way both of these Evil Men fit into and improve their stories while..... also being exactly What I Want From My Whumpers at different times 😁