Marryanne, Eve, and Yelena; representing chains
Hey world!
So, I think it would be fair to say my series has a lot of symbolism in it. From the characters themselves to the lesser Gods of the Rizen cult to the very concept of the Abyss itself.
Marryanne is, for all intents and purposes, the key to this series. Nothing else would have come to be if not for her.
Yelena is one of the stand-alone parts of this. She means something both old and new; the past and the future, the old self becoming the new, the self-realizations one has when they grow and evolve and learn, and how those realizations can hurt equally as much as they can help.
Eve is the other standalone. A separate character from the series but still equally important. In a sense, Eve is the guide. They help spur things along when the path is too dark to find, or the weight is too heavy to bear.
Pictured: me whenever Fatal Frame does anything scary (I couldn’t find the artist for this one :( )
The Fatal Frame games have an interesting relationship with weight.
The first is about discovering what happened to a manor in the past and feels a bit more dissociated with the death and weight of the series as a whole to me.
The second game is far more personal; Mio and Mayu, the leading characters, are siblings drawn to an old dead village. There they become intwined with the village’s past and descend into the madness that overtook the place. The twins must make a final choice before they leave, and that choice is intertwined with death itself.
FF3 is far more intimate with its relation; the protagonists are all survivors in some form, their loved ones taken from them without choice. As they are drawn into the ‘manor of sleep’ that is the game’s setting they are confronted with an ever-encroaching choice: to follow their loved ones into the abyss or to reject their beckons and continue living.
FF4 focuses more on medical malpractice and the lengths some go to bring their loved ones back. It ends on a somewhat bittersweet note though.
FF5 is where things get rough. The game has a heavy but not exploitative focus on suicide, on dying and the beliefs one passes with. All of these games have some sort of ‘chains’ on them, a weight that never quite eases but 5 is far more open and far more relentless with how visible and how heavy those metaphorical chains are.
The weight of these same kinds of ‘chains’ is present in my books too, though not as a symbolism for death or grief as much as the all-encompassing weight of mental struggle. The Void, the Abyss, whatever title gets slapped to it, it is more than just a dark omnipresence but a feeling, a thought, a memory, even a sound that evokes those least-liked memories in a person.
Okay, now for something lighter! Don’t want to make you think my work is just about cults and death and violence, just part of it!
I’ve come up with other series ideas over the writing of my current series. It isn’t going to take a backseat, far from that in fact. It’ll still be the prime focus, but the need to write something else that’s lighter in comparison has been growing on me since I began drafting this series over 10 years ago (holy cow it’s really been a long time).
My focus now, aside from editing Book 1 and drafting books 5 and 7 is focused on drafting the first manuscript for my next series. It’ll still have weight to it, still be dark and have those chains at times, but it won’t be nearly as constant.
Flea and Rorschach, that’s all I’ll drop for now!
Pictured: Art from the game Elden Ring. This piece has probably influenced the fantasy idea I’ve been brewing more than any other thing.
