Character Design: Amelia
MAKING THE HORIZON is the beginning of a compendium series. Set in a barren, sandbox world, 13 humans are left by a crazed mage to craft reality to their whims. The book, and its successors, are currently in development, the unguaranteed process shared with you as I work.
I’ve talked about Amelia before, her evolution
somewhat personally controversial, but the results striking me in a special way.
Amelia Yuèzhèng is a second-generation
American, a concert violinist and mother stolen from our world to be put into
the Sandbox with the other artists as part of a mage’s sick experiment on human
creativity.
Amelia is different from the other Sandbysk gods
in that she is the only one who truly lost something in her kidnapping. While
so far she is the sole victim with a family in the real world, she is also the
primary antagonist of the piece.
I’m not going too much into her race as I have
done so in prior blog posts. I’m a believer that there needs to be more
diversity in literature, that it would be more interesting, bare minimum, and
so when I first decided upon the thirteen original gods taken from our world,
it was obvious that I would have a good racial sampling. I made it completely
random, using the percentages from the American Census Bureau, but the
character really became fully-fledged after I had already assigned, The God of
Justice his race.
Yes. Amelia was originally meant to be a man.
Like Havana, Amelia was a part of the first two
gods’ domains I knew I had to have. While playing Dungeons and Dragons, there
were two religious figures ‘good’ aligned paladins could worship. One was the
Lady of Light, a kind and merciful goddess, and the other was a knightly-based
male who was more wrathful than he was good. I found that the paladins of our
group tended to be power hungry and controlling, less heroic and more
self-motivated.
Some of the things they did were more evil than
the players who were trying to be
evil. Under the idea of ‘justice’ of course.
I wanted a god like that, someone whose followers
did some amoral things in the name of goodness, who wasn’t completely a villain,
but wasn’t completely heroic either.
Amelia came into frame the moment I rolled her
race, looked down and thought, “Great. I’ve made a non-white villain.”
Despite my attempts for a realistic sense of
diversity, the characters came out more or less white-washed. My two initial
leads rolled Caucasian, and it worried me that my singular Asian character was
the main villain. Though as I develop the story more, the more interesting
characters and other love stories aren’t, so my fears of following racist
trends in literature have lessened. Havana, The Mother of life, a young Hispanic
woman, is more or less a keystone in
most aspects of the story, everything revolving around her in some form, and Angel,
the God of Risk, a young Hispanic man, has stolen the show.
In rolling, I asked myself what specific
stereotypes I would be buying into for my God of Wrath being Asian. Are Asian
people often labeled wrathful?
Well, tiger
moms, I thought.
The idea struck me hard the moment I had it. It
terrified me. In order for her to be a tiger mom, it would mean she would have
to have a child. “No, no, that won’t work. She’ll never get to see him again!”
But, actually, that would explain a lot.
Over the last few years I’ve been working on a
book I entitled, “The Worst Book I’ve Ever Written,” or, “Another World,” as it says on my document. The main character is an
awful sonofabitch who leaves her husband and baby to pursue a career in
writing.
Amelia became the flipside of that. Instead of
abandoning her baby, she would do anything to get back to him. This would
explain her anger, the way she sees the creations (the people of Sandbysk) as
merely tools for her own devices.
It all made sense. And more to the point, it made
her dear to me.
Even though Ronny of Another World was initially based off of me—what if I had a family, how would it affect my writing career and my dreams for the future—I don’t relate to her, and am disgusted with her actions. Amelia was more like me than Ronny ever will be. As much as I’d like to be whisked away to another land, not if it meant leaving my child behind.
The other gods (so far) come to term with their
kidnapping, they explore the world and the things they can create, and turn
their attention elsewhere. But Amelia struggles to forget the world she’s left
behind.
Amelia has of yet to appear in the actual
manuscript, but she is a force to be reckoned with. She appeared quickly and
readily, taking the book by storm. Admittedly, the God of Justice wasn’t going
to be that crucial to the plot, sort of a remote, judgmental eye. But the God
of Justice wasn’t Amelia, and Amelia can’t be ignored.
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