In honor of me finally troubleshooting all the problems out of this paperback edition of The Demon Lord is Apathetic, I have made this post…criticizing it?
Look, I did put a lot of work into this story and I do think it’s enjoyable enough to warrant a spot on the shelf. But I did make some poor decisions with it. So let’s take a look and move from small-scale stuff that possibly nobody but me noticed to the big picture.
You don’t need to have read the story to read this post. Extremely minor spoilers ahead!
#5: The Velvets. Why Did I Draw Them Like This?
Alright, so around ch. 150, there’s some minor side characters in a demonic auction house called “the velvets.” They’re dry, cynical butler-types, and for some reason they also have martial-arts-esque fighting skills. As depicted in the chapter illustrations, they look like this:
And I was either so into this character design or so devoid of other ideas for a later chapter illustration that soon I also drew this:
Whenever I see this rabbit…pigeon…beak…wrinkle guy, my soul shakes its soul-head. Not because he’s weird and wrinkly, but because I know what inspired his design.
I was deeply intrigued by the character design of Brother Rabbit from Coonskin.
“Of course,” I changed this literal-black guy, who very obviously represents a Black man in the film, from a tough-as-nails dude in a razor-edged satire into…um…a wrinkly white butler. A bunch of wrinkly white butlers.
Look, it’s the ears. I really just wanted to borrow those ears. The ears and the eyes. Maybe a fraction of the cynicism. That’s all! I wasn’t really thinking beyond that. Or maybe I thought it was playful irony? And that nobody would know the source? Well, little did Past Me know I would be betrayed by Future Me.
Earlier, I also devised a different character with “Coonskin rabbit ears” (though huge-er and chunkier) because I was just that into it. I was just that invested. At least this time I was somewhat more aware of the implications of what I was doing. This other black, rabbitized man is Mo, one of the four Rad Rabbits. He is featured in some zine I did called Carrot Informer, but he is also the villain in a comic class project I did called “Dub Rabbit and the Carrot Baby!”
In-universe, he was created by a well-meaning but inept Black businessman who says he just wanted to share the stories of Brer Rabbit with the world. Naturally this man decides that the story will be retold by Screech from Saved by the Bell. The Letters to the Editor section of his comic is filled with both complaints and confusion.
#4: These Chapter Names Make Me Shrivel
There are three rather specific chapter names that I hate to even absorb with my eyebobs:
Chapter 36: STAB the Brute!
I was so confident about this when I was first putting pen to pa—uh, finger to keyboard. “This is so brash, so confident! It almost sounds accusatory! It’s badass. The world will agree!”
You may agree or disagree, but now it just strikes me as overconfident. Maybe it also reminds me of phrases like “HELL yeah! DO the thing!” which I never really clicked with.
Chapter 60: Imploding Doggy Syndrome
The very existence of a character named “Doggy” was me adding something that I assumed other people would find funny, or at least amusing, and yet I never found funny, or even amusing. Then I tried to be cute with this off-kilter chapter name. “Woah! THIS one’s gonna raise eyebrows! Parents, shield your children’s eyes!!!”
Chapter 70: Echo Bissotwo
I know why I did this, I just don’t approve of it. “Bissotwo” just isn’t a cool-enough term. At some point on some website/s, I had retitled the chapter to “Echo #2,” but then I forgot to change it elsewhere. Well, as celebrity judge Glenn Hetrick famously put it in season 1 of the SFX makeup reality competition Face-Off, this will stand as “a vessel of my ineptitude.”
Also, I could’ve sworn I called a chapter “Kitty Come Play?” or used that as the end-of-chapter stinger somewhere, but apparently I either deleted that or left that on the cutting-room floor of my earlier draft. PHEW. We can leave that one in the stone age.
#3: “Isn’t It So Epic that Scimitars Are Curved and Used by Villains?”
I haven’t reread these parts of the story in a while, but I seem to recall everyone’s favorite demon lord Nyx fighting an evil spider woman who used scimitars. And after that, I also seem to recall Nyx getting unusually excited about this curved shortsword they come into possession of.
I mean, Nyx also has a gun at this point, but a sword with a curve in it? Are you fuckin’ kidding me?! Weapons don’t get any stronger than this!!!
Scimitars and curved blades in general are among the most stereotypical swords of evil. “Swarthy” cruel brigands use them in 50s pirate and desert-adventure movies and get swashbuckled off their feet by straight rapiers. I was actually reading Orientalism by Edward Said right around the time I was writing this, but it didn’t make a fucking dent.
If Nyx hadn’t been a neutral-to-evil demon lord , I don’t think I would have made them get so hot and sweaty over these conspicuously curved blades, and if this weren’t a story about villainous villain-villains, I doubt I would’ve included any curved blades in this weird, medieval-European-but-they-have-brown-skin-I-guess setting at all.
Well, at least I know for a fact that I included a chakram because I thought it was cool in a non-evil way. That won’t help me get to sleep at night, though.
#2: There’s a Wendigo? Whyyyyy
Somewhere in Book 1, a dwarf dude tells an elf girl and other fellow travelers a scary campfire story about how his village in the wintery north was terrorized by a wendigo.
I picked up the idea of using a wendigo from Shin Megami Tensei. Shin Megami Tensei should not be our fountain of respectful depictions of religious and fantastical figures from around the world. It’s a standard RPG. It turns them into Pokémon. It’s not about education, it’s about punching Hanuman in the face. Seeing a character in it is not a green light for us to say, “Hey! I guess this creature is in the public domain now…and free for my own characters to punch in the face!”
At the time of writing this chapter, I just thought, “Hey, I guess the wendigo is in the public domain now! It would be so cool if I at least put in a little hint of other global cultures. It’ll be alright if I have a side character talk about the creature so that it only features in the story as hearsay. That way, the wendigo will never actually be onscreen. There are no problems with my depiction anymore!” Blegh. Vomit!
I wasn’t raising awareness of other cultures by including a wendigo, a chakram and a scimitar in this wacky small-time fantasy story. I was fooling around with things I thought were interesting. That’s not an innocent act! Indigenous folklore, among countless other things, is continually looted and paraded around as “cute little toys we can play with.”
No! No. I could have swapped the wendigo out with so many other things. Riffing on some creature in a cultural matrix I feel myself a part of, the same way I have in other stories—using certain figures of Christianity and tropes of high fantasy, for instance—would also have opened the door to more creativity. Because I actually know things about those and I don’t know anything about the wendigo.
#1: I Didn’t Study the Genre At All
I fully admit that I wrote a story about a demon lord because I thought other people liked reading stuff about demon lords. Like a shrewd and sweaty businessman, only with none of the marketing knowledge.
I can count the number of times I’d encountered a demon lord in fiction on one hand. I loved Disgaea, so I used that as major inspiration. Beet the Vandal Buster was also up there. Beyond that, the pickings are getting slim. I had beaten Dragon Quest 4, does that count? There was the Red Guy in Cow and Chicken. I think I watched one episode of The Devil is a Part-Timer, and that alone says it all.
Lord Nyx has demonic servants, runs a castle, and goes to the underworld. That’s kind of the extent of their demon lord-ness. The part where they crush a village under their bootheel was a footnote in my earlier draft and is barely extended here.
There is very little other demonic presence on the planet of Darshanna (wait…why did I name this planet after the religious concept of darshan when I learned about that in a class for about five minutes and have totally forgotten what I’ve learned? Ugh). When another demon lord’s kingdom does appear, it is…get this…a filler arc added in post.
What do demon lords typically do in stories like this? What are the genre standbys? I still don’t know! I never read in the genre! So the result was a rambling, even random story.
I think The Demon Lord is Apathetic would have been far more successful if I had 1) added some more dramatic splash, better setups and payoffs throughout, stronger and clearer plot arcs, but also 2) wedded these characters I sincerely came to adore to the kinds of things people likely came for. Big demon-vs.-demon battles. A little diplomacy and warfare. Instead, the world is odd. Maybe original, but not well thought out. I know because I’m the one who thinked what thoughts there are.
Now I know better. I read more broadly and go toward ideas I find more compelling. The Learning Journey may never end but at least I know not to give every villain a scimitar. Gosh.
Writing Accountability Corner: How is Catgirl System Doing? Kitty come play???
Uh…er…I held off on posting this 90-percent-finished post for a few days in hopes that I’d finish more Catgirl System work by that time. But as it turned out, that did not motivate me…because I needed to catch up on a bunch of other stuff first, and when I have enough to do, I have a habit of saying, “I can’t possibly do even 30 minutes of this other important thing. After all, that other important thing doesn’t have a close deadline! It all has to wait.”
Therefore, I’ve edited and tidied up 3 chapters of Catgirl System Book 3. I’m not behind and yet I always feel behind. Darnit, I guess this is why no backlog besides a totally finished backlog is ever enough.
Well, non-Catgirl work is coming to more of a lull. I propose a new goal for myself: finish polishing 3 upcoming chapters per week. That will keep me going at the same pace at which Catgirl chapters are released online. It will still feel like “the bare minimum” in my heart, but my mind knows that life is lumpy, sudden new events are constantly happening, and the people in my life generally want me to take responsible breaks.
Thank you for reading, and Patrons, thank you for Patreonning.
On the other side of the story-creating coin, there’s the things I don’t regret…which I talk about more often. Learn what went into my current serial’s DNA in The 5 Secret Rules of Catgirl System. Or learn how to harden your heart against criticism (from within and without) by Thickening That Skin!