Dissecting a Succubus - "Joey Farrell Walks Into An Obvious Booby Trap" (pt2) (Patreon)

And part 2 of the author's commentary on my recent boobie monster girl story, "Joey Farrell Walks Into An Obvious Booby Trap."  There will likely be spoilers, so make sure to read the story first.

First part was designing the monster.  The second part is how to fit characters and story around her.

Given what Oppa is, the idea I had was for her to be part of some form of trap.  While chasing after a warlock, the protagonist would inadvertently activate the trap and fall into Oppa's lovely clutches.

I even had a warlock I could use—'Skinny Blue' from "A Trial in Vennington".

In the first draft of "Trial", 'Skinny Blue' was originally a big fat pagan nature goddess in a voluminous green dress.  It didn't work, especially as the other female character—'Red'—was already a fairly over-the-top caricature.  I made her sleeker and more dangerous (with a Matrix-style look).  It also played better with the scenario.  The other goons are there out of a misguided sense of 'justice'.  'Skinny Blue' is there as it gives her an excuse to feed a chump to a succubus and get off on watching him get sucked dry.

This led me to envisage her as an opportunistic chaosbringer.  In observing all the various real-life culture war nonsense, I've noticed there are no shortage of malignant narcissists willing to glom onto an issue and stir things up further to advance their own personal brand.  I liked the idea of creating a villain that was a supernatural version of that.  It also opens up future possible strands with the character—are they doing this for their own personal pleasure, or as part of a plan to serve darker gods?

I like that Weaver also provides a nice contrast with my other witchy character—Annette Brite.  Weaver is more mobile and pro-active, but her impetuousness also makes her sloppier.  Victims have a chance of escaping her clutches, whereas those that fall into Brite's webs are usually doomed.  I like having a contrasting character like that running around, so we'll likely see more of Linda Weaver.

As for her name, I've been moving away from naming characters after things I like, but for her I felt I had to make an exception.  Given that she was inspired by the various malignant narcissists fouling up geek culture at the moment, I really didn't want her to be seen as a specific Take That! to anyone in particular (I think Take That!'s are really bad for reasons I might explain in a future post).  As a result, I thought I'd name her after the two actresses responsible for portraying two of the most beloved kickass female characters in movie history.  So, despite her villainous nature, the root of her name is very much a homage.

Next, we get to our unfortunate (or fortunate!) Joey Farrell.  I am conscious that my irritation with current culture war nonsense has dragged a little bit of politics into my recent stories.  I don't want to be seen as one side or the other, so I wanted to balance things out with a more positive left-wing protagonist—in this case a community-focused activist more interested in devoting his time to fixing his local women's shelter than getting shouty at policemen/politicians on camera.

Whatever your political stance, I think it's a good exercise to try and create sympathetic characters from opposing political stances.  You can still make them villains and cannon fodder, but at least they will be more rounded villains and cannon fodder.  In the past I tried to do this for the other side with stories like "Busted Bankster" and "Welcome to the City."  With recent stories like "A ProudMaleFeminist Gets Creamed" I felt I was in danger of slipping a little too far to the right, so I deliberately set myself a challenge of 'make your next protagonist a decent, likeable left-wing student activist type'.  Happily, this also works well with the story as Farrell's idealism provides a great contrast with Weaver's self-serving opportunism.

The next step is how to get them into conflict, and once again I'm going to have to be a bit of a choad and bump that off to a future part 3.

I'm still having a few problems writing these non-fiction pieces.  Once they go past a certain length my brain goes a little haywire trying to crop them down into short blog posts.  I'm trying to bust through that problem by forcing myself to write these pieces.  You might also have noticed my blog has become a little more active recently with various posts on monster girl hentai games.

This was a bit of a fail as I wasted a lot of time before realising I'd fallen into that bad 'write-crop-write-crop' loop, and should stop and move the last segment to another post.  Still working on things.

Anyway, I hope this was interesting and will help other people looking to spice up their characters in their own succubus smut stories.

(Never forget your priorities, though.  If you're writing erotica (or horror, sci-fi etc), that should always be the most important part.  The rest is spice.  It adds to the flavour, but you still need the main dish to add it to.)

Until next time.

-manyeyedhydra