D&W Creator Commentary - Chapter 4, Pages 12-13 (Patreon)

Eve - or rather, an idea of Eve - has hovered over Dan's sad little story since the first page of Chapter 1, often literally so. Anybody who's read Dreamspace can probably understand the fixation: more than anything else, the moment Eve walked on out of Dan's life marks the point where Everything Went Wrong(TM). After that: downward spiral, Skullfuck, dehumanizing delivery job, downward spiral redux... In short, you can't blame the guy for getting a little misty-eyed. 

Still, what Dan's pining for isn't so much a real person as one idealized, computerized moment of time, conveniently frozen for maximum angst. Meanwhile, the world keeps spinning; the girl formerly known as "xxfuckallsystemsxx" has sprung for a haircut, bought a highly sensible cardigan, knuckled down on her thesis, and is now ready to minister to the downtrodden with every ounce of wisdom three-fourths of a psych degree can offer. Eve, bluntly, has moved on, gotten her act together. Dan... Dan, not so much, and that mismatch brings a tad more frisson to what's already a pretty damned awkward encounter. 

With such a central role in Dreamspace, it was only a matter of time before Eve popped up in D&W. Getting to the "how" was, as ever, a bit of a process: Claire's original notes had Eve getting nabbed by the creeps behind Skullfuck, who eventually strong-arm her into sending that fateful, wormy e-mail to Dan. The rescue-the-princess angle didn't sit right with either of us, though; roping her into Dan's (reluctant) rehab dealt Eve a far kinder hand and gave us a venue to tease out more detail about her personality. The simple, gentle normalcy of Eve's appearance is also a bit of a pin to the OTT character of her implant-induced cameos; after years of build-up, the ghost-in-the-machine vision that's haunted Dan's waking and dreaming life is... people. Decent people (a confessed rarity in our alt-'90s hell), but people nonetheless. 

Speaking of personality, we went back and forth a few rounds re: how candid Dan would be with Eve here. I liked the idea that he'd just come out and admit his problems for once; after three chapters of watching our man stonewall, lie, and lie-by-omission his way through damned near everything, it'd have been a striking change of pace. But realistically, that requires just a bit more personal growth than Dan has managed to scrape together thus far. Maybe next time?