Blog 5: A Brief History of Exiern: Dark Reflections (Part 2) (Patreon)

OK, so having set a bit of the scene with Blog 4, here's a quick summary of how we got to where we are with Dark Reflections (possibly something we'll revisit in greater detail in future but for now, here's some of the key points at least).

I learned about Exiern in August 2015, I believe which was just before Scott posted the first new page of Dark Reflections later that same month with Zen as the author and A+A illustrating it.

What really appealed to me about Dark Reflections was that I've always liked alternate world stories because they can really cut loose from the original in ways the original often cannot (in fact, my first ever comment in an Exiern comment section referenced Dark Reflections as well followed by a number of subsequent follow up comments on the same subject in the same comments section).

They can also build off the back of the original so even though they're different, the world building already done can really help speed things up - both with what's the same but there's a lot of fun to be had with what's different too!

In the case of Dark Reflections, obviously, many years passed between Page 44 and Page 45 (almost a decade!) and of course it was a whole new creative team trying to extrapolate things from what Drowemos had done up to that point?

So what did Drowemos have in mind?

In the days before Patreon existed (so, we're talking around 2007), Dark Reflections was funded by donations and once a threshold was hit, another page would be made. You can still remnants of the donation progress bars if you look at the originally posted pages using archive.org.

In some email conversations with Drowemos, he told me that his original intentions were to have a much more similar universe to the original Exiern universe but much more serious and well ... darker. 

From what I was able to glean (and apologies if I get this wrong), the gist of it was part Butterfly Effect and part what if instead of Typh wanting to change to do good, was instead struggling with his darker nature with no guarantees he'd not ending up giving in to it - or even wanting to.

However with different artists (Dazzler for the title page and then Pages 1-10 and then Master Krakken Pages 11-44), the interpretation of the written description of the story also introduced elements that led to a more pronounced divergence than originally intended over time. Probably the most notable is suggestions of a more technologically advanced present - or is it past? (I guess we'll see!)

I actually liked this outcome, it reminded me of the sci-fi TV show Fringe which had an alternate Earth with some quite different events in its history (additional natural disasters, different US presidents, more zeppelins (yay!), more smallpox (boo!) and better science in many areas) but somehow, a lot of the same people still existed ... just different in many ways. 

I like to think of it that despite the differences, instead of an increasing Butterfly Effect divergence, instead we have a situation where alternate worlds still run parallel to each other in many ways despite the major differences in past history. It's almost as if something is holding them on largely parallel tracks, isn't it? Possibly to be revealed!

The impression I got from asking Drowemos how Dark Reflections ended was that it was a story of limited duration, namely to the extent of how (or if?) Peonie got out of Faden's dungeon. There were four possible outcomes with different combinations of fates for our lead characters. However, as you saw mentioned in Blog 4, circumstances were such that Dark Reflections came to an abrupt end.

Fast forward about eight years and we have as mentioned, Zen's story with A+A's artwork. Of course Zen derived his own ideas of how the story might continue and I quite liked how there was a combination of magic and technology (reminded me of the early Ultima games, especially the first three games). I actually help fund the second page per month to get things moving along faster.

So I guess that leads to the next question which is how did we end up with two Dark Reflections stories? Well, you may have noticed that Dark Reflections eventually petered out due to various behind the scenes production issues as well as Scott also needing the artist for other non-Exiern projects that ... well, let's be honest were more successful at keeping the lights on, so to speak.

Then various things happened which we've covered at different times that led to Scott handing over everything Exiern related to me because of new demands on his money and time. Quite by chance we stumbled across Exiern's first professional artist (after searching and failing!) and that's how we ultimately ended up with two versions of Dark Reflections.

It's not a particularly complicated story, basically that as much as I liked the original continuation of Dark Reflections by Zen, I felt it did unavoidably close a few doors in terms of alternate world storytelling and at its simplest, I also wanted to have a go at an Exiern story.

It's been made very easy for me, though. I've just taken a combination of the alterations in the story plus some seeming differences in the characters that I noticed and plugged it into the original Exiern storyline in order to see what came out. 

Think of it as that being the different data inputted into the computer programme and said programme being the original Exiern story. I didn't have to write anything, just see what came out. I think it's leading in some interesting directions, I hope you all agree!

Anyway, it took over a year to find an artist to even get started with any pages at all, so it was a remarkable stroke of luck to find Exiern's original artist (and also as previously mentioned, an explanation for the source of our angst about what happens if we ever lost our main Exiern artist and didn't have a replacement lined up - it's been perilously close to going from weekly updates to indefinite hiatus for the main webcomic for a few years now!).

There was also the promotional angle as well, of course. As also mentioned in Blog 4, we do need to find places with likely potential audiences to promote Exiern and having a version of the story which meets their criteria (namely no characters under age 18 as per their payment processors - the other versions of Exiern didn't meet this requirement) and conditions also brings in potential readers and even patrons on Patreon. 

That site is TG Comics (aka TGC) and Dark Reflections: Chaos frequently updates on that site here (please note it'd be classed as a NSFW site so please keep that in mind before clicking the link - it does have Dark Reflections: Chaos in a slightly different order and a very handy slideshow format). This ensures periodic and frequent mentions on the home page. As mentioned in Blog 4, Exiern being posted there has been the most successful measure in recent years in boosting Patreon revenue.

So, the TL;DR is that we had Drowemos's original idea which stopped at Page 44 because he couldn't continue at the time, Zen's story which started around 8 years later and then the version called Chaos because I wanted to have a go. Dark Reflections: Zen was named after its author and Dark Reflections: Chaos was named that because, well ... you could say chaos is the opposite of zen? (There wasn't particularly deep thought put into this at the time.)

That's the behind the scenes rationale. As for in universe, you may have noticed there's already been a link between the two Dark Reflections versions as shown in a brief detour in Chaos. There'll be more in the future.

And to wrap up for now, you may have also noticed a relative lack of more Dark Reflections: Zen pages for a while now. There'll be an upcoming announcement about its future coming soon as well.

Thank you for your time and we hope that's been at least a little bit informative and interesting about how some of the Exiern sausage gets made!