And so, marks the end of the ping-pong match - the final round. 'Twas a messy tale that no one can doubt nor really see with the airs of polish covering up the great tales, great detail comms, great time crunches and great banter in-between. As such, I present two quotes today and a lil' message as always below:
"Women hold up half the sky" - Mao Zedong. A saying still true in oure modern epoch; for no revolutionary movement is complete without the complete liberation and upheaval of females.
"Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included" - Karl Marx.
I think it is fair that I interject this last quote in the last closer for the first ever ping-pong match here that I had with @brisby. So fair that it encapsulates the underlying inspiration for the works I've been trying to work out, and this has been the most explicit since the second round to here. Saddie had been, since her inception, a hypothetical friend to Ashley/Ashuri in the horrid biz of "bad stuff" society irks away from: witchcraft, thievery, wetworks (sorry, this is the safe for work version to a now normalized word on news recently when it comes to people committing one act to another causing death) and so on and so on. Yet as I played around with Saddie, taking it far back to the young-teen scene, did I see a character blossom in my mind with each petal unfolding in all its oddities. And I needed a spirit to capture this (which is to not suggest all my other non-male protagonists are not rebel rousers as well) and Saddie became a perfect candidate to push their very passion of mine forward.
And this cooperation with @brisby was a tricky proposition, not because @brisby dejected the offering (she more than accepted it) but because of where I wished to go and I wished to handle Saddie without falling into the misogynistic tropes that surrounds females in literature. I was more than gladdened that we managed to give Saddie a fighting spirit and a support cast that more than supported her for her being HER and not because she was merely some token teen that I could've replaced with someone else (which I say shouldn't be an air of accomplishment but I know how hard somehow it is nowadays to not internalize misogyny and having a male character coded in female terms). This immense desire paid off with the introduction of a character I've been meaning to get introduced in my fiction-crafting while also keeping quiet on the background details, say gossip and whispers would Emma be ever mentioned. Glad I was able to work her and make explicit the character of Saddie while respecting the constitutionality of their physical location that they wouldn't merge into one (okay there's clearly historical and character differences, but the joke is: they're so much alike that it's hard to tell their character apart whence they start fighting; trust me, never ever dare piss of a farmer's daughter, they'll chew you alive; or so it was in Eastern Europe, I wonder of my Western European counterparts).
But to wrap up this end blurb forcefully: we ping-ponged a real good match and exacted much on the themes as I expected to be the case. Time for me to pick up on the Ashley-Saddie-Cap'n Wither side plot in the New Angel Saga now...
Thanks again to @brisby for cowriting this tale with me!
We did indeed have a fine ping pong match, Felix! Saddie's road is not one easily traversed. The world she lives in and her involvement with darker elements are far from what the average teen deals with. (Her environment, profession and her personality makes her far from average and yet, she still has relatable trials and feelings that an average teen would have to contend with. )
Thanks to this set of stories, the lovable Goat has found two strong women (who have lived through their own hardships and triumphs) to give her support and be models of how one woman can use her strengths to make a difference in the world.
Again, Felix, thank you letting me write along with you!
Indeed we did @brisby, thx for the collaboration once again. We did tackle a tough subject, but we made sho' to dig a good path for Saddie and avoid tropes that put her down to the Earth for merely existing as a teen in a tough World. I love yah <3