Quoted By:
- Who?: Charlotte Fawkins, of course. Charlotte was invented after I made the crucial decision to ditch Ellery as the protagonist, which I did because he was a terrible protagonist. While he was fun to write, he had very little internal "drive", which resulted in him spending the original Drowned getting kicked between bizarre and horrible happenings without any say in the matter. I resolved to replace him with somebody 1. overflowing with drive and 2. with clear integration into whatever plot I cooked up. I think it's obvious that this happened as planned.
To get into specifics, Charlotte was originally generated from two concepts: a vague idea from the original that Ellery's ex-girlfriend would show up, and the thought that Ellery's quirk of meandering tangents could be replaced with a quirk of insulting everybody she saw. Yes, Charlotte was at one point Ellery's bitchy ex. The "ex" stuff was dropped fast (though not fast enough to be left out of the OG Drowned epilogue), but the "bitch" was not, and this remained Charlotte's driving characteristic through development and into early Redux. I did introduce more nuance over time, though, particularly as I fleshed out her relationship with Richard, and by August 2019 I'd landed on "smug, sheltered and delusional" over deliberate cruelty (picrel). This change is what gave Charlotte curly hair, interestingly. She was always blonde, one-eyed, and beauty-marked, but in my original sketches and reference image she had, like, flowing beach waves. When I pivoted away from outright "mean girl," I thought the previous ref no longer fit her, and I picked one with curly hair instead. The rest was history.
Alongside Charlotte, the only other new character I planned in depth was Richard, who also arose from a couple of places. I wanted to keep the innovation of That Guy as a constant companion / straight man, but kind of flip it, with Richard being an external force (vs. internal) and a horrible person (vs. nice and supportive). I was also inspired by the character Hiss of Snakecatcher Quest, a snake-with-human-form deuteragonist with evil intentions and a complex abusive-ish relationship with the MC... or I was anti-inspired, because Hiss was also a much-lusted-over waifu, and to avoid that terrible fate I made Richard explicitly abusive, middle-aged, and your literal dad (or so he claimed). Indeed, none of my players ever remotely considered husbandoing him, so mission accomplished.
