Balthazar Loves Ceres

I’m setting up the “flavor text” chapter intros for the second story arc of The Demon King, and I want these to convey more of a sense of the character of the person writing them, ie, Balthazar when he was younger. I especially want to suggest that he’s in love with Ceres through the passages he writes about Whitespire.

At the present of the story, he loves her mostly out of habit. This isn’t to suggest that he doesn’t care for her deeply, but rather that he takes his love for granted and doesn’t question it.

But why did he fall in love with her in the first place, during an earlier timeline?

It happened partially because he was (rightly) fixated on her as a key to finding what he was looking for, and partially because she openly expressed interest in him for reasons of her own. Physical attraction is another part of it, as is the fact that she saw him and talked to him at a low point in his life, when he was at his most desperate and inhuman.

So this is something that I’m going to have to think about. Like, Ceres isn’t a good person, and she was genuinely frightening when Balthazar first met her. She’d just killed her mother, and she didn’t make any secret of the fact that she wouldn’t hesitate to kill him. So what did he see in her?

Idk, most of the literary fiction I read that was written by straight men boils down to this: He’s kind of pathetic and he just loves her okay. And maybe that’s enough...?

Re: Balthazar Loves Ceres

I also want to say that it's wild to try to construct an elaborate epic backstory for characters who are, in the current chapter, mainly interested in making jokes about oral sex.

This is also why I'm going to have to learn how to draw these characters myself instead of commissioning comics. I would never, not in a million years, ask anyone to draw porn, and it turns out that I'm also extremely hesitant to ask someone to draw two characters standing next to each other and making jokes about porn.

I have fantasies about writing a comic script, hiring someone to draw it, and then Kickstarting the project like a proper graphic novel, but I'm deeply embarrassed about going up to someone I've never met in real life and being like, "Hey, I love your art. How do you feel about drinking and dick jokes?"

I blame YA fiction tbh. Every time I try to dip a toe into, like, ask blogs about publishing genre fiction, I always nope right the fuck away. Even though what I'm writing isn't remotely YA, the YA fiction purity police somehow manage to get their sticky fingers into everything, and that whole scene is like evangelical Protestant Christianity on steroids.

I just want to write about tired working professionals in their thirties finding common ground in awful dad jokes and horrible dirty humor, is that really so wrong.