Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "peal"

More on the hero of The Straggler's Mask.



He's not the first of my main characters even in his setting (Aurel would hold that distinction, though there's a version of Mirari that's even older), but not only did he end up to be the first one to be published, ever since his conception the vast majority of my story ideas involve him. I guess it's his inherent underdogness – small, weak, and meek – the near-guarantee that he'll be at a serious disadvantage in almost any situation he's put, that makes it easy to write stuff about him. I like underdogs.

Peal hatched in midsummer of the year 1554, as the phase of storm was shifting to rift, under particularly inauspicious auguries. At that time an especially violent thunderstorm was rolling its way above the hills, the forests, the town of Floris, and this one bugbear burrow. Then just as the very first crack appeared in an egg, just as the shaman lit a candle so that a shadow was cast and the newborn was granted a soul - the whole tribe was shaken by the absolutely loudest thunderclap that anyone could remember, like the skies themselves were seriously angered by something no underdweller could even begin to guess.

And so he was named, Peal-Of-Peeved-Heaven. Just Peal, for short. (I don't think he's ever given his full name to anyone actually.)

To a human this may sound like a pretty cool name with a badass origin, but to a bugbear it's... well, imagine if a really awesome and well-respected seer came over when you were born, looked at her seeing stones and fish guts and what have you, then solemnly named you Blind Joe. Even though your eyes work fine. How would that make you feel? How do you think other children would take it, and how would they treat you?

Bugbears like to pride themselves for their stealth, being unseen and silent, and see these traits as the only reason they can survive or prosper in the world at all. Being named basically the antithesis of the whole thing, Peal had few friends in his childhood, and was bullied a lot. No one gave him any respect: he tried hard to be as quiet as the others, but they'd always just laugh and (falsely) claim they could hear him coming from three tunnels away. In truth he was only ever, at worst, a little bit less quiet than the rest - even that because of his insecurities and lack of encouragement.

Usually he'd timidly take all this abuse, but every once in a while his temper would blow over and he would stand up to himself... loudly. As you might imagine, this only made things worse. He got into a few fights that - being nearly always outnumbered - he was bound to lose.

One of the few exceptions to this treatment was a girl bugbear named Floe. A bit older and bigger than him or his peers, she dissuaded the others from picking on him where she could, treated his injuries, comforted him, and was generally really nice to him - a tiny glimmer of warmth in an otherwise rather gloomy life. This not only led to him developing a crush the size of a moon towards her, it had a profound impact on him that would carry on to the rest of his days.

In the emberspring of 1561, some time before his seventh birthday, a number of his peers got each other dared into going outside the burrow, having a breath of the greater world around them, and seeing their shadows. At an age equivalent to a thirteen-year-old human, Peal was pressured into joining, and Floe (who'd gone through the same dare a year before) went along with them to make sure it'd all be okay. This is where things flipped around in a way that no one could foresee and that came to have a lasting impact in not just his life, but the world as a whole.

For a reason or another, Peal was just slightly more taken by the outside world than the others, and a little bit less frightened. He lingered for a bit to look at the stars... then followed a noise, wanted to have a look at the spoils of a battlefield, and came face to face with a dying human hero that gave him the Call to Adventure.

And for all his fears and insecurities, great many desires conspired to accept this Call: he wanted to see more of the world, to get his hands to this treasure promised at the end, to show off to his peers, and to impress his crush.

(A bit of spoilers for The Straggler's Mask follow. Spoiler tags don't seem to work, for reasons I can't tell.)

He had his highs and lows.

He got to experience true and overwhelming loneliness for the first time in his life, but he also made a number of genuine lifelong friends. He got to see endless expanses of the world and even beyond it, realize that there was more to see than he could see in a thousand lifetimes - but it all also nearly got him killed more often than he could count. He learned that the magic mask of courage on him was actually not magic at all, and that the courage was inside of him the whole time. He got his share of the treasure, but by that time had learned that the true treasure he'd attained was something far more than gold or jewelry. He grew to fill the shoes of the hero everyone thought he was, and irrevocably altered the destiny of a world far greater than himself. He returned home at the back of a dragon, to the tune of Return To The Tribe by Edguy.

But it was no longer the home he'd left behind.

No one bullied him anymore. Instead, unexpectedly to him, they came to fear and detest him for all the things he'd seen and done, having truly walked the world above and returned: it's like you never left your house and then went on to spend a year in hell. He had changed: he'd become something none of them, not even Floe, could understand anymore - nor could he understand them in turn.

And he couldn't fit in any better: it felt like such a small place now, cramped and stifling, when the wide world above called for him.

He lasted for maybe a few months - through his eighth birthday - before heading on out once again. He would still visit home, every once in a while over the years - but each visit would be after a longer time than the last, and each time he'd find that they remembered less of him, having reduced him to the status of a folk hero, a cautionary tale, or even a terror in the dark, a haunter, a living shadow.




Over the years to come, Peal goes on to leave his mark into the world in many ways. His activities run the whole gamut between saving children from predators, and taking an active side in the cosmic war between the forces of Law and Chaos. He brings balance to little towns, but also has a hand in toppling entire evil empires as much as rebuilding good ones. He travels to other worlds, alternate dimensions, even the streams of time itself. The high and the mighty come to know his name, and great many of the rest can feel the impact of his deeds.

Problem is, he's not cut for the job at all.

Even having discovered his courage and confidence, it turned out that there isn't much of either in him. He's far from the tall, handsome, and mighty warrior-sorcerer that you'd typically imagine in this line of work. Put him next to his predecessor, Aurel, and he'd look like nothing at all. Indeed, it's often doubtful that he could take on as many as three thugs in a fair fight at once, let alone hordes of mooks like most other heroes could. With almost everyone he ever meets being twice his size, he's easily intimidated. He's naturally a pack creature, yet for his size and meekness - combined with him often facing prejudice for being some weird monstrous little goblin - he has a hard time making friends. Things are often tough for him, especially when he first arrives to a new place and has to tackle all the stares and what have you until he manages to get through someone.

What he needs the most, usually, is for someone to hold on to him, comfort him, and help him unwind all the mental and physical scars his many issues tend to leave behind - and like with Floe, doing so is more than likely to evoke feelings of deeper attraction, which in turn tends to lead to heartbreak. He has a terrible love life and is pretty much inherently incapable of long-term relationships: he'll grow to recognize this eventually, I think, but I'm not at all sure he will ever find a way to amend this flaw.

He adores children. They're small and harmless, and tend to take him for what he is - unburdened by expectations or preconceptions, all they see is some cuddly creature to shower with hugs and affection. Anyone that would harm a child, or knowingly put a child in harm's way, is in for a bad time: he'll pull all stops to put the fear of darkness in such heinous folk.

Really he just wants to see the world, marvel the sights, try the foods and drinks (apple juice is his favourite), befriend the locals, sample everything there is to offer to him, maybe fall in love and actually not blow it for once, instead of getting involved in all these heroics and cosmic wars. But still he persists, because he feels like he can make a stand - and therefore should. Give him some darkness and shadows to lurk in, a few friends to give support, and he'll get the job done.

If he survives, long enough for it to become too much to bear and for his body to start breaking up under him, he'll probably retire somewhere involving children. Perhaps he'll haunt a school or an orphanage somewhere.





(Art credits, in order: Chai, jemmyky, Ink-Stained Matchbox)

So what exactly is Peal? What does it mean to be a "bugbear", apart from some small and timid prey animal? Let's try to figure them out.



When you're a small child, darkness is a living and deathly thing in a way it never again will be as you grow up. Things live under your bed, in your closet, creaking up in the attic or down in the basement... or looking at you through your bedroom window when the lights are shut. The hollow trees, under roots, abandoned buildings, empty playgrounds, dark alleyways, even your dreams - all are teeming with life.

You never see a bogeyman, but you know it's there. Stalking. Waiting. Even as an adult, you're not always sure that you're alone.

So the first question I asked was: "Why do they hide?"

The usual answer, in fairy tales and literature, is that they're predators that are just waiting for you to lower your guard so that they might pounce up and devour you. As dreadful as the empty darkness and occasional glowing pair of eyes is, it's still vastly preferable to the true terror of what they look like.



I flipped the premise around: what if they hid not because they're predators, but because they're the prey?



They're small and weak, scared of all the big loud folk like you and I, or wolves and eagles - but they're quick on their feet and good at laying low. They almost never come out in the open if they can at all help it, so most people don't even believe they exist, let alone know that they're not all that big or scary or toothy after all.

If you're a small child living out in a small village or farm, or an ancient manor or castle, and like to explore your surroundings... you might just meet one. They aren't that scared of children. But even then, odds are low - and odds of you remembering it, and not chalking it up as overactive imagination of childhood, probably won't be much higher.

And then, the natural next question... what if one was forced out of hiding? What if they lost their home and found themselves in the daylight sun, at the road to faraway lands and places?

It would be a highly uncomfortable and terrifying experience to the poor creature... and therefore make for a great story premise.

It's exactly what happened to Peal, after all. He found himself as a prey out in clear view... forced to take a page or two out of the book of the other kind of bugbears - and become more like a predator.



I intended to tell a little more about bugbears, their appearance and culture and what they were meant to represent, at the beginning of The Straggler's Mask - but in the end I cut most of these away, shoving the rest down into footnotes, so that the story itself might pick up faster without having to wade through all this exposition first. It probably worked a little better like that, but it still wasn't entirely ideal... and maybe it started a bit slow anyway.

Perhaps, if I ever end up writing an epic trilogy of books where Peal has to wander to a distant volcano and throw the palarum in, I can start it with a prologue called On Bugbears.

I'm reaching the middle point of my current work, Ivar Stormling of Skar. It's entirely dominated by an extended sequence involving the heroes participating (for dubious reasons) in a long and deadly high-speed death race.



This is the first thing I had in mind about the book, in fact: I've had it running through my mind, in one shape or other, for many years now, and you could even say that this entire book is written as an excuse to finally get the damn thing on paper. It all certainly formed around this thing: I thought of the race first, then far more recently started to imagine what got them to this position to begin with, what motivated them to enter it, and where they might go after the fact.

And I'm now coming to the somewhat painful realization that the race, and the plot constructed around it, actually have very little to do with each other.

Like the podracing thing in Star Wars Episode 1, the entire sequence is basically an excuse to make a new friend, then elongated into a superfluous action scene that is mostly there because the author really, really wants to add it in.

I'm rather often guilty of that sort of a thing. Many reviews of my first work, The Straggler's Mask, point out the flaw that a great deal of the book's events could be easily skipped without the story or the plot suffering at all. Since then I've taken some steps to try and curb such tendencies, but it seems it will always be a part of me no matter what I do.

Even as I write this, I'm struggling to find ways to make the sequence more relevant for the plot. There's not a whole lot that I can do to tie it to the main antagonist or his plans, for one. But maybe I'll work to develop the characters during it, let them display new sides of themselves, experience growth, and learn important lessons. I can also take it as an opportunity for them to show off new skills and abilities and equipment, things they could then use to save the day in a more climactic context - a bit of foreshadowing, Chekhov's Guns, so that it wouldn't all come completely out of left field.

But all such procedures are mere bandages on a gaping wound, and can never conceal the fact that, at the end of the day, it is pretty pointless. I could just ditch the whole thing, and scavenge all the actually important moments and put them elsewhere, to save pages and my readers' sanity. But I don't think I will do that, not this time.



So, what should you take out of this? Well, if you really enjoy death races and fast-paced action with little plot to hold it back, then I suppose you could skip the first fourteen chapters of the book to get right into the meat of things. If on the other hand you'd like your story to be tighter, each scene and chapter to actually mean things in the greater context, and were annoyed by how the previous book indulged in a bunch of pointless side tracks, then you might want to skip everything from chapter fifteen up to... twenty? Twenty-one? I'm not sure yet.

Progress on the whole is good: I've written 68k words since the beginning of the year, and if this keeps up I might get the whole thing written as quickly as Demure Sea, perhaps even faster. I doubt it'll come out this year, though. There's a great deal of backlog in between that I'd like to throw out there first.

I haven't written so much Ivar Stormling of Skar today, because I was flashed with a random bit of inspiration and just had to churn it all out at once. I may as well put it here now.

Loot



Also, this is a very nice picture of Peal someone drew for me.

(I've never written any satire before. This probably shows.)

full size



Drawn by a good friend of mine whom you can find here on twitter. Please bother him with a bunch of art commissions, he could use things to do.

My this year's summer project is a story about magic, and wizards, and witchcraft, and a whole lot of such things. It ended up spawning all those dry long blog posts about magical rules and how I thought things should be done - I just had to get the assorted ideas down somewhere, I guess. So I think it'd be just appropriate to carry on with the theme and also fish a practical example out of the story.



Wyla Prenward, aged fourteen, lives on a farm in Hightower with her brothers and sisters, six of them older than her, and then aunts and uncles, six of them from her mother's side. This is probably why she can talk to birds - with a bit of awkward consequences, on account of a lot of that stuff being unsuitable for a toddler's ears. Then over the coming years she picks up more witchcraft, almost entirely related to farm work - on the insistence of her mother, who isn't very happy about this stuff in general. It was neither from books, like with Melker, nor by selling her soul or making deals with evil things, like with Rime: she just lives her life, tries to figure things out, and the world around her will give her the answers. She's got talent: magic is in her blood.

So she knows how to plant and harvest stuff, how to fix broken things, how to tell weather, how to take care of animals, how to butcher them for meat, cooking, sewing, milling, and all other such things. She actually has absolutely no idea how to do most of these without magic: she just casts the spells, sings the songs and does the handiwork, and her heart will tell her what to do. It's basically shortcuts, and the very subtle sort: if you're not paying attention, you could well imagine that no magic is used at all, and that she's just really good at this stuff. But she's yet unsatisfied, and always on the lookout for more magic, more power, more fame.

That's rules one and four, in case you weren't counting.

Rule two - she's the only witch anyone around the area knows about, and the only fantastic fairytale element for that matter. She's discontent because her family - according to her at least - takes her skill for granted and aren't showering her in enough praise; and the folk of a nearby village just think she's the child of a demon or some shit and would be happy to see her gone forever. None of them really understand her, she feels. As such she is driven to step beyond the borders, to the fantastic and the unknown, where she discovers a whole new world of magic and adventure. That's when it gets weird for her.

And the rule three? Oh, that doesn't seem like much for her: all she thinks it does, the magic, is make her a little tired. She basically equates it to a quick jog around the woods or something else exhausting but satisfying. And for that matter, she's firmly on the opinion that there's no reason to not use magic to solve a problem if you can: why do something the boring and inadequate mundane way, when a little bit of sorcery will deal with it faster and more convenient?
She will know better by the end of this.

Oh, and Peal is there too. You can see him in the picture above as well, after all. This entire adventure takes place a good thirty years after The Straggler's Mask: by this time he's fully become a part of the land of adventure, the very opposite of mundane. He's basically there to make sure Wyla doesn't get into too much trouble.
He will fail.

Also, a couple talking bird buddies. The fowl in her hands is named Acapon. Think about that for a moment.

On the whole, I have a fairly good feeling about this story. There's a girl with too much magic and too little maturity, a realm of adventure and fantasy outside the world of the known, a mentor, and a whole bucketful of harsh lessons to come. We'll see if she can keep up with that cheerful smile of hers.

(Picture credit: Rebecca Tasic)

I've started up three or four short stories, and one rather the large and complex series of notes for a longer book, in these past couple months - only to grow weary of them and abandon them halfway. They always start so strong, too, like five thousand words the first day when my mood is still high and I think it might go somewhere! And then it won't. Alas. Until now!

Total word count is 18,816 words - since 14th of the last month, averaging to barely 800 words a day. It's not too fast, perhaps, but I am extremely satisfied with how it turned out, thinking like it might feature some remotely unique worldviews, a bit of good character growth, and Inverse Ninja Law applied on skeletons.

...And of course as soon as I take a break, I feel all weird and like I had to get back to writing again. I might return to one of those unfinished ones.

I've said before that I like it when the nonhuman races and creatures are depicted as legitimately alien, rather than just regular folks with pointy ears and a bit of fur and what have you. As an experiment, I put up a mind map about all the ways Peal's nonhumanity affects his character. I was delighted when I could trace just about all of him to him being what he was.



Here is the full thing if you'd like to learn more of him. Truthfully it ended up as a bit of a mess.

You've got your heroes who start out weak, and overcome their challenges by getting stronger, and just keep the cycle going until the story ends with them being the strongest around and having beaten everyone up. You've got your underdogs, who start out weak and never get stronger, and prevail by being quick and clever instead, and/or by relying on stronger friends. And you've got your supermen who are the strongest around, yet are constantly challenged by even stronger foes and higher stakes, or else the story is a power fantasy where we get to feel the thrill or hilarity as they beat things up with ease...

...or they're someone like Saitama.



He's the fastest thing around, nothing can harm him, and he famously beats all his challenges with a single, usually half-assed, punch. He's ridiculously OP - nothing can stand up to him. And yet in every other aspect of his being... he kind of sucks. He's just a regular guy. He has trouble managing his finances, isn't very good at video games, and struggles with the sheer boredom and ennui that his superpowers have brought him. It's a great juxtaposition, demonstarting that just because you possess godlike power doesn't mean your life - even mundane existence - isn't without its problems, and your godlike power might even make things worse.

Sadly, One-Punch Man is quite prone to forget its greatest strength, the superhero parody premise, and all too often devolves back into your usual stock shonen fights where enormous power and inhuman abilities duke it out. It's not bad shonen stuff, by any means, but it's kind of a missed opportunity. I'd like to see more of Saitama just trying to manage his mundane life. There was the short bit with video games once, but still.



The same story also features King, who possesses the fearsome reputation of an unbeatable hero... and only the reputation. In truth he's just a perfectly regular person, barring his phenomenal skill at video games. Basically the exact opposite of Saitama, and just as compelling to me: he gets around by staring his foes down until they submit, or coming up with some bullshit to convince them out of it, but there's a good deal of tension there in that as soon as this doesn't work, he's mush.

You see how I might like this kind of heroes the best of them all? Heroes that are basically unbeatable in one thing (doesn't have to be strength, or even related to fights at all), and beat any challenge without trouble so long as it's within their comfort zone, yet have just as much, even more, trouble as a normal person in other aspects of their lives. They can tap into a lot of experience and knowledge, but they also have great weaknesses that they all too often need to get around. It's the best of both worlds - underdogs, and the occasional power fantasy!

Not to mention, it's a perfect reason to make friends: bring forth some more well-rounded heroes to support them, to play off of them, and to have great mutual character growth and friendship and romance. Perhaps these friends are also really good at something but suck at something else, giving an even greater contrast and more things to distinct them. If I didn't do that, I'd just have to rely on subtle stuff like personalities and goals and likes and dislikes... like an actual good author would. No thanks.

Let's count the guys.

There's Peal, of course. He's far beyond just your regular sneaky little rodent - he has a deep inborn insight to all matters of stealth, subterfuge, and subtlety. He can hind himself or others or things up to a vast starship, set up your internet on absolute incognito mode with like a dozen proxies, and find Waldo, all with about equal ease. And yet he tends to crumble in social situations, is easily browbeaten or charmed if you can see him and stare him down, is hard to be taken seriously what with how cute and cuddly he looks - and he's plain starved for affection and can't handle being alone, ensuring this weakness will always come up sooner or later.

His best friend, Ivar Stormling, is also his exact opposite in this regard. He's a people person - charismatic, handsome, with big presence and a loud voice, not to mention a great personality and desire for good things for everybody. He can rouse the entire kingdom to follow his lead in a pinch. Yet, he's terribly unsubtle and simple-minded, and tends to have trouble approaching challenges from any other direction than straight head-on. He's honest and honourable to a fault, less because he thinks this leaves the best impact in the world (though he does), and more because he just doesn't have the imagination to lie or cheat. And when put in a bind, he tends to default to violence: often it catches the foe off-guard and gets him the advantage, but just as often it leads to even bigger trouble.

But when the two of them join forces, they can complement their strength while eliminating each other's weaknesses. Together, there's almost nothing they cannot do.

Sadly, the next three aren't as lucky.

Mirari Aedelwine is also good with people, albeit more with individuals than with crowds. She knows how other people work, what they think, what they feel, and can with quite the ease figure out their motivations and background, just from a quick conversation. And it's just as easy for her to get under their skin, make them want to do what she wants them to do, or destroy them verbally. Good at sleight of hand and misdirection, as well. But when she doesn't have anyone to talk to or swindle, in the case of beasts or eldritch horrors or some environmental challenge... well, she's not incompetent, but she is in trouble just the same. Not quite as extreme a minmaxed example as some others here, but she definitely counts.

Keam Vitrio is the fastest man in the cosmos - no one in the two galaxies of the setting can come even close to a match. If he's ever involved in a race, all the bets concern themselves with the second place, because the first place's decided before anything even happens. And he's a smug, unrepentant douche about it. Terribly high opinion of himself. Most people can't handle his company very long. It's lonely at the top - and boring, far more so than even he himself realizes. He wins on the racetrack, but typically loses elsewhere at the same time.



Last, and the latest in my line of heroes, Toryōshi Otsugi is one of the finest duelists in the land: she learned the way of the blade from her father, a notorious sword-saint, who had no sons and therefore had to groom his daughter into the position - and she demonstrated great talent and aptitude to it, picking up his arts and then some, almost without trying too hard. And indeed she did not try too hard - because she simply did not give a shit. She never wanted to be a warrior. She's plain sick of all the wandering swordsmen coming around to challenge her, and doesn't see the point in dueling to see who's best. She would have liked to learn to do other things, but can't find enough time for it. And perhaps worst of all, she's desperately lonely: no man would care to court her, in this feudal and patriarchal world, because she's as far away from your traditional delicate wallflower as she can get.

You could almost see her as a deconstruction of your common, by-the-numbers, Strong Female Character: she can kick ass and take names, show the men what for, yet she was thrust onto that path against her will, by a man, and now everyone around her sees her as more a man than a woman. So she's hardly your independent feminist icon. Her arc involves finding agency, deciding for herself, and growing to be her own person. But... that's really a talk for its own blog post.