HoB&M: Characters III
Today we’re finally digging into the two characters you’ve been asked to discuss since I started these posts…Hazel Medeis & Killian Drake!
Hazel was a bit of a special case for me as far as heroines go. Typically I create female protagonists that I feel can–through particular facets of their personality–give unique spins on stories. (ie: Elle of Beauty and the Beast is a lot more sarcastic and curious than the average fairy tale heroine, but she faces the same events and emotional high points.) Before I really nailed down the story, though, I began creating Hazel because I wanted her to be ever so slightly different from typical urban fantasy heroines, which was going to affect the events in the plot a lot more. (Meaning the story had to react to her instead of visa versa.)
Of course, Hazel still has snark and sarcasm by the boatloads, and she can kick butt and take names. But at the core of her character, Hazel is what’s called “a paragon,” a trope that is pretty popular in epic fantasy books.
Paragons are typically male characters who operate entirely out of doing what they believe is right. They don’t hesitate in their actions, they are driven by their goals/desires, and they see the world as black and white–or what’s right and what’s wrong.
As you can see, that pretty accurately describes Hazel. She joins the Drake Family not because she wants to survive, but because she believes she owes it to her House. She is willing to forsake her House beliefs and kill to spare innocents and save others, and her parents betrayal in Magic Forged hurts her to the very core because she believes so deeply in trust.
Urban Fantasy heroines are typically the opposite. Either because of the tragedies they’ve lived through, or because they have no other choice, a lot of UF heroines tend to see the world as shades of gray, and occasionally toe the line of good and evil. It works well with the genre’s tone.
I needed Hazel to be the hard line of right and wrong, and to stand her ground as a paragon because I wanted to use her as the standard to raise all the other characters in the series.
But a twisted part of me also wanted to make Hazel a paragon because you don’t see a ton of paragon heroines. They can be tough to write because they have to be entrenched in their right vs wrong beliefs which can make them come off as unemotional. I was able to skate by because Hazel has so many traumatic things happen to her she never gets a chance to really just chill.
And, yes, as soon as I started working on this series I KNEW I had to make Hazel short. 
