Bentley Hellbourne was the worst demon in all of Hell. Good thing she's dead now... right?
Her death at the hands of her angelic arch-nemesis ended the war between Heaven and Hell. And now, eighty-five years later, the world is finally getting used...
Sincerely hoping that this chapter doesn't mess up the perspectives of our readers on this one. This is just a discussion on design and reasoning. Please don't try to change your own imagined versions of the characters just because of Jester's notes on original inspiration.
Honestly, out of all the ingredients that go into the great soup of story, character design is one of the few that this Jester feels confident in preparing. Although there is ALWAYS room for improvement, it's one of the easier aspects of writing. However, more often than not, it is also one of the most surprising.
In case it isn't obvious from the way we write, Jester is a firm believer in the effect of interpersonal relationships and decisions relating directly to a character's personality. Although external events are an important and easy tool, the story should happen mostly because of the characters' behavior. So instead of focusing on the whole business with the soul fragment and whatnot, we invested more of the story-line into building up and showing off character relationships.
But in order to do that, we needed characters.
Since the cast of this story is mostly made up of immortals, we had to put a lot of thought into how such immortals would think. Based on the guerilla-style war setting, their psychology needed to be somewhat different from the average human (because lets be honest, most humans are physically incapable of killing another human just by nature). And as creatures who were never guaranteed death in the same way as mortals, they would react differently to the world around them. So we had to ask a few questions like: "what is their relationship with time?" and "what motivates these societies?".
In the end, we decided that most of the characters would act rather young --by human psychological standards. Everyone is mostly in the 16-25 year range in terms of thought process and personality. At this age, most ordinary humans have long since been exposed to all kinds of death, and yet it's also the age where most people still subconsciously believe that they are personally invincible. Its the time when humans are usually at the peak of their physical health, and still have the hormones to make you do stupid things. So although the characters have a large range in age presentation, Atticus, Bentley, Lucy, Xander, the whole crowd is generally in the "young adult" level of maturity. This was intentional.
There are some characters who have graduated to the human's "adult" level, though. Gabriel, Smythe, Reuben, Micaiah, Ophaniel, and a couple others arguably behave in more mentally mature ways depending on the situation. Like their appearances, immortal-character maturity is not influenced by age, but rather nature and experience. At least that's what made sense to us.
Of course, the psychology of everyone is dreadfully human. Thought processes, interpersonal relationships, perception, blah blah blah. If any of us humans were to meet an actual angel from the Heavens, we may find that our psychology, as different species existing in this realm, would be very different. However, this book was written for humans, so the characters needed some anthropomorphism in order to make them relatable. And there's a lovely quote by Descartes which I would love to offer in light of this subject:
"But it is true, perhaps, that those very things which I suppose to be non-existent, because they are unknown to me, are not in truth different from myself whom I know. This is a point I cannot determine, and do not now enter into any dispute regarding it. I can only judge of things that are known to me," -Descartes
Anyway, so that's how we've decided to set up this discussion. Now we can move on to a more in-depth look at each individual character.
Let's start off with the protagonist: the one and only Atticus "Halo Head" pash de Ophaniel:
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