Spinner of Stories, Professional Nerd

Hi all!

I'm Lil. I'm showing up on tumblr under my own name for once because I was one of the writers for Blades of Light & Shadow 2 and 3 as well as being the designated lorekeeper. (I also worked on Cursed Heart 2 (and was the facial reference for the Fae version of Longclaw, hence the icon), as well as Kiss of Death and Murder at Homecoming, and I was the lead writer on Villainous Valentines and the Blades Tabletop Guide.

I was one of the many people who were laid off by Pixelberry when the Cursed Heart team was dissolved over a year ago now. But my final contribution to PB canon, Blades of Light and Shadow 3, officially finishes its wide release today. The layoff was traumatic for a lot of reasons, but it did offer me the strange silver lining of getting to be on both the brainstorm team for Blades 3 and being the person who wrote the initial drafts of the book. I was not the book lead, to be clear, but I'm honored to have gotten to work for Emi and to have been gifted the absolute privilege to act as an archaeologist in the world of Morella and beyond in Blades 2 & 3. I especially loved writing the lore tablets and found objects like Nifara's letter, Kade and Tyril's poetry and songs (and Kade and Bakshi in general, my beautiful bards), the Old Gods, Mal and Tyril's romance routes, and both Mal and Raine's mental health journeys.

Since I wasn't the lead, not everything I wrote made it in, and there's some stuff that even ended up on my own personal cutting room floor for Blades 3 (mostly due to length). I got nostalgic over the weekend, and found a longer version of one of Tyril's poems that I thought y'all might like to see, so I've included it below as thanks for everything y'all have given the Blades team. You are what made the sequels happen, especially Blades 3.

Because I figure you might be looking for more stuff like Blades now that we've come to what I dearly hope is a bittersweet but satisfying end, I did want to shout out the art I was consuming when we were working on Blades 3:

Not Another D&D Podcast - If you're a fan of Dimension 20 (and who isn't?), you know the brilliant work of Emily Axford and Brian Murphy, but Jake Hurwitz's hilarious and heartfelt himbo fighter Hardwon from Campaign One was my direct inspiration for the voice of Nithrax. (Wanda Maximoff was Midys's, if ya couldn't tell. An autistic queen.) But truly pick any of NADDPOD's campaigns (or Dungeon Court), and you'll have a great, hilarious, and surprisingly poignant time.

Transplanar RPG "The Second Stranger" Show and Podcast - Mercer? Lee Mulligan? Iyengar? You know them, you love them, but I guarantee you've never heard someone like Transplanar's Dungeon Master Connie Chang. His work is poetic, visceral, and wickedly funny in a way that is, might I say, otherworldly, and her cast is magnificent. "The Second Stranger" is an all trans, POC led actual play show about a group of misfits who have to save their world's gods before they can save the world. It is also shippy (and gay) as fuck. Truly, if you wanted the Blades gang to be a polycule, this is the show for you.

Baldur's Gate 3 and The Dungeons & Dragons Movie - the new and worthy additions to the canon. If you haven't tried 'em please do.

Anyway. The poetry is below the cut (please be nice. Tyril is a baby writer.) and I'm feeling some kind of way so if you have lore questions (or questions in general), feel free to drop 'em in my inbox and I can try to answer them. They'll be non canon answers and I can't talk about PB's internal processes in detail, obvi, but I did hang around with the fire with Kade a fair time so I know a thing or two. (And if you like any of my recommendations, I'm always up for chatting about them!) P.S. Don't worry about me. I actually work at Chapters now, and my first book was high fantasy as well (primarily Norse and Celtic mythology). I'm also working on a new indie game with some other Pixelberry layoff casualties including some incredible artists, the head writer of the Cursed Heart, The Crown and the Flame, and It Lives series. (They are the same person can you imagine???), and the writer who gave us that scene at Joaquin's apartment in LoA2. (You know the one.) We hope to be able to tell y'all more about it soon.

Thank you, truly, from the bottom of my heart. It has truly an honor and a privilege to work for these characters. And for you.

Hi friend! Thank you so much for you question and for your patience, as I wanted to go straight to the source on this one, The Cursed Heart's amazing lead writer, Kathleen! He's been working on the Fae adjacent indie so I took the liberty of asking them to answer this question :) Like me, they're no longer with the studio, so PB can revise canon however they like but as the lore nerd, I will cosign everything my story monarch says. So take a look below and enjoy this dispatch from a true Choices legend. (In addition to TCH, Kathleen was the lead on The Crown & The Flame, It Lives, Wake the Dead, and Mother of the Year, among others. An absolute beast.)

Hello! I’m so happy to hear that you connected with The Cursed Heart. Heads up that I’m no longer at PB so this is all my recollection/opinions and not official canon etc. etc. Okay THEMES. Fairytales are the perfect medium for exploring real-life experiences through magical metaphors. At its core, TCH is a story about vulnerability. Being close to people means making yourself vulnerable which can be a pretty terrifying proposition, especially if you’ve been hurt before. Kieran and MC have both been hurt badly (Kieran by their former lover, MC by the death of their parents), and each of these characters is built around a core idea that is their reaction to that hurt.  For Kieran's side we have “if I feel nothing, I’ll never be hurt again”. On a literal level this is what happens when Kieran is cursed: their heart is broken and the pieces scattered, leaving Kieran unable to love but also impossible to kill. On an emotional level it’s a common and honestly very logical defense mechanism in the face of betrayal and heartbreak. It’s an attempt to exert control over a situation that made you feel helpless. It’s also... not super sustainable in the long-term (ask me how I know). Some part of Kieran wants to heal, which is why their Beast form single-mindedly seeks out their scattered heart pieces every night. For Kieran, however, the Beast represents yet another way that Kieran doesn't have control over the situation. They look at the Beast and think “this curse has turned me into a monster," which is fairytale-speak for “my trauma has left me broken and unworthy of love." On the other side of the emotional spectrum we have MC, a.k.a. “I know what cruelty feels like, so I’m going to be kind instead." Waymond’s “this is how I fight” monologue from Everything Everywhere All at Once puts it a bit more cynically than MC ever would, but it’s the right vibe. MC knows that their kindness won’t always make a difference, but they’d rather try and be disappointed than avoid disappointment by never trying at all. Does that mean MC doesn’t have any growing to do? Hell no! Like a lot of sweet lovely people, MC trusts a bit too easily  (cough*Radiance*cough) and is a lot less kind to themself than they are to other people. Living in the Fae world with all its intrigue and danger forces MC to develop boundaries and advocate for their own needs in a way they didn’t really have to back in their tiny rural community where everyone generally knew and cared for each other. Suffice to say, Kieran and MC still have a lot to work on (both individually and together), but they’re learning to really listen to each other and make their relationship a safe space which counts for a lot. Woof, that was a lot already but I wanna touch on Jack because you specifically asked and also because he is my sweet wonderful murder child. In Jack we wanted a villain who is the hero of his own story (hence why we named him “Jack” after scrappy heroes from English folk tales like Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the Giant Killer, etc). In earlier drafts of the outline, we fell into that trap that a lot of stories do when their villain is a little too sympathetic, which is to have them Kick the Dog and then point to the dog-kicking as justification for why they can’t be allowed to win. Fortunately, a friend happened to send me this F.D Signifier video that touches on a similar issue with the third act of Black Panther (the whole video is worth a watch, but he talks about this specific thing at around 59:45).

[Lil/Editor's note: TL;DR because I feel this is important: the video points out that Black Panther is more than slightly at war with itself because it establishes a villain in Killmonger who is generally right (It's weird that Wakanda just decided to abdicate responsibility while their neighbors were decimated by colonialism, he has a legitimate claim to the throne, and both Klaw and the CIA are so much worse, but the CIA is being treated as a positive entity here.) So giving Killmonger a Disney/Marvel kind of death feels hollow and weird and frustrating, while having Killmonger switch sides to help his family would have been much more satisfying. But F.D. Signifier explains it a lot better so please watch it!

Basically, the issue we faced in TCH2 was that Jack has done this very upsetting thing (killing Monty in a duel that they admittedly both consented to in order to avoid more bloodshed) so people are going to want to punish him, but Jack is also right about how dangerous and cruel these power structures are. TCH has always been a story about redemption in all its forms, and he'd already teamed up with someone he detests to help his cause, so it makes character sense for him to team up with Kieran if MC can get him on their side to begin the healing. Okay, now back to Kathleen!]

In retrospect I should have realized that we weren’t punishing the real villains of the story, and I’m very grateful we had the time and creative freedom to rework the ending so that it was more aligned with the themes and values of our story. Thanks again for your question! This story meant a lot to me and it makes my heart so glad to hear that it resonated with other people too <3 -Kathleen

I don't think I can say anything better than that but I just want to publicly thank Kathleen for canonizing trans!Longclaw and for being such a great resource for Villainous Valentines (and for being an amazing mentor/friend). When we were asked to do a Radiance romance, we almost instantly agreed that Radiance would plan to use MC and then kill them, so plotting the story ended up being about how do you make a character who can call Radiance on their shit without getting turned into a toad and it turns out the answer is expect Radiance to be better than they are and just be very, very fun to please. And MCs always are ;)

I just wanted to ask if you had anything extra to share about Nia’s storylines in books 2 and 3, since she’s my favorite character in all of the Blades of Light and Shadow series.

Her storyline in book 2 was my favorite in the series, especially with the aspect of coming to accept the “darker” or “shadow” parts of yourself, so to speak. I believe that you said you focused on more of Tyril and Mal as characters, but I would still love to hear whatever you want to share on this, even just your own thoughts or interpretations. Thanks again!

Hello! Thank you so much for asking and usual caveat that I'm no longer at Pixelberry so this isn't official current canon, just what I remember slash where my head was at.

Shadow!Nia is so important to Book 2's themes and the series' themes in general, so I'm so glad that it resonated with you! I adore Nia, and I did do some of the building out on her relationship with the Temple and the Light (particularly the Mother of Grey being her Patron Light and the concept of Patron Lights in general. I grew up around a lot of Jesuits because my dad is a professor at a Jesuit college even though he is a militant atheist, and I'm Italian American, so I've always found the concept of Catholic saints really fascinating). I handled some of the initial stuff on Nia and Raine's conversation before and after Ventra's funeral in Book 2 because we wanted her to be able to participate and talk about her journey in the book without imposing her belief system on Ventra since Orcs aren't Light worshippers, which is why Imtura invites her to participate rather than her just doing it. (Also Imtura asking her to participate is also a bit of foreshadowing for Book 3, where Imtura is trying to decide how she feels about the afterlife now that she's been running around with people who have different beliefs from her.)

Since we were dismantling the Elven Pantheon and the Temple even further than Book 1 did, it did feel important to show that Nia's faith doesn't have to be defined by the corruption the party discovers at the heart of the Elven Pantheon, because everyone's relationship to the divine (or just the concept of the divine) is personal. As the Blades equivalent of a cleric (in the D&D sense), Nia's felt the very real warmth and power the Light can give her, and she's used it to heal, protect, and take care of people, which is what's most important to her. The Temple doesn't get to police that, not ever, just like they don't get to police her negative emotions or moments where she lacks decorum or control.

At its heart, Shadow magic is about giving in to impulse and instinct. There is nothing inherently good or bad about that. It's all about what those impulses are. Nia's been suppressing her negative emotions and beating herself up for so long that when she gives herself even a sliver of permission to let go, all her suppressed emotions come with it, which is how we get her (super badass) Shadow appearance.

Part of what we wanted to explore in Book 2 is the idea that imposing a good/evil dichotomy onto appearance (especially when the "evil" appearance visibly deepens the skintone of a character like Aerin) is a problematic construction, which is party of why Isador and Nyra are there. Isador might veer toward concepts of evil because she prioritizes herself (and to a lesser extent Nyra) over others, but Nyra's "corruption" is in many ways more about her initial guilt for trying to "climb above her station."

Shadow!Nia isn't mean or dismissive because Shadow magic "took over." It's a manifestation of what happens when you punish yourself for your negative and uncharitable thoughts instead of acknowledging that everyone has them to some degree and what matters is how you impact others as a result. Shame can be a necessary and useful tool for when people hurt others, but punishing yourself often ends up just being a way of making a situation where you hurt someone else about how /you/ feel instead of how you can make amends. I honestly can't imagine Nia has intentionally harmed anybody outside of battle before her transformation, but any time she's had the impulse to do so, or to even just say something mean or selfish (or even just assert her own boundaries), she's spiraled about how bad a person she is because that's how she was raised. When she gives herself permission to let go, she assumes it's evil and therefore "looks" evil (once again, within the framework of how she was raised.)

Other Nia thoughts in no particular order:

The awesome little team I worked on at Pixelberry (who also did the Cursed Heart series and had just finished up Wake the Dead when I joined, truly one of my favorite VNs) had some very clear beliefs about genre that tend to go against the mold, especially for fantasy: no chosen ones and no "good" empires. While corrupt officials and deposing a king or religious leader are tried and true tropes, often the solution that's offered at the end is for the MC to take on that position of authority because they are inherently a good person and will do better of course. (Ask the characters in Dune how that turned out, ey?) The thing I adore about Nia is that she is actually that good a person, so she ends up in an almost Joan of Arc position where she's having to speak truth to power while grappling with her own feelings of guilt about not being the "perfect" Light worshipper.

Bear with me, but if you haven't seen Conclave, it is a great place to get a LOT of Nia feels. I won't spoil things, but there is a character Nia would adore, and I think one of the things that Nia has always struggled with is finding the confidence to interpret the texts that she loves so much in her own eyes and through her own sense of right and wrong. That's not something that the Temple really supports, but I know pretty much all the Old God aside from Nifara are so proud of her.

I know some people felt that Nia was underserved in Book 3 in terms of screentime, but if you look over the course of the whole series, she's had a lot of progress and growth in 1 & 2, much like Tyril, so at least for me personally, it felt more fair to give some of that potential screentime to someone like Imtura, who still needed room to process the loss of her mother and what it means about her relationship to her own culture because there wasn't time to do that at the end of Book 2.

Hello! What a very kind greeting when I am just a muppet with a keyboard (albeit probably like a weird Dark Crystal-y muppet). Obligatory I'm not the lead, I was laid off from PB, this is my recollection/understanding, etc. That is an excellent post from the-unconquered-queen (a truly excellent username we stan the original icon always) and matches up to everything we had to work with in the text itself slash that we added in the case of charting Mal's timeline in the Guild. For our internal purposes, we generally tried to treat everyone like they were mid-20s when it came to art, but obviously the characters' life experience and developmental age differ wildly.

What do I mean by "developmental age"? Well, this was a very funny/weird conversation we had to have about Tyril slash the gaps between elf MC vs human and orc MC. Because of the way Book 1 is set up, Kade and MC have to be around the same age (with MC slightly older) regardless of the chosen race, which obviously presented some worldbuilding problems at first glance. If elves are longer lived, one might presume they develop more slowly biologically.

...Until you remember that the elves are a created race with a very specific purpose. Anyone who's been around a two-year-old can tell you that there are some parts of child development one would like to not prolong. And one needs to remember that the elves were created in a... delicate circumstance between Vali and Nifara. So the general understanding we came up with is that elves mature at the same rate as other races and then just... stop aging aside from Light Magic use (pending choices you can make in Book 2). So their current society has now adjusted their notions of what "maturity" is to put things in perspective to how they perceive time and aging. We added the jokes where Tyril talks about being "very young" (or small, I think he says in Book 2?) when he was in his teens to hopefully clarify this because the lore tablets in Book 2 and 3 were targeted toward world expansion rather than those kinds of clarifications, but it was likely too subtle/confusing. My bad!

Basically think about how we're often told in Medieval/Renaissance Europe that 13 is considered the correct age to get a job, get married, etc. We know cognitive science, and we know child development, so we know that the human brain doesn't "stop cooking" for a long while after that, but because of life expectancy, the Medieval Europeans often ended up starting everyone a lot younger in many cases back then. I don't think Tyril was necessarily acting like a toddler at 16, but I think he was probably still being treated like he didn't have full agency yet, because the elves' perception of time is skewed.

For Mal, when we set about his timeline, we had to think about both Wren and Maria, since we roughly knew when his mother died from Book 1, and we didn't want Mal leaving the Guild to put Wren in so much danger that she couldn't take care of herself when he went off adventuring and she stayed in town, so we needed her to be old enough to find a partner. In terms of trauma and emotional regulation, Mal's an interesting one because he's got several points in his life where he could get "developmentally stuck," from his mother's death to his first interaction with the Guild to joining the Reapers, etc. (I swear I will do that Mal mental health / trauma post at some point I swear.)

Nia is in her mid 20s but hasn't been let out of the Temple really until now so she's still bright eyed and bushy-tailed. This is especially fun to contrast with Imtura, who is of a similar age but was doing very, very dangerous things at a young age because she was an orc princess. She earned that captainship with blood, sweat, and tears and was risking her life as a really young kid, just like cabin boys did in our Golden Age of Piracy!

Aerin and Baldur do have a meaningful age gap (i.e. Baldur is too old to be pulling this shit.) because you know Aurinae planned that shit as much as she could. And she's an herbalist so she pretty much could plan it in terms of when things didn't happen. I don't think we ever nailed the gap down super firmly but I'd say the four to five year estimate makes sense. The big thing to remember is that Arlan doesn't plan on dying any time soon so while he doted on Baldur as an heir, I'd say turning 18, etc. wouldn't have been a big deal for either prince because they weren't expected to ascend the throne and royals are generally expected to behave with decorum potentially beyond their years even as children. (WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TELL BALDUR THAT.)

Valax potentially has a little bit of a Ship of Theseus situation but her memory goes back about 200 years. She's also got the whole child soldier thing going on developmentally so the power dynamic with MC is more complicated than like a standard vampire-mortal romance would be.

I know I didn't really give you exact ages, but that's on purpose. What we needed for the writing was the dynamic each amount of life experience created for the characters as they interacted with each other, so it's more important (and more relevant) that both Mal and Imtura have more life experience generally than Tyril, Nia, MC, and Kade because, you know, having your first job or your first several changes you as a person.

I don't know the final word on this one because I believe it was decided after I was laid off. In the ttrpg companion (which I was a lead on), we just called him Kade of Riverbend because that's who he was in Book 2 when we put the ttrpg sheets together. A surname hadn't been decided at that point (as best I remember.)

We haven't gone into naming conventions a ton in Blades because there was lots of other lore to tackle and surname conventions have generally been the same as they are in Anglo derived cultures. We borrowed the Medieval (slash popularized by George R.R. Martin) convention of orphans tending to have a shared last name to explain Nia's last name as a reference to Ellara, the patron Light (basically saint) of mages. The Orcs share surnames/housenames with their primary (err, really only) parent. Surnames are very complicated among the Elves because obviously each partner has a right to claim the child initially but that should presumably be worked out by birth.

So when it comes to Blades MC, by standard Morellan human (i.e. Whitetower derived) naming conventions, I think we can presume that Kade and MC's adoptive father's surname is Lilborne. As to why we didn't learn that before I think we could say that Kade didn't use the name before because his relationship to it changed. (Perhaps because, you know, concrete proof of the afterlife. ;) ) Personally, I think considering the degree of trauma MC and Kade dealt with at a young age, I can see keeping or adopting a surname being a very personal thing that a man of few words like Tom wouldn't push heavily for with his kids even if he might have hoped that they would someday.

So I think it's really up to your own personal headcanon! Maybe your MC thinks of themselves as a Lilborne, but always wished they knew more about the biological parents they lost. Maybe they prefer to be the Hero of Riverbend/Morella/the Realms much more than being tied to any family or location. Or maybe they're a Lilborne, and that's more than enough.

That is the fun thing about names. They can be the same words yet mean something completely different depending on context. ("Elf boy" or "princeling," anyone?)

I wanted to ask you if there's anything you can share about Tyril's dinma?? :)

Hello double hi!

[Usual obligatory warning that I wasn't the lead writer on any of the Blades books, I was just the lorekeeper for 2 and 3 and we've moved pretty thoroughly into speculation slash plot/worldbuilding logic with this question because we didn't go into this in the Blades trilogy much so no canon was established or recorded by me beyond the mention of her in Book 2 in Tyril's elite skill scene. That said, this is all based on extrapolation based on what we did determine about the Elves, particularly their dislike of physical contact both at the ball in Undermount and Tyril's general struggle to be comfortable even with things like hugs.]

As best I know we didn't name Tyril's dinma, partially because she was only tangential to the family. There's no mention of a specific courtesan class or Handmaid's Tale type situation so one would presume that members of the noble houses were expected to pick sex partners from their own class. Physical intimacy (and therefore sexual reproduction) is so separated out from the emotional and social life of the Elves that I always imagined that all of this would have been conducted in a very private way until a pregnancy actually occurred.

Truly it hurts my heart to imagine Sarenya going through these very taboo feelings of simultaneous emotional and physical attraction and not knowing who Valir's sex partner is and then Tyril's dinma turns up pregnant and you know maybe he has a lot of partners maybe she just got lucky and then Tyril's dinma turns up pregnant again with Adrina. Just owwww.

Since sex is a taboo thing that isn't supposed to matter in daily life, I imagine Tyril and Adrina know their dinma for like logistics reasons but they don't see her much as she's got her own life going on and there's no reason for Tyril and Adrina to be particularly close with her because physical intimacy doesn't matter. (I may be misremembering, but I believe in Book 2, Tyril mentions Valir trying to help them be closer with their dinma and her not really being into it. Apologies if that doesn't fully match with his elite skill scene but I think that's where we left it.)

The other reason this approach appeals to me is can you imagine all the power games Elven nobles would play in terms of who's sleeping with who? It's definitely a courtesan type person's market, but the Elves would never let someone gain any kind of power from sex even if it's taboo power, so I imagine it would become about availability. The whispers would start if you were seen carousing more often with a rumored dinvalir than your kilvalir because that is very bad because why are you hanging out HUH?!?! In a world without physical cheating, emotional cheating has so much more weight. Lots of lovely court drama.

So the TL;DR is we didn't give Tyril's dinma a ton of space in the lore because Tyril wasn't supposed to give her a ton of space either. (Or, rather, any more space than the famously hospitable elves are expected to give their guests. One of my favorite things about the Elves is how obsessed they are with parties and festivals and things that would normally be very raucous and instead they're these beautiful, intricate events of pomp and circumstance but they're still fun.)

Also thank you for sharing that poem Tyril wrote 🥰

Aw thank you! So glad (and honored) to be here. Pretty much all VNs outside of Romance Club (a true fave) are conceived as standalone stories nowadays, but I can say that as a team you almost always plan for a sequel in addition to telling a complete and satisfying story as best you can. The end of TCH2 came around while multiple members of the team were being laid off so I unfortunately can't speak to plans that would have happened afterwards. I'll admit there was a particular kind of pain/catharsis in working on a book that was partially about how some loves must inevitably come to an end, but that doesn't mean they are any less meaningful or perfect while they live.

There's a Japanese idiom called mono no aware - the value of ephemera, the eternal mourning of the inherent nature of the world's impermanence. It encompasses many ideas (and if someone is more familiar with the culture and wants to correct me, please do and I'll reblog!), but the one that most applies here is the idea that things have meaning because they end. The standard fairy tale would dictate that Kieran gives up his immortality, or MC gains their own, but that was never the plan, at least not in Book 2. Both Kieran and MC needed to learn to accept each other's limitations and more than that, to celebrate them. Amid a horrible time, we tried to do that too as a team that would no longer be a team very soon.

The TCH series gave me so much. Our incredible art producer convinced me to overcome my own dysphoria and agree to be the facial reference for Fae Longclaw, making the trans metaphor for our beautiful bear queen fully complete. TCH Book 1 was the first book I ever worked on at PB (in the QA phase, which allowed me to get a head start on the lore bible for the series), and working on TCH2 was and continues to be a highlight of my career. I have so much admiration for the book's lead writer and am honored that I still get to work with them on our own all new project.

I was just wondering if you could give any extra backstory on how the Dreadlord first reached out to Aerin or his general experiences while growing up with shadow magic.

I’m a big Aerin-romancer so any lore about him would be super appreciated!

Hi! Honored to be here! I actually wasn't the in-house Aerin expert because our lead writer adores him and was an absolute monarch with his scenes so I don't want to speak out of turn. As I mentioned in another ask, I did write Kade's intervention with MC in Book 2 though where we talk about Shadow as it interacts with the humans as a race so I can talk about that and you can apply it to your headcanons where it fits for you, I hope?

So in Book 1, we view Shadow through the lens of Nifara's followers. Shadow is every negative emotion, every point of selfishness. It's wild and unpredictable and inherently cruel. In Book 1, Shadow is basically viral. A whisper from another realm can send it through where it shouldn't be, eventually consuming the sufferer until they are nothing but distilled cruelty and delusional ambition. It's not supposed to bother you that you kill the mayor or the orc pirate. They're too far gone, right? Impossible to save, so you have to kill them. (Sorry, Tyril. I really am.)

When we redefine the difference between Light and Shadow in Book 2, the way I personally understood it was the battle between creation/purity/order (Light) and destruction/complexity/chaos (Shadow). That is how the Shadow Court would understand it and explain it to Aerin, I think. If you think about the concept of a court in the nobility sense, while there is one monarch (the Dreadlord), courtiers are always jockeying for position, falling in and out of favor. The concept of the Shadow Court inherently implies a degree of complexity and flux that I think would appeal to anyone who considers themselves to be smart, but especially as an outsider. There are positive aspects to complexity, chaos, and even destruction, because they leave room for things to grow. And things have to grow. How else do they change?

I think all children remember the first moment they realized they were being lied to deep down, and that is what the Shadow Court always counts on. I imagine Aerin was such easy prey on that front. So many secrets in that family. SO many secrets. Imagine being told your tormentor is inherently more valuable than you, the Light's anointed, the next Divine Valleros. And then an (admittedly creepy) voice tells you that's all a lie and more so, you can use the truth to keep yourself safe.

I wish we had had more room to talk about Aurinae, Aerin, the Dreadlord, and even the role Nyra played as his tutor. (Not just because I love an "evil" lesbian but I do love an evil lesbian. *shoves Barbies of Nifara and Vali behind my back* How can you tell?) I think threading the needle of why different people join the Court is utterly fascinating. It's so different from the Old Gods.

While the Old Gods were conditioned in a way to obey Nifara, the Shadow Court are a loose group of competing factions by their very natures. Worshipping chaos doesn't exactly make you follow the leader super well. It's why the Dreadlord has to lean so heavily on shows of power. (Vali, on the other hand, might be "consumed" by Shadow, but she's still kind of unintentionally created a replica of Nifara's setup.)

Could you share any details??

Hi! I love this question and I'm not at liberty to talk about process, timelines, priorities, etc, but I did want to talk about how Blades MC overlaps with my fave trauma king, Frodo Baggins, and how we used that guideline to think about how MC interacts with their trauma. (Note: My degree is in drama, but my partner is a former social worker so I am working from some knowledge, just not badass graduate school knowledge.)

Now you might hear from many people that Lord of the Rings is about World War I. And it kind of is, but it's not an exact analog. It's Beowulf too, and some English folk tales, and other obscure Scandinavian epics because Tolkien was a big old nerd. The element of LotR that is most like World War I is the journey of Frodo and Sam. They're inexperienced adventurers who've been fed stories about heroes all their lives and are asked to do the impossible. And they do it. They walk into Mordor. Sure, they fight, they argue, and they admit that they physically can't go on, but they don't truly admit the depths of their despair and vulnerability until they've accomplished the mission but are certain they're going to die.

While Blades MC might have the wit and sense of mischief of a "purple" Hawke from Dragon Age II, the way they process the immense trauma they experience is far closer to Frodo than any other character. They compartmentalize real hard, and they always have. Like Frodo, Blades MC is an orphan raised by a surrogate father who was supportive but ultimately a little focused on his own thing. Like Frodo, Blades MC felt responsible for their vulnerable family member (Kade / arguably Merry/Pippin if you pay attention in the books). Both Frodo and Blades MC agree to bring along said vulnerable family member on their dangerous mission. And both (er, all three) family members are kidnapped.

And Frodo, like Blades MC, wobbles for a moment and then just shuts the fuck down. He keeps walking all the way to Mordor because that seems like the only way any kind of resolution is going to be found. There's no room to process. Or mourn. Because mourning means you have to think about what you might have did to cause this. And you've already got enough survivor's guilt from losing your parents. You don't need this too.

The funny thing about Blades Book 1 is that MC does a lot of listening to other people's problems and helping them. I think that was a little easier to swallow when MC was dealing with a more conventional "adventure story": the struggle to rescue a loved one. (Princess Peach, Kade, Perseus and Andromeda, it's a tale as old as time.) But once Valax and the time jump enters the picture, it makes sense that MC would feel a painful urge to talk about this. It's a complication in their life that they barely comprehend fully. They just don't have the vocabulary to talk about it because of their past, and they're barely keeping the group together as is. So they compartmentalize again. This is a super common thing for trauma survivors, especially when they're in leadership roles.

But Kade is a trauma survivor too. His love of stories gave him the vocabulary to explore and articulate his feelings (thanks Bakshi!), which is why he's able to get through to MC and give them enough room to express what they're feeling (if they so choose) in Book 2.

But recovery isn't linear. I can't think of something more traumatic than witnessing both one's own death and the death of loved ones in quick succession. MC deteriorates into old habits in Book 3 because they've decided they want their own body back, all while fighting that growing hopelessness that follows them like a shadow.

To me, it makes the choice between the world above and the world below genuinely difficult. Returning to the surface means literally opening up a wound again, no matter how much good awaits you there. The newly redesigned afterlife offers a stability and safety MC has literally never experienced and very much deserves, but they're cut off from many aspects of the living. So which do you choose? I think it depends on how the character's been dealing with their trauma when given the opportunity to do so.

I'm a writer, so I get really curious about people's processes and all the paths non-taken - specially if it's about my silly elf husband (!!!) with whom I've been obsessed with for years lol

Great to have you in the fandom, and thank you for taking your time to indulge us haha! Wish you nothing but success and happiness in your new ventures, Lil <33

Aw shucks thank you I'm so glad you liked the poem and you're so freaking kind 😭😭😭😭😭! This is a very interesting and ultimately very complicated question so please be patient as I work through some stuff lol.

Speaking again not as the official word, but generally since I wasn't a lead on Blades and it is Pixelberry's IP, this was just how I justified things in my own personal estimation.

The thing about Blades, and the thing that I think that people most don't like to hear, is that six LIs is a LOT, and that is (arguably) what was publicly committed to when Blades 2 was greenlit. It takes the book from a standard freemium VN to an otome format in a sense, and those have very different expectations on the real estate each character can take up. While we might aspire to be Dragon Age (especially Dragon Age 2, my fave), VNs are not open world RPGs, so we were bound by certain rules of linearity and demands on QA's time that mean some characters/elements will need to be pushed to the side in a way that a standard RPG wouldn't have to. (I adore Romance Club, but they are working with very different production pipelines for various reasons.)

I know that in the early days of Blades 2, Andrew was quoted as saying Book 2 was Mal's book much like how Book 1 was Nia's to a certain point, but in my estimations, as the development of 2 continued and we unpacked the extent of Mal's trauma from the core premise of 2, we realized he would be retreating into himself before going outward once he reached Whitetower and had to confront his past, while Tyril and Nia's personal conflicts locked in more actively to the conflict and reveals at the front of the book because of their relationship to the Light and the Elven Pantheon.

Tyril was a very useful voice for the personal impact of the imperialist hegemonic beliefs Nifara put in place in Light worshippers, and his breakdown in Zaradun was one of my favorite elements of the book to work on, partly because it was the first time we heard from Nifara in her own voice (I love that camp queen), but also because the Elven culture is very, very troubled, and it was very important to be able to explore that as it manifests in someone we know who very desperately wants to be a "good" person as much as "good" is an empirical quality in the Blades verse. (Spoilers, it's not, just as Light and Shadow themselves are not.) We really wanted to make it clear that 1) Tyril wasn't going to magically undo all this programming overnight because you talked to him once and 2) that he was capable of change if he worked on it.

Because Tyril has such a large role in 2 in terms of theme and did a lot of growing there (standing up to the Elves, protecting Valax, etc.), it was only fair that his ongoing conflict with the Elves take a backseat to the actual politics of the Afterlife and continuing Mal and Imtura's arcs in Book 3 to a meaningful conclusion since both of them had only begun to unpack their trauma in Book 2. The Elves' co-option of Tyril's death as a reason to isolate themselves once again is a great way to add urgency and complication to what's happening in the world above in Book 3 and I legit had SO many pitches of complications for that element (Nia and MCchoosing if they're going to use a Joan of Arc persona! The orcs' potential war profiteering! Aerin having to decide if he's going to seek the crown! Adrina and Valir having a falling out because he's ultimately a moderate and she is not!), but ultimately the dramatic questions of Blades 3 (again, this is just my POV here) is "Can you trust the world you built to be better after you're gone?" and "How much do heroes have to give up before they're allowed to rest?"

I'd argue that within its very conception, Blades 3 had a bit of a Return of the King/"Scouring of the Shire" difficulty in that you could literally do a whole book about trying to mop up the mess in Morella between the Elves and Arlan and the potential exposure of Aurinae's crimes used to uphold Arlan's rule and what it means for the other Morellan former city-states. It isn't the kind of conflict that gets resolved in one or two or even three chapters. It's a freaking civil war! In many parts of the world, that shit isn't resolved for a century or more.

I will always be able to do thought experiments about said war, but Pixelberry already has a very fun and complex fantasy book about a war for succession (also by a member of the Blades team) called The Crown & the Flame. (Again, to my mind) if you're going to attempt something in that vein, you need to be at least as good as the gold standard that was TC&TF, and there just wasn't room to do that in Blades Book 3 without short shrifting major plotlines that were started in Book 2.

Absolutely! Though I had differing amounts of involvement on each. A quick run down:

As a lead:

Villainous Valentines

The Blades of Light and Shadow Official TTRPG Companion (I know this is still Blades lol but I was told there were some questions on the sheets at the time that I wasn't at liberty to answer back then. I promise I'm an actual GM and everything had a very specific reason even when it wasn't min-maxed.)

As a main contributor:

The Cursed Heart 2

Blades of Light and Shadow 2

Kiss of Death

Specific Routes/Content:

Murder at Homecoming - the back half of Donovan and Stevie's date premiums, plus Claudia's premium and the poly/party scene.

The first advice I can give is that there's nothing wrong with planning as long as you stay curious and keep exploring! Frank Herbert spent almost a decade planning for Dune and that book is a masterclass in worldbuilding (at least to me.) [Do not get me started on the movies failing to live up to the majesty. Timothée is the perfect Paul but the rest is frustrating as hell. He is not a hero godsdamit and Chani deserves better!!]

N.K. Jemisin (whose work I also highly recommend, if you haven't checked her out yet) has a very useful framework for thinking about the logic of a speculative world that I think can really help you move through blocks in your planning. I used it a lot to "stress test" the lore additions we were discussing for Blades 2 & 3, especially when it came to building the multiple afterlives. The dwarves, for example, have faced so much racial cleansing that they're very worried about their culture disappearing so their idea of a positive afterlife is becoming part of a whole that has a shared memory that can't be destroyed, while their greatest fear is the destruction of the soul before it can reach that point of unity. (You can take a look at Jemisin's original presentation here.)

In SFF, plot and character tend to work best when they come from the world you built rather than sitting on top of it. Let their position in the world be a fundamental part of them, either negative or positive, and it becomes a lot easier to generate complications and connections. Say your main character comes from a warrior culture. What kind of warriors are they? A cavalry based fighting style is going to be a lot about picking the right battlefield, which means they might favor curiosity and even caution, while a stealth based culture might look down on people who insist on taking up a lot of space. Sure you could write the most badass rogue assassin around in that world, but it might be more fun and be a bigger source of conflict if they don't have the qualities their cultures prize. (This is part of why I think Aerin resonates for so many people - in many ways, he's everything a Valleros is not, but just enough of him tends that way that he's got a really lovely, angsty push-pull.)

Also, a purely mercenary thing but if you plan on trying to do tradpub rather than self pub do not plan your books as a series. They can be very difficult to sell unless the writer is established and there's nothing more heartbreaking than an orphaned book. :( (That doesn't mean you can't plan sequels, but make sure it works as a satisfying standalone.)

Will you be more on tumblr? Any creative work to share or just interacting with us Fans.

You're welcome because we are a cool, small fandom with our own events

Hello! I'm honored and will certainly stay as long as y'all will have me because you are, indeed, a very cool fandom, but I do want to make sure this is still a safe space for y'all to criticize the art without pausing to wonder if my feelings would be hurt.