#benavalence

oh man!!! ok so real quickly: i really hate how so many YA stories (or at least all the ones i’ve read/heard of) basically don’t talk about the parents of the characters at all like wOW THAT IS JUST SO BORING so i want very much to have my character’s parents be defined, even if i can’t always make them relevant or even fit all the information i have on them into the story. thE POINT IS THEY ARE REAL CHARACTERS AND NOT CARDBOARD CUTOUTS TO BE PERCHED IN DOORWAYS AS THEY WAVE THEIR CHILDREN OFF TO THEIR ADVENTURES.

Sherry Brie is Ava’s mother. she’s a freelance engineer that builds and fixes airships (steampunk-fantasy airships, that is) and other such things both for sport and work. the world Sherry and Ava live is really restricting for reasons i don’t quite think i should get into—but basically, the only way you’re going to see anything beyond the city you were born in is if you land a job working on trading ships or are wealthy enough to afford the luxury of a commercial airship or, even more implausibly, your own private (and authorized) ship. so either you spend an outrageous fortune and go wherever you want or you take the “beggars can’t be choosers” route and get a job delivering goods to traders, which usually means you’re restricted to 2-3 cities maximum, and you don’t get to see much of any of them. and—well, there’s also the illegal means, such as stowing away…

Sherry didn’t like any of those options. she loved her daughter and her husband, but to be honest, i think she’s kind of neglectful as a parent. she poured her soul into building her own one-man airship—an extremely daunting task in her world, especially given that she’s never had much money in her life, which means she had to go through a lifetime of trial, error, time and the patience of her husband to learn to even BUILD a flying machine, let alone find the parts (including all the parts she didn’t need or needed duplicates of to try again with) and then obtain them. everything else was second place to this project of hers—and while i don’t think it’s wrong of her to follow her dreams, i think the way she handled it—making promises and then dismissing those very promises in favor of what she wanted and that alone—was neglectful.

she managed to finish the thing when Ava was young—maybe 5-6? she set off to see the world with a well-meant goodbye to her family. it’s sort of hard to explain, because i think it was bad of her to do it, but i don’t really want to portray it in a negative light. in fact, it’s not portrayed in a negative light—Ava, even at the age of 19, has never looked back on that memory as hurtful or neglectful. she sees it as her mother accomplishing something the world would tell you is impossible, and to Ava, it rooted this belief in her mind that if THAT wasn’t actually impossible, then how can she believe anything else is impossible? it ends up actually benefiting Ava a lot, because a lot of Ava’s decisions, beliefs and personality RELIES on that moment in her life. so when when it gets discussed in the story, it’s almost always described fondly. but when i really look at it, and i think when anyone really looks at it, it was actually a pretty crappy thing for her mom to do? just up and abandon her family like that? Ava’s dad thinks so, but even he’s not really “mad” at her. he’s disappointed, feels pretty forgotten, but if you heard him talk about her, he really just missed her and loved her. i don’t really know, when i wrote down all that stuff about Ava’s parents for the first time, if there was ever a message i was trying to convey through these characters. honestly, it just happened that way. i guess it’s a pretty good example of how romanticizing can really murk something up if you forget or ignore the facts surrounding it?

her father, Ryan, is a less developed. the current story is: he worked for a woman named Pippa Lane at a tailor shop before he got sick a few years after Sherry left. when he couldn’t work anymore, Pippa agreed to let Ava work for her in his place, since few other places would really offer enough work for Ava to take care of herself and her dad. she was probably 12-14 at that point? eventually, Ryan died. Ava still works for Pippa—or “Ms. Pippa,” as she’s been calling her since always.

Pippa is basically Ava’s third parent of sorts. she’s a cute lil old lady who values proper ladylike things, while Ava’s a little, uh, less ladylike. they like each other a lot and compromise though—Pippa puts up with some of Ava’s unseemly behaviors, and in turn, Ava acts a little more proper at work. Pippa also has a spare bedroom that Ava stays in sometimes, but Ava has a tendency to sleep anywhere she can around town because, again, her mother’s adventurism really set a spark off in Ava, who likes to explore the city over and over and over again.

but that’s why Ava can’t read. her parents couldn’t (which couldn’t possibly have been easy for an engineer… i guess that explains why she was only freelance, haha) and didn’t have the money or means to teach her. realistically, i think Ava can read a LITTLE, because Ben can read.

which is because BEN’S parents are actually probably one of the wealthier families in the city. not wealthy enough to afford those luxury cruises, mind you, but wealthy. i’m still working them out because i’m still working out Ben’s backstory for the most part, but his parents are both really nice and loving, even if they all sometimes get too busy to tell each other they love them. when Ben was possessed by Gavin, he was absolutely mortified. being jinxed is a big deal, especially in smaller towns like Ben and Ava’s, where they don’t have anyone capable of performing an exorcism. on top of a lot of other shit Ben would be forced to deal with, his family would suffer a huge blow to their reputation if word got out about their jinxed son. he was probably pretty worried they’d resent him if they found out about him, but he was more worried about burdening them.

within a few days though, he was persuaded by Ava to go back to his house and tell them what was happening. his parents were really supportive of him and swore they’d do whatever they could to help, even though exorcisms and traveling to other cities and all the rest of it were well beyond what his family could afford. because this would really badly effect their image (which they didn’t care about and Ben knew they didn’t), Ben decided himself that he wanted to find another way than with their help, so he basically runs away and him and Ava proceed to make use of the “illegal” way of seeing new cities. his parents are looking for him though because they know exactly what he’s doing and they think it’s dumb and Ben’s dumb and it’s a big stupid mess actually. but if Ben doesn’t do it his family will kill their reputation and PROBABLY wind up bankrupt and Ben just doesn’t want to be responsible for that and is a stupid kid with stupid ideas.

I was like “whoa…wait what” then I remember you did mention there are demons lurking in the surface world, right?? /kinda thought them as humans before realizing theyre different than what I really thought omg im sorry! D:”

ahahah what are you apologizing for?? ;u; it's my job to make my shit make sense, not yours! and yes, the lower world is crawling with demons—or gremlins, if you want to use the name they refer to themselves by, heheh. "demons" is more like a human-given name for them.

i like it a whole bunch and wanna know more forever!

eeeee!! thanks!!! ;u; <33

Sound like a good start way to develop their relationship, or my thought said so! I almost thought of drawing them, but of course your characters is still in develop…but I have to admit, like what you said, they sure sound like a funny duo.. :>

aaaaaahhh you're really sweet, thank you so much!! ;u; <333

and i think for Ben and Ava at least, their looks are pretty set in stone. Ben's always been that boring-looking—it was actually a bit of a POINT, to me, to make him so. when i had that dream, it was made obvious to me that Ben was as normal a guy as they come, and i've always tried to maintain that about him. i never wanted him to become something special of a character. sure, of course, he's got a demon's spirit residing in his left side, so he's obviously kind of special. but i wanted to give the feel of a guy still working his life out. he's a guy who so far doesn't know what he wants in most cases, so he lets the world revolve and he just tries to follow its lead. the fact that things just happen to him and he adapts is one of my attempts at acknowledging how plain he tends to be. his name was one of the biggest things for me—there were a million names i thought were cooler than "Ben" when i named him, but again, my goal was for him to be typical. kind of just a simple guy. i don't want him to be bland by any means, but i feel that if i were to equip him with a legendary sword or grant him some supernatural powers, i'd lose what made me love him so much when i woke up from that dream once upon a time.

but now i've rambled a lot and all i meant to say is that Ben's looked the way he does for years, and Ava's much newer than Ben is, as far as when i created the characters, but my first mental picture of her and the drawing i posted a while ago are both very close to identical, so i imagine she won't be changing very much from here on out either.