#rotrose

it started with killing davepeta. i knew june would kill davepeta and that it wouldn't be permanent, but that it *would* still be very costly for them in some way. my oldest plan for how to actually do that was reaaaaally nasty though. for a long time after the big fight in chapter 8, dana and crew would end up in the debris field around the moon at one ship that hadn't been torn apart... except it had no power. so june resurrected davepeta, inside of a battery that used them as an energy source. which would of course be torturous in some sense because like, come on, if you're gonna make a living battery it's gotta suck. like they don't make being a yellowblood in act 5 seem cool at all. shit's gotta be horrific if it's to have any meaning at all conceptually.

and that's just a bit too edgy for godfeels. this story's dark but i don't want it to be *mean.* davepeta hasn't earned that treatment and it's just kind of a waste of their character. it sucks and it feels bad and it doesn't really mean anything narratively. like oh you put a really likeable character in a torture box to torture them? what's jade gonna do, get more mad??? it's boring. it's a boring situation to put those characters in because all it really is is them going grrrrrrr and then waiting until i can contrive a way to reverse my goddamn mistake and get them back to square one.

so then i decided instead that rose would go grimdark, have her head cut off, her corpse would become a sort of oozing mass of oil and tentacles and lovecraftian corruption, so naturally june would use *her* for a battery instead. what is it about rose lalonde that makes this exact some conceit so much more palatable? like it's still fucked up but you know she would approve. and oh, mary, soaring through the stars on a ship powered by her dead wife's seething eldritch radioactivity! the romance is palpable. that's got some gas, you know?

but when i really got started on chapter 8 i realized i could cut out a whole chunk of pointless faffing about with june and dana trying to get some junk ship working, and escaping with it, and doing whatever until they eventually somehow rendezvous with lenore... by just using june's fucking super power to directly transport us to the plot palace boogie cruiser hotel. seriously i didn't plan to get into ANY of that stuff until 3.3, and honestly getting us to the comet *now* is just so much better in every way

but that means: no more need for a battery powered by main character death. which is great for the fandom, but now i've got these fucking plot points (bodies) just dangling around with nothing to do! davepeta's an easy fix because june could just fax them out to jade, the whole thing writes itself from there really, it's a softer landing, less cynical, and as with the comet it sets us up to get right to The Good Bits instead of fucking around spinning wheels. it puts the trauma directly into the hands of the people who will have to process it while under the gaze of the narrative. cut to the chase baby.

so what about rose? i knew that she as a character would die but that some wretched fact of her physical presence needed to become an animate antagonist force in some capacity. you'd think that epigone would be an obvious connection, and you're right! but i literally did not know epigone existed until it just fucking *showed up* at the end of dirk's chapter. i literally typed that fucking smiley after the cut to black and went

so anyway i then had to invent the metaphysics of ideaspace out of nothing and develop an entire narrative architecture to justify whatever the fuck that smiley was, a process which included making the above obvious connection vis a vis rose's corpse. from there it was easy to piggyback epigone off of dirk's newly-planned resurrection, and once i got a read on epigone's actual *character?* oh my god it was like angels singing, but in the worst most awful and bad way possible! the more i wrote of rotrose, the more possibilities emerged, and now it just so happens that this freak abomination slots perfectly into the spot of a villainous thing that i knew needed to be present in that section of the story but which had until then been entirely vague to me.

that's the godfeels writing process in a nutshell, basically. if i ever seem astonished that chapter 8 makes any sense at all, this is why. and it's quite literally the reason i committed to a lengthy planning phase before writing 3.2 in earnest, because as much of a thrill as that was it is something i absolutely never want to do again. i will probably end up having to do something like it again sooner or later because this story just can't help throwing me fucking curveballs at the last second, but hopefully it won't be quite so irresponsible next time.