I’ve got a spot of workaholism.

And as a workaholic who is lucky enough to have built my life around work I actually rather like, through some rather difficult choices, it can be quite easy to justify to myself that I don’t need silly “breaks”.

That if I just love what I’m doing so much, why should I ever?

I also have rather iron discipline (and humility) as well as a work ethic that has seen me through the last fifteen years of being an artist with only two instances of homelessness. Just the two, if you can believe this.

I would also say that I’ve seen myself fall into a trap fairly cyclically.

Fun, Failure and Metrics

I can’t be sure, but if you’re anything like I am—first of all, sorry—perhaps you might also have a form of creative bi-polarity where you flit between fits of manic genius and the pits of abject despair. Where in one state you’re making more in a day than you’ll often make in a month, you adore it, you remember why you make anything at all.

Then, in the other, you have something rather different and it looks an awful lot like “what’s the point?”

That isn’t the trap, necessarily. Here is my trap: It is that I am constantly at war with my muse versus the logical desire to monetise every oh-so-terribly genius idea I have that I can turn into a thing.

Which then easily spirals into well, now I must take advantage of this arranque to make as much progress as possible and turn this into a project that both supports me and furthers my body of work before the honeymoon phase ends and I dip back out of my inspired mania when I can’t quite manifest the whole thing quickly enough.

And it’s a difficult question to ask myself when I put something down if I might have the desire to pick it back up later. I’ve had to become just as perceptive of my internal mind-state without delusion to know if I’m lying to myself or not.

It creates a type of anxiety. One fed by a few streams of thought—as thoughts tend to be right before they spiral—such as—oh no I’ve used an em-dash again, someone’s going to see that and think you prompted this, you should change that now.

Mm. Such as the fact that my “career” was delayed due to military service and medical situations that—I feel—put me behind anyone I could ever call peer. And now I’m desperate to finish the flagship, to start putting things on my career shelf of “I made that. It was good. People liked it. We go again.”

Which is not to say I haven’t made things and people didn’t like them and I have not simply kept going.

But I wonder if I might forever be perceiving that next thing as the “true prestigious thing” or if I’m merely ambitious in a general sense. After all, my harshest of self-criticisms have only done their job of making most anything I make better over time and this thing feels adjacent.

Is this the trap?

There are a few things you may be grappling with that may be traps.

Although I feel behind, I’m told that I’m very young yet. But I also feel that I should know better when I’ve made a mistake. Why do I occasionally fall into a pattern of judging my work by likes on social media? Why must I forget the principle of making what I want to make and the money will come? Why, when LLMs were new did I let it convince me my writing was terrible because it wasn’t “correct”? Why do I keep comparing myself to people who’ve lived different lives and psy-opping myself that this is meant to motivate me?

When will I achieve something that finally vindicates the years of artistic suffering?

Will I ever? Or is this a trope that, someday, a hallucinated Stephen King or GDT will float down and crack me over the head to say to me that it simply never happens?

So, Step Away or: Develop the Relationship to Your Work

I don’t mean for you to give up a project or your work. Rather, I mean to say, that with all this spiraling and overthinking—however unavoidable—it’s important that you do set your work down now and again.

Some of you clever, self-actualised creatives will roll your eyes over how obvious this seems. To me it was not until recently.

What this does is takes your mind out of production mode and allows you to plumb the meaningful depths of the work. If actually making it develops your relationship with your skill then I would say not making it nurtures both the emotional core of the work and your emotional relationship to it.

When I’m able to tear myself away and go on a walk, go socialise, go play another studio’s video games or read a book, I’m still working on my own projects—though in a different way.

You’ll have revelations. You’ll define thematic throughlines. You’ll solve plot problems. You’ll know what to cut. You’ll know what needs total upheaval.

In fact, this blog is precisely my best example.

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I’ve always been a writer in some capacity, though without realising it. And then someone said that I had such a way with words,—with characterisation, with dialogue, with world-building—that I should add ‘writer’ to my CV.

And because I’m fucking hopelessly arrogant, I decided that was true.

Right around the time LLM was picking up.

Right around the time I was writing in English.

So, this is no secret that I’m ESL—that is, “English-second-language”—and let me preface this whole section with two things. One: LLM bloody hates you ESL speakers. Two: I didn’t learn English from playgrounds, I learned it when I was a bit older while reading books that are stranger and more archaic in register than the way people spoke around me. That’s where my English lives.

And I am going to sound a little angry. And I’m going to sound a little like a victim, though I would be the first in line to flagellate myself for this because, being that hindsight is 20/20 or whatever the saying is, I went to LLM for bloody. Writing. Advice.

For god’s sake. Don’t do this. You may use models for brainstorming, fine. For organising notes, fine. Authors Guild explicitly allows this in works they certify as human-made.

I work in an industry where the latest craze is truly for chasing and no small number of us went to see what this supposedly groundbreaking technology was able to do. It seemed so clever, we said. It’s able to pull knowledge from every corner of the internet, we thought and so we—naturally—gravitated to talking about what we do.

I, ever the self-improvement junkie, am always looking to receive criticism. I love it. And I’ve seen myself take the most scathing of it with the most German of my sensibility fronting it as the data that it is. I’m proud of my ability to do so.

I’m highly logical. I have response inhibition which means I’m able to override impulse. One of the benefits to this? Exceptional ability to not take things all that personally and to filter them appropriately by their usefulness to me.

I’m getting to the point.

I allowed models to tell me that my writing was dogshit. That my writing was objectively poor, incomprehensible and littered with incorrectness that—only if I stopped all that ESL nonsense and odd-word-choice shenanigans—would I be able to realise my dreams of being a world-class writer.

And “here’s the thing”.

I trusted it. I thought, well here’s an intelligent, supposedly thinking model that has studied and pattern-recognised proper writing, English authors, good grammar, comprehensibility because it’s a machine and machines can’t be wrong (Omnissiah, are you listening?) It made perfect sense to me.

So it gave me advice. Things like even cadence. Emphasis on the correct words. Very correct grammar. Be comprehensible. This word is strange. This would be odd to an English speaker. This paragraph you’re so proud of? Kill your darlings. Publishing conventions say you have to be consistent with this. No, you can’t use American-style em-dashes with London standard formatting even though you like the flow. That’s too strange. Your unassisted writing is, you asked me to be blunt, objectively behind.

Would you like to keep talking about this work or should we jump in to other techniques? I can tell you more about other ESL authors who wrote in English.

That’s when I finally noticed the thing that shattered my trust in what was meant to be an objectivity machine. Up until that point I was following its advice, homogenising my strange, slightly arrogant voice towards the probability-centre of whatever it deemed to be the most comprehensible, corporate-American, safe writing it could be—but it was showing me everything else and saying that was the standard to reach.

It was telling me that a hint of strange was good. Reassuring me that us non-natives brought a charming exophony effortlessly to other languages. An unconventional foreignness that native-speakers have to try hard to engineer. It cited the likes of Joseph Conrad, Ágota Kristóf, Vladimir Nabokov.

(…) slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. —Joseph Conrad

Their work? Incredible. And yet I immediately clocked that it had all the bizarre cadence that I was told precisely to avoid doing.

So I stepped away.

And started writing like dogshit again.

Know Yourself First

While I never actually generated my writing, I may as well have done. Whether it was translating my perfect-terrible French or Spanish into English, telling me to remove my literary varnish, telling me to emphasise certain points or telling me that I would overwhelm a reader with density—I was letting a number-generator tell me how to be a writer, how to speak English properly, how to optimise for metrics, and I did not have a real one to tell me otherwise.

This is a pattern in my life.

I’m self-taught in all things. Never went to school as I could not afford this. My poor immigrant family wanted me to be an anaesthetist or a psychiatrist. Then they were rather happy when I became a forensic analyst and I bungled that up too by daydreaming about being an artist while staring at four stacked computer monitors that looked like they were built in 1998 in a room with no windows surrounded by hundreds of people who sounded nothing like me when they spoke.

I also had few friends, growing up in America as an outsider, as every specifically American friendship had about a two-year expiry date before they could no longer tolerate my lack of performed-warmth and I could never quite mask convincingly enough to fit into the constructed social texture.

I was alone.

And so I’ve had to be aggressive, agentic, canny to make it all work out. Which means embracing self-reliance, adaptability, strange tools, harsh criticism. And workaholism, too.

It wasn’t until I was not working that I realised I was optimising the fun out of the whole apparatus again. As I tend to—German systems-thinker that I am.

It is important to take breaks.

It’s also important to be more cognisant than ever for to have young people learn how to do something on their own before a number-machine trains them not to attempt problem-solving or trust their own judgment or, indeed, have their taste decided for them.

Or we may all in time be praying to the machine-god like they do in the 41st Millennium without the slightest idea of how bloody any of it works at all.

When I was in the military, I made the terrifying decision to leave and risk (and subsequently experience) homelessness all to pursue the arts.

I would rather live uncertainly than exist in scheduled certainty. That has not changed.

So then, if making art is so important to me, why should I let a machine optimise all my thinking for me and deny me the joy of being a dogshit writer that says someone’s eyes can be beset by deepening lines rather than merely surrounded by them.

I am a fool. I fall in love with my own ideas and can think my way into justifying anything I need to justify my way into thinking.

I should probably go outside.

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Fair Winds,
D.S.

The question got dropped on my doorstep, finally.

I can’t ignore it anymore. It’s everywhere. Let’s talk.

Let me begin by demonstrating where some well-meaning folk are in denial and where I am not.

Yes, a model can produce a beautiful sentence. Yes, output-for-output, generated and authored prose can be indistinguishable on the page. I grant this fully so that we’re sitting in a realm of reality when I tell you why this is okay and why your work is not destined to irrelevance in the face of some super-machine author/illustrator/artist meta.

So, if the page can’t always tell you, then where is the difference? Between you and generated prose/visual?

The Relationship with the Work

Not in the “this means something to me” sense but in the sense that you, present in every step of its probably rather lengthy creation, are fluent in it in the way no prompter could possibly be.

Your authorship? That exists in a rejected alternative.

In case you weren’t aware of how this works, AI isn’t true intelligence. It’s token-based on probability. This is why generated writing tends to have this recognisable cadence you’ve all come to know and loathe.

It’s become the green carnation of the writing world. Em (—) dashes. Not X, but Y.

Because, when these models were authored—ironic and we love this—the work that was used to inform its capacity for competent, advanced prose was the work of competent, grammatically correct and sometimes un-adventurous writing that has been condensed now into a pattern-recognition nightmare. One that informs any machine how to generate, edit and translate text.

So, now you see the context for the reasonable argument that sometimes competent writers look like AI-prompters. Even cadence, punchy declaratives. Sometimes an instinct to over-explain for a demographic. Things you may have learned or been taught to do that now get or have gotten you scrutiny.

A model optimises for that center and you, artist, are defined by where you leave the center.

I’m not here to console you—after all, I’ve just admitted AI can craft a lovely sentence. But what I’m going to explain will, hopefully, console you anyway.

I’m a transmedia creator. Which means that I work in more than one sphere of media. I’m not just a writer, I’m an illustrator and 3D artist, full pipeline. I’m also multi-lingual and that gives my english prose, I think, a foreign strangeness I should truly lean into more, not less.

What this experience has given me is a lens into how the minds of the many people I’ve worked with think about their work. And how they talk about it.

This is where I was able to realise something. That when you make it, you thought about that decision. When you prompt it, you’re handing authorship over.

And therefore, in making it and swerving from probability-based decision making—if you have any form of inner monologue with yourself—you have just nurtured your ability to talk about your work in ways that someone simply trusting an output just cannot do.

Your fluency in your own work under questioning is where true-authorship lives.

This is also why many argue—and I would strongly agree—that generated work lacks “soul.” Because soul is strangeness. It’s chaos. It’s emotional and unpredictable decision-making that a number-as-probability generator simply cannot do because it is constantly optimising for the “center”. The most likely. The most “what would very skilled and successful author x, y and z agree is the most appropriate and correct word to use here?”

And people want soul. This is art. Experiencing the world through someone else’s eyes is exclusively possible through the consumption of it.

Some media, I would also argue, may not be “AI-generated” but is crafted so precisely as to offend no-one, appeal to the most people possible, be the most comprehensible to the most people and be as un-challenging as possible that it is doing the same probability-based generation that a model does. Only it’s a person optimising for eyeballs (see: money.)

I’m not making an argument on what’s worse. Not at all. I’m attempting a dissemination of how to define authored-versus-generated writing so genuinely creative people can stop feeling worthless while we’re all trying to figure out what our relationship with this is going to be in twenty years.

So. The author can reconstruct the why, defend it, have it argued with, because the choice was real and made against options. And the generator cannot go past the surface, because there was no why; there was only probability.

Great, but for some of us, that wasn’t enough to feel better.

Your Body of Work

Fine, you may say. But someone could fake the whole apparatus!

I find that to fake sustained authorship—that is, holding a voice across a body of work, a world built below the waterline and a defensible, demonstrated why across thousands of choices—costs more than authorship.

The sustained forgery theory requires an accused artist to be more impressive than the person they’re accused of not being. Which is why I posit one looks at the body, not the sentence.

One artifact can be doubted; a corpus held together—authored—by one consistent intelligence cannot be faked into existence cheaply.

That’s you. Hopefully.

You can’t fake your own repeated aesthetic obsession. Not cheaply. And your ability to intelligently talk about these engines that drive you every decision, often down to word-level, is what makes your work authored. Valuable. Yours.

Let me try to demonstrate what that could look like to you.

I received critique on possibly having overwritten some prose with “odd” language choices that was argued to be incorrect or over-the-top literary varnish on a mundane detail that didn’t need it. “Showing-off” at worst.

An example; “Why did you choose the word ‘beset’ here?” (Context: a man’s face as “beset by deepening lines.”)

My pushback, close to verbatim, was in saying that the mood of a world lives inside how small details are described. That "beset" is predatory—it carries yielding, or fighting (and possibly flagging behind.) I'd called it "elevated," but isn't that what literary writing is? Taking what's "just" anything and transfiguring it into something aesthetic?

I wasn’t defending one pretty word. I was defending a principle: that the register has to go all the way down. That the same sensibility describing the world’s main menace and antagonist has to inflect a man's face, or the world doesn't have texture.

I don’t believe any model in the world could curate its own aesthetic. That’s not what models are built for.

That’s what you’re built for.

You’re You and You Use Tools

What a machine can’t take isn’t speed or polish. The line here, that I’m drawing, is not ‘did a tool touch this’—tools touch everything. We research with them, we draft bullet-point notes and outlines with them. The Authors Guild itself carves out brainstorming, structuring, grammar, translation and only draws the line at generating the text.

The question here is not what assisted you, it’s accountability. An author/artist who can defend every sentence wrote it, whatever they used to get unstuck.

An ‘author’ who can’t, didn’t write it, no matter what produced it.

The more generated text there is out there, the more an authored swerve stands out. Volume of average makes the strange (we want strange) more visible, not less.

Generating is cheap. Prompting is cheap.

Sustaining your authored vision across your body of work is expensive. You know every tributary, though. You can defend those waters because for every most-likely-probability turn you could have taken and didn’t, you built on your body of work with a chaotic, passionate, human vision where no model could fake experience. That’s where art lives. Where its soul lives.

Let that silhouette your work’s unique spirit. Its edges and form. AI sands off every corner and makes everything safe. Competent. Structurally perfect and entirely boring.

Kind of like Hollywood.

Interesting.

Fair Winds,
D.S.

The Latin word for courage is virtus.

This comes from vir—which is “man”, no flourish. It’s not an adjective, therefore not male, not chromosome count, not genital configuration. Man and the quality of being one. As Rome saw it, the was courage, self-mastery, command, agency, the capacity to act under pressure. These were not masculine traits in the way we mean for today—which is to say attributes that correlate to maleness by cultural habit.

To them, they were masculine substance. Evidence of masculinity. The Romans held that if you demonstrated virtus, you were demonstrating male nature. Your behavior was testimony (look up the etymology to that one, too) to what you were.

We get the word virtue from this, if that was not immediately obvious. Two thousand years of linguistic downstream, and we’ve managed to strip the sex out of it entirely. The Romans would have found this bizarre. For them, character and biology were rather connected. And in ways worth understanding. For the sheer fascination of it if not for historical accuracy.

It goes like this: A body that produced courage was a male body expressing itself correctly. A body that virilised (e.g. grew hair, deepened its voice, broadened its shoulders) was a body doing what virtus announced it would.

If that sounds alien to you, it should.

You're modern. You've inherited a mental framework that claims sex is determined by science—by chromosomes, by gonads, by rigorous biological assessment. In practice, it's determined by a nurse glancing at a newborn for half a second and checking a box. That box follows you for the rest of your life. Everything else—your skeleton, your voice, your temperament, the fire in you or the absence of it—is cosmetic. Personality? Irrelevant. Shut up. Next.

The Romans weighed all of it. We don't even look.

The ancients had a different framework. And it wasn’t primitive at all. I’d call it holistic.

What follows is about how the ancient and classical world understood sex and bodies—not just atypical bodies. What made a man a man. What made a woman a woman. How a civilization decided, and what it weighed, and why the answers it reached look almost nothing like ours. The intersex body is where the ancient framework becomes most visible because it's where the modern one fails most obviously. But the framework governed everyone.

If you write historical fiction, fantasy grounded in pre-modern cultures, or secondary worlds that draw on classical or medieval models, this could be of great interest to you.

The Box

If you think manhood—real, definitional, legal—has always been about the thing between the legs, that is not correct. A civilisation that is frequently cited as the greatest empire in Western history defined the thing by character. And this is the civilisation that invented democracy, philosophy, and the foundations of Western law, and medicine. They looked at bodies, ambiguous or otherwise, and read them to determine what it was that nature intended. They had legal frameworks for it. They had medical vocabularies for it. They had case law going back centuries.

A Roman jurist would have noted the broad shoulders, the deep voice, the temperament that commanded rooms. A Galenic physician would have read the larynx, the skeletal frame, the aggression, and said: the male sex prevails.

A modern GP—I can attest from embarrassingly first-hand experience—is able to look at all of that—every sign the ancient world considered primary evidence—and write “normal healthy female” without a second thought. Not because the signs weren’t there, however. I can only presume because no one taught him to look for them.

Something happened between the civilisation that read the whole person and the one that checks a box at birth and never revisits.

Not to bury the lede too deeply, it was something political, not scientific.

Something that shrank the definition of sex from a holistic assessment down to a single checkbox in a delivery room—and in so doing, made millions of bodies illegible (at absolute best) that had previously been merely unusual.

One Sex

Hermaphroditos was the child of Hermes and Aphrodite. When the nymph Salmacis saw him bathing and wrapped herself around him so completely the gods fused them into one body. Ovid described the result as though it were something numinous. Readings of tone are contested and Romans themselves would have feared the resulting pool that “softened” any man to enter it afterwards.1 Indeed, the merging is presented as non-consensual and one could argue what this means—I have my own interpretations out of scope of this essay.

We’ll move on.

The Greeks named people whose bodies carried both male and female characteristics after this myth. Hermaphroditos. It was not a slur. Perhaps something of a diagnosis. This should serve to demonstrate how integrated the concept was.

The myth is terrifying, maybe a bit beautiful. But it’s only the threshold.

Behind it was an entire medical system that understood sex differently from anything you’ve encountered and that system dominated Western medicine for two thousand years.

Hippocrates and Galen didn’t see two sexes. Rather, they saw one.

Male and female weren’t opposite or separate categories. They were endpoints on a single continuum of vital heat. There was hot and dry at the male end, cold and wet at the female end—and every human body fell somewhere along this. A woman’s reproductive organs weren’t different structures from a man’s. They were the same structures, folded inward by insufficient heat. Galen described the vagina as an interior penis, the uterus as an undescended scrotum. Not as metaphor; anatomy, as he understood it.

This is what scholars call the one-sex model. Thomas Laqueur, the historian who traced its full arc, put it plainly: for most of Western history, there was one sex with two expressions, not two discrete categories.

This came packaged with something that sometimes presented as a value judgment in the politics of the time. The ancients placed male at the top of the continuum and female at the bottom. In the medical literature, this was primarily a developmental claim—male was the more derived form, female the base state. Aristotle extended it further, arguing that women were deficient not just in vital heat but in rational capacity. Not every ancient thinker agreed with him on that. But the hierarchy of the spectrum itself was consistent across centuries of thought.

Modern developmental biology inverts it. Every human embryo begins on the same blueprint. The default pathway is female. Male differentiation requires a specific hormonal event—a surge of androgens at the right moment. Without it, the body develops along female lines regardless of chromosomes. Female isn’t the incomplete version. It’s the foundation. Male is what happens when additional conditions are met.

The Greeks had the direction backwards. They had the structure right: one design, expressed in degrees.

The ancients also understood something we tend to forget: sex arrives. Before puberty, boys and girls are not dramatically different—same proportions, same voices, same unfinished frames. The Greeks were acutely aware of this. They watched masculinization happen in real time, every generation. Voice dropping, shoulders broadening, hair coming in, temperament hardening. Under the one-sex model, this wasn’t just growth. It was vital heat completing its work—nature declaring what the body was becoming.

Which meant a body that declared itself late wasn’t impossible. It was expected. If sex is a function of heat, and heat can increase over time, then a girl whose body masculinizes at puberty isn’t changing sex. Sex is being declared—for the first time, in earnest—and nature simply took longer than usual to get there.

Now think about what a continuum means for a body that doesn’t sort neatly.

Under a binary, an ambiguous body is a problem. A system error. Something that shouldn’t exist and needs to be corrected—surgically, hormonally, administratively—until it fits one of exactly two categories. The binary cannot afford exceptions, because exceptions prove it isn’t binary.

Under a continuum, that same body is just a body. Positioned unusually, perhaps. But not impossibly. There’s no category it’s failing to fit. There’s no box it broke. It’s a point on a line, and the line has room.

And here’s where it gets directly relevant to anyone writing pre-modern characters—not just “intersex” ones.

Under this model, sex wasn’t fixed at birth and sealed forever. It was understood as unstable. Changeable. Influenced by diet, climate, activity, temperament. Reports of sex changes are common in ancient Greco-Roman literature—and the direction is telling. They are almost exclusively female-to-male. A body that virilized—that grew hair, broadened, deepened—wasn’t experiencing a disorder. It was completing itself. Nature turning up the heat. An imperfect form moving toward its more perfect expression.

The ancients didn’t see this as transgression. They saw it as fulfillment.

If you’re writing a world grounded in classical or medieval models, that distinction matters. Your characters aren’t living in a system where the body’s sex is declared once and questioned never. They’re living in a system where the body is understood to be in process—where what it does over a lifetime is as important as what it looked like at birth, and where virilization is nature’s correction, not nature’s mistake.

That’s a fundamentally different relationship between a person and their body than anything your modern readers take for granted. And it’s the foundation beneath everything that follows.

Prevailing Sex

Roman law did not have a crisis about ambiguous bodies. It had a procedure.

The Digest of Justinian—the sixth-century codification of centuries of Roman legal thought—addresses hermaphrodites directly. Not as curiosities. Not as abominations. As a civil matter. The question wasn’t “what is this person?” It was “which sex predominates in this person?”—because the answer determined inheritance rights, the ability to witness testaments, eligibility for civic duties. The jurist Ulpian held that “predominantly male” hermaphrodites could institute posthumous heirs. Paulus held they could witness legal documents. Both rights reserved exclusively for men.

The mechanism was the “prevailing sex” doctrine. And the assessment was holistic in a way that should embarrass modern medicine. Voice. Build. Bearing. Skeletal frame. Temperament. Body hair. The legal tradition that descended from Roman practice spelled it out explicitly: a person that is bold and sprightly, having a strong voice, much hair on the body, particularly on the chin—these were “certain demonstrations” that the male sex prevailed.

Not genital inspection. Not a chromosome test. Not a half-second glance at a newborn. A full reading of the whole person, conducted when the question actually mattered, using every piece of evidence the body offered.

The law had room. The question is whether anyone actually needed it.

They did. Repeatedly. And the sources name them.

Pliny the Elder—the most respected encyclopedist in the Roman world—documented multiple cases in his Natural History. He cited the eyewitness account of Licinius Mucianus, who personally saw at Argos a man named Arescon “who had been given the name Arescusa and had actually married a husband, and then had grown a beard and developed masculine attributes and had taken a wife.” Read that sequence. Arescusa was raised female. Married a man. Virilized. Became Arescon. Married a woman. The social transition was complete and apparently unremarkable enough that Mucianus could observe it as an established fact while visiting. Nobody burned Arescon at the stake. He was living openly as a man who had formerly been a woman.

Pliny saw another case with his own eyes: "I myself saw in Africa a person who had turned into a male on the day of marriage to a husband; this was Lucius Constitius, a citizen of Thysdritum." Virilized on the wedding day. Took a male Roman name afterward. Was reclassified. Pliny recorded this not as scandal but as natural history. A fact worth documenting.

Diodorus Siculus gives us the most detailed accounts. Callo of Epidaurus was raised as a girl, served as a priestess of Demeter—deeply embedded in feminine social roles. When male anatomy emerged, a physician intervened. After treatment, Callo laid aside her loom-shuttles and all other instruments of woman’s work, took the garb and status of a man, and changed her name by adding a single letter—N—to become Callon.

Look at how methodical that is. The physician treated the condition. The person changed clothes, changed occupation, changed name. There were specific, recognized social steps. This wasn’t chaos. It was a procedure.

There was one complication—because Callon had participated in the women-only rites of Demeter while still living as female, he was brought to trial for impiety. But the trial wasn’t about whether the sex change was legitimate. That was accepted. The trial was about a religious technicality: a man having seen women’s mysteries. The court dealt with the jurisdictional question and moved on.

Then there’s Herais. Born in Arabia, assigned female, married to a man named Samias. While her husband was on a long journey, she developed severe abdominal pain with sudden appearance of male anatomy. Herais changed her name, changed her legal status, and joined the military. She went from wife to soldier. The reclassification was total—and it included admission to the most masculine institution in the ancient world.

Her husband Samias returned and claimed his conjugal rights. It went to court. The court ruled in favor of the reclassification. The legal system adjudicated the question, decided this person was now male, and that was the end of it.

Modern medical researchers who’ve analyzed these accounts have concluded that the spontaneous virilization described in these cases is consistent with 5α-reductase type 2 deficiency or 17β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase mutations—intersex conditions where the body masculinizes at puberty despite female-appearing anatomy at birth. The “miracles” Pliny documented were almost certainly people whose endocrine systems did exactly what the one-sex model predicted: delivered the heat late.

One more case. The one that complicates any reading of this as a system that only worked for people who virilized conveniently.

Favorinus was born around 80 AD in Arelate—modern Arles. He was, by all ancient accounts, intersex. Polemon described him as “a eunuch born without testicles.” Philostratos called him a hermaphrodite. Modern scholars suggest his presentation was consistent with androgen insensitivity syndrome—the opposite of virilization. Beardless. High voice. Soft features. A body that expressed the feminine far more than the masculine.

He became one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the Roman Empire.

He lived on close terms with Plutarch, with Herodes Atticus, with the emperor Hadrian. He mastered Greek as a Gaul. He was accused of adultery with the wife of a man of consular rank—whether true or not, the accusation itself tells you Roman society treated him as a man capable of sexual agency, despite his ambiguous body. He had a bronze statue erected in Athens. He was elected High Priest in the cult of Augustus.

He described himself with three paradoxes: as a Gaul, he mastered Greek; as a eunuch, he was prosecuted for adultery; and he quarreled with the emperor and lived.

The system didn’t just accommodate bodies that resolved neatly toward male. It had room for bodies that didn’t resolve at all—provided the person inside them was extraordinary enough to command it.

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And this wasn’t limited to the Greco-Roman world.

Jewish legal tradition developed its own framework—and it was, if anything, more sophisticated. The Talmud identifies at least four categories for atypical sex: androgynos, a person with both male and female characteristics visible; tumtum, a person whose sex is indeterminate or concealed; ay’lonit, a person assigned female at birth who develops male characteristics at puberty; and saris, the reverse, or a castrated male.

Each category carried specific legal rulings—about inheritance, about ritual obligation, about marriage law, about which commandments applied and which didn’t. An ay'lonit, for instance, was exempt from certain obligations that applied to women—because the law recognized that her body was in the process of declaring something else, and the obligations needed to follow the body, not the birth assignment. This wasn’t erasure. It wasn’t flattening. It was a legal system that created more categories than we have now, not fewer, because the bodies existed and the law needed to address them.

The modern binary—male or female, pick one, no exceptions—is not the historical default. Every major legal and medical tradition of the ancient world found ways to accommodate variation without crisis. Greek medicine had a model that predicted it. Roman law had a procedure that processed it. Jewish law had categories that specified it.

The crisis came later. And it was invented for reasons that had nothing to do with medicine or science, nothing to do with law, and nothing to do with bodies at all.

The Rupture

For two thousand years, the one-sex model held. Not because no one questioned it—Galen was debated, Hippocrates was revised, the details shifted century to century—but because the underlying structure survived every revision. One design. A continuum. Sex expressed in degrees, assessed holistically, understood as something the body declared over time.

It ended in the eighteenth century. And it ended for reasons that had nothing to do with anatomy.

The Enlightenment had a problem.

The new political philosophy ran on a single premise: all men are created equal. Natural rights. Liberty as birthright. Authority derived from reason, not from God or blood. This was revolutionary, and the men who articulated it meant it—within limits.

The limit was women.

If all men are created equal, and women are a lesser version of the same thing—cooler, less developed, lower on the same continuum—then the argument for excluding them gets uncomfortable. A lesser version can improve. A lesser version can argue that the gap is smaller than you think, or closing, or irrelevant to the question of citizenship. The one-sex model, which had served perfectly well for two millennia, was suddenly a political liability. It left the door open.

So the door was closed.

The two-sex model emerged in the late eighteenth century—not from some great anatomical discovery, not from a laboratory breakthrough, but from a political need for biological justification. If women aren’t a lesser version of men but an entirely different kind of organism—categorically, fundamentally, in every aspect of body and soul—then exclusion isn’t inequality. It’s just acknowledging nature. You can’t argue your way across an ontological divide.

The French physician Moreau stated it with the clarity of a man who knew exactly what he was building: “Not only are the sexes different, but they are different in every conceivable aspect of body and soul, in every physical and moral aspect.”

Every conceivable aspect. Body and soul.

That's the death of the continuum. Under the old model, body and soul were connected—masculine behavior was evidence of male nature, and the spectrum had room for every gradation between endpoints. Under the new model, male and female are sealed categories. There is no spectrum. There is no gradation. There are two boxes, and every body goes in one.

Thomas Laqueur, the historian who traced this shift most precisely, put it plainly: sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented. The reproductive organs went from being sites for displaying hierarchy to being the foundation of incommensurable difference.

Incommensurable. That’s the word that did the damage. It means: cannot be measured on the same scale. Cannot be compared. So fundamentally different that the old continuum doesn’t apply. Male and female aren’t hot and cold versions of the same design anymore. They’re different designs entirely.

And intersex bodies—which had been unremarkable points on a continuum for two thousand years—became impossible rather than merely uncommon or unusual. Because the binary can’t afford exceptions. An exception proves it isn’t binary. So exceptions must be eliminated—reclassified, corrected, put in a box—or the entire political architecture that depends on said binary starts to crack.

The sorting mechanism narrowed in stages.

Even within the new two-sex model, physicians in the early nineteenth century still weighed multiple factors when confronted with an ambiguous body. A patient’s build, voice, interests, mannerisms, and the direction of their sexual desire were all considered relevant. Degraded from the Roman holistic assessment, but still something. The body was still being read, even if the reading was being forced toward one of only two conclusions.

By the 1890s, that was gone.

Alice Dreger, the historian who documented this period most thoroughly, calls the era from roughly 1890 to 1915 the “Age of Gonads.” A consensus hardened: “true sex” would be determined by gonadal tissue. Ovarian or testicular. That was it. The voice didn’t matter. The skeleton didn’t matter. The temperament, the bearing, the behavior that a Roman jurist would have catalogued as primary evidence—none of it counted. One tissue type, examined under a microscope, would tell you what a person really was.

There was a problem. You couldn’t examine gonadal tissue in a living patient. Biopsies were rarely performed. The only reliable method was autopsy or castration. Dreger notes that under this standard, true hermaphrodites could only be identified after death. The framework demanded evidence it couldn’t access in the people it was meant to classify.

So in practice, it narrowed further. If you can’t biopsy every ambiguous newborn, you fall back on what you can see. A visual assessment at birth—quick, superficial, based on external genital appearance—became the de facto determination. Not the holistic evaluation of voice, skeleton, temperament, and bearing that had served for millennia. Not even the gonadal inspection that the new doctrine demanded. A glance. A checkbox. A decision made in seconds that the system would never revisit.

Two thousand years of assessment methodology—from the Galenic physician who weighed the whole person, to the Roman jurist who catalogued boldness and voice and frame, to the Talmudic scholars who maintained four distinct categories—collapsed into a binary choice made by whoever happened to be in the delivery room.

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Then the doctors decided to make the binary stick.

John Money, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins, developed the “optimum gender of rearing” model in the 1950s. His premise: gender identity is primarily learned, not innate. If you surgically alter an ambiguous infant’s genitalia to match one sex and raise the child accordingly, the child will develop the corresponding identity. The body can be made to fit the box. Early enough intervention, consistent enough reinforcement, and the binary holds.

This wasn’t intentional cruelty. It was medicine. The doctors who performed these surgeries believed they were helping—sparing children the confusion and stigma of ambiguous bodies in a world that demanded clear categories. The logic was sympathetic. The intent was care.

The consequences were irreversible.

Intersex infants—who under the Roman system would have been assessed holistically over time, whose bodies would have been allowed to declare themselves—were surgically assigned in infancy. Tissue was removed. Anatomy was constructed. Decisions were made about who a person was before that person could speak, based on what a surgeon could most plausibly build, not on what the body was trying to become.

If this pattern sounds familiar, it should. The medicalization of homosexuality followed the same arc. Well-intentioned doctors reframed variation as pathology, created a diagnostic framework, and then—because pathology demands treatment—developed interventions that caused enormous harm to the people they were meant to help. Krafft-Ebing’s taxonomy led to conversion therapy. Money’s model led to infant surgery. Both started with compassion. Both ended with people paying for the framework’s failures with their bodies.

The result is the system we have now.

Sex is assigned once, at birth, by visual inspection. The assignment is recorded on a legal document. That document follows the person for life. The framework has no mechanism for reassessment—no procedure for revisiting the initial determination in light of what the body does afterward. A child grows tall. Shoulders broaden. The larynx enlarges. The voice deepens. The temperament is aggressive, commanding, unmistakably male in every dimension the ancient world would have measured. None of these observations lead anywhere in the modern system. There is no diagnostic pathway from “this person’s body is masculinizing” to “perhaps the initial assignment was wrong.” The file was closed in the delivery room. Nothing reopens it.

That’s what was lost. Not just a theory. Not just a medical model. A capacity—the ability to look at a human body and read it honestly, weighing everything it offers, without being blinded by a decision someone else made thirty seconds after birth.

The ancients had that capacity. We threw it away. And we threw it away not because we learned something new about bodies, but because we needed a political binary that couldn’t afford exceptions.

The Conflation

Somewhere in the late twentieth century, intersex got folded into a political coalition it never asked to join.

The reasoning was understandable. People whose bodies don’t conform to the sex binary and people whose identities don’t conform to it seem, from the outside, to share a cause. Both groups are failed by a system that insists on two categories and punishes deviation. Both face medical gatekeeping, legal obstacles, social stigma. The alphabet grew—LGBT became LGBTQI, and intersex was given a letter, slotted into a spectrum of gender and sexual nonconformity as though it belonged to the same conversation.

It doesn’t. Not because one experience is more legitimate than the other, but because they are medically different things, and collapsing them into a single political category has costs that intersex people disproportionately bear.

Gender dysphoria is a psychological diagnosis. It describes a mismatch between a person’s experienced gender identity and the sex they were assigned at birth. The treatment pathway is psychiatric evaluation, followed—if appropriate—by hormone therapy and potentially surgery. The framework is built around identity: what the patient reports feeling, how they understand themselves, what they need their body to become. The patient is understood to be changing something.

An intersex condition is a congenital physiological reality. It is diagnosed by endocrinology, confirmed by bloodwork, visible in bone structure and hormonal panels and tissue. It isn’t about identity. It isn’t about what the patient feels. It’s about what the body is—what it has been since before birth—and the treatment pathway is corrective, not transformative. The patient isn’t changing their sex. They’re demanding that medicine acknowledge the sex that was already there and was misread.

That distinction is not academic. It determines which doctor you see, which treatment you receive, which legal framework governs your documentation, and—critically—whether the medical system understands you as someone who wants to become something or someone who already is something and needs the record corrected.

When those two experiences are merged under one political umbrella, the intersex patient disappears. Not deliberately. Not maliciously. But effectively. The language of the coalition defaults to the more visible, more politically organized, more culturally legible experience—which is the trans experience. “Gender-affirming care” becomes the umbrella term. “Transition” becomes the assumed narrative. The entire medical and legal conversation orients around the premise that the patient is crossing from one sex to another.

An intersex patient isn’t crossing anything. There is no transition. There is a body that was incorrectly classified, and a medical system that needs to catch up to what the body has been saying all along. Framing that as “transition” doesn’t just misrepresent the experience—it actively undermines the patient’s claim. If you’re “transitioning,” you’re asking to become male. If you’re intersex, you’re stating that you are male and always were, and the initial assignment was wrong. Those are opposite legal and medical arguments, and conflating them weakens both.

I know this because I lived the distinction—though “lived” implies more agency than the process actually allowed.

When my parents brought me to a GP to help explain why their child insisted he was male, the doctor looked at a body with broad shoulders, an enlarged larynx, facial hair, body hair and a masculine skeletal frame, and wrote “normal healthy female.” He didn’t investigate. He didn’t order bloodwork. He looked at the chart, looked at me, and decided the chart was right.

Sometime later, a doctor at a gender clinic noted my adam’s apple with visible shock and asked if it was surgical. It wasn’t. It was mine. It had always been mine. But the question tells you everything about the framework—a masculine larynx on a patient assigned female was so incomprehensible that the first assumption was that someone must have built it.

I went to a urologist out of sheer defiance. My bones kept breaking in the military—a classic symptom of male hypogonadism that no one investigated because the chart said female and female bones break sometimes, apparently. I had done enough research by then to suspect what was wrong, and I thought I could argue that I needed testosterone to mineralize my skeleton. My bloodwork came back so textbook male hypogonadal that the urologist was prepared to treat me—until he saw my chart and realized my birth assignment didn't match the bloodwork. He stopped. But he confirmed that my LH signal should have been suppressed on exogenous testosterone, and the fact that it wasn’t was evidence of a male HPG axis. He told me to see an endocrinologist.

Fair advice. But here’s the absurdity: every time I presented my full medical history honestly—every time I trusted the institution and disclosed my early classification—the system couldn’t process me. I was too honest for the framework. I kept handing doctors context they had no pathway for, and they kept freezing. The diagnosis finally came by accident when an endocrinologist looked at me cold, with no history, assumed I was male because that’s what the body in front of him looked like, and only then learned the birth certificate disagreed. He got it right because he didn’t know the wrong answer first.

Most people with my condition don’t have the defiance (virtus?) to keep demanding answers after decades of institutional failure. Most people trust the system when it tells them they’re wrong about their own body. I didn’t—but I shouldn’t have had to fight that hard for a diagnosis a Roman physician could have made by looking at me.

The Architecture

If you write historical fiction set before the eighteenth century, you have been building on a foundation that didn’t exist yet.

This isn’t a criticism. It’s nearly impossible to avoid. The two-sex binary is so deeply embedded in modern thinking that it feels like a fact of nature rather than a product of history. When you write a medieval lord assessing his heir, or a Roman senator evaluating a young officer, or a Greek physician examining a patient, you import the binary by default—because it’s the only framework you’ve ever known. You write characters who live in a world that didn’t see sex the way you do, and you never notice, because the anachronism is invisible.

Now you can see it.

Everything this essay has described—the continuum, the holistic assessment, the legal accommodation, the capacity to read a body over a lifetime rather than classifying it in a single glance—is architecture. It’s the load-bearing structure beneath how pre-modern cultures understood bodies, assigned roles, processed variation, and organized themselves. If you’re building a secondary world that draws on classical, medieval, or early modern models, this is the foundation your world should be standing on. Not because representation demands it. Because accuracy demands it.

A world built on a one-sex continuum doesn’t produce the same institutions as one built on a sealed binary. Its medicine works differently—physicians assess the whole person, and the same body can be reclassified over time without crisis. Its law works differently—courts weigh evidence from skeleton, voice, temperament, and bearing, not just anatomy. Its military works differently—entry is determined by demonstrated capacity, not by a checkbox at birth. Its religion works differently—categories like the Talmud’s androgynos and ay’lonit and tumtum reflect a theology that had room for complexity, not one that demanded simplification.

These aren’t details. They’re the skeleton of a culture. Get them wrong and the world feels modern in period costume. Get them right and the world breathes.

This is what I built Nhera on.

My first essay in this series—”The Homosexual Was Invented in 1869”—described how pre-modern cultures understood desire without the modern categories of sexual identity. That essay was the first wall. This essay is the second. Together, they form the architecture beneath every human culture in my world: a civilization where sex is a continuum assessed holistically, where desire is understood as behavior rather than identity, and where the frameworks that would eventually flatten both into sealed categories haven’t been invented yet—because the political conditions that demanded them don’t exist.

The elves of Nhera take it further. Their bodies express no sexual dimorphism at all. Their language has no gendered pronouns—instead, address is determined by the relationship between speakers: active and passive, senior and junior, the dynamics of the conversation itself. When humans interact with elves, they stumble over this constantly, trying to map their gendered language onto beings for whom the concept doesn't apply. The confusion is deliberate. It's what happens when two species—one that sorts bodies into categories, one that doesn't—try to communicate across a gap that neither fully understands.

For the human cultures, the framework is closer to what this essay describes. Sex is assessed, not assigned. What a person does, how they carry themselves, what the body declares over time—these carry weight. But Nhera also adds something the ancient world didn’t have to contend with: a sentient ocean that wants to kill everyone equally. The Fathom doesn’t care who has breasts. It doesn’t check what’s between your legs before it drowns you. When the sea is trying to eat your civilization, you cannot afford to bench half your population over a genital configuration—and you cannot afford to care who your best navigator sleeps with when the alternative is everyone dies.

Survival is a solvent. It dissolves the luxuries of prejudice very quickly, and the sealed binary is a luxury—one invented by a society comfortable enough to spend its political energy on exclusion. Nhera’s cultures aren’t comfortable but besieged. The frameworks they build reflect that.

None of this required a treatise on gender theory in the novel. It lives in the bones of the world—in how a physician speaks to a patient, in how a court processes a legal question, in what a commanding officer weighs when assessing a subordinate. The reader doesn’t need to know the history. They need to feel the world operating on a logic that isn’t theirs. If the bones are right, they will.

The Raw Material

The first essay gave you the framework for desire. This one gives you the framework for bodies. Together, they’re the scaffolding beneath every secondary world that takes its pre-modern setting seriously. Treating this as structural rather than seasoning in a bid to “be different” for the sake of it makes something actually different.

But knowing what to dismantle is only the first step.

The second step—the one that actually matters for your craft—is what you build once the scaffolding is exposed. Because here’s what most secondary worlds get wrong: they don’t fail at representation. They fail at imagination. They import the sexual binary wholesale, drop it into a medieval setting, and call it worldbuilding. They import heterosexuality-as-identity, homosexuality-as-deviance, and the entire diagnostic framework that was invented in 1869, and they never notice—because they think it’s always been there. It hasn’t. You’ve now read two essays proving it hasn’t.

So the real question isn’t “how do I include diverse characters?” It’s: what happens when you strip away every framework your culture invented in the last two centuries and start from the raw material? What does a civilization actually build when it hasn’t been handed the binary, the identity categories, the diagnostic labels? What do your characters believe about their own bodies when nobody has told them to sort themselves into two boxes?

That’s where creativity starts. Not in adding representation to a modern framework. In removing the modern framework entirely and discovering what grows in its place.

The third essay, when it comes, will be about that.

This essay drops on my birthday. I don't usually indulge in personal writing on this platform—the craft comes first—but if there's one day a year to write about something that shaped me, this is probably it.

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Fair winds,
D. S. Black

There’s a feeling you know.

You’re working on the subplot. It’s doing Important Things, you tell yourself. Delivering information, positioning characters, enabling the scene you actually want to write. You’ve justified its existence. You’ve revised it three times. And still, every time you sit down to work on it, your hands slow. The prose comes out wooden. You find yourself checking email, refilling your coffee, doing anything except pushing through the next paragraph.

That would be me. I spent two weeks in this exact state. A subplot in the manuscript was doing three jobs at once: revealing a secondary character’s divided loyalties, giving my protagonist critical intelligence before a major scene, and providing him resources to participate meaningfully in what came next. On paper, it was essential. Every thread it touched depended on it.

I kept rewriting it. I was changing who was involved, adjusting the pacing. Adding justification, cutting justification. Moving it earlier, then later, then back. Nothing helped and it was driving me bloody mad because if I could just get this dialed in I could finally continue. The subplot sat in my manuscript. Something about it utterly lifeless.

The Diagnostic

It was desperation to move it along that led me to first seriously consider cutting it. What would I lose? Truly. Turns out, actually, not a whole lot of anything. The subplot was contrivance, not character.

Contrivance serves plot mechanics. It exists because you need X to happen before Y can happen. The character does something because you, the author, require them to do it. The sequence of events is logical. It might even be terribly clever. But it doesn’t emerge from who these people are or what they actually want but rather it emerges from your outline.

Character-driven plot is different. Things happen because of who people are, what they want, and how they’d realistically pursue it. The sequence of events might be messier. It might not hit your structural beats as cleanly. But it breathes. Readers can feel the difference even if they can’t name it.

The test isn’t “is this subplot necessary?” The test is: does this feel like something these people would do, or something I’m making them do?

My subplot utterly failed that test. The mechanics were sound. The character motivations were thin. I was pushing pieces around a board instead of following people through their lives.

So I cut it.

Didn’t even trim it. Just deleted the scenes, removed the thread from surrounding chapters, accepted that three jobs now had no home.

And here’s the thing about cutting something that isn’t working: when it’s the right call, you feel it immediately. Oh, that relief I felt. The story started moving again. The energy that had been trapped in that dead subplot flooded back into the manuscript.

What Emerged

The scene I needed to write was simple: my captain summoning his second lieutenant to brief him before a critical social engagement. The failed subplot had been loading this moment with external mechanics, logistics, information drops, resource transfers, loyalty tests. All the weight was in what got exchanged.

When I stripped that away, the weight shifted to who was in the room.

The lieutenant who enters isn’t delivering plot information. He’s a man whose uniform is always immaculate. He’s not vain, per se, but a lifetime of being watched and measured and found wanting by standards most men would never comprehend makes him cripplingly self-aware. He wears his perfection like armour.

The captain isn’t receiving a briefing. He’s bracing for judgment. His lieutenant is clever enough, observant enough. If anyone on this ship could see the cracks, it’s him.

The blade doesn’t come.

Instead, the lieutenant pivots. Becomes genuinely useful. Offers expertise freely, without positioning for advantage, because someone finally stopped treating him as a threat. And the captain feels something loosen in his chest—not trust, not quite, but the specific relief of a man who had braced for a blow that didn’t land.

Then the First Lieutenant arrives. The old one. The loyal one. And he reads the situation instantly:

“You’re taking Gore.” It didn’t sound like a question. Just the flat recognition of a man watching his captain choose a weapon he couldn’t provide.

The scene ends with two weights in the captain’s chest instead of one. He made the right choice. He knows that. It doesn’t feel like the right choice. It feels like a small betrayal.

None of this was in my outline. None of it could have emerged from the contrived subplot I’d been protecting. It happened because I stopped asking “what does the plot need?” and started asking “what would these people actually do in this room?”

The information still got delivered. The relationships still advanced. But now they advanced through character truth instead of mechanical necessity.

The Principle

Kill-your-darlings advice assumes you’re cutting something beloved. Something precious you’ve grown too attached to see clearly. That’s real. This happens.

But this is different. When cutting feels like relief, you weren’t killing a darling but were removing an obstruction you’d mistaken for load-bearing structure.

Not everything that feels essential is essential. Sometimes what feels essential is just needlessly, stupidly complicated. You’ve invested so much work justifying its existence that you’ve convinced yourself of its necessity.

Or perhaps you wasted so many hours writing it you hated the idea of tossing the work.

The story knows when you’re forcing it. That wooden feeling, that resistance, that sense of a Sisyphean uphill every time you think you’ve solved it—these aren’t signs you need to work harder. Something in the machinery is binding.

When you’re constantly justifying why something has to happen instead of simply watching it happen ask whether it’s earning its place through character truth or through mechanical necessity.

The former will carry weight. The latter will make you check your email twenty-five times an hour…

Something that helped my manuscript work flow again after weeks of stagnation, delivered with brevity. Hope this gives you permission to just cut.

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Fair winds,
—D. S. Black

Function vs. Haunting

There’s a distinction I use when building characters that separates the ones who function from the ones who haunt.

What they want is the surface. The conscious goal. The thing they’d tell you if you asked. Promotion. Survival. Revenge. Love. It’s legible, articulable, and usually drives the plot.

What they’re looking for is beneath. The need they can’t name—often invisible even to themselves. It’s not what they’re chasing. It’s what would still be missing if they caught it.

The protagonist of my novel The Reply wants to survive. Wants to maintain command of his ship. Wants recognition from an Admiralty that despises his peculiar gifts. These are his goals. They drive his actions. A lesser version of the character could run on these wants alone and be functional—he’d have clear motivation, generate conflict, pursue objectives.

But Somerset is looking for something else. Something he’d never say aloud because he doesn’t have language for it.

He’s looking to be claimed.

Claiming isn’t like being needed or merely used and employed. Claimed—by something vast enough to see him fully and want him anyway. The sea that hunts him. The officer who mirrors him. The divine attention that might destroy him but would at least know him first.

That’s why the plot can resolve and the character can’t. You can give Somerset everything he wants—command, recognition, survival—and he’d still be looking. The want is achievable. What he’s looking for is a hole in the shape of God.

This distinction is the difference between characters you remember a week after finishing the book and characters who take up permanent residence in your mind. Function versus haunt.

Most contemporary fiction has forgotten the difference.

Characters want things. Clear things. The plot provides obstacles. The climax resolves the wanting. Everyone goes home. The problem is that these characters only exist on the surface—because their creators do too.

You can’t write the looking-for if you’ve never asked yourself what you’re looking for. And that question requires a kind of interiority that’s becoming increasingly rare.

The Flattening

You can’t write what you can’t access in yourself.

This isn’t mysticism. The looking-for—that unnameable need beneath the conscious want—has to come from somewhere. You can’t invent it from nothing. You recognize it. You find it in yourself first, then give it to the character.

Which means the craft failure has a source: writers who’ve never asked themselves the question.

Not out of refusal. It’s not a matter of will not, but cannot.

There’s a term from psychology that I very much like: interoception. The awareness of internal states. Hunger, heartbeat, the texture of your own unease. The capacity to notice what’s happening inside you before you name it, before you explain it, before you translate it into language someone else can understand.

This capacity can be developed. It can also atrophy.

A culture that can't sit still, can't be alone, can't tolerate ten minutes without stimulus, produces people with diminished access to their own interiours. If you've never been quiet enough to notice the difference between what you want and what you're looking for, you can't write characters who carry that distinction. You'll write the surface. Legible wants. Achievable goals. Flat.

I grew up with European parents in America. Spanish, German and Polish. High-context communication, where what matters lives in subtext, in implication, in what remains unsaid. I learned early what it costs when the culture around you can't hear le non-dit. Everything must be stated. Subtext is "unclear." Implication is "poor communication." You're forced to translate yourself into explicit language—and something dies in the translation.

American communication has become pathologically low-context. This isn’t an accent or a dialect but a flattening of the entire register in which complex interiority can be expressed. Characters in American fiction explain their feelings. They announce their motivations. They narrate their growth. They do this because their writers do this—because the culture has forgotten that anything can be communicated without being said aloud.

The result is fiction that functions like a workplace email. Everything important is stated. Nothing is left for the reader to feel into. The text doesn’t trust you, because the writer has forgotten that trust is possible.

This is the disease. The craft failure is a symptom.

Writers who’ve lost access to their own depths produce characters who don’t have depths to access. The looking-for requires interiority. Interiority requires silence. And silence has become so intolerable.

The Marvel Problem

Let me be specific about what flat characterisation looks like at scale.

Marvel villains want things. Clear things. Legible things. Thanos wants to erase half the universe. Killmonger wants to arm oppressed people worldwide. Hela wants to rule Asgard. The goals are stated explicitly, often in monologue. The heroes oppose them. The conflict resolves through combat. Everyone goes home.

This isn’t bad storytelling. It’s functional storytelling. It generates conflict, sustains a plot, delivers spectacle. The machine works.

But ask a different question: what are these villains looking for?

Not what they want. What need would still be unmet if they got everything they’re chasing?

The answer, in most cases, is that the question doesn’t apply. There’s no beneath. Thanos wants the snap. That’s it. He’s not looking for anything underneath the goal—no unnamed wound, no inarticulable absence, no hole shaped like answer. He’s a function dressed as a character. A plot obstacle with aesthetic flair.

The most Marvel can manage is making villains sympathetic. Killmonger has a sad backstory. Thanos believes he’s righteous. The films work hard to make you understand why they want what they want. This is mistaken for depth.

It isn’t. Understanding someone’s motivation isn’t the same as complexity. A character with a legible backstory explaining a legible goal is still flat—just flat with context. Sympathy is not interiority. Explanation is not the looking-for.

Compare Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal wants things—escape, fine dining, freedom from tedious people. But he’s looking for something else entirely: a mind capable of meeting his. Clarice doesn’t just oppose him or help him. She sees him. That’s why he’s obsessed with her. That’s why the relationship is the engine of everything. You can’t resolve that by catching him. You can’t defeat recognition.

Or consider Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. He wants oil, money, victory over his competitors. He gets all of it. The film ends with him alone in a mansion, having achieved everything he ever chased, and he’s more hollow than when he started. Because what he was looking for—connection he couldn’t admit he needed, a son who’d see him as human, some evidence that his existence mattered beyond accumulation—was never available through the goals he pursued. The want and the looking-for were pointing in opposite directions. That’s why the film is a tragedy and not a success story.

Marvel doesn’t make tragedies. It makes conflict-resolution machines. Efficient, satisfying, forgettable.

The audience gets what it’s trained to expect: problems with solutions. Wants that can be thwarted. Villains who function as obstacles and then stop functioning when the obstacle is removed.

This is what flat characterisation looks like when it has a billion-dollar budget. The spectacle distracts from the absence. But the absence is still there—that hollow space where the looking-for should be. You feel it in how quickly the films evaporate from memory. You saw it, you enjoyed it, you couldn’t tell me what Malekith wanted if your life depended on it.

Characters built only from wants are disposable. The looking-for is what makes them permanent.

You Write What You Can Embody

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can only write what you can access in yourself.

Not what you’ve done—what you can feel the shape of. What you can find a path toward, even if you’ve never walked it. The interiority has to exist in you before you can loan it to a character. You can’t fake depth. You can only recognise it.

I write men of violence because I've held violence in my hands. Not theoretically. Not from research. I've made choices in rooms where the wrong word meant consequences I'd have to live inside forever. I've been the calm one when calm was the only thing between a friend and something I can't name here.

My characters are contained because I am contained—and containment is not absence. The people who’ve called me cold, robotic, “Spock” (I’ll take this one as a compliment) , have never seen what I’m holding. They see the stillness and assume the stillness is all there is. They mistake the lid for an empty vessel.

Meanwhile, inside: a furnace. Spiraling. Emotions so strong they’d be illegible if I let them out unfiltered. So I don’t. I learned early that the world isn’t equipped to receive what I actually am. You adapt or you break. I adapted.

My characters know this. Somerset performs control while drowning. Origen processes trauma through millennia of pattern recognition because feeling it directly would annihilate him. Fressange aestheticises war because beauty is the only container that can hold what he's seen. They're not me. But I didn't invent their psychologies. I recognised them. They were already in me, waiting for names.

This is what I mean by access. Not autobiography. Resonance. The ability to feel the shape of an experience from the inside, even if the details differ.

I can write a man who loves his ship like a body because I know what it is to love something that can’t love you back. I can write cosmic horror because the numinous invades my quietest moments uninvited—the vertigo of deep time, the terror of a universe that owes me nothing and will continue without me. I can write the ache of men built for wars that never came because I know what it is to carry capacity that has no outlet. To be made for demands that never arrive.

If you’ve never been quiet enough to hear what you’re actually looking for—beneath the goals, beneath the plans, beneath the story you tell yourself about your own wanting—you can’t write characters who carry that weight. You’ll write wants. Legible, achievable, flat.

The question isn’t whether you’ve suffered enough to write deep characters. Suffering doesn’t automatically produce interiority. Plenty of people suffer and learn nothing about themselves.

The question is whether you’ve sat with yourself. Whether you’ve tolerated the silence long enough to notice the difference between what you say you want and what you’re actually looking for. Whether you’ve felt the shape of your own unnamed needs without rushing to name them, fix them, medicate them, scroll them into oblivion.

Most people would rather do anything than sit in that room.

And so they write characters who’ve never been in that room either. Flat people producing flat people, all the way down.

The Practice

This isn’t mysticism. It’s craft prerequisite. And like any craft prerequisite, it can be practiced.

The exercise is simple. The execution is not.

Sit with a character. Not their plot function. Not their role in the story. Them. Ask what they want. Write it down. Be specific—not “happiness” but the actual thing they’d reach for. Promotion. Revenge. The woman in the blue dress. The ship with their name on the commission.

Then ask: what would still be missing if they got it?

That’s the looking-for. The thing they can’t name. The ache that won’t resolve even if every conscious goal is achieved.

Somerset gets command. Gets recognition. Gets everything he says he wants. And he'd still be looking. Because what he's looking for is being claimed by something that sees him—and institutional success can't provide that. Only the sea can. Only Daud can. The want is achievable. The looking-for requires something that can't be pursued, only encountered.

If you do this exercise and come up empty—if the character only has wants, no looking-for—you’ve diagnosed the problem. The character is flat. Not because you made a craft error, but because you reached into yourself for the deeper layer and found nothing to draw from.

Which means the practice isn’t really about characters. It’s about you.

When did you last sit in silence long enough to notice what you’re looking for? Not what you want—what you’re looking for. The need beneath the goal. The ache that wouldn’t resolve even if you got everything you’re chasing.

If you can’t answer, your characters can’t either.

The practice is simple: stop. Be quiet. Be alone. Notice what arises when there’s nothing to react to, nothing to consume, nothing to distract. The discomfort that emerges isn’t the enemy. It’s the material.

Most writers would rather read another craft book. Watch another video essay. Collect another technique. Anything but sit in the room with themselves and notice what’s actually there.

I’m not telling you to suffer. I’m not telling you to excavate trauma. I’m telling you to pay attention. To develop the capacity to feel the texture of your own wanting without immediately naming it, fixing it, optimising it into a goal.

The looking-for lives in the space before language. You have to be willing to stay there long enough to feel its shape.

That’s the practice. There’s no shortcut.

The Death of Nuance Is a Choice

So. Flat characters come from flat people.

Not stupid or untalented people, mind. People who’ve lost access to their own depths—or never developed it—because the culture they swim in doesn’t require it and at worst actively discourages it.

You can get by without interiority. You can publish, produce, profit. The market doesn’t demand complexity. It barely tolerates it! Audiences trained on conflict-resolution machines will accept conflict-resolution machines. The feedback loop closes. Everyone gets what they expect. Nothing haunts anyone.

But the work that lasts—the characters that take up permanent residence in the mind—comes from writers who’ve done the harder thing. Who’ve sat in silence. Who’ve asked themselves what they’re looking for and stayed with the discomfort of not knowing.

I write men who were made for worlds that demanded everything because I understand the particular grief of being made for demands that never come. The soul built for storm, landlocked. The capacity for valor with no war to spend it on.The modern world didn't eliminate the capacity. It eliminated the demand. And capacity without demand becomes a kind of rot.

I languish in a demi-solde of modernity—half-pay, half-life, waiting for orders that won’t arrive from institutions that no longer remember what they’re for. I suspect I'm not the only one. The reenactors know. The wargamers know. Anyone who's ever felt overbuilt for the life they're living knows.

That’s not a complaint (although permit me some.) It’s material. For art. Because aren’t we creatives just the best at turning suffering into beauty?

The ache of wanting to be tested and never being tested. The grief of carrying capacity that rusts from disuse. The looking-for that can’t be satisfied by comfort, safety, the padded corners of a world designed to demand nothing of anyone.

Most writers have never examined this in themselves because it’s not comfortable. It doesn’t fit the therapeutic model where all desires are processed toward resolution. Some desires don’t resolve. Some needs can’t be met by the world as it is. Sitting with that—without numbing it, naming it into submission, or scrolling it into background noise—is the work.

If you’ve never felt the shape of that, you can’t write characters who carry it. You’ll write people who want things. Achievable things. Legible things. Things that can be obtained and then the story ends.

You won’t write the ache.

The best fiction isn’t written by people who’ve suffered most. It’s written by people who’ve stayed in the room with whatever they carry. Who’ve refused the easy exit. Who’ve let the silence get loud enough to hear what’s underneath.

The death of nuance isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice—made daily, by writers who won’t sit still, by audiences who won’t tolerate ambiguity, by a culture that’s forgotten that some things can only be communicated in silence.

You can choose differently.

But you have to be willing to stay in the room.

I write because there’s nowhere else for what I am to go. The capacity built for storms, spent on sentences. The valor that would have been spent on battlefields, transmuted into characters who get to live in worlds that still demand everything.

It’s not enough. It’s never enough.

But it’s the only legitimate outlet I’ve found.

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Fair winds,
D. S. B.

Heath Ledger. Anthony Hopkins. Javier Bardem. Christoph Waltz.

We (rightfully) celebrate actors who disappear into villains. We call it transformative. We give them statues for it with standing ovation. We write retrospectives about the psychological toll of this craft, of method acting, and we mean it as praise.

A writer—guess who writes scripts—renders the same interiority on the page and someone asks if they’re okay. If perhaps someone should check their hard drive.

The method is identical. The psychological labour is the same. One is called skill. The other is treated as though it’s confession.

I’ve seen a few quite funny Tiktoks satirising the absurdity of accusing authors of simply writing themselves, no fluff, into their books confession-style. And thank goodness for that or I would have even less hope for the media-literacy of young people than I do at the moment.

But the double standard isn’t the (only) real problem. The real problem is what this suspicion assumes—and what it costs when we indulge it.

First principles first.

Stories do not exist to teach lessons. They are not public utilities requiring justification. They do not answer to your anxiety about what their existence might imply.

Humans painted on cave walls before we had written language. We told stories around fires before we had agriculture, cities, or any framework at all for asking whether a story was allowed to exist. The impulse to represent experience—even dark experience—precedes civilisation. It precedes ethics. It precedes the entire apparatus of moral licensing that contemporary critics want to impose.

Fiction exists because we are fiction-making animals. Full stop. No “because it teaches us.” No “because it serves social good.” No “because it makes us better people.” The making is the thing. Everything else is secondary.

Entertainment. Beauty. Aesthetic immersion. The pleasure of a well-turned sentence or a character who breathes. These are not lesser purposes requiring defense. They are not the sugar coating on the nutritious medicine of Moral Instruction. They are why stories exist in the first place.

The teaching, when it happens and often does, is emergent. A byproduct of honest rendering, not a price of admission.

A story about darkness does not owe you an explanation for its existence. It does not need to demonstrate social utility before some imaginary tribunal. It is not required to make you comfortable, and it is certainly not required to preemptively defend itself against your suspicion that the author might be the thing they’ve depicted.

Fiction is not applying for a permit. It does not need your approval to merely exist.

But let us address the suspicion directly, since it’s not going away on its own.

The assumption beneath it: that fiction is autobiography. That what a writer depicts, they endorse—or worse, enact. That the only reason someone could render a convincing villain is personal experience with villainy. That darkness on the page is darkness in the soul, and the more convincing the darkness, the more contaminated the writer.

This is a reading comprehension failure. And it just loves to parade as moral stancing.

By this logic, Thomas Harris is a cannibal. Gillian Flynn a sociopath. Cormac McCarthy should be investigated for No Country for Old Men. Vladimir Nabokov should have been imprisoned the moment Lolita saw print. The absurdity is obvious when you list it out. The authors we canonise have rendered some of the most disturbing interiority in literary history, and we don’t assume they’ve lived it. We assume they’re skilled.

Or, perhaps, they’re not being read by the demographic who is out there reading Heated Rivalry or whatever slop. Perhaps, if they were being read, then perhaps that type of reader would make those assertions. Truly, I would no longer be surprised.

The assumption is applied selectively. Not to the established pantheon—they’ve accumulated enough cultural armour to deflect it. McCarthy doesn’t field serious questions about whether he’s murdered anyone. Nabokov is studied in universities rather than investigated by authorities. The grandfather clauses are firmly in place.

The suspicion lands elsewhere. On newer writers. Less established voices. On anyone who hasn't yet accumulated the fanbase or credibility to make the questions stop. The same rendering that earns one author a National Book Award earns another a concerned Tumblr post asking why they’d want to write something like that.

Which tells you everything about what the suspicion actually is. It’s not a principled thing. If it were principled, the canon would be in prison. It’s a weapon—deployed against those who haven’t yet accumulated enough status to be beyond reproach.

I’ve been on the receiving end. You mention the project you’re working on. You describe the antagonist, or the themes, or simply the tone. And you watch someone’s expression change. The slight lean backward. The recalibration behind the eyes.

“Why would you even want to write something like that?”

Asked with the tone of someone backing slowly toward the exit.

As if the desire to render darkness is itself a symptom. As if the only reason to write a convincing monster is that you recognise something of yourself in it—and not in the way that all good characterisation requires recognition, but in the way that should concern the authorities.

The question is never asked of actors. No one asks Anthony Hopkins why he’d want to play Hannibal Lecter. The wanting is assumed to be professional. Artistic.

Writers get no such courtesy. Writers are invisible—at least until you need to send them a letter to call them daemonic. And because readers can’t see or perceive the performance, they assume there isn’t one at all.

Impossible Perfection

What the suspicion of writers wants, even if its holders won’t say it plainly, is for this to be true: For to depict darkness, that means you’re creating darkness. Inspiring it in the world. Where fiction is a kind of summoning ritual, and refusing to write about violence will make violence disappear. Where if we simply stop showing the ugly parts of human experience, those parts will wither from lack of attention.

This is magical thinking. The logic of a child who believes that closing their eyes makes the monster disappear, unable to see them.

Sex will not vanish because you refuse to depict it. Violence will not evaporate because you write around it. Cruelty, exploitation, the full catalogue of human capacity for harm—none of this was invented by storytellers. None of it requires fiction’s permission to exist. Darkness is not a narrative choice so much as a fact of the species.

The sanitisers imagine that humans are perfectible. That we are blank slates, and if we simply curate the inputs correctly, we’ll produce the right outputs. Perhaps that’s correct, to some degree, for the stupidest among us. They would have a world where no one needs to encounter difficult material because difficult material has been edited out of the feed. And in so doing, miraculously take the ideas out of people’s heads as if they need fiction to put them there in the first place.

Chicken and egg, situation. In this case, capacity for harm or fiction. What came first?

You cannot educate darkness out completely. You cannot curate it away. You cannot build a world so padded with safe content that humans stop being capable of harm.

Pretending otherwise doesn’t protect anyone and I would argue that it only makes them unprepared for the encounter when it comes.

So. Fiction doesn’t owe justification. The confession fallacy is illiterate. The sanitised utopia is a fantasy. You’re still with me, very nice.

Since the critics have decided to frame this as a question of harm—since they’ve claimed that dark fiction damages readers, culture, damages the fragile moral fabric of society. Let us take a closer look at that.

Let’s talk about what this argument destroys.

Because my argument—the argument that people are actually rather intelligent and, if you nurture their ability to draw their own conclusions without you attempting to manipulate their thoughts for them—are actually demonstrably capable of consuming fiction and understanding that it’s. Bloody. Fiction.

And it can be proven scientifically. Children as young as three-to-four years old can already discern a fantastical event from a real one.

Comprehending the thing is not the same as approving the thing. This should not need to be said, and yet here we are.

The entire project of psychological insight—in fiction, in history, in life—requires modeling how people arrive at conclusions you may find monstrous. Not to excuse them. To see the path. To understand the logic as it appears from the inside, where it doesn’t look like logic-of-a-monster but like logic-of-someone-doing-what-seems-necessary. Because that very well makes an interesting damn story.

This is the terrifying thing about “evil” that comfortable people don’t want to understand. That it makes perfect sense from the inside.

I wrote a bit about this in one of my favourite posts here:

And while we’re at it, I also wrote about how characters holding capacity for violence can be some of the very best:

The path to monstrosity is not marked with signs reading YOU ARE NOW BECOMING A MONSTER. It is paved with justifications that feel reasonable at each step. Grievance that feels sensibly justified. A Self-defense that feels necessary. Protection of one’s own that feels righteous. The boundary violations escalate so gradually that no single step feels like the full crossing.

This is what well-rendered fiction shows. Not “evil is cool.” Not “do this.” The machinery. The way ordinary humans become capable of extraordinary harm through a series of choices that each seemed survivable at the time.

If you refuse to understand how this works, you cannot recognise the warning signs. You cannot inoculate anyone. You’re left with villains who are Just Evil—cardboard figures who exist because the plot requires opposition, whose malice has no genesis, and whose threat teaches nothing about how threat actually develops.

The writers who refuse this work aren’t protecting morality. They’re protecting their own comfort. They don’t want to look at the path. They don’t want to find the seed of it in themselves—not because they’re secretly evil, but because the recognition is tremendously uncomfortable for some ordinary people. The knowledge that the path exists and is very walkable by ordinary humans is not a pleasant thing to carry.

So they write scarecrows. Boring.

And the most delightfully ironic thing is, I couldn’t really name a flat story like that off the top of my head. And this isn’t because I haven’t stumbled across one. It’s because I can’t very well remember it! It left no meaningful impact on my life.

And if I am to be perfectly fair, it doesn’t need to justify its existence with meaningful impact upon me. Fine. But I will still call the thing flat and really rather boring.

Burning the Archive

Have you perhaps stumbled upon this one?

“We already know what evil looks like.”

Do you? How?

Did that knowledge materialise spontaneously in your skull? Did you wake one morning with a complete taxonomy of harm, its origins and methods and warning signs, without any input from the centuries of humans who encountered it before you?

Lifespans are short. People die. The witnesses to the last horror grow old and then they’re gone. The direct memory fades. And unless the pattern is encoded somewhere in—goodness, could it possibly be fiction that bothered to render psychology honestly—it fades from memory entirely.

The people who survived the twentieth century’s atrocities are nearly gone. The direct witnesses to what humans are capable of, under the right conditions, with the right justifications, are dying of old age. What remains?

Documents. Histories. And stories.

Fiction that took the machinery apart and showed how it worked. Fiction that said without saying: this is how it happens. This is what it looks like from the inside. This is the path, and this is how you recognise when it’s being laid.

Every time a well-rendered villain appears in fiction, the lesson is alive. Not alive as in “and here is today’s moral instruction,” but alive as in encoded and transmissible. The pattern is being passed on. The recognition is being trained. Every time a writer does the work of showing how ordinary people become capable of monstrous things, that’s cultural memory in active operation.

That’s the thing standing between “never again” and “I don’t understand how this could have happened!”

The people who attack this work aren’t protecting anyone. They’re burning the archive and calling it safety or moral instruction.

They will not produce a generation of more moral humans. They will produce a generation that cannot recognise the path when it’s being laid under their feet.

So what happens when the suspicion wins? What’s the actual cost of this?

Writers learn to self-censor. To sand down their villains. To keep darkness at arm’s length so no one asks uncomfortable questions, no one sends concerned messages, no one looks at them with that backward lean and asks why would you want to write that.

The result is exactly the shallow antagonists that plague mediocre fiction. Obstacles instead of characters. Evil that exists because the plot requires it merely exist.

Safe villains. Non-threatening threats. Darkness that never makes you recognise anything, because it was never rendered with enough honesty to be recognisable in the first place.

The suspicion tax makes cowards of writers who might otherwise do the work. And the readers pay the price. Cardboard villains. Fiction that teaches nothing. A culture slowly losing the ability to recognise how harm operates, because the writers who could show them have been shamed into silence or trained into toothlessness.

Meanwhile, actors take identical psychological risks and collect some very cute little statues for it.

Allow me to reiterate that the method is the same. Stanislavski’s “magic if.” Inhabiting the character’s logic. Finding the version of yourself that could make those choices under those circumstances with that history. This is what Ledger did with the Joker. What Hopkins did with Lecter. What every actor does when they disappear into a role that requires them to find the internal coherence of someone they’d never want to be.

It’s what writers do when they render a psychologically honest villain. The same identification of a thread you can follow through your imagination and arrive at something monstrous—because that’s how you make it real on the page. That’s how you make it work.

The difference isn’t the labour. Just visibility, I suspect.

Actors take off the mask in public. They accept the award in a well-fitted suit, smiling, making jokes, obviously not the monster they played. The performance has a frame. The audience can see them step out of said frame.

Writers—the ones that aren’t asked to come to interviews especially—have no face behind the prose. Readers encounter thoughts on a page, interiour monologue, the killer’s reasoning laid bare—and because they can’t see the author standing outside the work directing it all from a chair, they assume there is no outside. They assume the voice is the author’s voice. The thoughts are the author’s thoughts.

It’s just plain illiteracy, not putting a finer point on it.

The Suspicion Tax

Fiction does not owe an explanation. It does not require permission to exist.

It is certainly not autobiography and the people who treat it as such are telling you more about their own limitations than about the work they’re failing to entirely read.

But more than that: they’re destroying something they don’t know how to value.

The capacity to render darkness coherently is very much a skill.

If we gave writers the same permission we give actors, we would get better fiction. Better villains. Characters that haunt rather than cardboard that functions.

And we would stop burning the archive every time someone gets nervous about what a writer might be capable of imagining.

The imagination is not the act. The rendering is not the confession.

The people who can’t tell the difference aren’t arbiters.

They’re telling you they simply don’t know how to read.

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Fair winds,
D.S.

The Homosexual Was Invented in 1869.

Not same-sex desire—that’s as old as humanity. Not same-sex acts—every legal code in history that bothered to criminalise sodomy proves people were doing it. What was invented in 1869 was the homosexual as a type of person. A “species”, a diagnosable condition, and with a characteristic psychology, recognisable traits.

Before that, there were things people did. After that, there were things people were.

If you’re writing historical fiction set before the late nineteenth century and your characters are navigating sexual identity—e.g. questioning what they are, coming to terms with themselves, finding their community—you’re writing ahistorical fiction. You’ve given your characters a framework for self-understanding that hadn’t been invented yet. This is like giving them germ theory or the unconscious mind: a conceptual tool they simply didn’t have access to.

This matters for the craft of the story, not merely accuracy. Because the stories available to people without identity categories are different stories than coming-out narratives. And most of them aren’t being written.

Act, Not Identity

The distinction is simple but its implications are total: before the late nineteenth century, there were sexual acts, not sexual persons.

Sodomy was a sin. Buggery was a crime. These were things you did, like theft or blasphemy, not things you were. A man who committed sodomy was a sodomite in the same way a man who committed murder was a murderer: the noun described the act rather than an ontological category.

This means there was no “closet” to be in. No identity to suppress or discover. No authentic self being hidden beneath a performed self. I will talk about that a few sections deeper in.

The Symposium

To understand what you’re missing, go back to Athens. Around 385 BCE. To a drinking party where some of the most influential thinkers in Western history are arguing about the nature of love.

Plato’s Symposium is structured as exactly that—a symposion, which is a ritualised evening of wine and conversation among educated men. The premise is simple: each guest will give a speech praising Eros, the god of love. What emerges is a philosophical framework for understanding desire which has dominated Western thought for centuries and that most modern writers have never encountered.

It starts with Pausanias, who takes a position that there are two Aphrodites, and therefore two kinds of love.

• Common Aphrodite (Pandemos) : The love directed at bodies. It’s indiscriminate, base, focused on physical gratification. It’s the love men feel for women, concerned primarily with reproduction and the satisfaction of appetite. It fades when beauty fades.

• Heavenly Aphrodite (Ourania) : Born from Ouranos alone, no mother, no female element. This love is directed at souls. It seeks wisdom, virtue, the genuine good of the beloved. It endures. And it exists, Pausanias argues, only between men.

The philosophical position isn’t that male-male love is tolerable but that male-male love is higher and spiritually superior to heterosexual desire, which is argued as being mired in the bodily and temporary.

Getting into the many ways this might be interpreted is beyond scope, so let’s move on.

To Aristophanes, a comedian and satirist; he offers a myth so striking it still echoes in modern language, although we’ve forgotten where it came from.

Once, he says, humans were double creatures. Four arms, four legs, two faces. There were three sexes: male-male, female-female, and male-female. These beings were powerful, threatening the gods themselves, so Zeus split them in half. Ever since, we’ve wandered the earth searching for our other half, longing to be whole again.

You’ve heard this. “My other half.” “My soulmate.” You’ve probably assumed it was always about heterosexual romance.

It isn’t. In the original myth, men descended from the double-male seek other men. Women descended from the double-female seek other women. Only those from the androgyne seek the opposite sex. All three: equally natural, equally cosmic, equally the soul trying to remember itself.

One could spend years with the implications. These were men with no feeds to scroll, no content to consume. They sat with questions. They examined their interoceptive experience, their felt sense of love, longing, recognition, with a rigour we've largely abandoned. Maybe Aristophanes meant the myth literally. Maybe it's allegory. Or maybe it was the only way he could reach toward whatever unknowable process defines us, and who—or what—we were before we were born.

Finally, Socrates speaks. But he doesn’t offer his own theory—he recounts what he learned from a woman named Diotima, a priestess who taught him the mysteries of love.

Her teaching is that love is a ladder. And you climb it through desire.

You begin with the love of one beautiful body. A specific person, a specific form that stirs you. But if you’re paying attention—thinking—you start to notice that the beauty in this body resembles the beauty in other bodies. You’re not just attracted to him. You’re attracted to something in him that exists elsewhere too.

So you ascend. From one body to the recognition of beauty in all bodies. From physical beauty to the beauty of souls, of minds, of character. From beautiful minds to beautiful practices and laws. From human beauty to beauty in knowledge itself. And finally at the top of the ladder—to the Form of Beauty. Pure, eternal, unchanging. The thing itself, of which every beautiful person or idea is merely a shadow.

Eros is the engine of philosophy. Desire is what moves you up the ladder. And where does it start? With a man’s love for a beautiful youth.

Their words, not mine.

Arriving Backwards

I should tell you how I found the Symposium.

Not through any structured curriculum—well, nothing I find is through any structured means. I found it because I was trying to understand myself, and the modern labels weren’t working.

I wasn’t attracted to solely bodies or genders. I was attracted to traits. Agency. Ambition. A mind that moved in ways I found beautiful. These traits manifest differently in different people, and the erotic and intellectual weren’t separate channels but the same current moving through different terrain.

There’s no checkbox for this.

So I started researching. Roman sexuality first—I write naval fiction set in that world’s very long shadow, and I needed to understand how my characters would think. That led me backward to what the Romans had inherited. To the Greeks. To a drinking party in 385 BCE where men were describing something I’d arrived at by accident, alone, two and a half thousand years later.

That felt indicative. If anything, it felt like relief.

If you give yourself permission to truly examine your experience and not immediately reach for a label and rely on category someone else made, just sit with it—you might find the Greek framework more resonant than the medicalised one.

Roman Pragmatism—Status, not Orientation

Rome inherited Greek philosophy but didn’t swallow it whole. The Romans were engineers, legislators, empire-builders. They took what was useful and discarded what felt too soft, too abstract, too Greek.

What they kept was practical. And what they built was a system organised entirely around power.

Romans had no word for homosexuality because they didn’t think in those terms. What they cared about was penetration—who was doing it, and to whom. The axis of this wasn’t gender. It was status.

A Roman citizen—a vir—could penetrate essentially anyone of lower standing without moral consequence. Slaves of any sex. Prostitutes. Foreigners. Actors, gladiators, anyone whose legal status was already—to the Roman social hierarchy—degraded. The act itself carried no stigma. What mattered was whether you were using or being used.

The anxiety ran in one direction: down. A citizen who allowed himself to be penetrated had degraded himself to the status of a slave or a woman. He’d abandoned the self-mastery that Roman masculinity required. He’d made himself pathicus—passive, receptive, suspect in all areas of life. Not because he desired men, but because he’d accepted a subordinate position unbefitting his station.

This is a completely different psychological landscape. A Roman general could take a male slave to his bed for decades and no one would blink. That same general, rumoured to have submitted to another man, could lose his career, his reputation, his standing in the Senate. The crime was hierarchy violation, not “homosexuality”—which, I'll remind anyone who hasn't heard it, they had no word for.

But Rome was never just Rome. The educated classes read Greek, were tutored by Greek slaves, thought in Greek when they philosophised. They had access to the Symposium. To Plato. To an entire tradition that offered a different frame.

This meant a Roman could code-switch. He could be Roman in the Forum—concerned with status, hierarchy, the appearance of dominance—and Greek in his private hours, understanding his attachments through a lens that ennobled rather than degraded.

Consider Mark Antony. Cicero accused him of having been Curio’s catamite in his youth—a political attack, weaponising the shame of the passive role. But what Cicero described, stripped of its rhetoric, was something else: Antony sneaking into Curio’s house at night. A young man, besotted, taking risks to be with someone. That’s a particular friendship, navigated in secret, between equals.

How did Antony understand it? We can’t know. But he had Plato on his shelf. He had a framework that said this love was higher, not shameful. He could hold Cicero’s contempt in one hand and the Symposium in the other, and decide for himself which lens fit his experience.

The Roman who loved another man wasn’t without resources. He just had to sometimes reach for them quietly.

Georgian England—Christianity, Capital Crime, and the Gentleman’s Agreement

We arrive at this period most writers think they understand. The age of sodomy laws. The hangings. The Church’s long shadow.

They’re not wrong that it was dangerous. They’re wrong about almost everything else.

Sodomy was a capital crime in England from 1533 until 1861. Men were hanged for it into the 1830s—more men executed for sodomy than for murder in some years during the Napoleonic Wars. The law was brutal, and it was real.

But it wasn’t universal.

Across the Channel, France decriminalised sodomy in 1791. The Revolution swept away the old religious laws. Napoleon’s Penal Code of 1810 maintained the change—what consenting adults did in private simply wasn’t the state’s concern. So while English sailors faced the gallows, French officers faced... nothing. Same acts. Same desires. Same continent. Different jurisdictions, different outcomes.

This should demolish any notion that “this is just how people thought back then.” There was no unified pre-modern attitude. There was politics, religion, legal tradition, and local enforcement—a patchwork that varied by nation, by class, by decade, by sheer luck. Your Georgian characters lived in a world where crossing the Channel could mean the difference between death and indifference. That’s not a monolith. That’s a landscape to be navigated.

And even within England, law and life were not the same thing.

Conviction required proof of penetration. This means witnesses. Evidence almost impossible to produce without a confession or someone caught in the act. Most prosecutions were for “attempted sodomy” or “gross indecency.” Serious, but not the gallows. And even this required someone to talk.

This created a system where discretion was everything. Not secrecy, per se. Not really the closet (which we’re defining as a hidden authentic self buried beneath performance.) Discretion. Conduct. The management of what was seen and what was said.

The gentleman’s agreement was simple: don’t make us know.

Class mattered enormously.

Aristocrats and gentlemen had resources the law couldn’t easily touch. Private spaces. Servants whose livelihoods depended on silence. Social networks that closed ranks against scandal. The assumption of respectability that made accusations seem implausible, even vulgar to voice.

Working-class men had none of this. The molly houses—gathering places with their own culture, their own argot, their own rituals—were periodically raided. Men caught in public spaces, in parks, in alleyways, had no shield. The law fell heaviest on those with the least protection, as law tends to do.

But among gentlemen? Two men could be inseparable. Could live together. Could be understood by everyone around them to have a “particular friendship.” As long as no one said the unspeakable, it remained within the bounds of acceptable conduct. They weren’t hiding. They were navigating.

What modern writers miss most often: these men could be Christian. Genuinely, devoutly Christian. Without constant internal warfare.

There was no identity to reconcile with this.

A Georgian naval officer who loved his lieutenant wasn’t “a gay man who is also Christian.” He was a Christian gentleman, devoted to his duty and his God, who also had a particular friendship he conducted with appropriate discretion. The things he did and felt didn’t constitute a category of person that stood in opposition to his faith. There was no “homosexual Christian” contradiction because there was no homosexual. Just a man. Living his life. Managing his conduct. Loving who he loved.

The drama of the closet—the suffocating sense of living a lie, of being divided against yourself—requires identity categories to function. Without them, you have danger, yes. You have discretion. You have real consequences if you’re careless or unlucky. But you don’t have the modern psychological architecture of repression, of the authentic self imprisoned beneath the performed self.

That’s a different kind of story. Harder to write, maybe, because we’re so accustomed to the other one. But truer to the period.

The Shape of the Cage You Can’t See

Here’s where you do some work. Because if you’re a modern reader, what I’ve just described probably sounds like repression. Like these men were “in the closet.” Like they were hiding their true selves behind a performance of respectability.

They weren’t. And the reason you think they were is because you can’t see the shape of your own cage.

Let me try an exercise.

You eat meat. Maybe you don’t—but assume for a moment you do. You’ve eaten thousands of animals over your lifetime. You probably don’t think about it much. You don’t consider yourself “a carnivore” in any meaningful identity sense. You don’t belong to the meat-eating community. You don’t feel that your burger consumption needs to be reconciled with your other values, nor do you expect the approval of other meat-eaters, nor do you structure your social life around access to fellow carnivores.

You just... eat meat sometimes. It’s a thing you do. Not a thing you are.

Now imagine a future where this changes. Where industrial farming becomes so morally indefensible that society ruptures over it. Where eating meat becomes a political identity—where you’re either a Carnivore or a Vegan and you’d better pick a side. Where scientists start classifying people by their “dietary orientation.” Where children are asked to discover and declare their authentic food-selves. Where you could come out as a carnivore to your vegan parents, or struggle to reconcile your carnivore identity with your environmentalist values.

Sounds exhausting, right? Sounds like it would take something simple and make it unbearably complicated?

That’s what happened to sexuality. And you’re living in the aftermath.

And if that didn’t land, try this.

Think of something you experience that you don’t have a word for.

Maybe it’s that specific melancholy that hits on Sunday evenings. Maybe it’s the discomfort of hearing your own voice recorded. Maybe it’s the strange guilt of being happy when someone close to you is struggling. You feel these things. They’re real. But you don’t identify as them. You don’t structure your social life around finding others who share them. You don’t come out to your parents as Someone Who Feels Weird On Sunday Evenings.

You couldn’t, even if you wanted to. The category doesn’t exist. There’s no community to join, no flag to fly, no identity to claim. The feeling is real; the framework isn’t.

Now imagine that’s your entire experience of desire.

You love who you love. You want who you want. It’s as real and consuming as anything you’ve ever felt. But when you reach for the shelf where the labels should be, there’s nothing there. No “gay.” No “bisexual.” No “homosexual.” Not even “heterosexual”—that word was invented after homosexual, to describe the people who weren’t the new medical category.

You don’t think “I’m attracted to men, so I must be...” because there’s no end to that sentence. You just are. Attracted. To him. Right now. The question of what this makes you doesn’t arise, because it’s not a question anyone has learned to ask yet.

That’s not repression. That’s not denial. That’s a mind working without tools we take for granted—and maybe, in some ways, working more freely because of it.

The Georgian officer who loved his lieutenant did not have a closet to be in.

The closet requires an inside and an outside. It requires an authentic self—the real you—hidden behind a performed self. It requires the concept of “living a lie,” which requires the concept of a singular truth about what you are that you’re betraying.

None of this architecture existed.

He wasn’t hiding his True Gay Self behind a performance of heterosexuality. He was a man. He had desires, some of which were dangerous to act on. He had a close friendship, the precise nature of which was nobody’s business. If he was careful, he’d never face consequences. If he was careless, he might face the law—but the law would be punishing his actions, not his identity. He’d be a gentleman who committed a crime. Not a homosexual revealed.

The shame, if he felt it, attached to conduct. To risk. To the possibility of exposure. Not to being fundamentally wrong. You cannot be ashamed of what you are if “what you are” isn’t a category anyone has invented yet.

I must keep insisting the stories available to these men were different. The drama isn’t “who am I?” It’s “how do I live?” Rather than a self-discovery, it’s having discretion. Love finding its way through a landscape of danger—not a soul at war with itself.

1869—The Invention of the Homosexual

Everything I’ve described ended in a doctor’s office in Germany.

The word “homosexual” was coined in 1869 by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, a Hungarian journalist arguing for the decriminalisation of sodomy in Prussia. His intent was progressive. His logic was simple: if same-sex attraction was an inborn condition rather than a moral failing, then punishment was as senseless as imprisoning someone for being left-handed.

He wasn’t alone. The sexologists who followed—Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld—built taxonomies. They catalogued case studies. They identified symptoms, proposed causes, described developmental histories. They were trying to help. Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) reads as clinical and detached now, but its project was fundamentally sympathetic: reclassify sodomy from sin to sickness, and you remove the justification for the gallows.

It worked. Slowly, unevenly, but it worked. The medical framework gave reformers a lever. You cannot punish pathology. You can only treat it—or, eventually, accept it.

But something else happened. Something the reformers didn’t intend.

Michel Foucault put it most precisely: “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”

Before 1869, there were acts. After 1869, there were people. A new category of human being, defined by their desire, knowable through their characteristics, diagnosable by their presentation. Not a man who committed sodomy, but a homosexual—a type, with a psychology, a developmental arc, an essence.

The identity was born. And it could never be put back in the box.

The Oscar Wilde trials of 1895 crystallised it for the English-speaking world.

Wilde wasn’t just prosecuted—he was typified. The press coverage constructed an image: the aesthetic, the effeminate wit, the green carnation, the French novels, the dandyism that now meant something specific. Suddenly there was a recognisable figure. A stereotype. A way to identify them.

This cut both ways.

For the hostile, it provided a target. The “Oscar Wilde type” became a thing to suspect, to police, to exclude. Effeminacy that had been merely unfashionable became evidence. The vague became legible.

But for men who desired men, it provided something too: recognition. If there was a type, you could find each other. You could know you weren’t alone. The very category that enabled persecution also enabled community. Subcultures could form around shared identity. You could belong to something.

There’s a bargain of identity. It makes you visible—to your enemies and your allies alike.

The Cure for the Disease They Invented

The dark irony of medicalisation: if homosexuality is a condition, conditions can be treated.

The doctors who pathologised same-sex desire weren’t trying to create a new form of torture. They were trying to save men from the gallows. But once you’ve established that the homosexual is a clinical entity, a developmental aberration, a psychological malformation: the next question becomes obvious.

Can we fix it?

Conversion therapy didn’t emerge from hatred. It emerged from the medical framework itself. If homosexuality was an illness, then doctors had a duty to seek a cure. Electroshock. Aversion therapy. Hormonal intervention. Psychoanalysis aimed at resolving the “arrested development” that had produced the inversion. These weren’t conceived as punishments. They were treatments. The men who administered them often believed they were helping—relieving their patients of a condition that caused suffering and social exclusion.

The suffering, of course, was largely caused by the categorisation. But the loop was invisible to those inside it. We defined you as sick; your life is hard because you’re sick; let us try to cure you so your life will be easier.

This is what happens when you medicalise human experience. You create patients. And patients need doctors. And doctors need treatments. And treatments need to work, or at least be attempted, because that’s what medicine does.

As my grandmother would say in the most defeated tone: “ayi, ayi, ayi…”

The road from Krafft-Ebing’s sympathetic case studies to electrodes attached to men watching images of other men is a straight line. No one meant to build that road and yet—hindsight and all that.

From Subculture to Constituency

The twentieth century added new pressures.

Urbanisation concentrated people. In villages, everyone knows everyone. Deviance is visible, policed by neighbours and gossip. Cities offered anonymity. You could disappear into London, into Berlin, into New York, and find others. The molly houses of the eighteenth century had been local, fragile, periodically destroyed by raids. The urban subcultures of the twentieth century were larger, more resilient, more organised.

Where there’s a community, there’s the raw material for politics.

Stonewall, 1969. A police raid on a Greenwich Village bar met resistance instead of compliance. The riot that followed didn’t create the gay rights movement—organising that had been happening for decades—but it crystallised something. It became a symbol. A founding myth. A moment when the community fought back.

And now the identity that doctors had invented became something else: a political constituency.

This is the logic of rights movements. You cannot fight for legal protections for “men who sometimes have sex with men.” You need a defined group with shared interests, shared enemies, shared goals. You need gay people as a category to be legible, countable and therefore capable of being represented.

The categories hardened because they had to. Ambiguity is useless in a courtroom. Ambiguity doesn’t get funding. Ambiguity doesn’t win elections or change laws. You need to be able to say who is affected, how many there are, what they need. You need identity to be recognisable, defensible.

This worked. It won rights, protections, visibility that would have been unimaginable a century earlier. But it came at a cost. The cost of the categories themselves becoming mandatory. You weren’t just allowed to identify as gay. Increasingly, you were required to, if you wanted access to the community, the politics, the protections.

The Crucible—AIDS and the Politics of Survival

Then came the plague.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s did something to gay identity that nothing else had done: it made identity survival.

Young men were dying. The government was ignoring them. Hospitals were refusing them. Families were disowning them. And the only people who showed up, organised care networks, fought for research funding, who held the dying and buried the dead were the community.

You cannot understand modern LGBT identity politics without understanding that they were forged in a crucible where belonging to the community meant someone would bring you soup when you were sick and fight for the drugs that might save your life, and not belonging meant dying alone while the president refused to say the word “AIDS.”

Identity became non-negotiable because identity was what kept you alive.

The boundaries hardened further. Resources were scarce and targeted—you needed to know who qualified. Political organising required clear constituencies. The question “are bisexuals really part of the community?” wasn’t abstract; it determined who got access to support networks, who was represented in advocacy, whose deaths were counted in the statistics used to demand government action.

This is why identity feels so existential to people who lived through that era or inherited its trauma. It was life and death. The labels were not arbitrary.

The Inheritance

So here we are.

The Greeks had philosophy that elevated same-sex love as a path to divine beauty. The Romans had pragmatism that cared about status, not orientation. The Georgians had discretion, particular friendships, and the gentleman’s agreement. None of them had identity.

Then the doctors invented a species. Then the species was tortured in the name of cure. Then the species organised, fought back, won rights, built community. Then the plague came and the community became a lifeline. Then the battles were won—not all of them, not everywhere, but enough that a new generation inherited the categories without inheriting the context.

And now we have people who cannot imagine desire without identity. Who think “people haven’t changed—there were always gay people” and don’t realise they’re projecting a framework backward onto minds that would have found it incomprehensible. Who write historical fiction where characters “discover they’re gay” in 1743, as if the discovery were possible, as if there were a thing there to discover.

The identity categories were necessary. They saved lives. They won rights. I’m not saying we should abolish them.

I’m saying they’re recent. They’re contingent. They’re one way of organising human experience, not the only way, and not the way that existed for most of history. If you want to write characters who lived before the invention of the homosexual, you need to understand that you’re writing people with different interior lives—not repressed moderns or closeted contemporaries, but rather different minds navigating a different landscape.

That’s the craft challenge. And it’s harder than it looks.

So let's talk about how to actually do it.

What This Means for Your Fiction

So. You’re writing a naval captain in 1805 who loves his lieutenant. You’re writing a Roman tribune who can’t stop thinking about his optio. You’re writing a Renaissance artist whose muse is the boy who grinds his pigments.

How do you do it without projecting?

The Question Changes

Modern queer narratives are structured around a question: Who am I?

The character discovers their desire. They struggle to reconcile it with their sense of self. They suffer, hide, perform, and eventually—in the hopeful version—come to accept themselves. The arc is interior. The drama is identity. The climax is self-acceptance.

Your historical characters don’t have this arc available to them. Not because they’re repressing it—because the question doesn’t exist.

Their question is different: How do I live?

This is not a lesser question. It’s an older one, and in some ways a harder one. It’s the question of conduct. Of navigation. Of building a life around a desire that is dangerous to act on, without the framework of identity to make that danger feel like oppression of the “true self.”

The drama is external. The stakes are material. What happens if we’re seen? What happens if he’s transferred to another ship? What happens if I’m promoted and he’s not? What do we owe each other? What do we risk for each other? How do we speak about this thing we never name?

These are not smaller stories. They’re different stories. And almost no one is writing them.

Desire Without Declaration

The challenge that results: write attraction without labelling it.

Modern characters tend to realise things. “He realised he was attracted to men.” “She finally admitted to herself that she was in love with her.” The realisation is the turning point. The internal acknowledegment precedes the external action.

Your historical characters don’t realise what they are. They want. Wanting doesn’t require a label. It requires an object.

He watches the lieutenant’s hands on the glass. He finds reasons to be in the same room. He thinks about him while falling asleep. He volunteers for the same watches. He tells himself it’s admiration, respect, the natural affection between officers who trust each other with their lives. He doesn’t tell himself he’s gay, or bisexual, or struggling with his sexuality—because none of those concepts exist.

He just wants. And wanting is enough to drive a story.

The reader will understand what’s happening. You don’t need to spell it out. Trust them to recognise desire without having a character narrate their identity crisis.

The Particular Friendship Is Not a Euphemism

Georgian England had a term: the particular friendship. Two men whose attachment was understood to be extraordinary. Who lived together, travelled together, were rarely seen apart. Whose affection exceeded the ordinary bonds of masculine camaraderie.

Modern readers see this and think: euphemism. A way of not saying what everyone knew.

But that’s not quite right. The particular friendship was a real social category—a recognised form of relationship with its own expectations and boundaries. It wasn’t a lie covering a truth. It required no further specification.

What happened behind closed doors was private. What was displayed publicly was the friendship: the loyalty, the devotion, the evident preference for each other’s company. This was legible, acceptable, even admirable. David and Jonathan. Achilles and Patroclus. The tradition was ancient and honourable.

Your characters can have this. They can speak of their particular friendship openly. They can be known for it. The silence isn’t about the relationship—it’s about the specific physical acts that the law cared about. Everything else can be in plain sight.

This gives you something the modern closet narrative doesn’t: public intimacy. Your captain and his lieutenant can be visibly devoted to each other. They can dine together every night, share quarters when possible, grieve openly if separated. None of this requires hiding. The hiding is narrower than you think—and what’s left in the open is larger than modern readers expect.

Strategic Silence vs. The Closet

The closet is a metaphor of interiority. You’re in it. Your true self is locked inside, and the performed self walks around outside, and the goal is to open the door and let the true self out.

Strategic silence is something else entirely. It’s not about interiority—it’s about speech. What is said. What is left unsaid. What everyone knows but no one voices.

Your Georgian officer isn’t in the closet. He’s in a drawing room where certain topics are not raised. He hasn’t hidden his true self—he’s declined to discuss his private affairs, which is exactly what a gentleman ought to do. His silence isn’t shameful. It’s correct. To speak openly of such things would be vulgar, embarrassing, a breach of conduct. The silence protects everyone.

This is a different emotional texture than the closet. The closet is suffocating, false, a constant performance. Strategic silence is... civilised. It’s the same silence that covers financial difficulties, family scandals, medical conditions, anything that’s simply not spoken of in polite company. Your character isn’t uniquely burdened by it. He’s participating in a social contract that governs all private matters.

Write the silence as form rather than suppression. It’s not that he can’t speak. He can. But it would be entirely gauche.

The Stakes Are Real, and They’re Not Internal

None of this means the danger isn’t real. It is.

Your English captain could hang. Your Roman tribune could be accused of unmanning himself and lose his political future. Your Renaissance artist could face the Church. The consequences are material, often severe, and unpredictable.

But the danger is external. It comes from discovery, accusation, bad luck, enemies who use the law as a weapon. It doesn’t come from the character’s failure to accept himself.

This changes where you locate the tension.

Modern narratives put the conflict inside the character: their struggle to integrate their identity. Historical narratives put the conflict between the character and the world: their struggle to live given the world’s constraints.

Both can be dramatic. But they’re not the same drama. And if you’re writing the internal conflict in a historical setting, you’re writing a modern character in costume.

What They Do Have: Honour, Duty, Discretion, Love

Strip away identity. Strip away the closet. Strip away coming out and self-acceptance and finding your community.

What’s left?

Everything that actually matters in a story.

Love. The real thing—not the labelled, categorised, identity-affirming thing—just love. Desire that won’t let go. Loyalty tested by circumstance. The question of what you’d risk for someone, and what you wouldn’t, and what that says about you.

Honour. What do you owe him? What do you owe your family, your career, your duty? When they conflict, how do you choose? Not “how do I reconcile my identity with my obligations”—just: what do I do?

Discretion. The art of navigating a world that punishes carelessness. The tactical intelligence of knowing what can be shown and what must be hidden. The partnership of two people who understand the stakes and protect each other.

Loss. The things that can’t be had. The life you might have lived if the world were otherwise. Not the tragedy of the closet—the tragedy of circumstance. The same tragedy that governs any love that can’t be fully lived: the married woman you want, the station you can’t cross, the war that separates you, the death that comes too soon.

These are the materials of serious fiction. They don’t require identity categories. They predate identity categories by millennia. They’re better than identity categories, if you know how to use them.

An Invitation

I’m not telling you what to write.

If you want to write a modern coming-out narrative set in 1810, with characters who discover they’re gay and struggle to accept themselves and eventually find peace in self-knowledge—you can do that. It will be ahistorical, but fiction is allowed to be ahistorical. Just know that’s what you’re doing.

But if you want to write something true to the period—something that takes seriously the interior lives of people who didn’t have our categories—I’m telling you it’s possible. And it’s more interesting than you think.

The Greek philosophers believed erotic love between men was a path to the divine. The Romans built an empire on pragmatism and cared about status, not orientation. The Georgians maintained particular friendships in open secrecy, conducted with honour and discretion. None of them were repressed. None of them were in the closet. They were living fully realised lives according to frameworks that made sense in their worlds.

Your characters can do the same.

It requires more of you. You have to write desire without naming it. You have to build tension from external stakes rather than internal conflict. You have to trust your readers to understand what’s happening without a character explaining what it means about their identity.

But that’s what good historical fiction always requires: the humility to let the past be foreign, and the skill to make that foreignness legible without flattening it into the familiar.

The stories are there. They’ve always been there—in Plato’s drinking party, in Antony sneaking into Curio’s house, in every particular friendship that history recorded and then declined to explain.

The man at the Athenian symposium, climbing Diotima’s ladder towards the Form of Beauty.

The Roman reaching for Plato in the dark, finding a framework that ennobled what his culture merely tolerated.

The Georgian officer, conducting his particular friendship with discretion and grace, needing no word for what he was because what he was was not the relevant question.

They didn’t need to be represented, validated, told the shape of some thing they were while in opposition to some norm. They didn’t need a community to tell them their desires were acceptable, or a movement to fight for their right to exist, or a label to make themselves legible to strangers.

They just lived.

You’re the one who needs all that. Not them.

The homosexual was invented in 1869.

If your story is set before that, write like it.

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Continue to the companion essay:

Fair winds—
D. S. Black

Meta That Means Something

Most meta-fiction is a parlor trick.

The fourth wall breaks. The game winks at you. See? You’re playing a game. Isn’t that clever? You feel smart for noticing, the creator feels smart for pointing it out, and nothing lingers past the credits. It’s a gimmick and teaches nothing.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Game of the Year at The Game Awards, and the discourse has been predictably shallow. Gorgeous art direction. Turn-based innovation. Emotional story. All true. All missing the point.

What Expedition 33 actually does should matter to anyone who builds worlds. It constructs an entire cosmology around a question most creators never ask themselves directly:

Why do you build?

The answer the game offers isn’t comfortable. It doesn’t celebrate the creative impulse or valorize worldbuilding as noble craft. It holds a mirror up to the compulsion itself and asks whether what you’re doing is processing or hiding. Whether the worlds you build serve your life or replace it.

If you've ever surfaced from your draft at 3am unsure which world you're in as if from a dream that felt more real than the one you’re living in—this game is looking at you.

And it's asking whether you should be proud of that.

The Premise (For Those Who Haven’t Played)

Every year, the Paintress paints a number on a monolith. Everyone over that age is erased—gommaged—a word that sounds like what it does: smeared out, effaced, unmade. The count started at one hundred. Now it’s thirty-three.

Expeditions go out each year to stop her. None have returned.

This is the surface that you learn from trailers. It’s enough to make a compelling game—a ticking clock, a desperate journey, a beautiful antagonist who might be a god or a monster or both.

What struck me is that the premise didn’t sound bog-standard—I tip my hat to France—and was therefore worth a look.

But the world of Expedition 33 feels wrong in ways the premise doesn’t explain. The art direction isn’t just stylized—it’s truly painterly. The environments don’t feel like places. They feel like memories of places. The light hits surfaces the way it does in oil paintings, not photographs. Everything is slightly too beautiful.

The game knows what it’s doing. It’s showing you something about itself before it tells you.

What follows discusses late-game revelations. If you haven’t played and intend to, know this: the reveal earns the journey. Bookmark this. Come back when you have.

For everyone else—for those who’ve finished, or those who don’t mind knowing—we’re going to talk about what the game is actually about.

Worldbuilding as Diagnosis

Here’s what the game reveals: the world is a Canvas.

Literally. Lumière, the expeditions, the characters you’ve grown to love—all of it exists inside a painted reality created by a woman named Alicia. The Paintress isn’t a god or a monster. She’s a mother who lost everything and built a world to hold what remained.

The Canvas is a coping mechanism where the dead can still exist and be made real again. Where time can be controlled, where grief can be managed instead of faced directly.

This is what worldbuilders do.

We build because something in reality is intolerable. Tolkien wrote Middle-earth while carrying the trenches—the Dead Marshes, anyone? Robert E. Howard created Conan while feeling trapped in a dying Texas town, nursing a mother who would outlive his will to stay; the Hyborian Age is vitality and agency, everything Howard couldn’t access in the room where he wrote. The Brontë children built Gondal and Angria because their real world kept taking people from them, and the imaginary one couldn’t.

The Canvas isn’t metaphor here in E33.

The shape of the world you build reveals what you can’t face directly. The rules you impose expose the chaos you’re trying to master. The characters you write into existence answer (or circle) questions you can’t ask out loud.

When I build my world with its intelligent ocean that’s more god than just salt, beast-saints that dissolve the boundary between human and animal, officers who become divine at the helm: (I think) I know what I’m processing. Not trauma in the conventional sense. Something older. The vertigo of deep time. The terror of a universe that doesn’t owe me answers. The way society trains you to distrust your own intuition until you can’t hear it anymore.

My Canvas isn’t where I hide from those questions. It’s where I practice living with them. A laboratory for ontological uncertainty. A place to be frightened by mystery and learn, slowly, to stay in the room with it.

But the game asks a harder question: Is that what you’re actually doing? Or is that the story you tell yourself about why you can’t leave?

And so, Alicia built her Canvas to hold the dead.

What did you build yours to hold?

The Choice: Maelle vs. Verso

The game ends with a choice that refuses to be comfortable.

Maelle’s path: Keep the Canvas. Stay in the painted world. Your companions survive—but only as fictions. You become what your mother became. A Painter who never leaves the painting. Protected from grief by a reality that can’t hurt you because it isn’t real.

Verso’s path: Destroy the Canvas. Kill the fiction. Your friends are gone. The world you loved is gone. But you’re present in what remains—whatever that is, however much it hurts.

Neither ending is correct. And I love that this choice is here. The writers are encouraging you to have a relationship with this question without telling you what you should do. The game won’t let you have that escape of having the decision made for you.

What it will let you see is what your choice reveals about you.

There’s a difference between people who consume fiction and people who create it. Both escape but that’s not the distinction. The distinction is what happens inside the escape. Consumers inhabit. Creators build. Consumers are sustained by the world; creators are drained by it, and build anyway, pulling from some deeper well of will that the act of creation itself depletes.

Maelle’s ending is the consumer’s mercy: stay in the world, keep the characters alive, never face the loss that made the Canvas necessary. Verso’s ending is the creator’s terror: destroy what you made, lose the people who only existed because you imagined them, stand in the ashes and call it freedom.

Alicia was a creator. She built the Canvas from grief and skill and the refusal to let go. But then she stayed. She crossed from Painter to painted.

I’ve watched dozens of players make this choice. Streamers, friends, strangers in comment sections arguing about which ending is “true.” The split isn’t random. Something in how people relate to fiction—to escape, to creation, to what loss asks of them—determines which ending feels like mercy and which feels like murder.

The game doesn’t judge. It just asks you to notice which one you reached for, and why.

Painters and Writers

The game hints at a war.

Not just between characters—between types of creators. Painters and Writers. Two factions who build differently, want differently, and might be fundamentally incompatible.

Painters make worlds with image. They create spaces. Environments. Places you can walk through, inhabit, lose yourself inside. The Canvas is their medium—reality as composition, existence as aesthetic experience. Alicia is a Painter.

Writers make worlds with words. They impose narrative. Structure. Trajectory. They decide what happens, when, and why. A Writer doesn’t build a space to inhabit so much as they build a path to follow.

The game never fully explains who the Writers are. But the implication is unsettling: they might be the developers themselves. The ones who created the “real” world outside Alicia’s Canvas. The ones who wrote her.

Which means even Painters are trapped inside someone else’s story. It’s all a bit meta. I love a good meta-plot.

If you’re a worldbuilder, you know this tension from the inside. Setting-first versus story-first. Sandbox versus railroad. The compulsion to build outward—more lore, more history, more depth to your iceberg, versus the discipline to build forward, toward an ending that justifies the journey.

Painters want you to stay. Writers want you to move.

The Painter builds a world so complete you never have to leave. The Writer builds a world that ends—that reaches conclusion, that closes, that forces you back into reality with something you didn’t have before.

Most creators are one or the other. The Painters fill wikis and appendices; their stories sprawl and meander because the world is the point, not the plot. The Writers finish books; their worlds feel thin because they’re scaffolding for the narrative, not structures meant to bear weight on their own.

The rare ones, with work that haunts, are somehow both. Tolkien painted Middle-earth so completely that scholars still wander its geography. But he also wrote. Imposed the trajectory of the Ring, forced the story to end, made you leave the Shire even though you wanted to stay.

The question E33 asks isn’t which mode is correct. But rather which one you default to when you’re not paying attention and what that reveals about what you’re avoiding.

Painters might be hiding from endings. Writers might be hiding from presence.

Which trap is yours?

Now, the Mirror: Why Are You Here?

The game’s cruelest move is that it doesn’t let you watch from outside.

You’re playing Expedition 33. You chose to be here. You’re inside a Canvas—a painted world built to process grief and you’re spending hours in Lumière instead of wherever else you could be. The fiction is doing something for you, or you wouldn’t have stayed.

When Maelle faces her choice, she’s facing yours.

Not metaphorically. The game makes you complicit in the question. You pressed the button. You decided whether the Canvas lives or dies. And whatever you chose, you now have to sit with why that ending felt like the right one.

Most meta-fiction breaks the fourth wall to congratulate you for noticing the trick. E33 breaks it without even making it obvious, all to make you face the question.

The hours you spend playing, building, reading in painted worlds are hours you’re not spending in the uncontrolled mess of reality. The game observes this.

For creators, the mirror cuts deeper.

The player escapes into someone else’s Canvas. The creator escapes into their own. The player can leave when the game ends. The creator built the exits. The creator knows where the walls are thin. The creator could stay forever, and no one would know—because from the outside, it just looks like working.

Alicia didn’t mean to become the Paintress. She just never found a reason to stop painting.

There’s No Clean Takeaway

I could land this essay on a craft principle. Something tidy, such as, I don’t know— “Know why you build. Make sure the Canvas serves the life outside it. Don’t become Alicia.”

But that would be rather a pointless lie.

The game doesn’t resolve. It doesn’t tell you which ending is correct, whether creation is salvation or sickness, whether the hours you spend inside your own fiction are making you stronger or hollowing you out. It shows you both possibilities and refuses to choose for you.

I’m not going to choose for you either.

What I know is this: I’ve built a world for years. I’ve written an ocean that claims what it loves, officers who touch divinity at the helm, people who turned off their capacity to feel.

I don’t know if that makes me Maelle or Verso. I don’t know if I’m building toward something or away from something. Some days it feels like I’m excavating something fantastic. Some days it feels like burial. Exhausting.

The game asks you to look. That’s all it asks.

Whether you can answer honestly is between you and your Canvas.

The best art about art doesn’t celebrate creation. That’s obvious. Making it is the point.

Expedition 33 asks why we build worlds and whether we’re strong enough to leave them.

I don’t know yet.

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Fair winds,
D. S. Black

Everyone thinks they’re empathetic.

Ask a writer if they understand people different from themselves and they’ll say yes. Of course. That’s the job. They’ll tell you they care about perspectives outside their own, that they believe in nuance, that they reject simple binaries of good and evil.

They’re usually lying. Not deliberately—they believe it. But performed empathy can be a shield from truly understanding the mechanisms behind rendering complex psychology on the page.

Here’s what I mean: claiming you understand people who think differently costs nothing. It’s an identity badge, a way to signal sophistication without doing the actual work. You can call yourself radically empathetic while never once inhabiting a worldview that genuinely threatens your own.

The tell is always in the writing.

If your antagonist exists only to be wrong, that is, to be defeated and confirm the reader’s existing moral universe, you haven’t written a character. You’ve written a scarecrow stuffed with everything you despise, propped up so your protagonist can knock it down.

Scarecrows don’t reveal anything about the villain. They reveal the author. They say: I don’t understand people who disagree with me. I’ve never tried. I don’t intend to start.

The Method Acting Frame

Stanislavski’s “magic if” is usually taught to actors. It belongs to writers, too.

I discuss the extensive overlap in another post:

The technique is simple: you don’t observe the character from outside. You don’t describe what they do and assign reasons for it. You ask yourself, instead, If I were this person, with this history, in this situation, what would I do?

Not what would a villain do. What would I do, if I had lived their life.

This is the difference between watching a character and inhabiting one. Most writers watch. They describe behavior, assign motivations, move figures through plot like chess pieces. The character does cruel things because the story needs cruelty. The character wants power because wanting power is what antagonists do. It’s all mechanical. You can see the author’s hand on every lever.

Method writing requires you to disappear into the logic. To find the internal coherence that makes choices feel inevitable from inside the skull. Not justified. Not excused. Inevitable. The character couldn’t have done otherwise, because this is who they are, and you know that because you’ve been them.

This is uncomfortable. It means genuinely understanding why someone would do things you find repugnant. You have to find the version of yourself that could make that choice. The version that exists under different pressures, different wounds, different circumstances.

This is generally understood but recently conflated with “if you write this you must be this” illiteracy. But that did come from somewhere and it’s fascinating to see that actors, enacting the same technique, are understood to be playing a role, where writers are—increasingly—not.

When I write institutional antagonists, I can’t make them stupid. I can’t make them cartoonishly corrupt. I have to ask: why would I stay loyal to a system I knew was broken? And the answer is always human. Because I built my identity inside it. Because leaving would mean admitting my life was wasted. Because the structure gives me purpose and status I couldn’t find elsewhere. Because I’m afraid of who I am without it.

That’s not villainy. That would only be me albiet under different pressures.

Most writing stays shallow because this work is genuinely hard. It requires psychological risk from the author. You have to touch the parts of yourself that could become the thing you fear. And most people would rather write scarecrows than look that closely.

The Psychology Gap

Most writers don’t have a functional model of why people do things.

They work from types. Surface behavior. Tropes inherited from other fiction. Their villains are cruel because villains are cruel. Their heroes are brave because heroes are brave. The psychology goes exactly one layer deep, which is to say it doesn’t go anywhere at all.

I came to writing through intelligence analysis. Specifically, the part of the job that requires you to model how people think, what they want, and what they’ll do next. You learn fast that humans don’t operate on logic. They operate on attachment, insecuriy and wounds they don’t examine. You learn that the difference between instrumental aggression and hostile aggression changes everything about how someone behaves. You learn that shame drives more destruction than guilt ever could, because guilt says I did something bad and shame says I am bad. Guilt can be repaired. Shame has to be defended.

This isn’t all just academia. When you understand attachment theory, you understand why your character clings to someone who hurts them. When you understand defense mechanisms, you can write denial that feels lived-in rather than convenient for the plot. When you understand narcissistic wounding, you can write a villain whose cruelty makes sense. Not excusable, never excusable. But that is not the point. Sense and coherency is.

Without psychology, characters are assembled from parts. The brooding loner. The power-hungry tyrant. The cold manipulator. You’ve seen these figures a thousand times because writers keep grabbing the same pieces off the shelf and stitching them together. The result is a character that functions, technically, but never surprises. Never feels like a person who might exist off-page. Those can haunt.

With psychology, characters become inevitable. The reader can trace the forces that made them. They recoil from the outcome but they understand the machinery. They can’t dismiss the villain as simply evil, because they’ve seen the path. They know, in some uncomfortable way, that the path was walkable. That anyone could have walked it, given the right wounds and the wrong circumstances.

The gap shows most clearly in antagonists. A psychologically literate writer can articulate why their villain believes they’re correct. An illiterate one just makes them cruel and calls it characterisation.

Why This Is Hard or: The Ego Problem

Here’s a truth: most writers only create characters they’d want to be friends with.

Protagonists get the author’s best qualities, or the qualities the author wishes they had. They’re brave when it counts. Kind beneath the rough exterior. Misunderstood but ultimately good. The protagonist is a wish-fulfillment proxy, the author’s idealised self moving through a world that will eventually recognise their worth. And even the most “anti-hero” is really just a soft, fuzzy thing that oh-so-secretly wants cuddles and love.

Antagonists get the opposite treatment. They become receptacles. Everything the author fears, despises, or refuses to examine in themselves gets poured into the villain. The result is a figure that exists only to be Other. Easy to hate. Morally uncomplicated. Safely distant from anything the author might have to own.

This is projection wearing a plot.

The problem isn’t that it’s lazy—though it is. The problem is what it reveals. When your villain is cardboard, you’re telling the reader something about yourself. You’re saying: I have never genuinely inhabited a worldview I find threatening. I’ve never asked what it would take to make me into someone I despise. I don’t understand people who disagree with me, and I’ve decided that’s their failure, not mine.

That’s not really characterisation, is it.

And I know that if you’ve read this far you’re the likely sort to agree and so, perhaps, I’m preaching to the choir when I say this but: Your work will be so much more impactful if you don’t merely use your own ideology to build characters around but rather use it to inform your exploration of another.

Or your cast will be inhabited by a dozen flavours of you. A dozen flavours of, perhaps, your most palatable beliefs.

The ego wants safety. It wants to write heroes who validate your self-image and villains who confirm your moral superiority. It resists the method acting work because that work is threatening. To do it you must admit the villain is in you somewhere. You have to find that seed and water it enough to watch it grow. Most people would rather not know what flowers.

The Formula Problem or: Where Shallow Writing Comes From

This is where formula fantasy fails hardest.

You know the shape. The Dark Lord wants power because Dark Lords do that. The villain is cruel because cruelty is villainy and villainy requires cruelty. There’s no interiority. No sense that this person believes in what they’re doing. No coherent psychology beneath the armor and the speeches about domination or snapping or whatever else.

The villain exists because the structure requires a villain. That’s it. That’s the explanation.

I won’t name specific books, but you already know the ones I mean. The villains who monologue about darkness and power as though those are motivations rather than aesthetics. The antagonists who do evil things for evil reasons, tautologically, because the author never stopped to ask what a real person would want in that position. You’ve read these books. You might have loved them when you were young enough not to notice the scaffolding.

The result reads like fiction written by someone who has never met a human being with genuinely different values. And certainly not from out behind a keyboard while blocking and calling them a bigot or phobe or whatever emotionally satisfies them that they did the right thing not trying to understand them.

Really, people we disagree with aren’t always wrong, but rather are someone who arrived at their conclusions through a coherent process you could follow if you but tried. The villains in formula fiction aren’t people. They’re obstacles. Abstractions to be overcome so the hero can complete their arc.

This is what happens when writers skip the psychological work. When empathy stays performative. When the ego protects itself from the contamination of genuinely understanding the opposition. You get villains who function mechanically but collapse under the slightest scrutiny. Who exist to be defeated rather than understood.

And readers feel it, even when they can’t name it. They finish the book and forget the antagonist’s name by the following week. Nothing lingers. Nothing haunts. The villain was never real enough to leave a mark and no amount of CGI or dramatic prose can make that less true.

The Craft Principle

If you can only write characters you like, you’re not writing fiction. You’re writing propaganda for your ego.

So then the work is to understand people. All of them. Including the ones whose existence makes you uncomfortable, whose beliefs threaten yours, whose choices you find repugnant. Psychology gives you the scaffolding: the attachment styles, the defense mechanisms, the shame and wound and compensation that drive human behavior beneath the surface. Method acting gives you the practice: the discipline of asking what would I do rather than what would a villain do.

The result is characters who feel like they exist independently of your approval. Who breathe on the page because you’ve breathed through them. Whose interiority is so coherent that readers can’t dismiss them, can’t write them off, can’t maintain comfortable distance.

I’ve written before about what this produces on the page.

This essay is about what it requires from the author. The psychological risk. The ego dissolution. The willingness to find the villain inside yourself and understand them well enough to write them true.

The alternative is children’s morality plays. Stories where the good people are good because they’re like you, and the bad people are bad because they’re not. Safe. Predictable. Forgettable.

You can write that if you want. But don’t mistake it for craft.

Next : Why Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Game of the Year win matters for worldbuilders, and the uncomfortable question the game asks anyone who builds fictional worlds.

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Fair winds,
D. S. Black

Primal has no dialogue.

None. Two seasons of gorgeously rendered violence, grief, found family, betrayal, sacrifice, love, rage communicated entirely through action, expression, and le non-dit.

This shouldn’t work. Every writing manual insists dialogue is essential. Every screenwriting course teaches you to reveal character through what people say. Prose workshops drill you on subtext within conversation, on the telling pause, on what characters mean versus what they state.

Genndy Tartakovsky ignored all of it. And made one of the most emotionally devastating pieces of fiction in the last decade. If you asked me, that is.

This essay isn’t a review. I’m not sure I’m qualified for that, but I can dissect why I believe its wordless storytelling works, and what prose writers, game designers, and anyone building narrative can take from it.

The Hierarchy

Tartakovsky understand that, for this series, body language is the foundation. Dialogue is furniture. Or rather, there is simply no dialogue and body language might very well be exactly how the earliest of humanity spoke.

We’ve been trained to think of physical description and body language as seasoning—the “he crossed his arms” you sprinkle between lines of speech, the “she looked away” that’s meant to signal emotional subtext. Beats. Or stage direction.

Primal inverts this. The physical behavior isn’t supporting the emotional content but rather is the emotional content. When Spear grieves, we see his body curl inward, see the way he holds space around the absence. When Fang protects, we see her position herself between threat and ally before the threat even climbs into frame. When trust fractures between them, we see the physical distance open—literally. With Spear sitting much further away.

No internal monologue to clarify and make sure we understand. No dialogue to state the subtext. Just bodies in a space.

Demonstration

Theory is cheap. Let me attempt to demonstrate. For fun, if anything.

Here’s the same emotional beat written three ways: a subordinate announces he’s transferring to a new master. The man who “collected” him—who views ownership of people as existential—receives the news. The subordinate, who has always seen more than he let on, chooses a moment to stop extending that courtesy.

Version 1: Dialogue-Forward

“I’m returning this.” Calix held out the bolt pistol. “My new master provides his own tools.”

“Your new master.” Saren let the words hang. “Origen.”

“Yes.”

“And what does he see in you, I wonder? The controlled violence? The useful savagery?” Saren’s laugh was soft, almost admiring. “He’ll catalog you. File you away in that vast archive of his. Is that what you want? To be understood?”

“You speak as if understanding is a threat.”

“For men like us? It is.” Saren was quiet for a moment. “He’ll find the hollow places, Fellner. The ones you’ve papered over. He’ll name them. And once something is named, it can be used.”

“Like you used mine.”

“I gave yours purpose. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” Calix’s voice was quiet. “The storm you hold back must be immense.”

Silence. When Saren spoke again, something had changed. “Origen taught you that. That particular cruelty.”

“No. I’ve seen it since Margard. I simply never had the words.”

This… works (but feels damn strange to me.) The subtext is present, I suppose. Saren’s fear of being known, his possessiveness framed as protection, Calix’s deliberate withdrawal of a courtesy he’d been extending all along. A playwright could stage this. Pinter could probably make it sing.

Version 2: Dialogue + Integrated Beats

“I’m returning this.” Calix held out the bolt pistol, grip-first. “My new master provides his own tools.”

Saren didn’t take it. He circled instead, boots tapping a slow rhythm on the deck. “Your new master. Origen.” He stopped at the viewport, silhouette framed against the burning star. “And what does the old scholar see in you, I wonder?”

“Purpose.”

“Purpose.” Saren turned, smile playing at his mouth. “He’ll catalog you, Fellner. Every trauma indexed. Every wound cross-referenced.” He moved closer. “Is that what you want? To be understood?”

Calix remained still, the pistol extended, untaken.

“For men like us, understanding is violation.” Saren’s voice dropped. “I never named your hollow places. Did you notice? I let you keep them.”

“And I extended you the same courtesy.” Calix met his gaze. “Until now.”

Saren went still.

“The storm you hold back must be immense.”

The smile didn’t fade so much as freeze in place. Something behind Saren’s eyes shuttered.

“Origen taught you that,” he said finally. “That particular knife.”

“No. I’ve seen it since Margard. I simply never chose to say it aloud.”

Also competent. The movement creates tension, the beats add information rather than merely labelling emotion, the physicality supports. This is prose fiction—physical behavior integrated with speech, each informing the other. Most published work lives in this register.

Version 3: Body Language Primarily

“A fine weapon,” Saren murmured as he came to a halt before Calix, his mismatched eyes not on the pistol, but on Calix’s face. “A tool for a precise hand. It suits you. Keep it.”

“My new master provides his own tools, Lord Captain,” Calix replied.

The rhythmic cadenza of clicking bronze heels ceased. Saren went utterly still, his head tilting fractionally, like a predator that has just caught an unexpected, dangerous scent on the wind.

“Your... master,” Saren repeated, the words a low purr.

He reached out, his movement a meander rather than an advance. His gloved fingers, splayed, did not touch Calix’s face, but instead went to the high collar of his new uniform coat. He adjusted it—a paternal gesture that instead felt proprietary.

“Look at you. Dressed in his sober colors, reciting his cold logic.” His other hand settled on the Grave-Pelt at Calix’s throat, thumb brushing against dead bone. “But beneath it all... the beast I found still lingers.”

For a long moment, the focus in his eyes wavered. The performance seemed to pause—not into anger, but into something older. The gaze, ordinarily sharp, softened, becoming distant. Lost. It was the look of a boy adrift in a cold and empty void.

Calix saw it. Searched the face with a saccadic eye.

“The storm you hold back must be immense.”

Perhaps a bit overwrought here, with more telling than showing, but you get the point.

What Each Version Can Do

These aren’t failures and successes, per se. Every writer often renders their chosen technique brilliantly, if they care to become competent at it.

Some revelations, spoken aloud, become smaller. Some overwrought physical description could instead be a killer bit of dialogue. And sometimes, marrying them both is the answer.

The moment Saren says “you’ve hurt me” or Calix says “I see through you,” the power drains from the scene.

This isn’t prescriptive. Dialogue-forward writers exist and thrive—Mamet, Pinter, Elmore Leonard. Their work does things mine certaintly cannot. The stage has constraints that demand speech carry weight prose can distribute elsewhere.

The question isn’t which approach is correct. It’s whether you’re making the choice consciously through your voice.

But more to the point

Tartakovsky isn’t working in prose. He’s working in pure visual sequence—animation that will never have the luxury of interiority.

And yet Primal carries psychological complexity that most dialogue-heavy fiction can’t touch. Spear’s grief isn’t explained. His bond with Fang isn’t declared. His capacity for violence and tenderness aren’t reconciled through conversation. They coexist in his body, visible in how he moves and what he protects.

Games face the same constraint. Combat, traversal, environmental storytelling—wordless by necessity. The narrative designer who understands body language as storytelling tool can make a character’s fighting style communicate psychology, their positioning relative to the player speak relationship.

What can the body say that speech would diminish?

Primal isn’t just “animation without dialogue.” It’s a systematic deployment of physical storytelling techniques that writers may not always consciously learn.

While not tips, just a few things might be worth pointing at to further demonstrate.

Watch where Spear and Fang position themselves relative to each other across the series. Early episodes: wary distance, neither willing to expose their flank. As trust builds, they sleep closer. After betrayal or conflict, the gap reopens.

Tartakovsky never cuts to a character thinking “I’m not sure I trust her yet.” The three feet of empty ground between them says it. When that distance finally closes and Spear sleeps against Fang’s side for the first time—the audience feels the magnitude precisely because no one announced it. It’s just earned.

Establish the baseline so the deviation can speak.

The Test

Take a scene you’ve written. Strip out all dialogue.

Does the scene still communicate? Can you follow the emotional arc through pure physical behavior—who moves toward, who retreats, who can’t meet eyes, whose hands betray what their words hid?

If yes, your dialogue is doing its proper job. That is punctuation, emphasis, the precise word at the precise moment. The structure is beneath.

If no—The dialogue isn’t enhancing; it’s compensating. And your scene will not land with the force it could.

This isn’t about removing dialogue from your work. It’s about building the foundation first. Then adding the words that need to be there—and only those.

Because foundation is built on character psychology and no matter what good actors we are, our words may never be as honest as our actions. Characters should act honestly first.

Primal isn’t a show that happens to lack dialogue. That much is obvious.

It’s a deliberate thematic throughline. And whether the result was purposefully serving this purpose—the ideas that essential emotion can be communicated through action and image alone—it achieved it.

Let someone have their own interpretation of the scene. This anxiety to be sure you’re communicating to the reader/viewer what you need them to understand cheapens the emotional core. And I’m talking about things like explanation that preempts the reader’s own understanding. The interior monologue that hand-holds through subtext anyone paying attention already caught.

Let them take away what they want, not what you believe they should want to take from it.

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Fair winds,
—D.S.

It’s popular. It circles the drain of overdone.

Jekyll and Hyde. Werewolves. The gentleman who becomes a monster when provoked. The seventeen year old’s deviantArt character with heterochromia.

We’ve been telling this story for centuries. Let’s think about why it’s so fascinating.

I posit: the transformation isn’t the point. The containment is.

Dual-nature characters aren’t compelling because they transform. Althought, for some, I suspect that is absolutely the main draw because it can be all spectacle on television. However, I believe they’re compelling because they contain both states simultaneously—and the tension of that containment is what creates character magnetism.

Somerset—if you permit me my own creation a spot—in his turquoise dress whites, speaking in measured slightly-aristocratic tones, knowing he contains something feral that the sea recognises. Conan the barbarian who understands statecraft better than the kings he deposes. The surgeon whose hands know violence and healing with equal intimacy. The hyena king whose gutter philosophy cuts deeper than any lion’s court rhetoric.

This is one of those “aesthetic obsessions” I never shut up about. Not the cliché split personality, but the more sophisticated construction: characters who are wholly and authentically both things at once. The officer who is also the beast. The scavenger who is the philosopher. The barbarian who is also the statesman.

The Transformation Trap

Most writers treat dual nature as a binary switch. Calm state. Trigger event. Beast mode. Return to calm.

Bruce Banner gets angry, becomes Hulk, smashes things, reverts. The werewolf transforms at the full moon, loses control, wakes up confused. The berserker enters rage, blacks out, surveys the carnage afterward.

I wouldn’t say this model is wrong, per se. I would say it’s a bit flatter than it could be.

It’s circumstantial. The character “becomes” a beast when angry, scared, or lunar-aligned. The duality is something that happens to them, not something they are.

It removes agency. The beast “takes over.” The civilised self is a passenger, not pilot. This is less interesting because the character isn’t choosing anything—they’re being hijacked, in a way..

It’s predictable. Readers know the trigger. They know the result. The tension becomes mechanical: will he get angry? Yes. Will he transform? Oh, yeah. Will he feel bad afterward? Of course.

The best versions of these characters, such as Hulk in recent portrayals where Banner and Hulk negotiate, integrate, coexist, have moved toward what actually works: simultaneous containment rather than sequential transformation.

The switch isn’t the story. The cage is.

Simultaneous Containment

And here is where I reframe the apparatus:

The sophisticated dual-nature character doesn’t become the beast when provoked. They are always both, and they choose which face to show.

The civilised exteriour doesn’t so much suppress the primal as it silhouettes it when it emerges. It displays through contrast.

Think about what a uniform actually does. Naval dress whites, aristocratic protocol, the measured cadence of command voice—these aren’t hiding the predator underneath. They’re framing it. The cage makes the beast legible. Without the bars, you can’t see what’s pacing inside.

In my manuscript there’s a moment where Captain Somerset takes the wheel during a storm that should kill everyone aboard. Here’s what his first lieutenant sees:

His eyes were wide with focus. His shoulders strained against the fine turquoise wool of his uniform coat, the elegant white countershading along the inner sleeves and flanks were a blinding flash against the bruised and black sky. He looked like a predator. He looked like prey. He looked like a man the sea had already claimed but who refused to acknowledge it.

Predator and prey. Officer and beast. In the same sentence. The uniform doesn’t hide what he is—the straining wool, the countershading designed to echo sacred dolphins, the formal dress barely containing something feral. It reveals it through the tension.

This is the principle: not transformation, but containment. Not “he becomes dangerous when pushed” but “he is always dangerous, and what you’re seeing right now is how he holds it.”

Three Expressions: Somerset, Gore, and Daud

The dual nature doesn’t have one shape. In my cast, three characters demonstrate three different expressions of the same principle.

Somerset’s charm is a lie. His rakish (oh, I love that word) persona coalesced in a moment of humiliation. And that moment created the persona: seductive, dangerous, magnetic. All to contain something his culture really doesn’t want to put a name on.

The sea recognises what’s underneath. In his world, the sea is the ultimate predator. Sentient, predatory and starving. To be seen by the hungry ocean is to have your capacity for violence recognised and to therefore open a connection to it. To read it and be welcomed in to drown. Or to keep you and your ship out of reach and stay afloat through listening to the song it sings.

But to speak that language of the sea—the one of something vast and hungry—you need be be just like it.

The gentleman is real. The beast is real. The tension between them is what makes him a witch-captain.

Then there’s Lieutenant Gore. His dual nature inverts the expectation. Where Somerset’s beast is passion barely contained, Gore’s is coldness.

When a Navigator goes missing—slipped overboard and lost—Gore delivers the news:

He said it as if he were explaining a mechanical failure. A component that had exceeded its tolerances and failed. Unfortunate, but predictable.

“Already done, sir.” He tapped the ledger under his arm.

Death logged, filed, processed. His beast—the mirror-image to his containement—is the reptilian efficiency that can catalog a soul and move to the next task without so much as pause.

His aristocratic rulebook, his obsessive adherence to regulation, his ice-cold social formality—these aren’t suppressing his emotions. They’re the shape his predation takes. The civilisation is the weapon.

Some readers expect “cold” characters to secretly have warmth underneath. Gore doesn’t. His inability to feel warmth isn’t a flaw to overcome. Short of making him interesting on the page, it’s the feature that makes him devastating. It’s the point.

So, Daud van Richter, the operative who becomes Somerset’s unlikely mirror—And I keep telling you, I swear it’s not a romance—demonstrates a third variation: beast as profession.

Daud’s knife found the space between the fourth and fifth rib. It was not a dramatic thrust. It was not even particularly violent a motion.

And afterward. No catharsis:

He washed his hands, watching the faint pink swirl away (…) adjusted his coat, smoothing the severe lines of the Befruoren cut.

Mind already on the next variable. The containment continues after violence. That’s the beast as profession.

No berserker rage. No loss of control. No transformation. Daud is a killer the way a surgeon is a surgeon. Whether by training, practice, or craftsmanship. His “civilised” presentation (the elegant fingers, the measured voice, the patience) isn’t containing something wild. It’s containing something merely professional.

The principle across all three, if I’m to sound like I know anything about what I’m talking about and not merely winging this: the “primal” doesn’t have to mean rage. Somerset’s beast is passion. Gore’s beast is precision. Daud’s beast is professional competence at killing. The containment is what matters, not the specific shape of what’s contained.

What matters is that there are two things simultaneously true about one character that, when pulled apart, seem incompatible.

The Inversion Principle: Conan and Chaa

The dual nature works in either direction. The interesting characters aren’t always officers containing beasts. Sometimes they’re beasts containing officers.

Robert E. Howard’s Conan—whom I adore to pieces—isn’t compelling because he’s a barbarian. He’s compelling because he understands statecraft, reads political situations with a general’s eye, and recognizes civilisation for what it is—Which is organized savagery with etiquette. And through his ability to inhabit both worlds, is able to offer precise observations that make you consider about how absurd it all is.

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilisation is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarism must ultimately triumph.”

The primal exteriour contains strategic intelligence. Conan survives throne rooms and battlefields because he operates in both of these registers. The barbarian contains the king.

One more. Chaa, my hyena king from Clawstar—a different project, genre but same bones—takes that further. Chaa is a literal scavenger. He’s a second-tier male in a matriarchal clan, destined for subservience and scraps. When the lions’ “righteous cull” murdered his queens, his sisters, his matriarchs, he filled the power vacuum not with nobility or tradition but with teeth and cynical clarity.

“Their law is the cage, and they are surprised when the prisoners rattle the bars. Let the dark come. At least it is honest.”

Cynical wisdom forged in the gutter from of the mouth of a low-life. The prides who cull his kind believe they’re civilised. Chaa understands that their civilisation is just violence with cleaner aesthetics.

To his followers, Chaa is the necessary monster. To his enemies, he is the embodiment of chaos—never realizing they were the ones who created him.

Chaa isn’t like Conan because he is not romantic. No nobility in his savagery. He’s a king of scraps whose worldview was proven correct by the very powers who look down on him. His wisdom isn’t despite his circumstances. He’s not rising above anything. And his low vantage allows him to see what the apex predator cannot.

Building Dual Nature from the Ground Up

How to do it?

Make it more than circumstantial.

Don’t give them a trigger. Build the duality into their baseline psychology. The question isn’t “when do they become dangerous” but “what keeps them from being dangerous all of the time.”

The cage is visible. Right there.

Uniform. Protocol. Ritual. Manners. Code. Whatever your character uses to structure themselves—it shouldn’t hide the beast. It’s framing the beast. Readers need to see the cage and what’s pacing inside.

Then, let the civilised and primal serve different functions.

The officer makes you effective. Things like strategy, command, social navigation, long-term thinking. The beast makes you dangerous. Survival, violence, instinct, immediate action. Both necessary. Neither is “the real them.”

No “normal mode” versus “beast mode.” The character should be readable as both in every scene. Readers should always be slightly uncertain which face they’re seeing, because both faces are always present. The charm that might be genuine or might be calculation. Keep both possibilities alive.

Make the containment costly.

The cage takes energy to maintain. Protocol is often exhausting. Performance is labour. Let readers see what it costs to hold the beast—whether by drinking, isolation, relationships that can’t survive proximity to something that controlled. The containment shouldn’t always be effortless. It should be the character’s primary ongoing work.

Why This Works in Grimdark

This concept, I believe, has a special place in the thematic throughline of grimdark. Which is why I wanted to mention this on its own.

Grimdark demands characters who can survive horror without breaking. Cozy fiction can have protagonists who are purely civilised because their worlds don’t require predation. Grimdark worlds do.

The mathematics are simple:

Pure civilisation breaks under pressure. It can’t do what survival requires. When violence is necessary, the purely civilised character hesitates, compromises, or shatters.

Pure beast can’t navigate complexity. No strategy, patience, or social intelligence. Raw predation without containment burns out fast—killed by something smarter, betrayed by a need for patience.

Both simultaneously? Devastating.

And the tension between two natures that seem—on the surface—diametrically opposed, is what makes a character unforgettable.

If this resonated, you might also want to read the companion piece on why compelling beats likeable every time:

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Fair winds,
—D.S.

The protagonist of my novel The Reply is not a “good” person. Certainly not in the modern definition. What he is: perfectly adapted to his world.

Captain Henry Somerset is charming—but it’s performance, a weapon he wields to disarm and seduce. He treats women like conquest trophies, drinks too much, and generally channels his considerable trauma into becoming excellent at violence. His loyalty is fierce but possessive. His competence borders on inhuman. When he smiles, it’s calculation, not often warmth.

He’s also the most compelling character I’ve ever written.

In Nhera, where the ocean is sentient and predatory, where competence is the only thing standing between you and drowning, Somerset is exactly what survival requires. He’s as dangerous as the world that forged him.

And yet every writing workshop, every social media thread, every virtue-signaling checklist would tell me he’s “problematic.” That I should soften him, redeem him, make him learn to be kinder.

Because here’s what modern writing advice gets catastrophically wrong: sympathy is not the same as compelling. And the relentless push to make protagonists “likeable” is producing fiction that’s predictable, safe, and—worst of all—boring.

The Sympathy Trap

We’re told protagonists must be:

• Kind (or trying to be)

• Morally legible

• Motivated by care for others

• Redeemable through growth

• Fundamentally good

This isn’t craft advice so much as ideology masquerading as technique.

The moving target of what counts as acceptable character behavior shifts with political winds. What’s “sympathetic” in 2025 would’ve been unrecognizable in 2015. Writers tie themselves in knots trying to hit a standard that changes faster than they can revise.

The result? Protagonists who are safe. Predictable. Designed by committee to offend no one.

If you always know your protagonist will choose compassion, help the vulnerable, and learn to be better—what’s the point of reading? That’s not narrative tension. That’s cozy political porn.

The Diegetic Problem: When the Author Shows Their Hand

Here’s the craft issue: authorial judgment kills immersion.

When your narrative voice signals disapproval of a character’s choices—when the prose itself leans in to let readers know “this is bad and you should feel bad about it”—you’ve broken the fictional dream. You’re no longer in the story. You’re being lectured about the story by someone who needs you to have the correct opinion.

Diegetic writing—fiction that stays inside the world without external commentary—requires neutrality. Not moral relativism. You present the character’s logic, their context, their choices, without the narrative voice editorializing.

Example of non-diegetic writing:

Somerset smiled that cruel, predatory smile that revealed everything ugly about his treatment of women, his need to dominate, his fundamental brokenness that he refused to address.

Diegetic version:

Somerset smiled.

The first version is the author controlling your interpretation. The second trusts you to see what’s happening and form your own judgment. One is propaganda. The other is fiction.

Fiction isn’t an instruction manual. It’s not modeling correct behavior. It’s exploring what humans do under pressure.

When you write morally complex characters without narrative judgment, readers engage authentically. They think. They debate. They feel complicated things about people doing complicated things in complicated circumstances.

The moment you signal which opinion you want them to have, you’ve turned fiction into a morality play. And readers who came for story, not sermon, check out.

There’s disposable fiction—stories consumed and forgotten. And then there’s fiction that stays with readers for years because the author trusted them to form their own interpretation. When you let readers build their own relationship with the text, when you resist the urge to guide them toward the “correct” takeaway, you create space for genuine engagement.

Writing that aspires to educate readers on morality is a virtue signal, not a snapshot of human experience. And virtue signals don’t stick with anyone—they just demonstrate the author performed the right-opinions-at-time-of-publication.

Why Unlikeable Protagonists Work: The Somerset Case Study

Let me be specific about why my protagonist works despite (because of?) violating every “likeable protagonist” checklist:

He’s adapted to his environment. Nhera isn’t a world where kindness is rewarded. The ocean is sentient, predatory, and wants you. Ships disappear. Sailors drown. The sea whispers promises and threats in equal measure. In that context, Somerset’s weaponized charm, his possessive loyalty, his refusal to be vulnerable—these aren’t character flaws. They’re survival traits. The world made him dangerous because anything less gets claimed by the depths.

He’s a commoner who clawed his way to Post-Captain through merit alone. The aristocracy despises him for it. His response? Be a jerk, seduce their daughters, drink their wine, and beat them at their own games while smiling like he was born to it.

The charm is trauma response. At his first high-society gala, a noblewoman treated him like an exotic pet—praising his “raw talent” and “unrefined energy” with amused condescension. That humiliation forged his rakish persona. He treats women of that class as conquest to reclaim the power stripped from him. It’s pathological. It’s ugly. It’s rather psychologically coherent.

His competence is the point. Somerset survives because he’s the best naval officer in Arune. Not the kindest one or most moral. His skill at reading storms, navigating impossible waters, and commanding a ship borders on supernatural. The sea itself is obsessed with him.

Readers don’t like him. They’re fascinated by him.

Competence > Sympathy in Grimdark

Here’s what grimdark understands that cozy fiction doesn’t: interesting beats likeable every time.

Somerset doesn’t need to be sympathetic because he’s:

• Complex: His flaws have clear psychological origins. You understand why he’s like this even if you don’t approve.

• Competent: When he takes the wheel in a storm, his crew watches a man become a god. That’s more compelling than any amount of emotional availability.

• Consistent: He doesn’t apologize for what he is. No redemption arc where he learns to be nicer. He’s a weapon pointed at the ocean, and the ocean wants him back.

The moment you make Somerset “sympathetic,” you lose what makes him work. If he starts treating women better, stops drinking, learns healthy emotional expression—he becomes predictable. And predictable characters are narrative dead weight.

Why This Works Across My Cast

This isn’t just Somerset. My entire main cast operates on “compelling > sympathetic”:

Lieutenant Gore: Aristocratic, protocol-obsessed, cold. Loyal to Somerset not from affection but from pragmatic respect for competence. Possibly gay, definitely repressed. Would execute a crew member for insubordination without hesitation.

Daud van Richter: Richter’s bastard half-brother, her deniable knife. Missing molars from a job gone wrong. Kills efficiently, questions rarely. When Somerset forces him to choose between completing his mission or saving Somerset’s life, he chooses Somerset—not from friendship, but from recognition. Two weapons acknowledging each other.

What “Flaws” Actually Mean

Modern writing workshops treat character flaws like:

• Small, manageable quirks

• Opportunities for growth

• Things to be overcome by Act III

That’s not a flaw. That is a plot device with a redemption timer.

Real flaws—the kind that make characters jump off the page—are:

• Structural to their psychology: Somerset’s performative charm isn’t merely bad habit he can unlearn. It’s load-bearing architecture holding up a psyche built on class resentment and childhood humiliation.

• Incompatible with easy redemption: You can’t “fix” Gore’s aristocratic coldness without fundamentally destroying who he is. His inability to feel warmth isn’t a bug—it’s the feature that makes him work as an intelligence officer.

• Morally uncomfortable: Daud’s competence at violence isn’t softened by reluctance or regret. He’s good at killing and knows it. Readers can be uncomfortable with that. Good.

The Permission You Need

If you’re writing grimdark, horror, psychological thrillers, or any genre where stakes are survival rather than personal growth:

Stop trying to make readers like your protagonist.

Make them:

• Competent at something that matters

• Psychologically coherent (even if ugly)

• Consistent in their damage

• Adapted to the world they inhabit

• Interesting enough that readers have to keep reading or watching.

Somerset isn’t sympathetic by Bluesky standards. He’s a traumatized weapon who treats the sea like an abusive lover and his crew like the only family he’ll allow himself. He uses people. He performs constantly. He’s probably going to die badly.

But I can’t stop writing him.

And readers who claim they want “likeable protagonists” keep telling me they can’t stop reading about him either.

There’s no shame in finding complex, dangerous, morally ambiguous characters compelling. This is not a failure of your values. That’s proof you understand that fiction isn’t bloody-well a morality exam.

The shame comes from people who need you to perform the correct opinion about fictional characters—as if your engagement with the Somersets of fiction says something damning about your real-world ethics.

It doesn’t. Fiction is where we explore what we may not tolerate in reality. That’s the whole point.

The Craft Principle

Compelling characters operate on internal logic, not external approval.

Somerset’s psychology makes sense to him. His actions follow from his trauma, his competence, his relationship with the sea. He doesn’t break character to be more palatable. He doesn’t soften for audience comfort.

That internal coherence—that refusal to apologize for what he is—creates the magnetism that sympathy never could.

Sympathy is asking for permission. Complexity is a territorial claim.

When you write for sympathy, you’re asking: “Is this okay? Will readers accept this?”

When you write for complexity, you’re claiming: “This is what this person is. Engage with it or don’t.”

One creates cozy political porn. The other creates crap like The Reply.

I wrote a companion piece about antagonists.

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Fair winds,
—D. S. Black

They gave us captains as skilled professionals navigating real historical conflicts. Watch any adaptation of Hornblower and you’ll see the same approach: competent men doing difficult jobs with skill and courage. We love a good competence porn.

I don’t believe I could ever measure up to what they’ve written. So I will simply try something else.

I’m writing what I will arrogantly declare is called elegiac naval gothic—secondary-world maritime horror where officers are intermediaries between their crews and a jealous ocean. Where the uniform isn’t simply a given because they’re naval officers, but is threaded through with an extensive material culture that encodes the philosophies of a people under siege by sentient sea. Where competence doesn’t just work as much as it borders on divine possession.

This isn’t better or worse than grounded historical naval fiction. It’s different aesthetic territory. The same way Warhammer 40,000 didn’t replace Star Trek but claimed adjacent space—Gothic grimdark in the void instead of optimistic exploration—I’m going to attempt to claim the space for Gothic grimdark at sea with what humility I’m able to muster.

Competence Treated as Mundane

I must identify what could stand to be elevated. What do I like about naval fiction and what does it look like to then turn some of the knobs and dials about in a bid for something exciting, strange and new? Something that I would read with stars in my eyeballs.

I love a good hero shot. And grounded naval fiction is swimming with those moments where the captain might take the helm in a storm. Turn the tide of battle with a genius play.

You may get the description of wind velocity. Wave height. The physical strain on the wheel. So we know what the enemy is. Then maybe the set of the captain’s jaw, the tension in his shoulders. The action of seamanship rendered with technical precision so we also understand the cost.

What I never see is transfiguration.

The moment when a man executing skills at the absolute peak of human capability stops looking human and starts looking like something… Else. The crew’s response isn’t just respect for competence—it’s the paralysis of witnessing the numinous.

Naval fiction is afraid to go Gothic. I’m not.

What Gothic brings to bog-standard competence porn is moments where ordinary human exceeds human limits and becomes something else.

And in a setting where the ocean is sentient and hungry—as I love to remind, it’s my boilerplate at this rate—that transformation isn’t merely metaphor but rather a form of survival. Officers don’t just look divine and tremendously neat in moments of crisis. They have to become vessels for something older and stranger, or the sea claims everyone.

And in so doing, you are transfiguring ordinary seaman into Hercules or Poseidon.

Competence as Religious Experience

Let me now attempt to show it.

This is Saltire—a working-class First Lieutenant—recalling his captain during the storm. He’s being asked by a child to describe what happened.

He saw Somerset at the wheel. Not the rakish officer who smiled his way through every wardroom and tavern, but the other Somerset—the one Vance had glimpsed at the summit of that impossible wave. Eyes wide, feral, his shoulders straining against the fine turquoise wool of his coat, the white countershading along his inner sleeves and flanks a blinding flash against the bruised sky—wounds of pearlblood rendered divine.

He looked like a man the sea had claimed.

He looked like a god.

The uniform is doing narrative work. Because that’s what I wanted to do when I was designing the material culture of Arune, their country. The turquoise wool (muirrine—the sacred color). The white countershading (dolphin mimicry). The visual description is intending to demonstrate that, for Saltire, the psychological experience was like witnessing something divine.

“Wounds of pearlblood rendered divine”—this is the iridescence, the light-catching quality designed into the white fabric. It looks like wounds that bleed pearl-light because the uniform is designed to make you look like you’ve survived the abyss and returned luminous. It’s something their people wished to encode in their officers.

This is what grounded historical naval can’t give you.

The moment when skill becomes something else. When a man doing his job crosses the threshold and becomes ferryman of the underworld. When his crew stops seeing their captain and starts seeing an intermediary between them and the divine, terrible ocean.

Saltire isn’t able to articulate this. He’s a practical man. So he reduces it to the simplest possible statement: “The captain did what needed to be done.”

But the reader sees what Saltire saw. The Gothic sublime. The horror and beauty of competence executed at a level that stops being human and starts being that strange other thing.

What Secondary Worlds Allow

In historical fiction, you’re bound by accuracy. Uniforms looked a certain way. Rank insignia followed regulations. You can describe them beautifully, but you can’t redesign them to encode your world’s cosmology.

In secondary-world fiction, you have a superpower of being able to design material culture from scratch to reflect belief systems.

I’m not writing about the Royal Navy (though I was deeply inspired.) I’m writing about Arune—a maritime nation where the ocean is god, where dolphins are sacred messengers present in the founding of empires, where the depths have myths and those myths have teeth.

I was going to write something entirely real, entirely grounded, but as I wrote I realised my instinct kept pulling me too far into the witchcraft of peak seamanship. And given that I cannot separate soul from salt, I decided to take the leap and just invent the whole damn world specifically to serve my distorted vision of our own.

Beginning with the seemingly mundane, I asked: what would a culture that worships the ocean wear?

And Arune was born for the first time when I began to design the uniforms.

Sacred Biomimicry

Dolphins (relansheer), particularly white dolphins—the Sollurela—are sacred to Arune. They’re messengers between the surface world and the deep, blessed creatures that navigate both realms without being claimed by either. They represent everything Arune aspires to: grace, intelligence, mastery of the ocean without being mastered by it.

So Arunean naval officers wear dolphin countershading.

White inner sleeves. White along the flanks of the coat. The same protective coloration that makes dolphins nearly invisible in open water—light from below, dark from above.

Officers are claiming the status of the sacred animal. They’re marking themselves as blessed, as chosen, as operating under divine protection.

When a captain stands on deck in full dress uniform, the white countershading creates a visual echo of the creature Arune holds most sacred. The uniform is making a theological statement also: this man speaks to the sea, and the sea recognizes him as kin.

Colour Taxonomy

Colour is everything to me. And so it means a great deal to the people in this world also. They have ontology for the colours of water.

So it isn’t simply what they wear, but also what colour it is.

In Arune, the water column—the vertical distance from surface to crushing depth—defines everything about their maritime culture. Which is encoded in colour symbolism.

When an Arunean describes something as muirrine, they’re not just saying it’s blue. They’re saying it has the quality of the most beautiful, shallow seas—sacred, beautiful, carrying the soul of their nation.

This is something secondary-world fiction allows me: systematic color symbolism. The colours become a vocabulary for emotional and spiritual states. For people, moods, things, places. I’m able to invent words for things I feel may not be effectively described by words like doomed, joyful, expansive, predatory beauty.

Rank Insignia: The Philosophy

Now we get to the shoulderboards. The rank insignia that every naval story includes but rarely makes mean anything beyond hierarchy. Not that it ever could, it’s not made for mythology, it’s for making rank legible. Fine.

I wanted rank to tell a story about what you’ve survived to earn it.

Lieutenant (Muiradon) : Churning, swirling waves on their insignia

• Still learning to read the sea

• Surface turbulence, chaos, motion

• You command the waves, but the waves command you back

Captain (Maarendar) : The drauhessa appears

• The drown-horse, the mythological mount of drowned sailors

• Folkloric, cursed, the creature that claims those the sea takes

• You’ve gone deep enough to encounter what lives in the myths

• You’ve survived touching the cursed and returned to tell of it

• At this rank, you don’t choose the drauhessa. It chooses you.

• You’re a sea officer; you’ve been called to the deep. The insignia marks you as touched by the myth.

Commodore (Venmaarendar) : The relansheer (dolphin)

• Administrative officers, shore command

• They’ve chosen safety, chosen the blessed over the cursed

• The dolphin says: I survived the deep, and I’m not going back

• This is the path most officers take—up and away from the water

• By commodore rank, many officers have moved to administrative roles. They’ve survived, and they’re choosing safety

The Dolphin Choice: Living or Skeletal

Any officer who wears the relansheer (commodore or admiral) faces an additional choice in how that dolphin is rendered:

The living relansheer honours the blessing itself. It emphasizes protection, the dolphin as sacred guardian, the forward-looking hope that the blessing will continue. Officers who wear this are choosing to focus on what the dolphin saves.

The skeletal relansheer honours the dead. It acknowledges that the dolphin’s blessing didn’t save everyone. That you’re standing here because others aren’t. Officers who wear this are choosing to remember what the blessing cost.

One looks forward, one looks back.

Admiral (Draumeir) :

• At this rank, you decide: dolphin or drauhessa?

• Most choose the relansheer (dolphin) with pearlescent backing—pearl-light, the only illumination that returns from crush-depth

• They’ve earned administrative safety—they take it

• They’ve been to the abyss and returned luminous, and now they command from shore, from safety, from the blessed side of the myth

But some will keep the drauhessa.

And when you see an admiral of the fleet wearing the drown-horse instead of the sacred dolphin you can infer something about that man’s soul.

He’s chosen the call, still. Chosen to remain a sea officer even when he could command from land. The drauhessa on his shoulder says the ocean still speaks to me, and I still answer.

It’s fatalism, of a sort. The mythology teaches that the drauhessa appears to claim sailors, to carry them down to the drowning-places. Captains wear it because they’ve been called, touched by that myth, and they know—somewhere deep—that the sea will probably take them eventually.

The Drauhessa

The drauhessa deserves special attention. In Arunean mythology, it’s not just “a sea horse” but is the mount of the drowned, the creature that appears when the sea claims a soul. It’s featured on heraldry alongside the white dolphin because both are sacred, but they represent opposite relationships with the ocean:

• White Dolphin (Sollurela): Blessed, messenger, chosen by the sea, operates in the light

• Drauhessa: Cursed, taker of souls, claimed by the abyss, dwells in the dark

Why do captains and admirals wear the symbol of the cursed alongside the blessed? Because to command at that level, you’ve been both chosen and claimed. The sea has touched you, marked you, and you survived. The drauhessa on your shoulder says you’ve been to deep places where men die—and came back.

And the pearlescent backing on admiral insignia; that iridescence that shifts between soft pink, teal and orange depending on angle? That’s the only light that returns from these dark places. Pearl-light. The organic treasure that forms in darkness under pressure.

They’ve been to the abyss and brought back illumination.

Make Material Culture Systematic

If you’re building secondary worlds and trying to encode actual themes rather than just making a formula fantasy, your material culture should encode your themes systematically.

Don’t just tell your readers “the sea is sacred”. Put the sacred sea on your characters’ bodies and make it mean something.

This is worldbuilding through material culture. It’s what Gothic fiction has always done—every detail is symbolic, every object carries meaning, surface appearance and intimate reality are different things.

I’m bringing that symbolic density to my naval fiction.

The genre has given us technical precision and historical authenticity. Beautiful. Necessary. I love it. But there’s room for something else—room for the sublime, for competence treated as apotheosis, for officers who look like what they actually are in moments of crisis: men communing with something vast and terrible that sometimes, horribly, answers.

Claiming New Territory

Elegiac naval Gothic is what happens when you take the competence and seamanship of historical naval fiction and admit what it actually feels like when executed at that level.

The sea is a jealous lover. Officers are her priests. The uniform is sacred vestment displaying a cosmology of depth, darkness, and divine blessing bought at terrible cost.

And when a captain takes the helm in a storm and brings his ship through the impossible, he’s more than skilled professional. He’s transfigured into a conduit between his men, ship and the deep. He’s possessed. By something strange.

That’s the aesthetic territory I’m claiming.

Grounded historical naval fiction will always have its place—O’Brian and Forester built something beautiful and true. But there’s room beside it for something that admits the ocean is older and stranger than any history.

If you’re curious about the actual maritime horror novel I’m building this aesthetic for, that’s The Reply—currently in development, set in the world of Nhera where the ocean only sometimes pretends to sleep.

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Fair winds,
—D.S.

You do not expect Lt. Gore to make the choices he makes.

He’s an aristocrat which—for as much as the meaning of that word has been twisted or misunderstood by moderns—is something a bit older and I would say load-bearing in his world.

He looks at Captain Somerset—reckless, common-born, possibly cursed—and concludes: This man survived when he should have died. That is data I cannot ignore.

Dossier: Lieutenant Marion Gore

Designation: Second Lieutenant, Arunean Navy; Officer aboard the frigate Siren’s Reply
Known For: Analysis, lineage, competence, efficiency

Appearance & Demeanor

Marion Gore is tall—even for a family known for their height—with the kind of bearing that suggests years, if not generations, of expectation informing it.

His features are the usual acute angles. High cheekbones, a blade of a nose, pale blue eyes that assess. His uniform manages to always be immaculate. Every button catching the light at precisely the right angle. It’s infuriating.

What’s also infuriating is that he doesn’t perform superiourity. He simply is superiour—at least in the variables he considers meaningful. He’s calm under pressure, he’s rather good at what he does.

When he fights, he doesn’t brawl. He doesn’t charge—he advances. His movements are a dancer’s waltz and he’s just too bloody perfect.

The creature at the bow moved with speed that should not have been possible, but Gore was faster—not in body, but mind. He sidestepped with balletic precision, his saber tracing a path planned moments prior. The strike wasn’t aimed at thick hide or otherworldly flesh. It found the weak point, the joint where whatever was holding the emaciated body upward was clipped apart.

One thrust.

It fell. Gore wiped his blade.

Psychological Profile

Gore was raised to be a certain kind of officer.

The sort father envisioned: methodical, traditional, obedient. And the “right” families produced the “right” officers through breeding and training of comportment alone. His father, Commodore-General Valoren Gore, is quite certain about all this.

Tall, austere, absolutely convinced that his way—the old way, the proper way—is the only way. You know, the usual noble father trope.

Marion is supposed to become that. A continuation of the family legacy. Another Gore in the long line of Gores who commanded through birthright rather than earning it through blood and salt because now they were expected to earn it in reverse. Blood and salt was the entry fee when Arune was only a dream.

But Gore—our Gore, not father Gore—had another idea.

He looked at Captain Somerset—common, reckless, contemptuous of regulations—and saw something his father couldn’t process: Somerset survived when doctrine said he should die. Somerset held a ship together through the Fathom’s dreamed up storm when every law of seamanship said it was impossible.

That is not mere luck, surely. There are numbers for this. There’s data.

And data, to Gore, is the only god worth worshipping.

The Variable He Can’t Control

Gore burns bridges. Quickly, too. Because for all the times father has said he’s being troublesome, it’s only because he raised him to be decisive. Gore is.

And he chooses to serve under Somerset despite dad really not liking that. And not out of any loyalty, per se.

Somerset survived the psychic storm. That data justified the choice. But Somerset is also becoming something Gore doesn’t fully understand—something touched by forces that don’t operate on logic. And Marion Gore is, above all else, a man who trusts data.

What happens when the data changes? When Somerset’s competence starts looking less like skill and more like communion with something that hunts them. When the sea’s obsession with his captain becomes undeniable?

Gore chose to stay. But he’s an analyst, not a zealot. He follows Somerset because Somerset has proven his worth. The moment that proof becomes compromised—the moment competence tips into madness—Gore may very well recalculate.

For now, he stays.

It’s not about whether Gore respects Somerset. It’s whether respect will be enough when the abyss starts calling.

Well, calling louder. We already established the whole abyss calling thing. It’s a nautical horror.

Fair winds,
—D.S.

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This guy.

If Origen Thule is the crushing pressure of the deep ocean, Saren von Aurastor is the storm that tears across its surface. The man is all thunder, lightning, and the desperate performance of a man who cannot afford to stop moving.

I already wrote about designing an antagonist whose power comes from Byronic stillness. Which is interesting because Origen came second in conception:

Today I dissect his perfect opposite: a character whose intensity comes from constant motion, whose control is maintained through perpetual performance, and whose greatest fear is the moment the theater goes dark and he’s forced to face what’s underneath.

This is about building a force of nature who is simultaneously apex predator and terrified child.

The Dossier: What You See

NAME: Lord Captain Saren von Aurastor
TITLE: Rogue Trader, Last Scion of House Aurastor
VESSEL: Novacula Mortis (Avenger-class Grand Cruiser, 7.5km, 141,000 souls)
KNOWN FOR: Ruthless efficiency, calculated charm, spectacular displays of authority, an a la mantella overcoat that commands rooms

OFFICIAL RECORD: A man of “refined” cruelty and cold logic. Abhors emotional decision-making. Views people as assets to be collected and managed. Operates with pragmatism in service to his Warrant of Trade.

And the truth is that every single aspect of that performance is a defense mechanism.

You’re not surprised? You know what, that is fair. It’s another trope.

Saren von Aurastor has no childhood memories. Decades ago, his family’s vessel—the Astrum Perdita—suffered a catastrophic Gellar Field failure during warp transit. The archaeotech aboard destabilized the ship’s warp translation, and the Immaterium tore through. When Arch-Inquisitor Origen Thule arrived to investigate, he found a lone survivor: a young man with xenotech in the hold, his mind wiped near clean by warp-exposure, surrounded by the wreckage of his entire dynasty.

What Origen saw was opportunity.

The Inquisitor struck a bargain: the archaeotech and all future finds in exchange for a new Warrant of Trade and the resources to reclaim power. Origen would forge this broken survivor into another of his tools. An asset who could probe dangerous frontiers and acquire xenos artifacts that official channels could never touch. The ship that would become the Novacula Mortis was built from this devil’s bargain: salvaged components of the Astrum Perdita merged with a Grand Cruiser hull Origen had access to through his work with the Ordo Originatus.

Saren took the deal. Because the alternative—that is, remaining powerless, amnesiac—was unthinkable.

Everything he is now is built on that absence. He is a man constructed entirely from scar tissue. He can never, ever stop moving because stillness means confronting the hollow space where his foundation should be.

Motion as Survival

Where Origen’s design philosophy was “stillness as a demonstration of power,” Saren is built around the opposite principle: motion as survival. He is a performance that cannot end. His mask has become him.

Every gesture is theatrical. Every word is calibrated. The clicking of his bronze-tap boots, the swirl of the stupid overcoat, the way he circles rooms like a predator establishing territory—it’s all part of an exhausting, never-ending show designed to keep the galaxy (and himself) from seeing the void underneath.

This creates a fundamentally different kind of threat than Origen. Where Origen waits and everything falls into his orbit, Saren moves and forces the world to keep pace. He’s centrifugal force—flying apart at incredible speed, held together only by the velocity itself.

The Paradox of Control

The central contradiction in Saren’s design is this: he desperately needs control, but his methods are fundamentally chaotic.

He claims to resent emotional decision-making but everything he does is driven by a terror so profound it dictates his every action. His “logic” is just fear he’s able to explain with better vocabulary. His “control” is actually a constant, near-frantic attempt to prevent the universe from taking anything else from him.

This is why his possessiveness is so violent. He doesn’t love people—he collects them. Not out of affection, but because losing control of what he considers “his” would mean experiencing that original trauma all over again. So now, every crew member, every artifact, every ally is insurance against powerlessness.

The Performance and the Performer

One of the most interesting design questions with Saren was: Is there anything left under the performance, or has the performance consumed him entirely?

I believe it is both. Simultaneously.

Saren is Schrödinger’s authenticity. The theatrical persona is so complete, so practiced over centuries, that it is him now. But in rare moments when someone like Calix looks at him and says “the storm you hold back must be immense”—the mask cracks, and you see the terrified amnesiac boy adrift in wreckage.

Those moments are violations for him. To be seen is to lose control. To be understood is to be vulnerable. And vulnerability, for Saren, is death.

Visual Storytelling: Designing Thunder and Gilt

Visual choices for Saren were designed to communicate spectacle, authority, and fragile control barely maintained.

The Ship as Metaphor

Before we even discuss his physical design, there’s also Novacula Mortis.

The ship embodies everything about Saren’s constructed identity. It’s an Avenger-class Grand Cruiser—7.5 kilometers of rare, elegant lethality that most Rogue Traders could never acquire. At 141,000 souls, it’s a statement: I am legitimate. I am powerful. I matter.

Yet it’s built from the corpse of his family’s ship.

When Origen salvaged the Astrum Perdita, he didn’t just scrap it. He merged its components with a Grand Cruiser hull. Saren literally commands a rebuilt monument to his trauma. He can’t let go, so instead he transformed his greatest loss into his greatest asset. Every day, he walks corridors that might contain bulkheads from a ship that killed his family and he wouldn’t even know this.

It’s the perfect metaphor for his existence: something magnificent built on top of devastation, performing strength while standing on silt.

And like the man, the ship has a critical vulnerability. Avenger-class cruisers lack prow weapons, leaving them exposed to frontal assault. Most captains would consider this a fatal flaw. Saren sees it as proof of his tactical brilliance—he’s so skilled he can compensate for what lesser commanders would never risk.

There’s one more detail that reveals everything: Saren’s obsession with Geller Field stability borders on pathological.

I was inspired by an anecdote I read about a man’s neighbour in Japan, who was so pathological about making sure his front door was locked, he would return to check a dozen times before finally leaving for work satisfied that it was, indeed, locked.

Saren monitors field integrity constantly, runs triple-redundant systems, and has been known to abort warp jumps at the slightest fluctuation. His crew whispers that he’d rather drift through realspace for months than risk even a microsecond of field destabilization.

They don’t understand why.

He’ll never tell them that somewhere in the blank void where his memories should be, his body remembers the Astrum Perdita tearing itself apart. His mind doesn’t know what happened. But his nervous system does. And it will do anything to prevent that helplessness from happening again.

The Silhouette

That overcoat.

It’s a vast, gilt-red and black garment that flows to his calves, with heavy faulds that amplify his already stupid void-born height. The skull motif, the intricate aiguillette arrangement, the sheer weight of it—this is costume as armour, as declaration, as the physical manifestation of I am too magnificent to be powerless.

Where Origen’s severe greatcoat communicates containment, Saren’s is pure expansion. It takes up space. It performs even when he’s standing still.

The bronze heel-taps aren’t just aesthetic but rather a constant auditory imposition on those around him. Click. Click. Click. He needs you to know he’s there. It’s exhausting.

Saren’s beauty is supposed to be unsettling. It’s the sharp, predatory elegance of a raptor—refined features that should be attractive but instead trigger some instinctive alarm in prey animals.

The mismatched eyes create asymmetry that’s a bit wrong. They scan surroundings with “wild almost deranged intensity” because he’s constantly assessing threats or imposing his dominance by looking at you.

The Voice

Saren’s dialogue is designed to be the opposite of Origen’s economical precision. Where Origen wastes nothing, Saren uses language as spectacle, as territory-marking.

“A fine weapon,” Saren murmured as he came to a halt before Calix, his mismatched eyes not on the pistol, but on Calix’s face. “A tool for a precise hand. It suits you. Keep it.”

“My new master provides his own tools, Lord Captain,” Calix replied.

The rhythmic cadenza of clicking bronze heels ceased. Saren went utterly still, his head tilting fractionally, like a predator that has just caught an unexpected, dangerous scent on the wind.

“Your... master,” Saren repeated, the words a low purr.

Saren is harder to apply a formula to. He operates on performance and then relies entirely on said performance to manipulate whatever outcome he wants. And he does so through determining your weaknesses.

Therefore, he’s not a one-trick pony insofar as being limited to one register. Not like Origen. Origen you can—at least—expect to be measured and calm. Saren is like weather. You can think you know what to expect and then the weatherman is wrong like he always bloody is. God what is the point of you weathermen?

And so Saren uses language to control the room, to perform dominance, but when that fails, the mask cracks and you see the genuine threat underneath. Or the pain.

The Theatrical vs. The Real

“Look at you,” Saren whispered, his voice a hypnotic thrum. “Dressed in his sober colors, reciting his cold logic. A fine performance.”

He calls Calix’s new allegiance a “performance” because everything is performance to Saren. He can’t conceive of genuine transformation because his entire existence is theater. When someone acts differently, they must be performing—because the alternative (that change is real, that people can choose to leave) is too threatening to his control.

Then Calix says:

“The storm you hold back must be immense.”

And Saren breaks. Just for a moment.

That’s the essence of his dialogue: it’s all spectacular armor, brilliantly maintained, until someone finds the exact right words to crack it. Then you see the terrified boy underneath, before the mask slams back into place.

Saren isn’t threatened by the accusation of courting damnation—he’s threatened by someone caring about whether he ruins himself. Genuine concern is intensely terrifying because it requires acknowledging that someone perhaps sees past the performance to the person underneath.

So he does what he always does. Weaponizes intimacy, mocks attachment, and reasserts control through cruelty. Because being seen is more frightening than any external threat.

The core of him is that he’ll use every tool at his disposal—physical intimidation, verbal brilliance, strategic cruelty—to ensure no one gets close enough to see what he’s standing on and find that he’s perhaps not so magnificent after all.

The Dynamic

Saren exists in constant tension with Origen because Origen is the one person who knows. Who found him in the wreckage. Who built him into what he is now. Who cannot be performed at, manipulated, or impressed because he’s seen Saren at his most powerless.

In a way, he’s like a parent. And parents are often better positioned than most to hold an image of us that may not be what we want others to see.

Saren is desperate to prove he’s not Origen’s creation, while simultaneously needing Origen’s validation. He wants to be seen as an equal while knowing he was found as a powerless child. He performs magnificence while Origen sees through to the mechanism underneath.

And without any real contempt, which is almost worse.

The Memory Problem

Saren has no origin story. Not because I haven’t written one, but rather he doesn’t remember it.

This creates fascinating opportunities because, without memory, he has no anchor for his identity aside from what he’s built. Every quirk is constructed. Preferences are choices, not inherited. How much of him is him and how much is something he can’t quite recall?

This uncertainty is the static he’s constantly at war with. The performance can never stop because stopping means confronting the possibility that there’s nothing underneath.

So his obsessive need to collect and possess things makes perfect psychological sense: if you have no past, no memories to anchor your sense of self, then your identity becomes what you own. Every artifact, every subordinate, every piece of shiny thing becomes evidence that you exist, that you matter, that you have substance.

To lose something he owns isn’t just a logistics failure in a pragmatic sense but rather—it’s existential threat.

The Romance?

If you were designing Saren as a romance option (à la a companion quest concept), the entire arc would be about whether genuine intimacy can exist when one person is incapable of vulnerability without self-destruction.

The “romance” would mostly be:

• A high-stakes game of intellectual chess

• Constant testing and manipulation

• Rare, shocking moments of accidental honesty that he immediately tries to retract

• The slow, painful realization that being known might be worth the terror of being seen

The climax wouldn’t even be love confession. It would likely be just Saren letting someone see him existing. Without the performance, without trying to control every outcome. Just being—and not immediately destroying that vulnerability with defensive cruelty.

That would be his ultimate character growth: learning that intimacy isn’t possession, and that being understood isn’t the same as being controlled.

But getting there would require someone willing to weather the storm long enough to find the eye and, really, is anyone that damn determined? I suspect it would be an accident and a long game.

Conclusion?

Saren is what happens when trauma isn’t processed but weaponised, when vulnerability is so unacceptable that you rebuild yourself as pure spectacle, when the performance becomes so complete that you can’t remember what you looked like before you put on the mask.

He’s magnificent. He’s dangerous. He’s exhausting. And somewhere under all that flourish is a terrified boy who just wants to stop running but has forgotten how to stand still.

He is thunder trying to outrun silence.

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When I tell people I’m building languages for my fantasy world, I usually get one of two reactions:

1. “Oh, like Tolkien!” (Yes, but also no.)

2. “Isn’t that just... making up words?” (Yes, but also very much no.)

Here it is: anyone can smash random syllables together and call it a language. Most fantasy writers do. And most of the time, it sounds like someone sneezed on a keyboard.

Kh’zarthyx’ul. Ae’tharion. Zyx’kael.

You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. We’ve all seen it. And we’ve all quietly cringed.

But good conlanging—the kind that makes a world feel real—isn’t about sounding exotic. It’s about sounding inevitable. Like these words have been spoken by real people for hundreds of years, worn smooth by use, shaped by the needs of the culture that speaks them.

So how do you do that?

Here’s what I’ve learned from building two languages for my world (Arunaic and Low Aelhir), informed by a lifetime of being a bilingual, bidialectal weirdo who accidentally became a conlanger.

Step 1: Start With Culture, Not Sounds

Most people start conlanging by picking “cool sounds” and mashing them together. That’s backwards.

Start with: Who are these people? What do they need to say?

Example: Arunaic (The Language of Sailors)

The Aruneans are a maritime culture. Their entire civilization is built on ships, trade, and naval power. So their language reflects that:

• 6+ words for wind (shao = breeze, shaul = gale, shaullue = wind caught in sails)

• Depth/distance is EVERYTHING (linne = shallows, laae = deep, drau = abyss)

• Time is measured by the sun’s passage (fenilasra = high passage/noon, feilasra = waking passage/morning)

The vocabulary tells you about the culture. Aruneans don’t just have “one word for ocean”—they have words for coastal waters, deep sea, drowning depths, and the horizon. Because those distinctions matter to them.

Even their color words are depth-based. They don’t see “blue”—they see where in the water column that blue exists:

• muirrine = sea-blue (the color of shallow or near-surface seas)

• laagerrine = deep loden green (the color of the mesopelagic zone)

• nadirrine = abyssal purple-black (the color of crush-depth)

When an Arunean describes something as muirrine, they’re not just saying it’s blue. They’re saying it has the quality of the sea itself—open, deep, unknowable.

But here’s where it gets interesting:

Aruneans don’t just have “a word for travel.” They have laaonarre.

Etymology:

• laae (deep, beyond the coast) + on (across, beyond) + maare (horizon)

• Meaning: Traveling beyond the coast and across the horizon—into the unknown.

What this tells you about Arunean culture:

To an Arunean, real travel isn’t just “going somewhere.” It’s leaving safety behind. It’s crossing into the deep (laae), beyond sight of land, where the horizon (maare) becomes your only guide.

There’s no single English word for this. “Voyage” is close, but it doesn’t carry the weight of risk, of leaving the known world. “Journey” is too generic. Laaonarre is specific. It’s sacred. It’s what separates a sailor (muirar) from someone who just owns a boat.

This is what good conlanging does. A single word reveals an entire philosophy. It shows you what a culture VALUES—and what they FEAR.

Even their military ranks encode this relationship to the sea:

• Maarendar = Captain (”horizon-commander” - master of the reach)

• Draumeir = Admiral (”abyss-master” - lord of crushing deep)

• Fendraumeir = Fleet Admiral (”high-abyss-master” - master of all depths)

Rank isn’t just hierarchy. It’s how deep you’re trusted to sail, how far from shore your authority extends. A captain commands the horizon, but an admiral commands the abyss itself.

Your language should do the same. If your culture is desert nomads, what’s THEIR word for the moment you leave the last oasis and head into open sand? What do mountain-dwellers call the act of descending into the lowlands? What do your characters call the thing they do that NO OTHER CULTURE has a word for?

That’s where language becomes world-building.

Culture shapes language. Always.

Step 2: Choose Sounds That Fit the Vibe

Once you know WHO is speaking, figure out what they should SOUND like.

Arunaic is:

• Vowel-heavy (a, e, i, o, u dominate)

• Flowing, liquid consonants (l, r, n, m)

• Few harsh stops (no hard K or T clusters)

Why? Because it’s a language designed for speaking on ships—over wind, over waves, over distance. You need CARRYING sounds. Long vowels. Resonant consonants.

Compare that to Low Aelhir (my elven language):

• Sharper consonants (kh, th, zh, hard R)

• More guttural (especially in the Draihir dialect)

• Shorter vowels

Why? Because elves in my world are older, harsher, more warlike. Their language reflects that—it’s harder, more angular, less forgiving.

The sound should match the culture.

Step 3: Build Derivation Rules (So You’re Not Just Making Shit Up)

This is where most conlangers fail.

They make up 50 random words, slap them in a glossary, and call it done. But then when they need a NEW word (which will happen constantly), they just... make up another random word. No consistency. No internal logic.

Good conlangs have RULES.

Example: Arunaic Compound Words

Arunaic builds new words by COMBINING root words:

• drau (abyss) + hessa (horse) = drauhessa (drown-horse, a mythological sea creature)

• shaul (gale) + lue (caught/captured) = shaullue (wind in the sails)

• thea (return) + lua (light/beacon) = Thealua (the Return-Light, the great lighthouse of Theastone)

This means I can generate NEW words whenever I need them. I’m not making shit up—I’m DERIVING words from the system I already built.

This compounds beautifully. Once you have hessa (horse) and drauhessa (drown-horse), you can build:

• hessar = rider, horseman

• drauhessir = of/relating to drown-horse heraldry

• allahessen = horse dressage, martial performance (from allan = graceful form + hessa)

Or take something like bibilausa—a word that combines bibi (cute, small, harmless) + lausa (beast, prey). It means “useless but endearing,” the kind of creature that’s too cute to hunt. It’s the Arunean word for a lapdog. One compound tells you that Aruneans view most animals through the lens of utility, and anything that fails that test is... well, adorably pointless.

Your conlang needs this. Otherwise, it’s just a list of random nouns.

Step 4: Make It Speakable (Or It’s Just Decoration)

Here’s a test: Can you say your fantasy words out loud without sounding like you’re gargling gravel?

If the answer is no, you’ve failed.

Bad fantasy names:

• Kh’zarthyx (how do you even pronounce this?)

• Ae’thalos’kyr (three syllables? four? who knows?)

• Xyl’gothrim (unpronounceable)

These aren’t WORDS. They’re PUNCTUATION.

Good fantasy names:

• Muirrine (myoor-EEN)

• Drauhessa (DROW-hess-ah)

• Thealua (THAY-ah-loo-ah)

You can SAY these. They have rhythm. They have flow.

If your readers can’t pronounce your words, they’ll skip over them. And if they’re skipping over your words, your world-building has failed.

Step 5: Let Your Own Linguistic Background Inform Your Work

Here’s my secret weapon: I grew up bilingual and bidialectal.

• Native Spanish speaker

• Native Midwestern American English speaker (from family)

• Native N/W London English speaker (from childhood friends)

This means I’ve spent my entire life code-switching—flipping between languages and accents depending on context. I can HEAR how languages work. I can FEEL when a sound pattern is wrong.

This is why I can build conlangs that feel real.

I’m not guessing. I’m drawing on a lifetime of linguistic immersion.

You don’t need to be bilingual to conlang well. But you DO need to:

• Listen to how real languages sound (not just English)

• Pay attention to rhythm, stress, intonation

• Study how languages EVOLVE (why do some sounds change? why do dialects diverge?)

The more you understand about real languages, the better your fake ones will be.

The Takeaway

Good conlanging is:

1. Culture-first (what do these people need to say?)

2. Sound-appropriate (what should this language sound like?)

3. Rule-based (how do I generate new words consistently?)

4. Speakable (can I actually say this out loud?)

5. Informed by real linguistics (how do real languages work?)

Bad conlanging is:

• Random syllables with apostrophes

• Unpronounceable clusters

• No internal logic

• Just “sounding exotic” for its own sake

If you’re building a fantasy world and you want your languages to feel REAL, start with culture. Build from there. And for the love of all that is holy, make sure your readers can actually PRONOUNCE your words.

Your world-building will thank you.

Want to go deeper? Next time I discuss conlanging, I’ll break down the elven pronoun system I built for Low Aelhir—where ‘you’ and ‘I’ aren’t fixed identities, but shift based on who’s dominating the conversation. It’s a linguistic nightmare. It’s also one of my favorite things I’ve ever built.

If you want to see that (and more craft deep-dives), subscribe. I post every Tuesday.

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The theme was this: In a galaxy that screams horror, what does it look like to Juan Tranquillo.

Arch-Inquisitor Origen Thule is not designed to be loud. He doesn’t need to be. While Warhammer 40,000 overflows with characters whose power manifests as spectacle—and we love this, do not get that twisted—as the chainaxe-wielding berserker, flaming prophets, the tyrant enthroned in Gothic excess. Origen represents something far more unsettling: authority so absolute it doesn’t require performance. He is the crushing pressure of deep oceans, the weight of geological time, the singularity whose gravitational pull is so immense that frantic motion becomes unnecessary and a bit unrefined, to be quite honest.

Everything falls into his orbit eventually.

I want to dissect how I designed this character to embody what I call “Byronic stillness”. The kind of intensity that comes from contained pressure.

The Dossier: What You See

Let’s start with what the Imperium sees. The official record:

NAME: Arch-Inquisitor Origen Thule
AFFILIATION: Ordo Originatus (Esoteric)
OPERATIONAL PROFILE: Consummate Puritanical scholar; master of historical precedent and Imperial Law; investigates anomalies of deep-seated origin through meticulous archival research and precise interrogation.
KNOWN FOR: Encyclopedic knowledge spanning millennia, legendary patience, unwavering adherence to Imperial doctrine.

This is the mask. The performance. To most of the Imperium, Origen is a living archive, a stern scholar whose severity serves the Emperor’s vision of purity. When he arrives on a world, it’s not with fleets and fanfare but with data-slates and centuries-old case files. He is perceived as the institutional memory of the Inquisition made flesh—unyielding, methodical, and utterly objective (Puritanical).

But beneath that carefully maintained facade lies something far more dangerous: a Radical Pragmatist who views dogmatic purges as crude and wasteful, who is obsessed not with purity but with long-term stability, and who plays a galactic game of influence measured in centuries. He doesn’t merely serve the Imperium; he believes he understands its survival mechanisms better than anyone else alive.

This dissonance between perception and reality is everything. Origen is terrifying not because he’s unpredictable, but because he’s playing a game no one else even knows exists. And sometimes others in proximity get a sense of that for just a moment.

The Craft Concept: Designing “The Stillness of the Abyss”

The Byronic Inversion

When most people think of Byronic heroes, I would assume they think of intensity expressed through motion. Byron wrote this himself. The tortured soul pacing clifftops, raging against the heavens, consumed by passionate excess. Think Heathcliff on the moors, Rochester in his fury, the Phantom haunting his opera house.

I’m trying to have Origen invert this.

And I admit, I’m no genius here. Quiet, still, methodical characters are not new. But in this universe, I do think subtle can be interesting in contrast.

His intensity comes from stillness. From the weight of someone who has already processed every possible outcome, who has survived horrors that would annihilate lesser minds, and who has emerged not broken but refined. He is a singularity—a point of such immense gravitational pressure that everything around him warps and bends. He doesn’t need to move because motion is inefficient. He simply waits, and the universe delivers what he needs into his hands.

This creates a fundamentally different kind of threat. Saren von Aurastor (his opposite in every way) is an explosion of charisma and rage, a storm that announces itself with thunder and lightning. And the contrast between them isn’t just aesthetic.

I wanted to explore two different sorts of authority. And I love to ask myself if there’s one that’s better than the other.

“Human as Machine” vs. The Interior World

One of the thematic challenges in designing Origen was balancing two seemingly contradictory aspects:

1. The Machine: His ability to process information with inhuman precision, to view people as data points in a vast calculus of Imperial survival, to make decisions across timescales that render individual lives meaningless.

2. The Human: His profound weariness, his capacity for intimate cruelty, his understanding of trauma because he carries it.

The key was realizing these aren’t contradictions—they’re the same thing. Origen processes emotions and relationships with the same rigorous methodology he applies to historical analysis. When he tells a subordinate, “Your trauma has become a contagion in your mind, and you have attempted to infect me with it to feel some measure of relief,” he’s not being cold—he’s applying diagnostic precision to psychological phenomena. The horror is that he’s very often perfectly correct.

This is what makes him Byronic despite the stillness: he has a rich, thoughtful internal world, but it operates on principles that are fundamentally alien to normal human experience. He’s not a sociopath lacking empathy; he has profound empathy processed through ten millennia of pattern recognition. He understands pain intimately because he catalogs it, studies it, learns from it.

And that, at least to me, is fascinating to see in action because, let us face it, most people are impulsive, emotional wreck-houses that could never separate the self from the situation if you paid them. Or is that a bit too cynical?

Visual Storytelling: Designing the Weight of Centuries

The Silhouette

The severe, high-collared greatcoat and inverness isn’t just aesthetically striking—it’s a visual metaphor for containment. Origen is a man who holds immense power under absolute control. The coat creates a rigid, geometric silhouette that communicates institutional authority. He doesn’t dress to communicate personal style—not really. He dresses so as to be legible as an authority. Like the office itself.

The high collar also serves a practical narrative purpose: to conceals daemon scarring on his neck and below, which he can choose to reveal as a weapon. When he does reveal it, the moment works precisely because it’s a breach of his usual containment.

You can read about how I think duality serves to elevate characterisation here:

The Details That Tell Stories

The daemon scarring is never ostentatious. Like so many in the 41st, he’s survived horrors and he really doesn’t need to boast about that. This is in deliberate contrast to Saren, who wears his scars like challenges, like proof of his magnificence. See what I have survived? Origen’s scars are archives. Data cataloged. Nothing more.

Even his posture communicates this. He’s patient and there’s simply no flourish there.

The Voice

I fucking love dialogue, it’s my favourite.

Origen’s dialogue is designed to be economical and as devastating as I can manage. He is a being of immense intellect and experience; he doesn’t waste words. Every sentence is a carefully calibrated move on a board only he can see. And because he never rushes, they’re waiting on him to speak. He’s never itching to get a word in.

Saren’s voice gathered strength: “You may have provided the first blow from a place of safety, Origen. But this edge was honed in a darkness you have only ever observed from your archives.”

Saren thinks he’s landed a blow and reasonably accused Origen of being a theorist, a scholar removed from real suffering. After all, Origen hardly advertises what he does, unlike Saren who simply must have you know. It’s a bit of projection.

For a long moment, Origen remained with his back to Saren, posture dismissive Saren thought. Then, with a slowness that felt older than the ship itself, he turned. The knowing smile was gone. His charcoal-grey eyes were flat, cold, and held the depth of a starless void.

“Observed,” Origen repeated, his voice barely a whisper, yet it cut through the room’s sterility. “Observing darkness from an archive.”

It was like he tasted the idea.

He raised a gloved hand to the high collar of his coat and unfastened a hidden clasp.

“I have archives, Saren. It’s true. Memories cataloged not in vellum, but in flesh. From the art carved into my body by a daemon’s claw while I listened to the sound of my own soul screaming.”

I try to have a bit of a formula, but in practise it is but vibes, my friend.

1. The Pause: He gives Saren the silence. He’s in no hurry to compete. Letting someone think they’ve won isn’t a discomfort.

2. The Echo: He repeats Saren’s own word back to him, turning it into a scalpel. Since he does not waste words, you know there’s a purpose to it and you can but brace.

3. The Revelation: He reveals a history of suffering that very well makes Saren’s entire challenge meaningless.

And then, let the subtext just simmer.

He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t threaten. He simply delivers a checkmate that reveals he’s been operating on a level Saren never conceived of. The result? Saren—this magnificent, charismatic force of nature—is deflated. Not for long, never for long, but it lands.

The Dynamic: Storm and Singularity

I designed Origen specifically as a foil to Saren von Aurastor, and understanding that contrast reveals a lot about how both characters work:

Saren is:

• An explosion of charisma and anger

• Performative in his power

• A storm that announces itself

• Driven by the need to prove himself

• Operating on timescales of decades

Origen is:

• Contained pressure

• Economical in his expression of power

• A gravity well that waits

• Operating from a foundation of certainty

• Working across timescales of centuries

The tension between them is delicious because Saren knows Origen made him, yet he constantly tests this creator-creation dynamic. He needs Origen’s validation even as he resents the reminder of his own constructed nature. And Origen? He watches this with the weary patience of someone who has seen this pattern play out before. He knows exactly how to wound Saren because he designed those vulnerabilities into him.

This is what makes their relationship so engaging to me. It’s not hero versus villain, it’s tool versus maker, and both are aware of the dynamic even as they perform their respective roles.

Conclusion?

Origin didn’t get made in a vacuum. I wanted a character to exist in contrast to Saren while never being a straw-man to knock against. So I worked backwards from knowing what I wanted to how a character could get to be this way.

How does a human get to start thinking like a machine?

So he would be powerful through restraint, threatening through patience, and Byronic through stillness rather than storm. He would heave the ability to process trauma and relationship dynamics through the same analytical rigor he applies to historical patterns.

I think he’s neat.

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I’ve spent 570 hours on The Reply in the last two months.

That’s not a complaint, by the way. Far from it.

Instead, I confess that I’m building a world I’ve been obsessed with and the hours disappear because this isn’t work. And that means that I can’t ever be sure anyone will give much of a damn about it. Because like the best things that matter to those that make them, they’re personal first. They’re a piece of something. Of you.

And I’ve never been entirely likeable.

My point here is that this is ok. I’ve given myself permission to write it and possibly even write it poorly.

LLM would advise me to write it like a powerpoint presentation, devoid of all the ESL nonsense, romance-language exophony and strange archaicism that might define my English. I’ve decided to write it in English anyway since I do believe—if there will ever be an audience for it—that English is a nice home for a nautical horror.

Perhaps when the manuscript is done, I’ll translate it myself.

Where Began

So, to the point. Nautical horror is something I’ve been rather obsessed with since I read my very first book in English. Wreck of the Whaleship Essex by Owen Chase, first mate of the very voyage he recounts. Which, while not strictly a horror—or even a work of fiction—is definitely horrific.

I was so immersed in the atmosphere, the salt, the suffering. It’s crusted over my dreams since.

In The Reply, the sea—called many things though mostly the Elder Fathom, or the Oraen depending on who’s speaking—is sentient and jealous. It doesn’t just kill sailors rather it claims them. It whispers, makes offers, gets inside your head and stays there.

Captain Somerset survives it not by blocking it out, but by listening. This gives him preternatural intuition at sea and it’s destroying him.

The fog was a living thing, its tendrils clinging with a damp chill that had nothing of the sun’s mercy in it. It tasted of salt and envy.

I grew up with the ocean as a constant presence. My mother’s love for it was tangible—old glass buoys hung like captured stars, sea shanty CDs were our soundtrack.

What I understood later, or perhaps it was true because of this: the ocean is where I feel most spiritual. Where some people find God (or whatever) in mountains or forests, I find myself in the sea. It’s an empty, contemplative space—devoid of sound but roaring with it also. It’s a perfect analog for a human mind, for a soul. Sailing on the sea is sailing your own consciousness. And in some parts of your mind, as the old maps warned, “here be dragons.”

Somerset’s relationship with the Fathom is that spiritual conversation turned predatory. It’s the sea I want to love—need to love—responding with obsession instead of peace. A horror that sits in the violation of something sacred. The darkness that corrupts love into possession, the way existential dread creeps in when you’re in deep contemplation and suddenly the currents turn sour.

You don’t know when it will happen. Just like you don’t know when something sacred can be violated, something important taken away or mutilated.

The sea has moods.

One of the most important creative decisions I made was giving the Fathom temperament. Some days it’s indifferent—you’re an insect crossing its surface. Some days it’s curious, almost playful, testing you with strange calms or unexpected swells. And some days it’s hungry.

The worst days are when it’s in love with you.

When the Fathom decides it wants a particular ship, a particular captain, and begins the work of claiming them. It offers intuition. Power. The ability to read the water like no one else can. And in return, it demands everything. Your peace. Your crew’s lives. Eventually, your soul.

I want to be the sea. Be in it, around it, be loved by it and love it in return. That yearning is why the Elder Fathom exists. It exists because I needed to explore what happens when that love becomes corruption. When the thing you’re most drawn to, the thing that feels most sacred, turns predatory.

Because that’s how obsession works, isn’t it? What felt like grace becomes possession before too long and you wake up one day drowning not having realised you went under long ago.

The Fathom’s moods are my moods. The sea’s jealousy is every time I’ve sacrificed something real for something I needed to create. The way it claims people is the way my work has claimed me. Utterly and often without room for anything else.

The Cultural Cost

Building a haunted sea means building the societies that survive it.

The Orosian faith teaches that the sea is a test—suffer correctly and you might be worthy. The Arunean Navy developed rigid doctrines specifically to keep sailors from listening too closely to the water. In practise, this is for safety. In essence, it’s become paternal discouragement from using your intuition. It’s certainly not meant maliciously, but sometimes terribly tedious decisions are made by people who really just want to keep you safe.

Somerset is dangerous to the Admiralty not because he’s breaking rules, but because he’s proving their entire survival strategy might be inefficient. Wrong. He listens to the thing they’ve spent centuries teaching people to ignore. And it works. That’s what they can’t accept.

And inversely, they may just be right. Because men like Somerset don’t often live the longest lives. Sure, he’s magnificent now but wait. How long can this be tolerated on a gamble before we risk another priceless vessel going down and hundreds of working sailors with it?

After my military service, I needed stories about characters navigating impossible systems with grace and precision. Hornblower. Aubrey. Men who operated in worlds of rigid hierarchy and constant mortal danger, where competence was the only virtue that mattered.

The frigate under sail is the most beautiful piece of engineering humanity ever made. It’s a cathedral of timber and canvas—gifts from land—powered by wind. But it’s also a prison. You’re trapped with the same men for months, sailing over an abyss that sees you, under officers who might be incompetent enough to kill you all. Or so competent that the sea wants them and kills you all to get them.

That tension—which is beautiful and horrible—is everything I needed to process about power, survival, and what it costs to be good at something that might destroy you.

The Cost for Me

I’ve made a crucial decision, repeatedly, at several points in my life where I chose creation over everything else.

I sacrificed stability for art. My every waking moment is always utterly consumed by it. 570 hours in two months isn’t an anomaly for me.

I wouldn’t even say I’m lonely.

The Fathom claims people by offering them what they most want—power, understanding, connection—and then demanding everything in return. It’s not a metaphor. It’s what I’m living. Art claimed me the same way. And I went willingly, eyes open, knowing the cost.

When you’re building the horror that sits in the violation of your most sacred space, when you’re finally telling the story only you could tell whether anyone else cares or not—it’s not really a price. It’s tuesday.

Fair winds,
—D.S.

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For the Arunaic Navy, the repository for this sacred knowledge isn’t resigned to a collection of scrolls. It’s a masterpiece of practical artistry: the Rhumb Atlas.

I’m rather fond of material culture and in a world particularly defined by the sea—and really not just any sea, but one that thinks about how best to swallow you—“yes, they have maps” didn’t feel like rather enough at all.

How do they store them? How do they access them in a storm? How are they built? What happens when the sea changes?

Form Follows Survival

The Arunean Admiralty Atlas—the primary, official version—is a massive portfolio bound in water-resistant Hammersheer-hide and reinforced with polished brass. Its construction is the purview of Theastone’s legendary Chartwrighters Guilds, with designs ranging from the starkly functional to the grandly bespoke. Each atlas secures the permanent, master charts of the known world—a library of hard-won, generational knowledge.

So if these big honking things are so valuable, the problem is that you can’t simply throw a priceless, unwieldy tome onto a shelf on a ship that’s constantly rolling, pitching, and threatening to go down. So the Aruneans solved it with engineering.

On frigates like the Siren’s Reply, the Atlas is kept on a Navigator’s Arcing Rack. It’s a sophisticated, counter-weighted brass arm that rises from a hidden channel within the chart table itself, allowing the entire Atlas to be swung into place for use.

Think of it as a mechanical limb that knows exactly how to move with the ship, not against it. Form follows survival.

There’s an internal mechanism in these atlases. The vellum charts aren’t simply bound—they’re held taut by a series of spring-loaded brass bars.

A simple press of a release catch allows one to remove or insert a single Rhumb Chart in seconds, transforming a vast library into a functional, single-page workspace. This elegant piece allows for both secure storage and immediate, practical use in the heart of a storm.

Because when you’re trying to navigate through a gale and avoid being seen by the hungry dark with waves breaking over, you don’t have time to foofle about through a goddamn book.

The Factor’s Folio: When Truth Has an Expiration Date

I just love this whole mechanic here. It’s one of the core horrors and challenges of the people in this world.

That is, the Admiralty Atlas—for all its authority—cannot tell the whole story. Those coastlines and lanes are mostly set in stone and quite literally so.

The most dangerous voyages aren’t charted with its permanent ink. They’re charted with the ephemeral lines of a Factor’s Folio.

These are slimmer, more utilitarian leather portfolios that contain the high-value, high-risk intelligence commissioned by a Lord Factor for a specific voyage. A voyage with tight expiry dates because… There is a catch. Due to the shifting, sentient nature of the Oraen (sea), the accuracy of these charts is guaranteed for only a short period—typically a three-month sanction.

When a Factor’s chart “goes cold,” it becomes a liability. By the harsh laws of the Trading Companies, it must be committed to flame in ritual, ensuring a rival never captures its secrets or a valuable ship doesn’t drive straight into the teeth.

This constant cycle of creation and destruction is expensive. Which is why these folios are worth far more than their weight in hard mint.

Your map isn’t just outdated after three months. It’s wrong.

I obsess

I really could have simple said “they have nautical charts” and moved on. Most fantasy writers do. But that’s not worldbuilding. Or, it might be, but it could be so much more.

When you dig into the material culture of your world—these are the objects people make, use, and depend on—They’re not always mere props. You’re revealing philosophy or showing what people value, what they fear, and how they adapt to survive in a hostile world.

The Rhumb Atlas therefore is a statement that could reveal such things about Arune:

• They value permanence (the Admiralty charts, bound in hide and brass, meant to last generations)

• They respect impermanence (the Factor’s Folios, burned when they lose their truth)

• They understand that knowledge is survival (the spring-loaded mechanism that prioritizes speed)

That’s the kind of worldbuilding I’m after. Not just “what does it look like,” but “what does it mean?”

For them, it means adapt or drown.

Fair winds,
—D.S.

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Captain Henry Somerset is a problem.

He’s a commoner, which in just about any fantasy story means he has some sort of a bone to pick and I won’t pretend to be above writing that trope.

What I am above is leaving it at that. His character arc explores what nobility means in a world that has not yet forgotten—as we have—how nobility is earned. No, he does not become a duke at the end of the story. He’s not even afforded a spare joy.

What he does is embody his world’s mythology.

A man who drives the boat out of an eldritch storm while the sea he really should not be listening to is trying to drive him mad is someone the Admiralty hates to legitimise but loathes to dismiss. They need officers like that.

Dossier: Captain Henry Somerset

Designation: Post-Captain, Arunean Navy; Commanding Officer, frigate Siren's Reply Known Alias: The Witch-Captain of the Reply

Appearance & Demeanour: Somerset is not particularly impressive in stature. He’s rather average. But he’s strong enough, elegant enough. Certainly predatory enough in a way that might belie a common birth. His features are “intelligent”, however, with thick brows and a salt-sprayed mane of copper hair. There are a few scars here and there, the most obvious on his forehead.

His most defining characteristic is the charm—and it’s almost certainly a lie. He’s quick to smile, easy to laugh and this is generally enough to inspire the minimum requisite loyalty to avoid despairing mutiny. The performance? Flawless until he’s alone or with you.

The fog was a living thing. It had a weight—resistance, even—with a damp chill that had nothing of the sun’s mercy in it. It tasted of salt and envy.

Somerset heard the voice again.

(…)

“Possessive this morning,” Somerset said, his voice bright as it carried over the quarterdeck.

(…)

“Oh, aye,” Saltire agreed, turning his big brows away toward the water again. After a pause, his assessment. “A grasping mood, Captain,” he rumbled. “The whispers, I suspect, will be finding purchase in these quiet hours.”

Somerset’s mouth tightened though just barely. Saltire saw it. Said, “The men are on edge,” as his head inclined slightly. He then took a sip of his tea with the hurry of a man who just made a decision needing acting upon.

“Mmh,” he grunted, wanting to speak before he could swallow. “Then we’ll give them something louder to hear.” He turned his back from the sea and fixed Saltire with a lopsided look. “Lieutenant Saltire. Beat to quarters, a live fire drill.”

So, Somerset’s "witchcraft" is not a gift.

He survives not by blocking out the song he’s not meant to hear, but by listening to it. It’s intuition, torment or possibly madness.

The very thing is what makes him a threat to the Admiralty’s status quo. It’s not (wholly) a matter of common birth but the results are a touch too good. And through methods too unorthodox, too heretical. And you mustn’t challenge the traditions that have kept this island nation afloat in defiance of a malicious ocean for generations. It works. Do not break this.

This is his central conflict. He is a man whose greatest “gift” is almost certainly a curse, whose successes make him a threat to the very system he serves, and whose charismatic performance is the only thing holding back a tide of grief that threatens to drown him and his entire crew.

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Fair winds,
—D.S.