Without fail. Ayo has Jamil do the big denouement speech, Levi solves the crime but Wen is too insulated to face real consequences, and Gray figures it out but realizes the killer was 100% in the right and stays quiet.
From THE UNQUIET BLACK
Detective: Gray
Red Herring: Brother Scylla
3rd Party Collateral Damage: Zyntra
From A FABLE OF ARMS
Detective: Sgt. Levi
Surprisingly helpful sidekick: Makeda
Red Herring: Takori
Killer: Cpt. Wen
Detective: Ayo
Exasperated Sidekick: Jamil
Red Herring: Cassandra
Inept Police Captain: Jericho
Victim: Clive
Killer: Dromak (she can phase through matter when she goes fast)
‘Hey’ came before ‘hi,’ and ‘hi' came before ‘hello.’
‘Hi’ is most likely a variant of ‘hey.’
‘Hello’ is not related to either.
Goodbye.
But also a lot of her "fights" are about respect. She feels (often but not always rightly) like other people don't take her seriously, so she's always trying to prove herself.
Which does lead to some weird situations where a "win" for her isn't even necessarily a "loss" for someone else.
Depends on what we mean by "winning." Cassandra is happy to move her own goalposts if, say, legal recourse doesn't pan out, to move to...less legitimate approaches.
She takes L's along the way, but she's always got a next move ready to get the W in the end.
Even Clive and Jericho exhibit this tendency, though in more unhealthy ways than the MC squad (not that they're all that healthy about it either).
"Persistent beyond reason" describes most of my characters one way or another. In the case of Ayo and Jamil, it's a survival strategy born of growing up in a refugee camp. For Cassandra, it's...only mostly she wants to be RIGHT (aka to WIN).
It may be my general stoicism infecting them to be fair.
Ayo made peace with an unfair world having a creator they worship a long time ago. An extra layer of abstraction is only a minor complication to that.
Zyntra: [psychically] I have you to thank for my people's fall. Impressive, if arbitrary.
From THE UNQUIET BLACK
Brother Scylla: YOUR COMEDIC TIMING NEEDS WORK, BRUTHA! BUT THIS WORLD KICKS ASS SO I'LL LET IT SLIDE, BRUTHA! WHY ARE YOU HOLDING YOUR EARS, BRUTHA?
Gray: [squints, looks me up and down] Ah. I see. [refuses to elaborate, aside from an inappropriate gesture]
From A FABLE OF ARMS
Levi: I don't know what's worse, living under the regime, or knowing someone made the regime up.
Makeda: [laughing her ass off, something about Tlatoliztlaq, god of stories]
Ayo: [long, silent stare, then looks around at the world] "Harsh, but fair."
Jamil: [long, eloquent rant about how bullshit it is to not only himself, but everyone in his whole world, exist, suffer, and prosper at the whim of one person]
Cassandra: [punches me in the face] That's for my dad, asshole
Carmen Sandiego from the 90s cartoon
Happy International Women's Day to the original International Woman
I have two modes:
(A) sometimes even with the best of intentions, people do terrible things
(B) sometimes people just genuinely, actually want to do terrible things and the systems around them enable that to an alarming degree.
HOMEBOUND is A, FABLE is B.
I don't have the antagonists for THE UNQUIET BLACK fleshed out enough yet to answer, and unfortunately the answer for A FABLE OF ARMS is "torment subordinates/prisoners."
Admiral Lockridge and Captain Wen are both *awful*
Neither Jericho nor Magpie House understand the meaning of the word "relaxation," although in the former case that's more "is a workaholic living a double life as a caped crusader which doesn't leave much time for himself" and in the latter it's more "literally does not understand the concept"
Clive is a retro gamer! He has a whole room in the house dedicated to refurbished classic consoles, all the way up through a PlayStation 2, GameCube, and OG XBOX, though he prefers the cartridge-based systems of classic Nintendo above all else. SNES and N64 particularly.
move slow and repair things
Of my three current projects, 2 have outright happy endings, and the third ends in a pyrrhic victory for the protagonists, a powerful blow struck against an inconceivably large foe that nonetheless comes at a great cost.
But some characters don't get happy endings. Not everyone can get what they want in an individual story, but beyond that some stories just don't thematically work if everything works out in the end. Sometimes, the tone or message of the story demands a downer ending.
"Say the line"
"It depends on the story"
[cheering]
Anyway, *in general* I prefer happier endings. Part of this is that I tend to write stories with heavier subject matter, and a happy ending helps to even that out a little bit. Part of it is that the world can suck sometimes and it feels nice.
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love - whether we call it friendship or family or romance - is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work.” - James Baldwin
FABLE is about as subtle as a sledgehammer lmao
[Looks directly into the camera]
The bad guys in this story are really, REALLY bad. But they only get away with it because they have a constantly churning propaganda machine manufacturing consent for them 24/7.
He figures it out pretty quick tbh. Not quick enough to get out from under his superior officer's scheming, though.
Makeda's punishment is even worse than how I described it. The whole reason they replace her arm is because she's a shapeshifter. It's to deny her bodily autonomy.
And the title is meaningful because Makeda, the child he rescues, eventually loses her arm due to...um...well basically she gets caught getting into teenage mischief and the totally proportionate response is to remove her arm and replace it with a metal one. Cue several verses of angst.
But these two aren't my only characters with injuries! Continuing with leg problems, Levi Erikkson of A FABLE OF ARMS received a nasty blow to his right leg while he was...well he didn't know it but he was kinda committing a war crime...anyway he walks with a cane now.
