alright, i got like three whole comments on my last devlog, and i genuinely didn’t know people read these things. i mean, i know i read them from people i follow, but i thought that was just because i cared a whole lot.

i have decided to tell stories of the development process post-mortem. these memories will be lost to time if i don’t, so i will put them here for your reading pleasure.

i have a panic disorder and little to no meds about it. the meds never work. they always make me worse. “have you tried xanax” yeah man, it sent me to the hospital. you know what does work, though? a 5mg edible every night. it also makes me calm enough to say, fuck it, i’m writing whatever i want without worrying about how it makes me look. it doesn’t make me incoherent, it just makes me cozy.

i’m gonna talk about vampires. something i’m fucking sick of. i’m so fucking sick of vampires, but i’m gonna talk about them because i wrote a whole visual novel about them, and i have to live with that now.

i’m not a vampire media guy. i’m a visual kei fan with existential dread. i listen to fucking malice mizer. i’m not a gackt guy, though. that guy sucks. my favorite vampire of all time is iris from rune factory frontier. that’s a game that has very little focus on vampires as a species. I only got into vampire stuff after i made val, actually, and the only reason val is a vampire is because my friend told me “he looks like a vampire” when i was like, what, 18? and when i went to write parfum nostalgique, all i wanted to do was write a very old, slutty, immortal man, and vampires were right fucking there.

it feels like everything i like is adjacent to vampires in some way, but i just don’t seek shit out about vampires. i don’t deliberately get into vampire stuff. but it feels like everyone else who likes showa 24 manga and pretty blond guys as much as i do is into vampires, so when I started writing this, i tried to study up on that. and then i was like, oh right. i’m not obligated to do that. vampires aren’t real and i can do whatever i want with them. i can represent them however i want, and that’s the beauty of the genre.

I do find beauty in the genre of the vampire. i promise i do. i believe that if you have too much contempt for the genre, it comes off as self-hatred. “my vampires aren’t like other vampires” okay, do you want a fucking sticker? i personally think that many times, yeah, my vampires tend to be Different from other vampires i’ve seen, but i’m not fucking original. if i wanted to be original i wouldn’t have written vampires. the joy of the genre is the community of the genre…

…even though the more i delve into it, the more i feel like fuck, man, i don’t relate to any of you people.

listen. i’m sorry. i tried so hard to fuck with vtm. but i just can’t do it. it’s not my thing. majority of american vampire media, i don’t fuck with. i can’t do castlevania anime, but i fuck heavily with regular old castlevania games. is count d from pet shop of horrors a vampire? was that ever confirmed? i don’t think so, but after iris, he’s my absolute favorite. sure, i’ll take some vampire hunter d. abel nightroad from trinity blood? beautiful, beautiful. takarazuka seal of roses? always in my heart.

my friend showed me blade recently, and it fucked so hard that it reminded me why i hate anne rice. blade was so cool, and it was written so differently from how I write vampires. i mean, both ways are good, but it felt like… we are so far from that man. okay, i’ll just say his name. but i’ll censor it. l*stat.

once upon a time, val got compared to lstat a lot. at first it was okay, and then it was not, because i started to realize that oh fuck, i don’t like anne rice, i don’t like her work, and i very much do not like that motherfucker lstat. actually, it was beyond dislike. anne rice’s work terrifies me. she was a level of crazy that i never want to ever become. i’ve been perturbed by her work ever since i read a post on tumblr detailing how much she hated fanfiction being written about her work when I was 13. i never forgot it. her weird racism and christian-ness freaks me out, the fact that she wrote a letter to a chicken restaurant AS LESTAT trying to get them not to build a location somewhere she wrote his house to be freaks me out, every fact anyone ever tells me about her FREAKS ME the FUCK out. but the fact that it freaks me out is reflective of my own fears as a writer.

the thing i have in common with anne rice is that we both have pretty blonde vampires we wrote who we are very attached to. parfum nostalgique was a project that was keeping me together, keeping me sane, and i consider myself to be very close with val as a character. because of this, i cared very much that this character and i had a healthy relationship, because if i did not have a healthy relationship to every aspect of this project (or at least healthy enough), there was no point in doing it, because this was a project i did to preserve myself in a world that was actively damaging to my mental and physical health. when i look at anne rice’s work, i see someone who definitely did not have a healthy relationship with her work, and especially not with lestat. this was so apparent to me that it was immersion-breaking. that shit really broke my brain. trying to read anne rice was like trying to read everything i was ever afraid of my fiction ever reflecting. ever. EVER. i was just like, “oh my god. i hope my writing doesn’t sound like this.” and from that point on, when people would compare val and lestat, i would just get TICKED about it. not to their faces, but on the inside. the obvious answer to why this ticked me off was, of course, that they are nothing alike, and assuming that my blond vampire is the same as every other blond vampire felt insulting to my work. but the more personal answer is that when someone compares val to lestat, especially AFTER reading parfum, it makes me wonder what the hell i did in my work that made them think of anne rice, whose work is everything i’ve never wanted to make. i’ve decided that this is just something i’m going to have to live with. when i look at lestat, it makes my skin crawl. he’s like the anti-val. he’s horrendous to me. but how fucking funny is it that my character has an extremely cursed, god-awful Anti-Version walking around in the world of fiction? to me, that’s pretty funny. i can’t think of a more harmless face to put on my supervillain dart board.

i used to think i didn’t like people comparing the two because i didn’t want to be told i was unoriginal, but i think that’s entirely untrue. first of all, i made a vampire named valdemar andressen. that’s like naming a guy dracula smith. you can call him dracula smith, if you want. hes big and blonde and sexy and slutty and he’s a dom and he’s queer and he’s so comically stereotypical in that way, and i did that on purpose, because it was fun! second of all, when someone compares val to robert plant or oscar francois de jarjayes or, if they are truly an individual of Refined and Impeccable taste, earl dorian red gloria, it feels as though i am floating in a blissful soup. it feels like my brain made the windows xp startup noise, and all i can think about is the grassy green hills of the default windows ex background, aptly named “bliss.” it’s like, yes! yes! you get it! you understand! i AM in fact creating from influences that i have tons of love for, and i AM in fact unafraid of that reflecting in my work!

I think, in general, when someone compares my vampire characters to other characters, i respond better when it’s a comparison to a human, because comparing a vampire to another vampire is so… “wow. love your vampire. you know i’ve also heard of another vampire with the same color hair/same vibes.” like….. okay. it’s kinda like in movies when people from america meet someone from canada and they go, “wow, you’re from canada? my cousin lives there. maybe you know him!” but also… i was not inspired by vampires when writing this shit. I was inspired by humans and human characters.

I mean, look at kenny. is that not the most obvious goro majima insert you’ve ever seen? tiff is also inspired by majima, but she’s inspired by goromi. she ended up looking like draculaura from monster high, though, and i decided that was a good thing, because she would really love that character as a vampire enthusiast. val was inspired by… barbie. oberon was the product of an absolutely crippling buck-tick obsession, i wouldn’t have made donna the way she is without fukiko utsunomiya, betty was based off how i looked fresh out of high school, toulouse was based off of an outfit i wore while dressed as a castrato on halloween one year (which is such a funny thing for a guy who didn’t know he was trans to be, and then VOICE ACT for), and lucian was based off of an emo boy who worked at the grocery store when i was a teenager who my friend had a huge crush on. donovan, wherever you are, i’m thinking of you.

if i were to ever write vampires again, it would only be with these characters. i think, in the future, i’m just gonna stick to writing humans, or fairies! i love fairies, and me any my husband have been working on a game that features them. I’m also a big fan of the concept of living dolls. i like the idea that a doll can be alive and be your friend, and i feel that the idea of a terrifying living doll is overplayed. i think, as lovely a time as i had with parfum nostalgique, and as lovely a time i will have writing these characters whenever i like, i wrote vampires so i could write characters that were terrifyingly human. now, i think i’ll write humans who are terrifyingly human instead. or…

i’m gonna be so real with you. you’ve all inflated my head by telling me i’m funny. so many people tell me i’m fucking funny when they read my shit, and it’s made me believe it. the next thing i have in the works is a comedy about being true to yourself as a queer person when it feels like the world is built to reject you. after 4 years of existential dread this, midlife crisis that, i’m going to write something that looks cool, makes people laugh, and is absolutely STANKY with fun times.

i’m going to take a bath, and then i’m going to work on the script for it a little bit. steam release has been kicking my ass, work on PR has been kicking my ass, and i just need to make something fun.

good night, my friends.