MLV - Creating Antoinette - Discussion

The amount of feedback I got for MLV blew me away. I had no idea so many people would be interested in a paranormal mystery/suspense/thriller story about vampires that was low in action, and high in politics. What's more, I had no idea people would be so into Jack, a tiny kid lacking confidence and with no truly special qualities. Even more, I had no idea people would enjoy Antoinette so much!

As a huge fan of the video game Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines, I went looking and found that World of Darkness was dead (kind of, anyway), and had been reborn as Chronicles of Darkness. Vampire: the Masquerade was reborn as Vampire: the Requiem. Gone were most of the ridiculous lore dumps of utter insanity, and instead I found fleshed out political/religious belief systems, and governance systems that had texture and flavor. Like LIGHTNING, a million ideas hit me, and I just had to get them down.

One of those key ideas was Antoinette.

Intelligence is attractive, I find. Self-awareness is the ultimate in attractiveness. The ability to question your own beliefs, to question your own thoughts, to question your own reactions, and to make informed, pragmatic decisions that can overrule your previous beliefs/thoughts/reactions, is spectacular.  Antoinette is the ultimate representation of that. Not only does she have awareness of self and awareness of her surroundings, but she actively does her best to cultivate that self-awareness in her city, in her brethren and kin, because she understands that they all survive together, or die together. Wisdom!

What I'm trying to say is, I wanted to create a leading vampire, the Prince of my city, to NOT BE A MORON. As much as I loved LaCroix in Bloodlines, for all his intelligence, he had no wisdom. He couldn't see how self-destructive his path was, when anyone with half a brain could. A typical villain, well-acted but shallow.

So, intelligence and wisdom were the founding principles behind Antoinette's philosophies. Then I moved onto personality.

Queen + Seductress + Motherly.

I wanted to capture the confidence and mastery of a queen, someone who's been manipulating and controlling people for ages. Of course, that would probably default to a cold character, and I didn't want that. I wanted confident, but also someone that would make for good interplay with a timid and self-doubting character like Jack. A cold queen would crush Jack, but a seductress would toy with him, while a motherly woman would be drawn by his youth, and his innate honesty. 

Queen = confident, Seductress = sexual, Motherly = nurturing. The combination made for Antoinette's personality, like a puzzle piece that fit Jack's combination of intelligent, introverted, and honest-to-a-fault's personality. And I'd be lying if I said the sex wasn't part of the decision process here. I was aiming for some dom/sub sex here, where the dom is actually kind of motherly, and tender, while the sub is timid and easily malleable in the sexual scenarios.

Then her physical appearance, and mannerisms. I cheated here, and made both her and Jack physically match their personalities. If the story was more nuanced and had less sex, I'd have probably mixed this up a bit, but I felt it worked for a story that is ultimately sexual in nature.

Long white hair and tall = confidence of a queen. Busty and curvy, slender and beautiful = seductive seductress. Soft touch, inviting but gentle (usually) words = motherly and nurturing.

Her prose were more difficult to write than, say, Beatrice. Beatrice is just me dialing up my angry and cynical side. To write the prose for Antoinette required me to both stop using most word contractions (so 'couldn't' becomes 'could not'), but also explore the thesaurus more to find words that were eloquent and poetic. Antoinette wouldn't say something bluntly, she'd say it with hidden meanings layered into clever word use, like any intelligent manipulator would. And I had to reflect that in the narrative prose for how she viewed the world. Beatrice would describe a dark room as 'shit was fucking dark,' while Antoinette would describe it as 'the black held back her gaze.'

When I wrote her, I had no idea so many people would be intrigued by her, and the dominant but nurturing and tender relationship she'd have with Jack.