Daughter of Damnation Ch. 4 - Reflection

I know I've mentioned that DoD is going to be a shorter series, but I honesty can't remember if I've stated exactly when I'm planning on ending it. Allow me to fix that now: it's going to be seven chapters long.

Pretty short, right?

Now, as many of you likely know, I like using the midpoint of my stories to mix things up a bit. Usually that's Chapter Seven, but for DoD, that's this chapter. However, because it's a shorter book, I can't necessarily throw a wrench in the gears like I normally do. In Book One of SaS, Chapter Seven shows us that Vee is the angel hunting Amara around campus. In Book Two, Vee finally returns to campus after having been missing the entire first half of the book.

So what's my equivalent tactic for DoD? Well, until recently, the two time periods have been pretty distinct. 1938 Evelyn is mean, callous, and selfish, while 2000 Evelyn is patient, kind, and sweet. This Chapter is where I start to blur those lines a little bit.

In the past, we finally see Evelyn start to change her mind about her attitude, but only after she does the worst thing she can: take a soul and kill someone. She does this selfishly, to ensure her own survival, and without thought for the person she's killing. Conversely, in the future, she only takes a soul because she needs to save Zadkiel and their child. She does this with great regret, and full acknowledgment of the tragedy of her actions. Then, fresh off her consumption, she blitzkriegs a military facility.

Tangent time! Oh boy!

I remember a time where it was popular to say that morally upright characters were boring. The only real interesting characters, detractors would say, were morally dubious people that sometimes did questionable things. It's boring to always do the right thing, because there's no depth to that decision! Many stories in this vein like to focus on darker elements, either of the character or the world they're inhabiting.

I've always been a bit annoyed at that train of thought. Personally, I think morally outstanding characters are fascinating, but they can be tricky to write at times. A character with a dark secret that occasionally does bad things is, in my opinion, a bit easier to make a compelling story about. The character themselves is inherently layered with drama and conflict, regardless of the world around them. However, if you're writing a true, virtuous paragon, it's tempting to think that their inner monologue is somewhat flat.

Part of the problem, I think, is the tendency for stories to present their heroes with somewhat flat problems. If you have a generic fantasy setting, with a generic fantasy big evil guy, there's not a lot of nuance to the world. The hero's problem is strictly mechanical: stop the big villain.

I love Superman. I think he's such a fun character! He's kind, hopeful, inspiring, and ideally he shows everyone what an ideal world might look like. However, apparently it's really hard to write a decent Superman story, because there have been a lot of failed attempts to bring him to the big screen. At his best, I think Superman is interesting specifically because of the inherent complexity of trying to be a good person.

Even if you're Superman, if you're the most morally outstanding person in the world, how do you live like that? Sometimes it's really hard to do the right thing. If you care about every last detail, every possible person in existence, isn't it much easier for outside threats to seem serious?

I don't think that's the most clear tangent I've ever gone on, but hey, these are my reflection and I'll make them as pointless as I want :P

What I'm trying to say is that I think a lot about goodness, and how to portray it interestingly. Evelyn is a complex character, but when we first meet her in Suddenly A Succubus, she's a total sweetheart. Everyone that read her chapters was like "Wow, she's so nice, and caring, and sweet!"

Except Evelyn is older than any of us can comprehend. She's been alive for thousands of years, and spent a vast majority of her life being a truly terrible creature.

You may recall from my SaS Reflections that I do my best to outline stakes for my characters. When we see Amara turning down a dark, impulsive path, we understand the weight of any time she chooses to take the high road. I'm trying to do the same thing with Evelyn in Daughter of Damnation.

It's not as simple as "Evelyn was bad, met a nice boy, and then was good."

There are parts of Evelyn that are hard-wired into who she is, aspects of her personality that make it really easy to consume souls and kill people if she decides it's necessary. She's powerful enough to walk into a maximum security military facility and casually bring it to its knees. I do my best to describe scenes as I'm picturing them in my head, but I do wish I could beam the images directly to y'all at times. The moment where Evelyn is blasting her way through that massive security door is one of those instances.

Above all else, I wanted to stress the sheer amount of power that Evelyn is capable of. She doesn't outwit this door, she doesn't seduce a guard to open it, she simply barges through with an amount of power that no one in the facility ever thought they would have to contend with.

Hopefully, the entirety of Daughter of Damnation helps us understand the difficulty of Evelyn's choices. She's actively suppressing huge portions of herself in an attempt to live a peaceful life. This is why I wanted to talk about goodness. Here's a character that's trying to be good, she's spent decades doing everything in her power to find a lifestyle that harms as few people as possible. She's attempting to do a good thing and rescue an archangel from the clutches of a military testing facility, which I think most people would say is a good thing. With all that in mind, however, her victory doesn't come without a cost.

A cost Evelyn is all too aware of, which is another point of purposely comparison between the two time periods.

In the past, when Evelyn kills Doc, she doesn't think twice about her actions. In the future, I set up a scenario that, on a meta level, people think they've seen before. "Oh, Evelyn just needs to seduce the guard to free herself. He even seems like a bit of a scumbag, so all the better!" Of course, it's not the simple. I purposely set up this scene to be a bit of a rug pull, and based on the reactions of my beta readers, I think it worked.

Even though the guard wasn't the nicest person, he was still a person. He had hopes and dreams, fears and complex relationships. He was starting to overcome some of his more problematic behaviors, and Evelyn completely erased everything he was, everything he could have been.

Not only is this a tweak to the expected formula of the scene, especially for a story about a succubus, but it's also a big character moment. We learn in the 1938 section that it's really easy for Evelyn to ignore the memories of the souls she consumes. However, when she kills this guard, she goes out of her way to familiarize herself with him, to grieve him. She recognizes the tragedy of her actions, and this speaks volumes to how she's changed over the years.

(I'm going to skip over to the latter portion of the 1938 section, since the first part of this reflection got a little scattered and touched on a bunch of stuff.)

When the Evelyn of 1938 steals a soul, she's initially ready to not give a shit. However, because of her living situation, she's forced to sit in the consequences of her actions, and it forces her to start reflecting on the true scope of the damage she's caused.

Also, fun fact, I name Doc Clarence Brown. That was originally that name I was going to give Amara's father! I decided pretty quickly I didn't like it, and I'm happy I changed my mind.

Anyways, seeing a community in morning isn't quite enough to push Evelyn into being a better person. She's also forced to see Vince come back from work with a terrible injury. In my initial outline for this chapter, her motivations were going to be much more selfish. She was literally just going to help Vince because she didn't want Rosie to follow her around in the event Vince didn't make it.

In the final version, it's a bit more nuanced, and I prefer this version.

It's also one of the few times I let myself be a bit more direct with my themes. Evelyn basically stares into the camera and goes "Hey communism is great!"

Okay, not literally, but like, look at this shit:

Everyone here survived through mutual effort and respect. Had they all been like Evelyn, had they done nothing but scheme and backstab for their own gain, Evelyn would have died that very first night on Earth.

Their cooperation did not make them weak; it ensured their survival.

The important thing for me was to show every step of the process to Evelyn becoming a better person. A cheaper version of this story might have involved her stealing Vince's soul, becoming overwhelmed by how good he was, and then suddenly she has a conscience and is a great person. I don't like that kind of mechanical storytelling, and I think the end result is only earned if Evelyn herself wrestles with every step of the process.

So, yes, at first she only helps because she learns that it's literally in her own best interest to help out. As the chapter continues, however, she sees that her good behavior continues to get rewarded. The Mayor offers her Doc's house, even extra food!

And golly gee, it sure is plot convenient that being forced into a doctor's shoes in the middle of the Great Depression means Evelyn is forced into a position of needing to care for other people! I'm really happy with the touch, but specifically, I'm really happy that my vision for Rosie panned out.

I've never written a child before, and while I have no real experience to say this with certainty, I think I did a good job with her. I wanted to show that Rosie has clearly developed a fondness for Evelyn, and not only is she following Evelyn around, but she's even trying to be like her. The idea of a child making up illnesses for her stuffed bunny and deciding that Sad Ears was a condition still feels like a stroke of genius to me. It also ended up being surprisingly poignant at the end of the chapter, which was great.

In the end, we get a critical turning point, and one of the very few plot points that I had planned from the beginning: Rosie calls Evelyn mommy.

I'm not being very secretive that motherhood is a big theme of this book, but this was the first time that it's been so relevant in 1938. After all, I hint in 2000 that Evelyn seems to have hangups about children, what's up with that? Well, we're starting to see those thoughts appear as Evelyn spend more and more time with Rosie.

I'll admit, I wasn't expecting to cry at the ending, but I absolutely did.

I hope you enjoyed this one! I'm honestly really happy at the reception to Daughter of Damnation. I thought it was going to land a bit awkwardly, what with the dual time period stuff, but it's going really well.!

Nyx ♥