Because it makes for a better story.

Uh, maybe that’s not good enough. Maybe that doesn’t actually help anyone understand, or even properly answer the question. Maybe I should actually put some thought into this, since more than a few people seem to wonder (or have outright asked me) exactly why I’m so god-damn cruel to my characters in so many of my stories. This journal should go into addressing exactly that!

Before I go any further, I’d like to point out that this journal will include spoilers for both my Blood And Water series/upcoming book version of the series, as well as several of my Fae’s Christmas Music-Themed Special stories, including the ones that went up very recently. You’ve been warned!

So, let’s take it from the top… literally, of this journal post. I said that it makes a better story. That’s not… strictly true. I believe it, but it’s not an unequivocal truth of writing that being a complete arsehole to your characters is the means by which you make your story better. The old saying about killing your darlings certainly rings true and has a not inconsiderable volume of relevance and truth to it, but I dump onto my characters a level of cruelty that’s usually reserved for tax collection agencies and George R.R. Martin.

At its core, a story is about conflict. Something in the protagonist’s life is wrong, and it’s up to them to go and sort out the wrong thing and set the world around them right. Protagonist wakes up groggy and needs caffeine. They’re out of coffee. CONFLICT! Now they have to go out and obtain the coffee. PLOT! They buy the coffee and… learn something about themselves on the way, I guess? RESOLUTION! These three aspects of a story are pretty damn immutable, but this journal is mostly focused on the first and last of those three. Sure, the plot does contain a lot of my being mean, but it’s for the conflict and for the resolution that most people wince at the things I do to my characters.

Let’s start with the conflict. Every story has it, and every story needs it. Without it, there’s literally no reason to go out and have whatever adventure the story is centered around. The more the conflict affects the protagonist, either directly or through what they care about, the powerful that conflict is and the more powerful the story is as a whole. This, right here, is where I look at conflict as a means by which to torment a character.

Let’s divert for a second and talk about themes as well, while we’re here. Let’s be honest, there are just some themes that you can’t tell unless you’re willing to paint your story with darker strokes. You can’t tell a story of war, I feel, if you’re unwilling to dip your brush in the red. You can’t tell a story of heartache without shattering something. Dipping into the darker spectrum of human emotion tells a very different story than one that is inherently uplifting and joyful. Telling a story of oppression, or pain, or suffering, or even something as simple as loneliness, is impossible to do with the proper gravity (in my personal opinion, that is) without allowing your characters, and readers by extension, to feel the weight of it.

Stories, as a medium, are brilliant. I love them. They take you to far off places, and they show you magnificent things. Above and beyond those, they can make you feel. They can make you feel so many things. We thrill at the success of a hero, and we gasp at the revelations that shock them. We bond to our characters, and feel with them. So many stories however (and this I feel is particularly true of the fandom itself) shy away from the darker emotions. They don’t want to make a reader feel sad, or angry, or hateful. They don’t want to explore those tones, because let’s be honest, who wants to feel sad? Who enjoys feeling angry? No one in their right mind, I imagine.

Darker conflict and darker themes may not bring a reader to an emotionally pleasing place, but that does not mean that they are brought to a place that they are averse to. How we deal with, feel and channel our emotions are some of the most human-defining traits we have. It hurts when I read a story and a character I love is tortured. I cry a LOT when characters I’ve grown attached to are killed off. This includes my own. But these feelings that I feel – that WE feel – are part of what it means to be alive. I don’t want to shy away from them, because I want to embrace them. I want to accept them as a part of me, and I love the chance to explore those feelings both in myself and in my readers through the telling of a story that cannot be told without their evocation.

Being willing to tell a story with darker tones and darker feelings at the fore is not being a darker person. It is acceptance of the greater emotional whole, and I think it’s perfectly valid as a means of storytelling, if only more had the courage to step up to the plate and give it a go. A story does not have to have a ‘happy ending’ to be a good story, and a ‘bad’ ending does not make something a bad story. This, however, is perhaps a journal entry for another time. I would definitely like to get into that at some point, because it’s intricately tied into my philosophy with regards to storytelling. For now though, let’s get back to conflict in stories. We’ll even look at some examples in my work.

Consider Deacon and his situation from Blood And Water. The whole story centers around his conflict between his duty to his father, and his budding relationship with Bain… and by extension his free will and sense of independence. I take every opportunity to strain both of those issues. I turn Deacon’s world upside down and throw everything but the kitchen sink at him by the end. That says nothing of the physical torment I put Bain through under Oswell’s knife. Or knives.

Let’s also look at Lucas, one of the recurring characters from my Fae’s Christmas Music-Themed Special stories. Lucas is in a shitty situation in the first few stories, but let’s be honest, he’s a flawed hero in the extreme. He’s in a bad way, but he’s also done it to himself. He’s made some bad decisions that have led him to a bad place, but he’s starting to dig himself out of it, with not inconsiderable effort and suffering. The conflicts he faces – living with his shame, adjusting to making his own decisions and standing up for himself again, facing a person he’s wronged terribly every single day of his life – are not pleasant things, but they help to make this fox who would otherwise be condemned for the choices he’s made be more sympathetic.

This is where we run into trouble being kind (or at least not being a total arsehole) to your characters. Being nice to these characters is all well and good, but being nice to them simply doesn’t invest the audience. You don’t want to know what happens next if everything’s alright, except perhaps to wonder how it’s all gonna turn to shit. That’s sort of the unspoken covenant between author and reader. When a story starts with everything nice and neat and fine, the reader knows (by virtue that it’s a story) that things are about to get fucked up so that the plot can send the main character on their way.

That covenant is also something that I loathe about the resolution of stories, and particularly in-fandom stories.

I almost always hate the happy ending.

That is to say, I don’t find it satisfying anymore in the vast majority of cases. If there exists the promise that a story that starts off calm and idyllic only to have everything turned upside down by the plot, there also exists the promise that a story will be resolved by the end… and that resolution usually sees the heroes come out on top. I say usually. I mean in roughly ninety-nine percent of cases, the hero triumphs. I call bullshit.

You can open up almost any book and, no matter what story is being told, the end of that story will see the hero triumphant. I don’t mind this, so long as the toils they have undergone match the triumph that they enjoy at the end. I’m very, VERY picky when it comes to resolutions of the hero’s journey, because nearly every author chooses to forget that the hero’s journey can end with the hero FAILING in their quest.
I just cannot feel that there are stakes for a hero if I know with reasonable certainty that they are going to succeed in their journey. If it is a foregone conclusion that the hero is going to pull through against all odds and save the day, why read the story in the first place? Ostensibly to see how they reached that point, of course. The journey is why we read for the most part, not the destination.

Success however, as a foregone conclusion, relieves tension. It breaks conflict. How can there be conflict – how can you FEAR for the protagonist – if on some level you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are going to pull through in the end no matter what they have to face?

In those rare cases where I find myself in a situation wondering if a particular author is going to actually have the balls to off their main character, or see one of the heroic party succumb to darkness (perhaps echoes of their past, like a drug addiction resurfacing under stress or a death in the party taking away sufficient hope to make them quit altogether) rather than continue their heroic quest? In those stories, I’m absolutely fine with the happy ending. I’ve already accepted that there are high stakes for the heroes of the tale. I’ve also been shown by the author that the obstacles the heroes must surpass might also be insurmountable. The uncertainty there makes the story more real to me. The journey holds more power over me, because the destination is less certain.

“But Fae,” you howl with increasing frustration with my view to story-writing, “we’re talking about your furry porn here! Why the fuck do you need to torment your characters in furry porn? We just wanna get off!”

Well… you can. I mean, I’ve written plenty of stories that have minimal plot and conflict and a maximised focus on getting my reader off with hot word-sex. You can also go elsewhere; it’s not like the furry fandom has a lack of erotica writers. But let’s be honest for a second. If you’re here and reading this, it’s because you know what sort of things I like to write. I like to do plot heavy, character development pieces that see those characters pitted against severe odds. Stories where I set them against something that seems literally insurmountable, so that you honestly wonder if the character is going to succeed. And this, now, is finally where we get to the core of it all.

I write stories where the protagonists don’t always succeed. I’ve written stories that have ended badly and painfully, and I’ve written stories where everything works out and people live happily ever after. Or at least live happily morning after. I mean… geez, look at my 2015 Fae’s Christmas Music-Themed Special pieces. Of the three that went up (before the ones that recently went up to finish up the five-set), one of them ended with a broken heart and one of them ended with both lovers winding up dead. This is fucking porn, and they both fucking died. That shit wasn’t kind, either; the way I did it was fucking awful. I’m very good at finding horrible ways to kill my characters, and that one was no exception to the rule.

And it was still a story that people appreciated and enjoyed. Moreso, the story that saw the broken heart (but everyone more or less physically intact) saw an appreciation and empathy for the broken relationship there. Empathy and emotion come into play when the conflict hits the right mark. More than that, they set the stage for the stories that followed, and are still yet to follow. Now, my readers have learned a valuable lesson about reading my stories. They’ve seen my work and come away with one piece of super-important information about me.

THIS author does not promise a happy resolution.

By the time the last chapter of Blood And Water rolled around, I think nearly every reader there wondered what sort of ending I was actually going to visit upon Deacon and Bain. From people I asked, the question wasn’t if they were going to stop Oswell, but instead if either of them would even survive facing Oswell. The stakes were so high, and I had been so cruel to my characters, that my readers began to question that sacred promise between myself and them. They started to question if the hero would win in the end. The turning point for most? The way I tortured Bain so graphically in Oswell’s lab. Faced with his power and his overwhelming cruelty and intelligence, I set him up as an almost insurmountable, terrible challenge for the pair to eventually be forced to face off against. The stakes were high, and my readers had no way to know if I would allow both, or either, of the main characters to survive.

In the penultimate story of Lucas’ story arc from the Christmas Special stories, Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), Lucas is confronted again by the abusive ex-boyfriend who was responsible for single-handedly ruining his life. The character development that Lucas has gone through is threatened. The life he’s trying to build back up for himself is threatened. Lucas’ well-being is threatened. The comments I got for that story were full of fear for Lucas. One person said that they didn’t care about the porn anymore, as long as Lucas was okay. They were invested, because they could not be sure that the story would end well. They were uncertain. They were invested.

That, right there, is why I do it. And that right there is why, on several occasions, my characters have to endure failure in the journeys they are set on. My readers know that a story by me will challenge the characters in it, and that it will challenge them. My readers know that I am unafraid to make them confront some pretty dark shit in a story of mine. And of course, most importantly, they can’t be sure of how the story ends. My readers know that when they read my work, there’s no way to know for sure. The heroes might prevail. MIGHT. And they might fail.

And this is great, because the reader does not know. They have to read and see.

It’s a careful balancing act, to make your reader fear for the character they should be rooting for without giving up hope. I don’t think anyone truly gave up hope for Deacon and Bain in Blood And Water. I don’t think anyone’s given up hope for Lucas, come the resolution of his story in Pleasure And Pain. More importantly, the strain that they had to endure – that conflict being so dark and so cruel and so tough to overcome – calls into doubt that just because it’s a story it has to end with the protagonist safe and well and happy. That meta thinking is broken before they read the first page, because they recognize the name of the author. They understand that the covenant that I make with my readers isn’t that everything will be resolved neatly, but that they have to read right until the last page to know how it ends for sure.

The cruelty and the pain that I subject my characters to is carefully considered and applied quite deliberately. I do it because it is all part of a carefully orchestrated plan with one devilishly simple goal in mind. I do it because I want my readers to be uncertain. I want my readers to be challenged in every single story, from the simplest fap piece to an involved short to a deep novella to the grandest novel series. I want them to start every single one of my stories knowing that at some point, no matter how hard the hero works and tries or how right and good their cause is, they might fail. I want my readers to click on a story of mine, ready to enjoy the journey, and ready to enjoy it all the more because they cannot possibly know the destination. I do it because my cruelty invests you all the more in the characters and, though you might hate me for being so cruel, because you will love the characters (that succeed) for having the strength to do so.

And that, right there, is why I am so mean to my characters. You should try it.