The Birth of Drusilla Arenzai

I want to take a little time to expound on my personal experiences as an amateur writer. Specifically this post will be covering the birth of one of my characters, Drusilla Arenzai. I’ll be posting a scan of a drawing of her as well as what passes for an original picture I have of her…

... I’ll explain that all in the post tomorrow.

I am a visual person. In terms of my ability to learn I can mostly learn no matter the teaching style, but in the end I lean to the visual and hands-on side. As a result, when writing I need to have some picture in my head of who the character is and what they look like. It is harder for me to just write a story and fill out the details of a character afterwards. My skills in conveying that notwithstanding, I do know what every one of my characters looks like.

Drusilla is a unique character, however, in that she ostensibly exists beyond her appearance. What I mean by that is unlike Anzushiro or Yami or Runa who are mostly bound by the characters who inspired them, Drusilla is not bound by any such limitations. That’s really just an overblown way of saying that she is actually a personally original character. There is no Drusilla she is aspired to be, unlike Anzushiro who is supposed to be at least somewhat like Mana/Dark Magician Girl of Yu-Gi-Oh, or Runa who is supposed to be at least reminiscent of Runa Date of Soul Taker. Drusilla is free to be whomever I would like her to be, again notwithstanding my actual skill as a writer in achieving those ends.

Almost every character in my story starts first as a character I want to add to the story. They exist elsewhere and they, along with parts of their source material, become a part of the Book of the Shadows. That’s how fan-fictions work. But most writers create their own characters and the image for those characters. Drusilla was my first half-step towards that when I first wrote her into the story.

So far as my story is concerned, the Arenzai family predates the Rosencraft family. It is actually from the Arenzai family and another family I will discuss another time that the Rosencraft family is born. When I got to planning this part of the story several years ago, I started off with the idea of there being some conflict between the Arenzai and Rosencraft families. Wanting to avoid the shounen trap that the story was starting to develop into, I wanted the leader of the Arenzai to be a bit different – someone difficult for Yami to face but in a slightly different way than the obvious of them just being really strong. I also wanted to take some time to refocus the story a little since so much of it between chapters five and eight are all about Yugi and Anzu.

At the time I was still solidifying my plans about Lynette, so I figured that the toughest thing for Yami, given his overall character profile, would be a non-conventional threat. Between chivalry and the unspoken rule of shounen, good-guys don’t get to fight females of any sort except under extreme circumstances. That has started to change somewhat with more and more anime of the last few years, but in general that unspoken rule has always been there; if you’ve got a villainess, she fights a heroine. It’s Sanji’s code (check One Piece). As such, making Yami’s Arenzai family counterpart female serves as an important dynamic, though admittedly one that could have alternatively been filled by a male character with a little more effort – getting into the other less stringent rule of good-guys not beating up on kids.

So, I needed something a little more to push Yami away from wanting to directly confront the Arenzai family. I then went to the next most obvious deterrent – someone not really all that bad. Much of the First Moon Saga speaks to the concept of balance between light and dark, and the idea that appearances can be deceiving. So I had the idea of Drusilla being an enemy, but one that was cordial enough or easy-going enough to not present a clear threat. In other words, I wanted her to appear nice, happy, smiling, not brooding and angry right from the start. This would play on the better nature of Yami and the Rosencraft, thereby postponing any need or more importantly desire for immediate action against her.

Finally, I needed a principle and reciprocal reason for conflict. The primary reason for the conflict is what introduces the Arenzai to the story. The reciprocal is what serves as the undercurrent of the conflict. For example, in Bleach the principle conflict throughout the story, lest someone forgets, is the fact that Hollows devour souls so Soul Reapers have to fight and cleanse Hollows to stop that bad thing from happening. The reciprocal reasons are all of the personal motivations that drive Ichigo henceforth to fight too; wanting to protect his friends. There are then the further reciprocal reasons for conflicts from the enemies Ichigo fights; self-preservation from the Hollows, desire for power from almost everyone else, revenge with some Hollows and the latter portions of the manga post Aizen’s defeat. It is these reciprocal reasons, these smaller quibbles, which ultimately draw out a conflict; otherwise you’d just have a bunch of fights based solely on the need to fight.

The reciprocal conflict I produce is a more comedic one for certain. It is meant to be a lightweight arc in the story, not so heavy-hitting with the whole world hanging in the balance sort of setup – although technically a world is hanging in the balance. It also happens to be the most classic setup in all of storytelling; love.

Basically to overcome the previous points about giving reasons for the Rosencraft to not want to fight the Arenzai, I need one to make at least someone have a strong desire to actually fight. It has to be a balanced approach, however. Too heavy-handed (she kills someone close to them, or kills a ton of people) and there would be no reason for anyone to want to hold back against the Arenzai. Too light-handed (she said something mean) and the drumbeat towards conflict becomes hollow and gutless, seeming too contrived to make much sense.

Love triangles and quadrangles and however many sides you want to add to the polyhedron tend to be in that nexus; outsiders to the relationship tend to look at them with apathy if not confusion, while those closest might sometimes be driven to murder. So, I basically have Drusilla fall in love with Yami, simultaneously giving certain factions of the Rosencraft to be more than willing to fight her, while similarly making it less reasonable to start an interplanetary war between the two families.

Now, I do add other more salient components to this particular story arc beyond leaving the fate of two empires in the throes of some love spat. However, this design of the story leads to a revelation about what Drusilla needs to look like.

I wanted her to not look too much like any of the others of the Rosencraft so that basically meant either drafting out a picture all my own or choosing someone from a story not yet represented in the Book of the Shadows at the time, who at the same time if coming from another story has a personality that is close if not a match for what I was looking for. She had to be beautiful and very alluring; the sort of character whose very presence evokes the feeling of competition or rivalry in a romantic pursuit (obviously it would be up to me to write in a good personality). Given the constraints of the framework, she had to have an impactful appearance as there wouldn’t be adequate place to frame the leader of an offense-minded adversary as some bookish or demure type that has to be built up out of her shell – she had to have at least a slight air of danger to her just by looking at her.

Ultimately, as you can see tomorrow, I ended up with a viable appearance to cement my vision of Drusilla. Then came Soul Eater… precisely, Arachne of Soul Eater.

In the end some of the characteristics of Arachne have been rolled into Drusilla, but I have mostly stopped short of making them one-in-the-same. They’re probably similar enough, but I just didn’t take that leap.

So there you have it, the broad strokes of how I developed the character that is Drusilla Arenzai. I will share a little more specificity about her come Friday (I think). And as I said, tomorrow will be an art post of a drawing of her. See you around.