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Why did you do this.

Heck yeah!

Alright, so. I actually had a horrible childhood since infancy, and Chris/Solemn is semi-autobiographical. The novel explores not so much the events in Solemn’s history, as how it affects them now, focusing on healing and on the craving for loving family that they had since they were small. Like Chris, I also fantasized from a very young age about being rescued from abuse, neglect, and abandonment by strangers, who would pity, love, and care for me. And so the novel explores Chris discovering and grappling with attachment disorder among the other issues. When I was that age, I also wanted to be Don Bluth; and I spent most of my life writing, drawing, and creating music that channeled my trauma, feelings, and what I was learning into art.

My novel’s spiritual predecessors always had that intelligent child character. I both wanted them to be a “woobie” child, but also able to have experienced enough to become “broken”, and to learn to heal. And I wanted the power fantasy where they saved their family and the world. While in previous ideas the setting was different, I ultimately settled on an afterlife to raise the stakes; to allow the setting to more naturally encourage talk about healing, self-improvement, and important timely topics; and to allow a true “happily ever after” wish fulfillment. So this afterlife the novel takes place in now has really cool themes and features. Reincarnation pods that determine your new body based on what your psyche wants, all situated on the space station Advent Terminus. Spaceships, sub-light travel, psychic features and tech that work with them, and a lot of domestic technology that makes living and productivity easier. I wouldn’t call this “hard sci-fi” by a long shot, but it is pretty well-thought-out, grounded, and pragmatic. Seraphs themselves have science fantasy powers— telepathy between seraphs (which has a really cool explanation that factors into the plot in several ways), and “ionic fields” they form around their bodies or other objects. The ionic fields separate them from outside matter and forces, which allows for defying gravity (flight), telekinesis, near-invulnerability, and sub-light travel at .9x. Spaceships and Advent Terminus also use ionic fields to keep in atmosphere, maintain gravity, leave or enter a planet’s atmosphere easily, and travel at .3x.

For Chris’s new name, they didn’t want anyone from Earth to remember them. They wanted to start anew. The first night that Chris’s new foster mom brings them home, she validates Chris’s bad life and their deserving to be loved. She then reads them a poem about appreciating the duality of a bad day, called “Sing a Solemn Song”. So they choose the name “Solemn”.

As for the political side, seraphs separate humans to one of four of the five planets based on simple and pragmatic definitions of their ethical and emotional maturity, and encourage individuals to improve themselves so they can “ascend” to another planet in the solar system if they wish. Seraphs are social workers and keepers of the peace, and only get involved in government if human rights are being systemically violated. This system allows people to become better so they can move away from a more problematic and exploitative planet/society, potentially to the paradisical planet. But peoples’ lives are generally pretty good regardless of the planet, due to the foundations seraphs set and make sure are still working, as well as the seraphs’ social work when needed.

So about the planet separation. Eris is for people who believe they are good, or want to be good, but who struggle to challenge their flaws. They might be, say, your grandma who goes to church and helps with charity, but who believe interracial marriage and trans people are bad. Or they might be self-righteous against, say, people who do casual drug usage. Nemesis however is for people who know they are harmful and simply don’t yet care. So Nemesis is a soft prison where people have their own homes and jobs, but seraphs have more say in laws and they make sure people are separated better so they’re not harming others. So what if people from Nemesis want to become better, so they are allowed to leave? Well, a lot of people on Eris don’t believe in forgiveness or in rehabilitation, and they often rely on platforms of self-righteousness and fear. And KAPE is the most-prominent group of such people, and are political activists. And our husband-and-wife main villain duo are at the head of this.

What’s more is this issue extends to Solemn’s new family— though I won’t spoil why. Something happens concerning it, and… long story short, Solemn becomes a seraph. But when the seraphs are killed by the main antagonists and KAPE, Solemn isn’t affected nearly as much due to the psychic feature I vaguely mentioned before, and they are the last seraph remaining. Until our villain duo kidnaps Solemn to read their mind and learn how it happened (same way minds are read when first arriving so seraphs can present the body you want to you, and place and help you when you are reincarnated). Then the husband becomes a beefed up seraph, and the spouses and their KAPE military continue their war on the world order.

The villains, Solemn’s family members, and the supporting characters (including their helper android Iota) are all really richly-developed and cool, too, and have their own major struggles that factor into the story heavily. But that’s another post altogether.

If you have any more questions, I would love to answer them. I love getting questions or feedback. I also upload a semi-public WIP draft as I work on it, if you want to see any of it. I warn though that it’s still cheesy or unfocused at a few points.

Four people suggested this was AI-made, and I’m gonna be honest that it’s frustrating (not that I’m mad at you). I like to keep all stages of commissions; and so I have all dozen or so stages, plus the redline-work I did and sent back to them to help them understand what I was going for.

The art style in this pic isn’t how I see Solemn in my head; but it gets the broad strokes down, and I find that it looks more like Solemn to me the more I look at it. I do wish it were more accurate to real body and feature shapes and proportions, but there’s only so many edits I can request before it starts being rude/frustrating.

I paid this person $60 for their work, on Fiverr. They have a nice (and consistent) portfolio, and I told them they could put this pic up on it too!

Also, if you want more details on the world or on why I am writing this, I posted a giant wall of text in the replies here. (Plus a list of character diversity, but that’s not the one I mean.)