InBrightestDay

Okay, listen, I read, and this precisely how I’ve defined this in the past, enough of this story to know what happens, and then avoided being really depressed by not thinking about it. The combination of the chapter and talking about this is keeping the story in my head, and if we talk about this any more, I am going to be very tempted to go over to the Depravity Repository, copy Metroid: Last Mission, paste it into a PM and send it to you, so that that way it can live in your head too. And yes, of course it’s a Metroid story. Deschrimung wouldn’t be a Predator worth his salt if he didn’t get himself a Samus trophy. I’m sorry; that was kind of mean. My feelings are a little off-kilter at the moment. Moving on... I actually wondered that myself. Her description is striking enough that I figured she had to be from somewhere, but I couldn’t place her. Yeah, in any of the following stories he’d sneak up on her and stab her through the face with his wristblades. I mean, it’s really similar, just more mean-spirited. Sorry for talking about that again, speaking of which... Honestly, that criticism wasn’t fair. At a guess it was probably bleedover from the other story. I was probably wanting Lara to put up a better fight because of my feelings about Samus. Don’t tempt me! Actually, if I did this, she would probably be tall to pass for a man, with relatively small breasts (again, easier to pass as a man), and I’d probably follow the Anne Bonny example and have her have joined the crew after falling for the captain of the ship, with him getting killed by either a xenomorph or a Predator partway through the story, forcing her to try and rally the crew… Shit, I might write this. I’ll just add it to WitS, The Spider House, Sigrid and Reynard’s story, Aldreda and Elis’s story, New Year’s Visitation, The Arena… This might not happen for a while. Game mechanics! Actually kind of makes sense. I wonder how many pulse rifle rounds you have to fire into a Predator in the AvP games to kill it.

Oh my God that’s amazing! I’d already read the chapter in question (the Lara Croft one) by the time I said that, so there wasn’t really any way to avoid it, but I appreciate the thought. As for the copying thing, I don’t mean you were plagiarized, merely that a commissioned Deathstalker fic (a tie-in to the Gogedheh series, referenced several times in My Enemy’s Enemy) very much seems to have taken inspiration from that chapter, with several plot elements being reused and certain imagery as well. The ending bit with Gogedheh, while not written precisely the same way, is nonetheless so similar to a bit with the Predator in that story that it was the exact moment I decided these two were linked. Yeah, that’s...that’s the guy from the story I’m talking about. Yeah, he counts her in the other stories, so I did too. Yeah, that was a fun thought. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll find a way to one-up her! Yeah, I actually saw that a while back. That’s a nice piece of work.

The first movie is, in my opinion, honestly a decent entry. It’s not R-rated like both franchises and a lot of the characters are kind of bland (excepting Sanaa Lathan as protagonist Alexa Woods and Lance Henriksen as Charles Bishop Weyland), but it’s nonetheless got some pretty fun action scenes, well done creature effects and the third act is awesome. Yes, Celtic employs plasma bagpipes that play Amazing Grace as they fire, and wields a telescoping shillelagh in close combat! No, in all seriousness the three Yautja were given nicknames in the script, some of which made sense by the final film (Scar is the only one to kill a xenomorph and ritually scar himself with the mark of his clan, thus earning “blooded” status; Chopper has two long arm blades instead of the usual dual wristblades, so he can...you know...chop people up) but Celtic’s name seems to have been a reference to something that didn’t transition from script to finished film. Maybe he was supposed to have Celtic-style weaving line patterns on his bio-helmet or armor or something, but the final design didn’t end up with those. As for Gogedheh getting kicked in the crotch, kicks and blows to the crotch actually are a recurring element in the Deathstalker stories, having happened five times that I can recall, though only once to Gogedheh. Something actually did, but it’s difficult to explain. See, it wasn’t actually anything you wrote (let’s just say you might have been copied, sort of). When the review of the chapter in question goes up I will either be comically mock-indignant with you or genuinely depressed, it’s hard to call. You did actually call Alex a fallen angel, amusingly enough. Oh God I didn’t realize it was a PUN! I mean, it’s from the creator of Dreneparssa and Eparlegna, so I probably should have guessed. Funnily enough, though, “Rehtegog” sounds like a pretty good demon name for one of your stories. That carried over into Multiverse Trophies, where he does seem to be fending off guilt (or at least that’s how I read it). As you say, as the requests went on any semblance of guilt vanished (once the character goes as far as he did in that second story, there’s really no coming back). That’s weird biped tortoise, thank you very much! It’s just so specific. “Fourteen inches and vibrating, got it. We got those modeled on humans and, for the kinkier, horses.” “No! Like, neither of those will work! They need to be donkeys!” “We don’t have those… If you want donkeys specifically, I’m going to have to go to the farm and take measurements and photos and the farmer’s going to think I’m really weird...” “This is totally important!” “I mean okay...” I kind of want to put Jane Maybelline into a fic now, but I don’t know if I have a place for her. Yeah...uh...weirdos. By the way, Uma Thurman is apparently seven inches taller than me. Not that I find that attractive or anything! It does indeed! It was natural enough that I didn’t even notice it at first, not until I started to make the “your princess is in another castle” joke. Maybe it was because the guy on the Pringles can looks vaguely like Mario? I mean, not exactly, but...he’s got a mustache. He’s killed three of those now, by the way, and his apprentice is killing her way up to a fourth. Don’t know what “are we learning yet” meant, but yeah, she did, and that is the best she has ever done against a Predator. Fun fact, there are literally no stories I can find on the internet where Samus fights a Predator other than the ones by Deathstalker, so that only ends one way...so far (I may have unintentionally caused a thing to happen; fingers freaking crossed that it doesn’t go horribly). Oh, and… You’re welcome!

I may yet. It’s hard to say, though, given how difficult Gogedheh’s actual strength is to pin down. I mean, Deathstalker consistently misspells “scraping” and “scraped” as “scrapping” and “scrapped”. Nobody’s perfect. Oh yeah, I noticed that. From my reaction post concerning Multiverse Trophies: Now, I admittedly have not read Five Women. One Night., but looking at the chapter titles I get the idea. A Yautja (Predator, for simplicity's sake, from here on out) arrives on Earth who specifically hunts women. He tracks and kills five of them, Lara Croft, Beatrix Kiddo and Miho from Sin City among them. I should be able to follow this without having any questions. … I don't know what the circumstances are precisely, but somewhere, somehow, JD is responsible for this. So yeah, that answers that! Funny you should mention Eparlegna. Roundabout Becoming the Hunted (wherein Gogedheh wades through the cast of Mass Effect) he pretty much turns into Eparlegna. Morally speaking, and in terms of what they do, they’re essentially the same guy at this point, the only difference being that Gogedheh does this stuff when he’s mad, while Eparlegna does it because it’s fun. On the vocal mimicry, absolutely. I don’t remember Predator 2 as well as I do the first film and Predators, but the City Hunter may have broken someone’s wrist in that. Celtic does it in the first AVP film (a redshirt pulls a gun on him, so he grabs the guy’s wrist and very quickly snaps it). You make a very good point concerning the height difference. Just because the Yautja in the films all tend to be around the same height doesn’t mean there couldn’t be larger ones. As for the internal testicles...maybe you didn’t want to have to describe his balls so you decided they were inside? I appreciate that, though I don’t know if anything in here is going to do what the other stories did (Becoming the Hunted features a torture scene so long and detailed that I didn’t feel anything, emotionally speaking, for a good 15 minutes afterward, or as I put it to Deathstalker...), and there is, like, plenty of entertainment value!

Thank you so much for the recommendation!

Uh...yes! That’s exactly what I meant. They...play matchmaker for one another and then...go on a double date. It’s definitely not something else. And now onto JayDee’s review of Moonlit Snow! Oh, shut up, you! I’m genuinely curious, how did you expect the ending to go? Thank you! This is in large part thanks to you asking that very question. I think (though I can’t remember precisely) you may have even offered me the idea that there were those who felt the prejudice, but had to be careful not to offend the church. It was only while writing the bandit fight that I realized that Hopkin could serve as a representative of the less devout, who would just openly insult Lady Aldreda over her albinism, which brought up the idea that she can pretty well handle blunt insults like that, but that the more “polite” ones hurt worse because of how she just has to take them. The tactical stuff was part of my research into medieval combat, which was where I got both Lady Aldreda’s swordplay moves and the knowledge that plate armor more or less makes you immune to a sword (unless it’s stabbed into the chain mail in the joints), but a mace is still dangerous. As for the Serenity moment, I just loved the idea of it so there was no way it wasn’t making it into the story! I didn’t end up settling on precisely why Hopkin and his bandits started doing this, but they’re definitely somewhat lower class people (hence Hopkin’s “m’lady” as opposed to “my lady”) and my vague idea was something like what you suggested, and a failed harvest seems the most likely thing. Either that or his restaurant chain, IHOPkin, recently went under. The whole “stealing due to hard times” thing is actually what’s behind Aldreda just letting Hopkin and Mack go. She gets the impression from their amateur status that these men may be jerks, but they’re probably only doing this out of desperation, so she wants them to have a second chance. On the “m’lady” thing, Elis is also originally from a lower class background (farm work), but he addresses Aldreda like that so much that when I wrote him saying it as “m’lady”, I kept imagining him donning a fedora. I figure he may have picked up the more formal manner of saying it due to being around Lady Aldreda for the last three years. Thank you! That was another thing picked up through research. Some of the videos I watched were analyzing Hollywood sword fights, and one of the most common things that came up is that movie choreographers love big wide swings because of how cool they look, but in actual combat that’s a bad idea for exactly the reason Lady Aldreda gives. The videos called it “telegraphing”, but given the setting I obviously couldn’t use that term. Yeah I was trying to come up with a word other than “fireworks” and I thought of how when several of them go off in a cluster they can almost look like bouquet of flowers. That was exactly what I was going for. Elis is kind of like the kid with a crush on his teacher, albeit because of her rescuing him she’s more than just a teacher, she’s his idol; his personal hero. There is absolutely that desire on his part to grow up faster, to be the man he thinks she’ll want. Which, of course, leads directly into… That was another thing that came up in research, that there was this swordplay treatise where it was recommended to “end your opponent rightly” by throwing the pommel of the sword at them. Every video I saw said this had to be a joke, so I had Lady Aldreda use it like that, and then decided to compound the joke by having it actually used to end the fight. To an extent yes. He’ll be a more proficient fighter and more adult, though I’d imagine he’ll still look up to Lady Aldreda. That’s kind of a thing in my writing, I guess, where the woman is the man’s protector or teacher or mentor. People seem to be enjoying it thus far, though, so hopefully it will continue to be fun to read. I believe there’s a different thread for that.

I kind of go back and forth about whether or not to ever write a scene with someone under 16. Course, I’ve yet to write anything with a character under 18, so… Actually, “a character under 18” might happen next year. I know what my entries for the next two parties are going to be. In an inversion of the pattern from this year (where the Halloween story had sex in it and the holiday story didn’t), next Halloween will be Fury of the Storm, another yōkai story with a blizzard theme and no sex, while the holiday story doesn’t yet have a title, but it will be me, um, revisiting my roots in terms of adult fiction, with a hopefully-sweet Christmas story about sibling love, which means exactly what you think it means. The younger brother might be 16 in that one, though I haven’t decided yet. Of course, with Aldreda and Elis, it really was mostly that I had plans for the characters and thus wanted to wait until their main story was going. And now, on to your reply for the review of Memories. I really enjoyed it. I love stories like that, where the whole thing looks different on a second read. Well, usually. Every Daenerys scene in Game of Thrones looks different now, but in a way that makes me not want to watch the show again. It seems very in character for her, not pushing the guy, but still offering it. His response is also kind of why I love stories like this. “I’ll wait for you, no matter how long it takes” is an idea I’ve always found very romantic, and knowing the personality of this vampire, I love thinking about her very tsundere-ish response to it. Oh, I totally got that. No, he’d be under punishment by the time of that story. Shit-talked his boss a bit too much. Well, as George Lucas once said, “They’re cliches because they work!” I started explaining why this makes me feel the way it does, but I got rather nervous about upsetting people, so I’ll just say that overly sentimental or not, it really, really affects me. I’ll get to your review of Moonlit Snow soon!

You’re not wrong! What’s going on is that, while the definition of albinism in mammals is pretty firm (it gets murky in other animals because melanin isn’t their only pigment) there are multiple kinds of albinism, medically speaking, differentiated by the genetic mutations that cause them. Oculocutaneous albinism is the most common kind and there are different types of that based on what genes are mutated. As for the red eyes, recall that I said Lady Aldreda has oculocutaneous albinism type 2. What you’re thinking of is type 1. OCA2 is caused by a mutation of the OCA2 gene (named after the thing the mutation causes!) on Chromosome 15, a gene that codes for melanocyte-specific transporter protein. I could explain the biochemistry a bit more, but what it amounts to is a drastically decreased production of melanin, but the body does still make some, and melanin gives the iris its color. Large amounts of melanin result in brown eyes, while very small amounts, like in OCA2, result in icy blue eyes. OCA2 is the most common form of albinism, occurring in either 1in 20,000 or 1 in 15,000 births (sources vary slightly) OCA1, on the other hand, is far rarer (1 in 40,000 births), but is probably the most iconic form of albinism, caused by a mutation of the TYR (tyrosinase) gene on Chromosome 11. People with OCA1 don’t make any melanin, not even in their eyes. As a result, the iris is transparent, and you can see the red blood in the retina through the iris, hence the red color. I actually wanted Lady Aldreda to have OCA1 in my initial planning stage, as I thought the red eyes would look cool, factor into the negative reactions to her and contribute to her exotic beauty (there probably would have been a bit during Elis’s description of Aldreda talking about her striking ruby-colored eyes) but I ran into a problem. You see, melanin doesn’t just color your iris or help keep your skin from being hurt by the sun. It’s actually important in the development of multiple parts of the eye, including the iris, retina, optic nerve and eye muscles, so a total lack of the chemical has adverse effects on vision. People with OCA2 may sometimes suffer from problems with bright lights, but people with OCA1 have it far worse. You’ve heard of 20/20 vision? Well, people with OCA1 can have 20/200 or even 20/400 vision. They’re not blind, but it’s a pretty severe impairment. This wouldn’t necessarily hinder Lady Aldreda’s melee capability (she could compensate for decreased vision with her other senses), but I also wanted her to be good with her crossbow, and she needs sight for that. Thank you again for the compliment, and I’m sorry for the biology lesson I just gave you above. Well, given that this is sort of a retelling of the story, when you mentioned the Great Fog of ‘64, I figured it might be a reference and did some research. By the time you mentioned ‘39, I knew what that was about. Oops! Had that backwards...

On an amusing note, @GeorgeGlass reviewed Moonlit Snow at almost the same moment I reviewed The Ninth Reindeer! Thank you so much! I did a lot of research for this, and by extension for the other stories that will feature Aldreda and Elis, and most of it centered on medieval and early Renaissance weapons, armor and combat, so learning about stuff like the different types of swords and armor and so forth. The sword training was based on stuff I learned there, including both Aldreda’s “hand behind your back” thing… ...and her advice about using shorter movements and not going for the big wide swing because it shows the enemy what you’re doing. the videos I watched referred to this as “telegraphing”, but since the telegraph obviously doesn’t exist in the setting, I had to explain it some other way. Finally, I also learned about both some swordplay (the bit where Aldreda alternates left-right-left-right-stab is an actual technique, meant to do just what it does in story: lock the enemy into a repetitive set of movements and leave him unprepared for when you change things up) and about how different weapons interact with different kinds of armor, such as how her plate armor would render Lady Aldreda pretty much immune to swords or axes, but weapons like maces and certain polearms could still really hurt her. Yeah, that was a joke that only emerged during research, with a number of medieval combat videos talking about it. Apparently it pops up in an old German treatise on sword fighting (starting with “to end thine opponent rightly...”), and since it, as you said, unbalances your sword and makes it more difficult to fight with, and since the pommel itself is unlikely to hurt someone wearing armor, pretty much everyone is certain it’s a joke. One video I watched suggested that this might have been, for all intents and purposes, trolling, an instructor giving his students a ridiculous idea because it would be freaking hilarious to see them try to do it during sparring. As you suspected, its inclusion here is Lady Aldreda playing a bit with Elis when he tries to rush his training, only for him to take it seriously and actually make it work! Thanks! I mention it during the overview of the dinner she goes to, but Lady Aldreda gets varying reactions to her condition, with one reaction being to make open, insulting jokes about her being a corpse or some sort of undead, and I imagine for that she tends to get bitingly sarcastic in her responses. That was definitely a challenge. Unlike After Party, which used the “like reality unless otherwise noted” idea, this took place in its own world. I could get away with certain things being similar to reality (a feudal system like medieval England, and hints of countries analogous to East Asia), but I had to craft a unique religion, and it was hard to figure out how much of that to explain. I should probably clarify that Lady Aldreda isn’t a vampire. That was just a mean-spirited jab Hopkin threw at her. I was trying to generate some level of mystery for the audience about what exactly her deal is, and I figured some people might assume she really is a vampire. I explained it to an extent during the dinner overview, stating that she was “born without color” and that her condition is rare, one out of tens of thousands of births. She’s not a vampire; she’s albino. The scientific term for this is “oculocutaneous albinism type 2.” OCA2 occurs in roughly 1 in 20,000 births, and the lack of pigmentation results in Aldreda’s distinct look as well as her problems. Her lack of melanin means that she sunburns at the drop of a hat, which is why she doesn’t really go outside during the day and covers her skin when she does. This also leads to her visual problem. Albino people often suffer from photophobia (sensitivity to bright lights) due to a phenomenon called ocular straylight, wherein light scatters inside the eyeball; it’s the biological equivalent of a lens flare in a camera (which even happens the same way, with light scattering inside the camera). Because of this, she operates better in softer light, like moonlight or starlight, and between the photophobia and the ease with which she sunburns, she does most of her work at night, and as a result has developed very good night vision. Thank you so much! Pretty much the entire story was written to lead up to that scene. I meant it to be sweet and romantic, and I’m really happy it seems to be working for people. Thank you for the review!

@Thundercloud gives Moonlit Snow its first review! I did briefly consider having Aldreda and Elis have sex, or at least share a kiss, but there were two reasons I didn’t do that. The first is that I wanted JayDee to be able to read this, and they don’t read anything with a character below sixteen, so Elis is just one year too young. Of course, I could have just made Elis sixteen, but that brings me to the second reason: as you guessed, I have plans for these two. Thank you! It’s a very G-rated romantic moment, but I felt like it could still be very sweet given what it means for the two of them. I’m very glad it worked! Also very glad that worked! I was trying to write Elis as believably feeling like a fifteen year old, not quite a little kid anymore, but not really a man yet either. Hold that thought… So I didn’t know about Lucky Luke, but I did figure something like this might happen. “Dalton” is from the Old English meaning “valley town” (a valley being called a dale, and thus “dale town”), but plenty of English names were derived from the place the person lived in, so I figured it might sound like somebody. Sorry about that. Thank you, and now we bring back that thought you were holding above. Much like After Party was an introduction for Yua and Cody as a couple, who will later have their own story, Moonlit Snow is one for Aldreda and Elis. There will be three more stories set in this world, one starring a human named Reynard and a giantess named Sigrid, and the other two starring Aldreda and Elis. The first one will take place when Elis is twelve and he first meets Lady Aldreda and, as you might expect, won’t feature any sex due to his age. The second, longer one will happen when Aldreda and Elis have to stop a huge supernatural threat. That one will take place when Elis is twenty and Aldreda 32, and that’s when the sexual relationship will happen. Since Moonlit Snow is in between these stories, I figured I could show them inching toward that eventual relationship, growing just that little bit closer to one another. Thanks for the review!

It may has to do with two things, the first being, as you suggested, the acting ability of your average porn star, but it may also have to do with the writing philosophy behind porn. I tend to think of porn as being like fast food: the goal is to get the product (the sex scene, in this case) to the customer as quickly as possible, and as such the story and character beats are reduced to the bare minimum to get to “the good stuff.” This is why I prefer written erotica: while there’s overlap, at its best erotica is less like fast food and more like a sit-down restaurant. You wait for the sex scene, but you spend time with characters you like and get buildup (appetizers, if you will), so that when your main course finally arrives, it’s more rewarding. Yeah, it can come across like Stockholm Syndrome if it’s done wrong. In fanfiction it can also bother me depending on what character it’s applied to, but that would turn into a rant if I discussed it, so I’ll just leave it at that. Thank you for joining the party!

Posted!

I’m going to be the last one to post; I’m really sorry about this! I’m really hoping to have it up before Christmas, and rest assured, you will all get reviews from me!

Crap. I swear I’m working on mine. I would be done by now, but I’m also helping someone else write something for another site (if you want to blame someone for this...uh...JayDee will do). Fair warning: Moonlit Snow is a dreaded NoSex story. Hopefully the fuzzies will be warm enough that it will be nice to read, though. Assuming this site is still here a year from now, I promise some proper smut for next Christmas!

We all have new reviews from @Thundercloud! Thanks! I wanted the initial approach to the house to slowly build a vaguely creepy atmosphere. Are there jorōgumo in Inuyasha, or is it just the mention of yōkai in general? I’m so glad that worked out. I had a lot of fun writing the initial segment where it’s dark and Yua is just this creepy voice from the darkness, and we know something is moving around up there, but we can’t see her. As for the sexy part, I’d never written any bondage before, so it was kind of tough to do. BDSM often involves some level of physical pain, but I figured that while Cody is submissive, he is not a masochist, and in fact if Yua caused him any real pain it might bring up bad memories of the house he came from, so the closest I got to pain was that little prickling thing she does with her claws. Out of curiosity, what did you mean about the plot twist at the end? As for more like this, there is another story that features Yua and Cody called Parlor Games, but that doesn’t have any sex in it. There is eventually going to be a considerably bigger story with these two where we find out how they met, and as I’ll be shooting for erotic horror/dark romance there, that one will have sexual content.

I might have a thing. I got to introduce Yua and Cody for Halloween, so for the Holiday anthology I might be able to introduce Elis and Lady Aldreda. They live in a medieval fantasy world, though so it would just be a winter solstice celebration (their version of New Year’s) rather than any real-world winter holiday. On top of all that, I was prodded by an author on another site to write a thing I’d outlined but been afraid to write and...you know what? Put me down as a “hopefully.”

If it is bad, you’re in good company. Around Halloween, I had a lengthy conversation with InvidiaRed over insect mouthparts due to a throwaway line in his story, and just yesterday I made an author on another site blink by explaining how much research I had to do to figure out if you could use water to hide from something that sees infrared. *notices everyone else staring* It’s more complicated than it seems, okay? The infrared spectrum is huge!

Yua’s secret backstory confirmed. It actually sounds like something that would be fun to continue. Out of curiosity, why did you go with writing it as a period piece? I apologize for nothing. The funny thing is that the prompt apparently came from someone named Agoras, which sounds like a cool name for a demon. The skin-suit actually sounds like a cool and really creepy idea too!

A lot of the jokes are about how humorously unremarkable the couple is, but they work! Ones that spring to mind are probably Mal’s introductory line, “did you know this is the place with the longest name beginning with X...” icebreaker line. That it works makes the whole thing. I actually imagine that’s right. “Erotic Couplings” which is the vanilla stuff with no specific kinks, is the single largest category on Literotica (Incest is the second largest, and BDSM is third...I’m sure it’s a masochistic category so it enjoys being third). I haven’t read any Naruto fanfics, so I’ll have to take your word on that one. That makes way too much sense.

Well, as if my “stories to be written” pile isn’t big enough, now I’m thinking about a romantic comedy involving a man and the naiad who has come to inhabit his toilet cistern.

As I recall Mizore is how you learned about yuki-onna. And yeah, a bit of research shows that Keito is a sadistic minor villain from the show, and is indeed a jorōgumo. She even kind of looks like how I described Yua’s in-between form (a woman with black and yellow spider legs sprouting from her torso). Hers sprout from her abdominal muscles, which is a look I considered, but I felt like it would be potentially gross for the readers to imagine. Granted, that was no doubt the intended effect with Keito. I did actually find a sympathetic jorōgumo story after I left that last post. It seems episode 7 of Dororo features a jorōgumo who, after narrowly escaping combat with the protagonist, is rescued by an unsuspecting human whom she eventually falls in love with. Also, while Rachnera from Daily Life with Monster Girl isn’t a jorōgumo, she is technically a non-bad spider woman. I wasn’t counting her before since DLwMG is primarily a comedy. And yes, anime can absolutely be culturally enriching, especially the series that introduce mythology or aspects of Japanese culture! Thanks!

@GeorgeGlass reviews After Party! Cody enjoys the game sometimes. Like the story says, he’s glad they don’t do that every time they have sex, since he enjoys their more normal time in bed. He is naturally more gentle and submissive, though. The “Hollywood royalty” thing was me trying to find a good way to describe just how well she wears her (apparent) age. I’m glad it worked! The alien sense of morality is something from the myths I really wanted to incorporate. I never defined this term in-story, but yōkai is a word that describes a wide variety of magical creatures from Japanese mythology. The word is often translated into English as “demons”, but that’s horribly inaccurate. Yōkai come in many forms, but the closest western equivalent to them is probably the Fair Folk from European and Celtic myth, primarily because, like fairies, yōkai have a very strong sense of morality, but it’s different from the kind humans have. I was painfully aware of that stereotype, and definitely wanted to avoid it. It seems like in any story featuring a spider woman of some kind (jorōgumo or otherwise), she always has to be preparing to kill and/or eat the male character or something like that. Yes, sexual cannibalism (the technical term for when the female of a species eats the male during or after mating) is well-documented in spiders, to the point that several Latrodectus species have actually gotten their name from it (widow spiders), but even among those species it doesn’t occur 100% of the time. The frequency of sexual cannibalism depends on a number of factors, including how aggressive the female is, how well fed she is in general, specific nutrients in her diet and, I swear I’m not making this up, foreplay. So yeah, I got a little fed up with how ubiquitous this idea was, and wanted a story where the spider woman is genuinely threatening and creepy, but it turns out that while she’s a threat to other people, she isn’t one to the male lead, and that was the genesis of this couple. Yua is a jorōgumo just like you’d read about in the old tales, a seductive, flesh-eating monster...and yet in spite of everything you’d expect, she adores this boy she’s chosen as her mate. It makes her a somewhat more interesting character to me.

After Party gets another review! This one comes from the awesome @CloverReef This may sound a bit odd, but thank you for that! I definitely wanted sweet, but I was worried that I lost creepy in the process, so I’m glad to hear that I did get both feelings in the story. Don’t count on me to do that crafting thing as well in any other story! As for the brief glimpses, that was very much intentional. See, this was originally supposed to be a sequel. I mentioned this in my response to JayDee, but I have a planned story called The Spider House, which is going to be about how eighteen year old Cody is forced one day to go near the neighborhood haunted house. It’s covered in webs and the forest around it is crawling with spiders, so the local folks all just call it the Spider House. To Cody’s surprise, a beautiful woman named Yua lives in the Spider House, and the two begin to bond. After Party was originally just catching up with Yua and Cody two years later, but when I had the mad impulse to throw this into the Halloween Party, I realized I couldn’t depend on readers knowing who these characters were. Still, I didn’t want to spoil too much of The Spider House in the process. Obviously I spoiled that Yua is a creature from Japanese mythology, but aside from that I tried to keep things vague: that Cody had a rough life and that Yua rescued him, but not what was rough and how she did so. I’m glad that actually paid off. I loved writing that whole thing. I was shooting for fear of the unknown, and I felt like Yua was at her creepiest there in the beginning, when we know she’s some kind of spider-themed creature but we don’t yet know what she looks like, we can only hear her voice and see the web shift and hear the wood creak as she moves around. Hearing that you got so absorbed that you forgot to take notes is an amazing compliment. And this is also an amazing compliment! I was very nervous about the sex scene, as I always am when I write them. It’s only the third one I’ve ever written (well, the third one involving the main characters; there’s a tentacle scene involving a minor character in another story), and the first time I’ve ever written anything involving bondage. It’s also my first try at a dominant/submissive relationship, but given that Yua is a giant, intelligent spider, and given the (arachnophobe warning: link leads to spider pic) size and power difference between female spiders and their male counterparts (yes, those are N. clavata males and a female in that photo), female dominance seemed like the right way to go for the character. Tragically, “porn writing skillz” is not something I can tell my family about or put on a job application. As far as making Yua erotic and beautiful in her in-between form, it was sort of a balancing act. Jorōgumo (the specific type of yōkai that Yua is) have been depicted many different ways. One of the more common depictions is the “drider” type (like a centaur, but with a spider instead of a horse for the lower body), but I didn’t want to go that far in the monster direction. I liked the other common type of jorōgumo illustration, a woman with spider legs sprouting from her back, and used that as the base, adding a few more spider characteristics like the six eyes and the claws on her fingertips. I think the eyes were what I was most worried about turning people off, and JayDee does seem to have felt a little squirmy over those! I think something that helped was the sensory deprivation aspect of the bondage. Since the story is told from Cody’s PoV, once Yua webs over his eyes, we experience the world through what he can hear and feel, so it’s really just like he’s with a normal woman, with only occasional reminders that she’s anything else. The one idea that I came up with in the scene that I was kind of proud of was the idea of Yua talking while her lips were touching Cody. I thought the idea of feeling her lips brush against his skin as she spoke, or her, as I wrote it, caressing him with her breath, was kind of hot. Hey, the only part she destroyed was the shirt!