A Rose by any other name · 12:37am Jun 21st, 2021
In planning Amphorae, I knew right from the start the social worker would have to be central to the story, every bit as much as the Dazzlings themselves. Creating and fleshing out that character would demand a lot of thought and care.
I started from the need for a security clearance. As I establish in Cook’s Tour, everything to do with the portal is classified secret under the codeword Eloptic Machine. This reflects the fact any modern nation-state of any significant means has an absolutely staggering capacity to gather and process intelligence. There is no way in the universe the government would be unaware of the shenanigans going on in Canterlot City. They might be hazy on details, but knowledge of the portal itself and the visitors from the portal’s other side is an ironclad certainty.
From there it was a short jump to the character being a military veteran, and particularly an officer, partly because I have a weakness for such characters. Middle-aged to balance experience against remaining athleticism. Disabled to explain the change in career. Female because my two existing characters were male, and I wasn’t quite confident enough to write a major nonbinary or trans character. The rest of the personality filled in as I considered who and what makes a good officer and a good, humane helper.
The resulting tough, no-nonsense individual, I realized, would be perfectly suited to dealing with the most difficult, marginal cases. By the process of bureaucratic inertia, those would be the cases she would get. By the time the Dazzlings land on her lap, she’s had many years to build up a whole repertoire of strategies and methods. As FanOfMostEverything once described her, “A little menacing and a lot straightforward, but working for the betterment of those in need.”
Naming characters always has been a trial for me, though oddly enough less so for pony-style names. In this case I cast about for something suitable that was subtly—not overtly—military and historical in nature, to reflect a family tradition of service. For that I simply bumbled around until I stumbled across the phrase rose brass, a largely archaic term for what today is called red brass or gun metal, a bronze alloy originally developed to cast artillery. As a bonus, Rose is an actual woman’s name and “brass” certainly describes her personality.
When I finished Amphorae, I was a little sad because I didn’t have any way to continue writing Rose. Lectern’s New and Used Books gave me a couple of opportunities for cameos, but that was about it.
Then Virga came along, sparked by the question “So what is Sunset doing while the Mane Six are gallivanting around ahead of Tempest Shadow?” Being my story, of course, I couldn’t resist bringing in both Cook and Rose, and what began as a lark turned into an old-fashioned adventure story. And Rose got her very own miracle out of it.
The Campus grew out of “The Last Problem”. A great deal of free-associating brought together disparate threads to answer questions I had about what would happen to the portal, which after all is on a high-school campus, and to the characters associated with it, including my own. Once Rose was able to return to uniform, she stayed in, because she had a job nobody else could do as well.
So I found ways to bring her along. But even so, she was largely secondary to Cook—until Three-act Play. Scampy lobbied hard for a story revolving around Rose and Wallflower. On the principle of “you asked for it, so it’s your job”, I conscripted her as coauthor and we began work on it. We estimated it would be somewhat longer than Amphorae. We were wrong; it has become my longest story, longer even than Virga if one doesn’t count the other-world vignettes in the author notes. Yikes. When all is said and done, Brass Ring might end up longer than Cook’s Tour, which comes as an enormous surprise to me.
Now for the elephant in the room. Yes, I have been an Honor Harrington fan. Yes, Honor Harrington probably was an influence on Rose Brass. Yet many elements were simply convergent evolution, and certainly there are significant differences between the two characters.
First is service—army instead of navy—and that was a conscious choice. Second, Rose definitely is not the superhero Harrington is. Rose is, I think, a more realistic and nuanced character, flawed and traumatized, sometimes struggling, but doing her best to follow a code of honor informed by both her careers.
Both are pistol shooters; both are martial artists. However, they take very different paths to similar destinations that are not at all unusual for many people of military bent. Harrington also is a master swordswoman, while Rose’s knowledge of such weapons is strictly casual and academic.
Harrington rises to become perhaps the finest admiral in the explored galaxy as well as a high-ranking noble. Rose’s career is far more modest, ending at the rank of colonel, but no less satisfying for her.
The clearest resemblance is loss of an eye and an arm. In Harrington’s case that was an authorial homage to Horatio Nelson, though of course advanced technology could make good the losses, even if imperfectly. In Rose’s it was the outcome of a writerly process to achieve specific world-building results.
I wanted the disabilities to be obvious, even striking. Together they needed to be sufficient to sideline her, even as prosthetic limbs are reaching the point of permitting their bearers to keep serving. Damaging face and eye is a very easy way to accomplish both goals, and contributed to the complexity of Rose’s personality and vulnerabilities. The desire for visibility pointed to arm rather than leg for the lost limb.
Last but not least: I don’t know what Rose’s romantic or sexual proclivities are. Rose herself may not be sure. She might be straight. She might be bi. She might be gay. She might even be asexual. I don’t think she’s aromantic, though, and if there’s anything in that whole part of the human Venn diagram she truly misses, it’s having children. The latter yearning is why she threw herself so completely into her work at Social Services.
Yes, she was married, albeit briefly. How much the dissolution of that union was due to him, how much to her, how much to a mismatch based on societal cishet expectations, and how much to strains and tensions between the two of them—including military service—still is unclear to me and maybe to her.
Always fascinating to peek behind the scenes, especially in a setting so grounded in how our own world actually works. The results with Rose have been fantastic. I'm looking forward to more of her.