My Little Xenophilia. · 10:57am Jun 29th, 2017
I am finishing my fic.
Finally.
It just clicked one day (and I think I barely wrote a hundred words on said day), that this is it. The final stretch.
Sure, I still have 5-7k words to put in. Sure, there are almost thirty placeholders I'm yet to fill. And yes, I still have an unresolved B-plot, and a huge hole of vagueness where the second act is supposed to be. But it feels like I'm finally somewhere at the end of this almost painfully slow journey, that if I dig a little deeper, work a little harder then in a month or two I might finally be able to start publishing the next bit of my Sunset adventures.
Yay!
So a bit more attention is now spared for the bit after the next. Adventure number four, the fall of Griffinstone, intrigue, high court, a lot of badly translated poetry and gratuitous Spanish. What do all those things have to do with each other?
I'll tell you once I figure it out.
But before I do, I need your guys's help.
Among many characters (and almost none of them canon) I plan to introduce a character who is a courtesan at the King Grover's court, at the height of it's glory days. The sort of old-school high-class hetaira, kinda like Thais of Alexander the Great.
What I am not sure about, is whether to make her a gryphoness or a pony.
On one hand, that sort of character would be very much defined by the social graces and immaculate grooming that you'd associate with the unicorns (or if you want to play slightly against the stereotype - a pegasus), and I certainly do not want any predatory traits you'd associate with gryphons, even (or rather, especially) before the loss of Idol of Boreas.
On the other, she clearly would cater to mostly gryphon clientele, and while some appeals to "exotic beauty" and to desire to "own", or at least patron someone who would represent a neighboring and much more powerful and prosperous nation, could be made, in the final account a hetaira must be appealing in a rather directly sexual way, so the question is - would it work across the species?
Realistically, not only the difference of appearance would be not immaterial, but more than that, those are different biological species (one assumes) and therefore their subconscious social cues for sex would be entirely different. But then again, there was a decent argument in Alan Dean Foster's "Spellsinger" that if said cues would be instead similar (and perhaps that is a learnable skill?) then appearance would matter much less. And the pegasus character would let me play up the ancient greek theme, that I do so love...
So I am somewhat torn, so I am using my lifeline, and asking the audience, all of the 29 people who are following this blog - what do you guys think? What character would work better with this concept?