CHAPTER 127: THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR
The Cutting Room Floor:
This is more writing-oriented than world-building, so if you're not interested, then feel free to ignore this.
On Katarina:
Katarina went through a whole slew of different inspirational archetypes before I settled on her as a character.
First, Warhammer 40k Sisters of Battle. Fanatical, zealotous, clad in power armor and empowered by faith. It worked to an extent, but I wasn't really comfortable with how it turned out. Writing her like that, there was too much chafing, she was rigidly inflexible and the exact opposite of how I wanted to portray her.
I tried my hand at Inquisitors and Witch Hunters from both Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy, respectively, but again, it didn’t really fit with what I wanted for Katarina.
Warhammer 40k fans will recognize the names of Living Saints in the story anyway...
Stephen King’s "The Dark Tower" series was a big influence in the beginning, but Roland is too focused on his goal to provide any sense of real inspiration.
Poetry:
T.S Elliot’s "The Wasteland"
W.B. Yeats "The Second Coming"
Robert Browning’s "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
And a lot of e.e. cummings.
There’s this scene in Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon that’s like, "A flower doesn’t have a name; a flower’s name is just something that someone else slapped on it." That resonated with me, but I still couldn’t get close to Katarina’s "ideal".
I got closer by reading "Gunslinger Girl" by Lyndsay Ely (It’s a novel, totally unrelated to the Gunslinger Girls manga/ anime) and "Red Sparrow", a book by Jason Matthews, but still couldn’t quite "get there".
Also Ayla from the "Earth’s Children" series played a part in forming her character, buuuuuut...
But I still couldn’t get Katarina down, her personality. I couldn’t (for lack of a better phrase) find her heartbeat.
Anyway, I dithered around with a paladin (that for some reason wore leather armor) and carried around guns for a while before I settled down with her class, but I talked about that already. I want to talk about her character.
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I returned to my D&D roots and re-examined her character sheet. Alignment: Chaotic Good.
I kept asking myself, "What would be the best way to represent a "Chaotic Good" character?" Oftentimes, people wander off into the "murderhobo" mentality of "chaotic neutral" and handwavium it with "lol I’m chaotic netral I do whatever the fuck I want, hahahaha!"
Obviously I didn’t want to go that route.
For Katarina, "Chaotic Good" revolves around the worship of her Goddess directly, rather than following the rules of the Church. (That actually created a few problems for me later on, which I’ll get into directly)
Finally I reviewed my setting notes, and everything came together.
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Now we get into the World Building:
The Church of Angland (and thus the Anglish Empire) is more or less matriarchal in the major cities. There was a massive civil war that tore the Empire apart that was instigated when men held power.
Afterword, it was decided that only women should hold positions of authority.
In smaller cities and towns where survival is critically important, men hold authority, but, because it’s small-town politics, a man can’t gain a whole lot of authority or wield a great deal of power outside of his own village. Even then, (on paper) a woman owns the land, the man just administrates it.
Women hold authority. I went full balls-to-the-wall with it in Ardeal (can I really say "balls to the wall" with a matriarchy? Fuck it, I do what I like.)
One thing the Church likes to do is snatch up second, third, fourth children from noble families and say "The goddess has chosen them to serve" but really it’s just a way for the Church to exert power over the noble class while increasing their own numbers.
Men can join the clergy, the knighthood, the priests and clerics, but they can't be paladins. Paladins are an exclusively female class of warrior. They can fight on the front lines, but their real value comes from game theory and command of tactics. Functionally there’s zero difference between a male "knight" and a female "paladin" except that men must defer to women. That’s it. To further muddy the water, there are female warriors and male warriors, but that has nothing to do with this conversation at all.
Anyway, Katarina’s sister was a mage, Katarina was recruited to be a Witch Hunter, and suddenly we have political intrigue where there was none before. Whoops!
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I wanted Katarina to have both a "noble lineage" so that she could be recruited by the church to become a Witch Hunter and a "troubled past" that’d fit with "Chaotic Good".
Oftentimes, a writer will say that a girl with a troubled past was raped as a child. It’s a trope. To avoid the trope, I went with some bullies and a teacher that betrayed her.
...
For the record, Devon wasn’t originally going to be a "bad guy". He wasn’t a "villain" in the twirling moustache, monocle, world domination, stroking white cats sort of way. He respected Katarina, her willpower, her determination, her drive to excel in everything that was thrown at her. Ultimately, he wanted to cultivate her talents to be the best possible person that she could be and then court her, as an adult. (OMG GROOMING)
His problem was that he didn't really take into account that she had a will of her own; he tried to force the issue using blasphemous powers, and got a bullet in the head for his trouble.
Katarina’s sexuality:
I didn’t want to deal with this. I just wanted a badass woman doing badass things in a rough world where strength is determined by the strength of your sword. (or gun, in her case). But that can only take you so far when your Goddess is a Goddess of Sex and War. (Seriously, look up Inanna. She’s the Akkadian/ Sumerian goddess of sexuality and war).
To Katarina, there’s only a few things on her mind... usually. "Kill the Witch" (her job), "Fuck the Church" (because of the way they’ve treated her in the past), and "Worship the Goddess". Sex and sexuality don’t really play a part in that.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
Thinking to myself, considering things from Katarina’s angle, what sort of "partner" would suit her?
The answer always came back, "Well, who does she respect?"
Her Master left a really strong, lasting impression on her. That basically "set the bar" with her as far as partners. If there were someone she could become romantically involved with, she’d have to respect them. They’d have to be really fuckin’ amazing to get through the veneer of jaundiced cynicism she’d armored her heart with.
She got along with Gared from Aston and that totally could have been a thing. It ended up not being a thing. She slept with a prostitute, and that didn’t really jive with her either. It did let her know (as far as her Goddess was concerned) that sex for the sake of pleasure was perfectly fine as far as the Goddes is concerned about such matters, but ultimately it wasn't very fulfilling for her.
Anyway...
But if Katarina was going to be chosen as a Living Saint by the Goddess, wouldn’t it make sense for her to be more than just an avatar of death to mages?
I had to do some thinking. I gave her a partner that would trip her up, and was a little crazy herself: Olivia. Olivia was a li’l schemer. She was a planner, a plotter. (In early drafts, Olivia was also known for her fiery temper and hysteric outbursts) Katarina was an Action Girl; jump in with guns blazing. Oil and water. They initially hated each other, and eventually came together. I’m not really that good at portraying romance in the classical sense, so I more or less just threw a bunch of shit in the pot and fished out what seemed like a good idea at the time.
The Cutting Room Floor:
There’s a lot of scenes I left on the cutting room floor. Things I cut out for story flow, various scenes that didn’t convey what I wanted them to convey, and also... a lot of shit that I cut out of the story because ... sometimes the narrative changes.
Book 4:
A huge chunk of Book 4 was cut out.
Did you know that ‘Ardeal’ is the Romanian word for ‘Transylvania’?
Book 4 was gonna be a straight-up gothic vampire romp from start to finish. Lots of vampires, transylvanian lore, gothic edifices, towering churches, bleak mountains, "creatures of the night... what music do they make?"
Hot Bits: "Alsabet" is a version of "Erzabet", as in Erzabet Bathory, the Bloody Countess, the most prolific serial killer in human history, with a body count of upwards of 800 people.
Schactice Castle was where she died.
...
Unfortunately, it didn’t go the way I wanted, and I felt pressured by deadlines, so I cut out a bunch of stuff that didn’t "fit", left some allusions and implications that some serious shit went down, and left it at that.
I regret it a lot.
There was a portion where Katarina, Ollara, and Elizabeth storm a city filled with mages, mutants and all sorts of nastiness, only for the mages to tear the entire city out of the ground and set it on a course for Darnell. There were chapters of running battles and confrontations, and ultimately Katarina saves the day by breaking the magical device that keeps the city aloft and crashing the flying city into some mountains.
There was a whole arc where Katarina (in the city) is also being hunted by a cadre of nuns wearing golden skull-faced masks, black nun habits, all carrying golden swords that were constantly on fire. (They thought she was one of the mages because they’d never seen guns before)
Eventually they teamed up and defeated the flying city!
But it was long and wordy and it was in draft form- there was no set conclusion.
Because it was in draft form, there were several branches where Ollara died, where Ollara and Elizabeth died, (and because that’d contradict why the Goddess would give her a holy sword, I rewrote it so that Elizabeth survived the crash, but woke up with no memory of the event and would later sort pass into history as a paladin of renown on her own, quite oblivious to her involvement in Katarina’s story)
...I couldn’t decide where to go with it, I felt pressured by deadlines, so I just cut it out.
There were also elements where Ollara came to Darnell and was slaughtered on the docks, or ended up teaming up with Alayne to free Katarina from the Inquisition...
Book 5:
I rewrote book 5 a number of times.
There was a whole scene where Katarina is caught and arrested by the Inquisition and tortured (and miraculously healed!) that I eventually dropped.
I picked it back up later, and went with "We tortured her, found nothing heretical about her, and then mindwiped her" and that felt a little better, but I cut that part out as well. What's the first thing Katarina is going to do when she wakes up with a hole in her memories? Try and put things back together. You can see bits and pieces of the setup for those scenes here and there.
...
There were variety of ways I wrote Katarina’s "grand reveal" of the Emerald Tablets, the Saint’s Relics, and the fact that she was a half-celestial, but I figured "big reveals" would destroy the narrative I wanted to create between Katarina and Olivia, so I let that go.
The eternal struggle: I wanted Katarina to slap down the Tablets and the Relics like BAM, Bitches! But if I did that, I couldn’t have the recipe for romance with Olivia that I wanted to express. So instead, Katarina disappeared, did a bunch of things behind the scenes, a few other things.
Also, I wanted to downplay Katarina's celestial powers, because if she's too powerful, then she's unrelatable, and Olivia wouldn't be able to reconcile her lover = angel.
There was a scene where Katarina summons Alicia Silverthorn herself, but that was cut.
There was going to be a scene where Katarina makes a speech to the Witch Hunters and then accidentally explodes in holy light. Obviously cut. Part of that scene exists; you can hear Alicia giggling in Katarina’s mind and daring her to unleash Glory.
There was going to be a scene where, even though Katarina is able to convince the Goddess to spare Darnell, the Goddess still demanded a sacrifice. I couldn’t get it to come out the way I wanted it to, but I published it anyway in its crippled form.
Sorry. I feel like I failed you.
...
There was going to be a scene where Indigo becomes Katarina’s Apprentice. I drew up a whole character sheet with stats, skills, personality, parentage, the works. She was a master of capoeira, carried a couple of kukri and a derringer. Also, she secretly tattoos the Divine Language into her skin. She was going to be a fluid, flowing dancer sort of person, with lots of cartwheels, acrobatics, flashy moves and the like. Sorta.... wuxia-like.
...unfortunately, when I was writing Indigo, her personality just couldn’t come together. Ultimately, I think you can write her off as a Witch Hunter that had a short but illustrious career.
Other shit?
This thing is crammed with references! It’s like that BEES! meme with Oprah Winfrey. YOU get a reference! YOU get a reference! YOU get a reference! AHAHAHAHAA! REFERENCES FOR EVERYBODY!
...I have no idea how many references there are. I’ve made mention of a few of them up there.
...
In short, there’s a lot that was cut that hurt the narrative. In a lot of ways I’m disappointed in how it’s come out because I’ve had to make some drastic cuts that break up the flow of the story (especially in Book 4).
In some ways the story has been a lot cleaner than previous drafts.
Why did Kuroyuki have to die?
Technically she’s not dead; her soul is in the gem that Sasaki carries. Also, she’s technically not human, so things like "life" and "death" don’t actually apply to her. The why is simple enough; she wanted to save Sasaki’s life; and she believed she’d screwed up beyond acceptable measure, first with the horses, and secondly by accidentally leading Sasaki in the wrong direction. She sensed the Anglish army was nearby and committed a magical form of seppuku to not only safeface, but also to bring Sasaki the help she needed.
I feel like that wasn’t adequately conveyed in the previous chapter. I’ll be revising it later.
Final Notes:
The main arc of Katarina’s story is nearly finished.
There are a few small side stories that I’ll include in the Complete Collection that don’t specifically relate to her directly, but sort of revolve around her impact on the people and the world around her.
Also, once all the edits, chopped text (especially for Book 4) and corrections have been made in the drafts and have been turned into proper narrative, I’ll transition the Complete Collection to "completed" and delete the individual books. That'll be your cue as readers to perhaps look through the Complete Collection and revisit old scenes, see the (restored/ new) scenes, and close the book on Katarina's story.
I'd like you to keep in mind that Katarina's world is immensely vast, and the other stories I have to tell in her world will come along soon.