The cast of afterward seems to be made up as I go along. And that's correct. 587Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzksVwoIipg
The first characters I had ideas for were actually Constantine and Mangosteen (whose name I gleefully took from an obscure Cuphead boss), two incidental characters I had planned for that first-person adventure title. I had plans to give them both a larger part of the story, though the latter's part was instead handed off to Kroff, a character I thought more people (myself included) would find endearing with his quiet demeanor. Most of the characters past that point in the first chapter I actually had no plans to come back to, including Connor. It wasn't until I wrote Shim that I found a character I thought would be a member of the more permanent crew. Her two friends were created pretty much on the spot and I had to keep referring back to what I had written to keep them straight up until I started keeping track of everything with an extensive sheet of shorthanded-to-the-point-of-near-illegible notes.
Shim, Shaw, Jev, and the other Lizi were partly based on characters I had considered for a fantasy/sci-fi story I started writing a while back. The idea was that a sapient cold-blooded character would need to stay warm, and in dire situations their warm-blooded friends or significant others could fill the role. I never actually wrote much of that story and what I had written included zero of these characters, but I saved this idea for afterward, where something like that would seem less odd. Shim's introduction also begins part of afterward's strange obsession with Australia. I've never been and I'm from Chicago, so I don't know why it wound up in there other than that Team Fortress 2 made me equate Australia as a ridiculous place with a funny name. Most of what drives afterward is the mouth feel of a word. If it made me happy in my half-asleep daze just to say, then it wound up somewhere in the story. Australia fit the bill perfectly for a running gag.
Constantine as a character was one I personally didn't have a plan for until quite a bit later, but by then he was kind of out of the picture. The original idea was that he would keep shifting between different personas and that his eventual calling would be as an improvisational character actor, but instead I stopped writing him in and by the time I had gotten back around, the idea of the reader, the writer, and the storyteller was already buried in there, so I began to show that he had found a calling as his own writer instead. I don't know how on earth I'd ever write an afterward continuation, though if I did it'd probably explore what's next for Constantine. Just, not in the way he'd want.
Memmi and Bit were two characters that appeared almost out of necessity. I needed someone for the protagonist to bounce ideas off of in finding their own “true north”, and the idea of a borderline witch just seemed right to me. Memmi's entire gig was that she wasn't (explicitly from the get-go) psychic or magic, but instead was incredibly perceptive a la Psych. By the time I had written her having a second drink, I just rolled with the idea that she might be constantly drunk but still under control, it just sold her as a more “mature” character, as well as a bit odd. It obscures her intentions. Bit's appearance was mostly a joke, but I found use for the two Nephim in the end. Upon revealing that Memmi is more powerful and tactful than she lets on, she speaks in two separate fonts (that were both red in the Penana edit). While the first font is rather legible, the second font that is continually presented in bold and centered on the page does actually translate out. I have included the alphabet in that font below:
Ꮧ Ᏸ ፈ Ꮄ Ꮛ Ꭶ Ꮆ Ꮒ Ꭵ Ꮰ Ꮶ Ꮭ Ꮇ Ꮑ Ꭷ Ꭾ Ꭴ Ꮢ Ꮥ Ꮦ Ꮼ Ꮙ Ꮗ ጀ Ꭹ ፚ
Tammy Wilson as a posthumous character was something I wanted to tackle in afterward from the beginning. She acts as an anchor for the world that once was. There is continual mention that the afterward has gotten more and more weird, but her diary acts as an important means to explain just what had happened to the world. As a current-day character, the protagonist who found themselves in Tammy's old, unfortunately-discarded body kind of represents my own insecurities when confronted with the unfamiliar. She seems both helplessly lost but also just a bit frustrated, is somewhat afraid to express her own boundaries, and clings to people she knows she can trust very strongly. This personality counters that of the posthumous character of Calvin Riddick, an arrogant and aggressive hitman. The name was something I scavenged from a project I scrapped in the fall of 2016, and I stuck it to this character. Calvin's story is a much more grounded, grim storyline that gets intertwined with the more surreal, fantastical storyline of afterward. Jim Baker and Felix are two characters that appear in these flashbacks, and their importance can be found elsewhere.
Linus Linoleum is a bit of an odd case. Linus was a character I created for a college web computing class that was the president of a company that produced useless things™. The entire backstory presented in the class was nothing like afterward, with the character presented on the site instead being an entrepreneur who got his start by tricking former President Richard Nixon into buying his garbage and passing away of a heart attack after witnessing the “lifelike graphics” of Bubsy 3D. Every product on the website's catalog page was useless in some way or another (infinite gum that was just a lump of plastic, a bag of “bottomless fries” in which you'd put fries in and they'd fall out the bottom, a replica of a “hitman's weapon” that was merely an airsoft BB gun, etc.). The name Linus Linoleum was just too funny to me to pass up, and making him an important part of afterward was of course entirely necessary. He originally wasn't meant to fill a more antagonistic role, instead being someone that Tammy would have met to learn more about Calvin, but by then the bigger conflict was the arrival of the Nexus, so I opted to change things up a little.
Linus in a way is afterward's sole antagonist. He might not have created the Nexus but he had no plan to take it on and just kept stacking afterwards, even though it was causing stress to the “core” of the afterward and was leading to many of the oddities. He refuses to accept defeat and wants to control everything but not solve any actual problems. I could say this has deeper meaning and is meant to be a reflection of my father, but that would be lying to sound smart, and afterward isn't smart. It's also a blatant, bold-faced lie. I have lied to you. I apologize.
While the Nexus isn't a character, it is something I do think we should end by talking about. I didn't actually have a plan for it at first, I just had in my head a confrontation with the Nexus involving the old body of Calvin. Blight was introduced a bit later, and it's a recurring material in some of my other works (though none of them successfully published), but it made sense to me that the Nexus would be partly made of it. It also gave me an easy way to continually namedrop Calvin.
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