RobinHarper
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Being Fiona Red 296
🕑 Added 2025-03-13 04:19:36 +0000 UTCAnd here's another Red Strip!
Anyhow, I've really enjoyed fleshing out Jess' backstory. It's been a while, but I think when I originally conceptualized Jess' character, she wasn't even Felix's classmate, she was just some random girl who used an implant to rent out use of her body for girls to use on dates.
She was literally just an object, a plot device used to stick Felix in a real girl's body.
The original plan was that Felix was going to pay her to rent her body for an afternoon to meet Lisa at the cafe. But then a few weeks later Lisa would then run into this girl at a local mall, mistake the girl for Fiona, and the girl, caught off-guard, decided to play along. But then she accidentally befriends Lisa, and then needs Felix's help to pretend to be Fiona when hanging out with Lisa.
And then in exchange for letting Felix borrow her body to hang out with Lisa, this old-Jess was going to have Felix pilot her body for jobs she couldn't be bothered with, like modelling or recording a sense-stream date with sense-streamers she can't stand.
But a lot of the second part of the original plan got thrown for a loop when Jess getting doxed had a much larger social and emotional impact on her than I originally intended.
Minor Spoilers follow
I threw in some hints a while back about Sophie's backstory and I'm hoping to flesh out Craig and Lisa's backstories too. But Craig and Lisa aren't facing any struggles like Jess and Sophie currently are and maybe they don't need to. Maybe when the story focuses on them, their problems are not from the past, but simply occur in the present.
Comments
Disbet
If I had to vote, I'd choose the café chat.
From the Files of Robin Harper
For Felix, I've been internally debating whether or not to have him go through his own personal history as if he was Fiona in a custom game in VR, meaning that he experiences it as Fiona, or to just have Fiona and Lisa talk about their personal histories while hanging out at the cafe the next day.
stevedore
I'd say that at this point we know more about Jess than anyone else, even Felix. So much of this has been about him being someone else, he still a bit of a mystery. We got some idea of him in the strips where he agonized I get how to avoid meeting Lisa but that was pretty brief. Maybe it's good to have him be sort of a blank slate and it is through his adventures here that he becomes more fully realized as a person. Jess' backstory has been really well done - she comes across a a pretty complex person.
