8FOLD: Mancers # 2, "Company Man"

[Tom Russell]

On Tuesday, September 18, 2018 at 4:34:07 PM UTC-4, Drew Perron wrote:
> 
> Hmmmmm. *nods* I feel like this level of it worked well for this story, at least 
> for my level of comfort. Not that I'm uncomfortable with kink (I mean, have you 
> seen WBW?), but as I said on #3, the way power dynamics and intimacy are 
> situated within these tense and not exactly healthy relationships is intense and 
> uncomfortable. (And I'm guessing that's the intended effect. o3o I feel like I'm 
> not exactly the targeted audience here? X3 Nevertheless, I'm impressed.)


Well, part of that too is that we're mostly seeing these moments of intimacy through the lens of The Company, and like all corporations it co-opts, commodifies, and exploits - turns something normal and human into leverage and profit. That's turned up to eleven given that it's a corporation that exists not to make profit, but to end the world.

I didn't get to write an "intimate" scene between the two Liekes before [spoiler], but I think the two of them have a much healthier and mutually-beneficial dynamic. Well, "healthy" might be relative there - their whole sense of identity/self (and self-worth) is dependent on the other, on their existence together as a couple - and for people who aren't magical immortals, that only works for as long as both people are alive and together.

There will be some romance-y stuff in the second arc - I'm a sucker for it - and with it some scenes of relatively healthy, slightly kinky intimacy, but there wasn't as much room for that in this arc given its peculiar trajectory.

Like I think I said elsewhere though, the uncomfortable/intense intimacy stuff gets dialed way down after issue three (though there are a couple of moments that might be borderline, and there's quite a bit of creepy violence in the back-end).

==Tom