Daily VA-11 Hall-A 2022 #7

So yesterday I brought up that this is the day that a certain girl finally shows up in the full product. And just as nobody expects the Dorothynquisition, nobody expects that after talking about it I’ve decided to skip it for now and focus on Jill instead.

For one we already made a lengthy post talking about Dorodoro years ago that, while rough, will do as an introduction for now. But also, I wanted to talk about Jill yesterday and I got sidetracked talking about other things.

So I’ll start by clarifying an important detail: Despite what you might think, I don’t really see myself in Jill. Sure, she speaks a lot like me because it’s inevitable when a character has so much dialog as her, but she’s “me” just as much as Dorothy or Stella are by virtue of me writing them. I’d argue Alma or Sei align more with me personally than Jill.

With that explanation out of the way, another one is in order: Where did the concept of Jill come from?

Well, we go back to Bartender by Araki Joh. Specifically, Jill is the “anti-Ryu”.

Ryu Sasakura is a cool and affable bartender that by all intents has his shit together, is an expert on his craft, and knows exactly what everyone needs. Jill LOOKS like the sort of character that would fit that role but then you wonder “in real life, who behaves like that?”.

That’s where I grabbed an example from my own personal life as a frame of reference. Growing up people said and thought that I was very serious and collected, almost unfeeling… when in truth it was more the result of me pushing away and repressing so many emotions out of a constant fear that I wouldn’t be able to control them because I felt things “too intensely”.

And so, I applied that logic to Jill: A cool-looking person that in truth only acts that way because she feels her life is already in enough shambles and she doesn’t need to make it worse by speaking her mind because the few times she’s done so she feels things have gotten worse… despite the fact that she cannot help speaking her mind even then.

So, she’s the perfect anti-perfect bartender. The sort of girl in her late 20s that has a pink shirt with “SLUT” written on it fully visible when you enter her place, with the full implication of the sort of person that wears that sort of apparel despite initial impressions.

I’ve always liked to imagine that the shirt was hot pink but she’s had it for so long that it kinda faded after washing it so many times.

Jill is a mesh of many things, but if I had to pinpoint a singular influence that I was channeling when writing her, it would probably be Squall from Final Fantasy 8. Two characters that desperately wish to open up to people but are afraid from how they’ve been hurt in the past, resulting in this cat-like behavior of “go away but also don’t leave me alone” that swings back and forth.

Like Squall they both get a circle of friends that see clearly through the facade and lead them to at the very least open up more. And fittingly, Squall is a character that resonated strongly with me growing up, especially going through puberty. Notable because in practice my problem was the complete opposite (molding myself to fit people groups to not be alone, thus resulting in a lack of self-worth, rather than pushing people away out of fear of being hurt), but as it turns out you don’t need to live the exact same thing as a character to identify strongly with them or their struggles.

You don’t create resonance playing the exact same note on the exact same octave in two separate keyboards of the same brand after all. You need something that vibrates on a similar rate but not the exact same one.

And also fittingly, did you know that Rinoa (リノア) is one katakana away from the Japanese spelling of Lenore (レノア)?

This is just a happy coincidence, but I could’ve told you it was intentional and you wouldn’t know I was lying. Like I’ve said in the past, the process of creating things is one where only the final result matters and the order in which things were crafted is only trivia at best.

So, if you’re playing along, today’s the second day of the game. Another character we wrote extensively about also shows up today.

Tomorrow: Titty Hacker comes and so do I.