Reckless Sympathy Part 1 is out now.

Scary! Exciting!

It's been a pretty modest start in terms of sheer numbers, but it's exceeded my expectations already. Every time I hear from someone pumped up about even with this short glimpse into the world, it makes my heart glow in my chest.  This power is converted directly into Part Two Energy, which will then be used to finish Part 2 (working on it now, hopefully out later this year!).

But for a sec, I want to talk about where Reckless Sympathy comes from. Some of the initiating influences. The stuff floating in the broth that makes up the base of the soup before you add the big stuff. This is gonna have vague spoilers for part 1, so wait till after you read it!

###     SPOILERS AHEAD!

So, I think there are 3... maybe 4 foundational pieces to the version of Reckless Sympathy currently in progress. There's a lot more than that obviously, but I've arbitrarily decided on 4 that I want to mention today.

1: A general malaise around writing short-n-sweet stuff! This isn't a piece of media, but it's important. Not to say that Reckless won't have it's sweet moments, but it's not short and it's got more bite to it that a lot of the fics I was writing right before I started.  I wanted to make something more painful, a love story where love isn't enough to save anyone in the end. A story without a hero, or maybe with only villains. That's why the tagline was almost 'a tragedy' or 'a tragic romance' instead of the (possibly odder) 'horror/romance'.  Things have drifted pretty far from this original impulse, but the bones are still there.

2: An old story pitch submission from a follower that never got used while I was writing fics on twitter! I can't find the exact wording offhand but it was to the effect of 'monster maid and human mistress'. Might have specified that the maid was a vampire? I have it written down somewhere, I'll put a shoutouts in the credits of a later release . This is where the initial kernel of Anmarie and Glory comes from, though they're unrecognizable from their initial incarnations.

3: Tsukihime! I read this for my Type-Moon podcast (Fate/ moon archive) and had a shockingly good time with it despite it's reputation. Definitely a rough around the edges experience, but I'm a huge fan of the original. You can see a pretty direct connection right at the end of part 1 of RS - The person who's perspective you've come to inhabit does something very violent, seemingly out of character and without much warning, leaving you to wonder why. Reckless isn't very similar to Tsukihime in concrete ways, but it has it's fair share of thematic overlap. M ore than anything else though, Tsukihime was the game that convinced me to stop hemming and hawing and just Make A Visual Novel.

4: Kitakawa! Kitanai Kimi ga Ichiban Kawaii! is a yuri manga about a couple of girls getting caught doing kink play in a classroom after school, and their lives spiraling completely out of control from there. It's a tough read at times, but it's really made a place in my brain and clarified some of the ideas I was playing with in the early stages of writing the overview of the whole story. Since this is mostly conceptual at this point, I'll leave the specifics influences up to your imagination. You could also slot Girl's Last Tour in here for similar reasons, but I think Kitakawa is a little more relevant.

##     SPOILERS OVER!

I could go on about influences for pages and pages though. How playing Fate/hollow ataraxia pushed me to do more with sprite animation and scripting. How Hidamari Sketch and other earlier Shaft anime got me to me to bring back some of my fine arts/collage skills in for the backgrounds. How watching a bunch of French cinema (especially Jean Rollins' 'The Living Dead Girl') turned the setting more French over time...

But, I have a migraine today and that's all I have time for. I don't think I'll be doing many devlogs here besides for major releases, but if you want to hear me talk about process and whatnot as I work on part 2 and on,  you can always subscribe to my Patreon and support ongoing development!

Oh, and one last thing. If you like the music featured in Reckless Sympathy, go check out the artist on Bandcamp! Jamie Paige is a saint, a savior, a super talented musician, and very patient with my vague yet rambling guidelines.

Anyway, that's all for now. Thank you for joining me on the way to the full release of Reckless Sympathy. May we meet the devil at the end of the long and narrow road.

~Benn Ends