In Love This Way

In Love This Way is the tenth installment of A Better Place, taking place quite some time after the previous story, The Great Curve, and canonically, it is also the last story to take place in the series. After being mentioned in passing for several stories now, Baroness Serra Celestia Anhera finally makes an appearance, returning to her high-end lifestyle in the upper echelons of high society in the grand Anhera Estate after a successful raid. With both of her parents out on other duties, Serra tries her best to enjoy her rare moment of solitude before being called to her city's grand botanical gardens; while there, she meets a close friend who holds a secret that can destroy not only Serra's life, but all of her family's reputation, only to find herself eventually fighting to keep both of their lives safe.

In Love This Way can be read here.

The above image was drawn by controlline3, whose online portfolio can be found here.

In Love This Way was named after the song by hardcore punk group Descendents; it was initially entitled Something Changed after the song by britpop group Pulp, but I found that the track worked better as a theme song for Serra.

Serra herself came into existence long before any other members of the Anhera family and indeed, most of the characters for this series, initially being designed as a possible paladin for a one-shot adventure, named after the Magic the Gathering card Serra Angel ("Anhera" being an accidental corruption of the Maori word "Anahera"). The concept of the character gradually changed, becoming a male paladin named Renard Schuler (after artist Douglas Shuler, who drew the first and arguably most famous version of Serra Angel), but Serra stuck with me over the months. Initially intended to be a female version of Renard, the addition of the Anheras in several earlier works, starting with Here's To Life, caused Serra's own character to strongly diverge from her prototype. In particular, Serra's antipathy, lack of devotion to her family, serious demeanour, and even her preference for bourbon over brandy came about as an attempt to differentiate her from her base. Serra herself went through a number of different appearances as well; this one, drawn by Kirino Kasumu was rejected for looking too waifish to be a rugged paladin (though I now internalise it as a representation for Ione Anhera), while this one, drawn by WANKE, suffered from a similar issue.

As for Primrose Reed, she was initially supposed to be the male heir apparent of another noble house, albeit one that Serra's parents would have intensely disliked. I considered a variety of different causes for this hatred, including trade wars, competition for influence, simply being too low-class for them, or some other long, internecine feud as typical of nobles, as well as potentially making the love interest a commoner of some sort. As to make things more creative, I elected to make them a merchant's apprentice for a not-quite-established business, something that would have tied into Serra's already established backstory of working the merchant routes and would have attracted the ire of her parents for going after someone who works for a small business (and it let me finally bring back Leily Rhoeas, who we last saw in Holidays In The Sun). Making the love interest a half-elf was then introduced to further sow disdain for the Anheras, who were established to dislike other races in No Regrets, and, ultimately, Serra's love interest became female as to create an effective dead-end in the Anhera legacy and to simply increase drama for Serra.

While Zetian was always intended to seek revenge on those who attacked Huaisheng Temple, the decision to weld her backstory with Serra's only came about as I started working on this series and as Zetian's character became more fleshed-out in the real-life campaign. With the inclusion of warlock and an interest in adding some drama to the group dynamics, I improvised a bit where Zetian, after coming face to face with this warlock's personal demon, revealed both her mother and brother were murdered by another warlock, who later became Emma Galan herself. If I ever made another story outside of this cycle, I'd love to feature Duchess Galan in her own segment, whether purely by herself or as a brief interaction with Serra.

In Love This Way is probably the single hardest work for me to have written so far, both for A Better Place and for everything I have written. Outside of it having extremely high stakes for both of its lead characters, I also felt enormous pressure to depict Serra's lesbianism in a way that I felt was respectful to both her and the reader; I didn't want her to be a character who just so happened to like women, but I also didn't want to beat the reader over the head with this aspect of her character. I certainly hope I succeeded on this front. 

And as one final remark, this story was partially inspired by The Secret Message, a 1767 oil painting by François Boucher.