01/03/24: Lysistrata

All Smiles

This update introduces yet another character, and the first woman character featured in Goethe - Cheryl Lysistrata.
Across Gondolas city live many "mutants" - a caustic term coined to describe the unfortunate victims of chance and circumstance who, for any number of reasons, have had their genetics either scrambled, altered, or spliced with contaminants - one such being Cheryl, who inherits shark DNA from contaminated drinking water.

Romantic partner to Mick Ferris, close compatriot (and not-so-secret admirer) of the radical, underground, politically-charged, punk rock maverick Phoebe Brixton, Cheryl is, by contrast, manic, swift, and sweet as she is bashful. Although not on the whole facetious, this "cutesy" facade she presents seems to mask a certain shame - a repressed monstrosity - lurking just below the surface.

Manic quirks aside, it's made immediately obvious that she loves her friends deeply.


On a meta note, translating her visually from a 2D to 3D medium was a great pain - one worth undertaking every step of the way - but a process of trial and error, trying to convey in a new visual language what was made apparent in the former. Underpinning her seductive aesthetics is a dark shadow that looms on, over, and around her head and neck, and one particular perk of working in 3D was the ability to re-introduce an old concept intended for (but restrained by) her 2D iteration: her snake tattoos!

Cheryl will, in due time, develop a nascent gift for magic that draws on these tattoos specifically, but that's better said at another time - right now, I want to take a moment to divert your attention to the lore of this world.

So, what's the story?

This is a question I have, over the years, become very talented at redirecting, dodging, hand-waving, or otherwise disregarding - this is not done out of contempt, disinterest, or any actual disregard. It's just a very, very complicated thing to answer; to give a definitive answer is to imply a single canon, to imply that there is a single over-arching story; instead, this unconventional universe is littered with dozens of unique, character-driven experiences that criss-cross, dot, and tangle within each other until you have a deranged mess of explosive personalities at each other's throats.

All that aside, I'll do my best to present the narrative of Goethe in a self-contained and digestible manner:

GOETHE

The mod is named “Goethe’s Last Laugh” after the German poet Wolfgang Goethe, who wrote ‘Faust,’ an epic poem about an eponymous scholar, who sells his soul to the devil for worldly pleasures and material knowledge - at first, he’s enamored by his own wealth, but the loss of his soul becomes too much to bear, and plagues him to his death

You play my own Faust - a vampire who made a similar deal with the devil some 500 years back; those centuries of seeing human civilizations rise and fall has made him extremely cynical, jaded, desperate, and depraved; 

He’s a corrupt cop officially employed as the sheriff for Gondolas city (the story’s fictionalized setting, a mega-corrupt city, so polluted that it’s sinking into the sea, a kind of gothic cross-section between Baltimore and Venice), but he’s also a narcotics trafficking, heroin-addicted, roughneck bounty hunter whose fidelity to the virtue of ‘justice’ is dubious at best.

There’s a working-class revenge power fantasy at the heart of the project - the idea that this dude Faust is charged with certain powers - both legal (as the city sheriff) and supernatural (being a vampire), but that, once abandoning his cynical apathy towards the plight of the living - he can learn how to turn these powers on the government bureaucrats and private interests pulling the strings of society, making a stand for those without the ability to make one for themselves, instead of continuing to function - as he did previously - as the jack-booted and fascistic strong-arm of an oppressive political regime.

The arc of his story is influenced deeply by the people he meets while trudging from one vice to another - he strikes up a partnership with a paranormal investigator who makes - ostensible - claims of federal agency, trades war-stories with a cartel hitman possessed by surprisingly deep, brooding, moral conscience, and humanizes himself through experiences with other soulful personalities meant to cast light on the vacuous black hole and heartbroken agony at the core of his character.

These characters are intended to spurn his growth as a person from this self-destructive nihilist into someone who affords room in his (un)life for hope, idealism, and virtue - from a dope-slamming jerk who can’t be assed to believe in anything, to someone who finds a way to use his unique and unholy talents to become an agent for meaningful positive change in the lives of the people of his city.