Character Portraits - Aelinia (Patreon)

It's time for a peek behind how the characters in To Be A King came to be. I'll let you know what, if anything, inspired me for certain characters, my original plans for them, and maybe some future plans. Hopefully this idea turns out as well as it seems in my head.

First up is our bustiest princess, Aelinia. With the princesses, I wanted a blonde, brunette, and a princess with another hair color (to cover my bases). I wish there was more logic behind it than that. It is a bit strange, as the Queen is blonde, and the King, years ago, had black hair. So maybe Cassia is not the King's real daughter (I'm joking)? I had intentions of having all the princesses look a bit similar in the face, but quickly abandoned that due to it not being very interesting to me and me being very bad at trying to match things in terms of morphs.

As the oldest child, Princess Aelinia was meant to be different from the immaturity of her siblings (looking at you, Val and Cass). However, she was not planned to be an LI at all. It's true! She is among a few of the ladies who were never going to be romanceable (but now are). That plan changed after Aelinia, with just her brief appearance in Chapter 1, got a TON of love. Angering a lot of your fan base for an arbitrary choice isn't wise. The original plan was to have her as more of an informal advisor to the MC, and play a part in future events. Well, now you can fuck her brains out, so I hope everyone is happy. Given her recent poll results, probably a good thing I didn't close off that option.

Aelinia is meant to be a lot like her mother, only more so. I'm not going to give away anything that happens in the future, but you'll see this more in future chapters. I've often wondered what it was like for women who aspired to have great influence, apart from their offspring, to live in ancient cultures that were very opposed to this. And, if it's one thing we know about the Romans, it is that they loved war. And if it is two things we know about them, it is that they did not like women taking ANY sort of agency. Stay in the background, don't sleep around, and be an example of purity and virtue. So I dropped a proto-feminist, Aelinia, into this alternate history to see what would happen. Queen Helena has Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great and FASCINATING even without that, as a big influence on how I write the Queen's dialogue and see her responding to events. Aelinia is Olympias with some tweaks and in very different circumstances. It also helps the story as Aelinia can easily convey information that you wouldn't otherwise expect a woman in Caudium, even a princess, to know anything about. Her character further gives me opportunity to introduce King Brennus, who we will hear more of in Chapter 7.

A quick note on the height of the princesses. Cassia is the shortest, and I believe Aelinia is just slightly taller than Val (who is also tall). The King is tall, so this makes some sense (Helena is shorter than Cassia). I'd love to say this was all intentional. Dear patron, it was not. I forgot to dial down the height as the default height of Genesis 8 females is close to 6'. Whoopsie! On a positive note, it does make Val and Aelinia as the two easiest to pose characters in the game. Marius, in case you were wondering, is shorter as I had his morph for another project I was working on that got shit-canned.

That's all for Aelinia, the accidental love interest. Do you like this sort of thing? Want to find out more about the characters? Let me know in the comments.