Itch page: Radiance Inviolate by DemonApologist
IFDB page: Radiance Inviolate - Details
Spring Thing page: Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction
I know there’s a lot going on in the world right now, but if you feel so inclined, perhaps you’d like to spend some of your downtime visiting with me in Chthontemps? Let’s generously assume it survived the dorrie coup. Let’s also assume—less generously—that it’s not terribly busy here. But I’m glad to see you.
This is a collection of journal entries I wrote and rewrote during the last few weeks of the festival as discussion and reviews of Radiance Inviolate dried up (until a sudden burst of a few kind comments on the last day). Those last few weeks really dragged on—it’s a very long event, and as an author I felt like my job was to stay out of people’s way and not hover. The readers will read what they want to read, how they want to read it. So, instead of letting the anxiety of these weeks fester, I did my best to channel that energy toward something more productive, which is this journal.
There’s ~a lot~ in this post, comically too much perhaps, but my hope is that one could look at the topics listed in the tags below and click them open to read about whichever ones (if any) interest them, in whatever order.
Thanks for stopping by!
ORIGIN FRAGMENTS
ORIGIN FRAGMENTS
Radiance Inviolate threaded together a few different fragments into one overall project idea. What were those fragments, and what did they contribute?
FRAGMENT #1:
One of my dreams for a while has been to publish a collection of what I might cautiously call “atmospheric gay demon short fiction.” I have, for whatever reason—the result of my personal deficiencies, let’s say—many, many ideas for such stories. There are many poignant paths into a devil’s arms. Some people have awesome, impressive, or at least utilitarian dreams. Mine feels a little frivolous, I guess.
The first fragment contributing to Radiance Inviolate is one of these “atmospheric gay demon short fiction” premises, and (at the time) not one of the well-developed ones.
The idea went something like this:
A demon estranged from his subterranean community emerges from the earth and begins exploring the woods. A pair of cruel hunters take advantage of this green (figuratively, not literally) demon, overpowering him, throwing him into one of their pitfall traps, and leaving him to die from whatever combination of thirst, starvation, and sun exposure it takes to slay such a creature. But when his vision reaches its most fevered, a third, kinder hunter finds him, and rescues him from this fate. They retire to the third hunter’s cabin, become lovers, and perhaps another night, take revenge upon the cruel pair.
This premise had never been a high priority for me to write. It’s not really that… specific? All it really has is the bare minimum of what any story needs to function properly: dark hours of brooding and bleakness, a romantic rescue, gay sex, and a dramatic conclusion that circles back to the beginning, the unseasoned having gained some seasoning. I’m surprised that it jumped the line past a bunch of my other ideas.
What do I like about it? It has the core of something that I find very alluring and romantic—to see a big scary monster guy turn out to be vulnerable, sweet, perhaps even cowardly, and for him to be encountered as someone worthy of love and support despite possessing aesthetic signifiers of evil. And the experienced hunter, a white knight with some brooding paint slathered on, (un)surprising with his compassion. Surprising to the demon, but perhaps less so to a genre-savvy reader who noticed that an author calling himself “DemonApologist” is directing the sequence of events. It’s nothing so revolutionary, but there’s a tinge of interest when one flips the more standard idea of a calculated, experienced demon and a naïve, desperate human, so that the human in the encounter is the worldly one.
There are some things in here that give me pause, as well. First off, the question of empowerment. Being rescued? Aren’t we supposed to be rescuing ourselves in current year? The frisson of genderness provided by being a man who wants to be rescued by a man perhaps absolves me a little, but not a lot. Wish fulfillment is far from the worst of my crimes, but reveals trouble in my character. Do I not think him clever enough or capable enough to escape the pit on his own? Is that what I think of myself? That I would be too weak, too cowardly, give up? (Well, yes.)
I have internalized the writing advice that characters should have agency: drive the action, work toward what they want, and face their conflicts. This is good practice in general, I think. Better to write a character doing too much than too little. Better to camp than to stay at home. But I don’t know, for all the stories about bravery and courage and overcoming impossible odds through determination, qualities that I don’t feel that I possess, I have an urge to instead narrate weak characters for whom a bleak world can spare enough compassion to comfort, despite their limited ability to live up to such lofty standards as “brave,” “capable,” and “determined.” Still, a character being driven by an external plot through no credit to their efforts is often less satisfying for most readers. And even if I think writing from a position of weakness is interesting, I don’t want to crush a character’s growth if it’s starting to sprout.
This premise-fragment also makes me suspicious of “hunters” as a class of people in this barely-developed world. What exactly are they hunting, and why? Are these demon hunters? Animal hunters? Trying to feed themselves? Feed a community? Killing for sport? What is the relationship between the third hunter and the first pair? If the third hunter is against what the first pair is doing, has he actually confronted his attachment to the “hunter” identity and therefore his role in the upkeep of a suspect system? And what kind of questions does that raise for my involvement, in imagining them how I did?
«Quelle horreur!» It is hardly praxis to want to be a good, rescuable little demon salvaged from the anonymous horde of monstrosities, to long for anything less than the total end of the hunt. How can I ever live with myself? Goodness.
FRAGMENT #2:
If the first fragment is a general premise—demon gets rescued by shady hunter, really just a hint of a plotline—the second fragment contributes a more developed character, a world, and some aesthetics.
Something I got into in 2023 was ArtFight, which is a surprisingly active month-long art-trading event taking place annually in July. In this event, participants create original characters and then other people create art of them. You might reasonably think that I should not join art events based on how my art looks—that’s what I think of myself at any rate, how healthy—and yet, I did. I don’t know? It’s fun, and I clearly need the practice. Even if it does result in me consigning that work to appear online for any random person to see, when the emotionally safer option is to just… never do that.
After the event, I worked over the course of the intervening year to expand my roster of demon OCs, not only in terms of visual design, but trying to think about character and what types of stories I would attach to them.
As part of that, in May 2024, Gannethil was born. Well, first he was “demon_050524.png,” then he was “pinstripe_demon_public_defender.png,” and then he became Gannethil. It’s a whole process, I’ll have you know.
He is largely the same as you may have encountered him in versions of Part 6 and Part 7 in Radiance Inviolate. A devil lawyer is a well-worn (but for me, beloved) trope, considering all the bargains and contracts and paperwork it takes to keep all that accursedly sexy devil business running. But I zagged a touch, reimagining a devil lawyer as an overworked public defender facing concerns like: the looming threat of smiting at the hands of paladins; dismal and upsetting casework for doomed clients; and the fraught position of trying to leverage his skills to help his targeted community while participating in the legal system that makes their existence so difficult. And what of the hunger, lingering around a place of such emotional distress? If he were stellar at his job, eventually, wouldn’t he feel starved? He judges himself harshly first, drinking his holy water—locally sourced, I hope—to steel himself against what he imagines your judgments will be.
There’s more to Gannethil than made it into Radiance Inviolate, since he’s in a supporting role there. Looking just past the edges of what is present in Radiance Inviolate, I see him having hate/envy/unrequited horniness for the briefly mentioned “Solicitor Prime,” my slight weirdification of a district attorney, his natural rival who he faces in court. (But which is Phoenix Wright, and which is Miles Edgeworth?). While not in the text of Radiance Inviolate, my personal view of the story is that the Solicitor Prime would’ve been the one that tipped off Gannethil about the coup, giving him time to flee the city before the dorries banished or killed him. Even though Gannethil and the Solicitor Prime mostly hate each other, I somewhat optimistically imagine that there is a mutual grudging respect for each other’s work.
Still, this fragment contributed a fair amount—Gannethil himself, the paladins as an antagonistic faction, and a few drops of urban fantasy to accent the more gothic elements.
FRAGMENT #3:
Enter the Queer Vampire Jam. I believe it was Tabitha who told me about this event, back around when I finished up my 2024 IF Comp responses in late September or early October. Ey linked me to the 2024 edition, and I played several of those entries. I especially loved: Tabitha’s Blood & Company, manonamora’s Tea Time with a Vampire, and xenubinstudios et al.’s Carnival of Shadows. I was determined to submit something for that event when it came around again. (Well… so much for my dreams.)
The QVJ is the point of convergence for it all. I took my original vague story idea, then transmuted it slightly to make a vampire the monster de la nuit. That made more sense anyway with the premise. This also brought the sun into focus as a primary antagonist, eventually getting the entire story named after it.
FRAGMENT #4:
It’s a bit difficult to talk about this one, since it involves Pharos Fidelis, a work-in-progress that started before Radiance Inviolate. But when I switched from planning to submit that to planning to submitting this, I ended up porting over a lot of my CSS work from that project and adapting it to its new context. So aesthetically, Radiance Inviolate branches off from what is happening in Pharos Fidelis. That’s not all these works share in common, but I don’t want to say too much about this fragment at this time.
I will, however, point out what I thought was by far the funniest aesthetic theft/adaptation. In Pharos Fidelis, the placeholder “click to reveal more text” characters I used were three downward facing triangles: ⧨ ⧨ ⧨. I deleted one of the triangles to leave just two: ⧨ ⧨. Vampire fangs. It’s silly to have the readers biting down on more and more text, but that’s what I did.
WHY SUBMIT TO SPRING THING
WHY SUBMIT TO SPRING THING
I wrote my first IF project (Lazarrien: A Love Story) during August 2024, for Single Choice Jam. I was so excited about it. I still am! If I ever remaster it (say for a Spring Thing new game plus) I would certainly apply my CSS knowledge (now that I kind of know what CSS is) to make it more visually appealing. And without the single choice restriction, I would have a lot more flexibility in terms of how the story unfolded.
But anyway, I almost slipped through the cracks of the IF world after Single Choice Jam. It just feels kind of alienating to do the scary thing and put something out in the world, without a sense of community attachment. I might never have been back, except that IF Comp happened to be starting around that same time, and people were so excited about it that I decided to take a look. The energy around the event really enraptured me, so I participated as a responder/reviewer during September.
Still, after playing and trying to analyze all 67 IF Comp entries, I just had that lingering feeling that, well, there wasn’t that one project that was just for me. Don’t get me wrong, many of those works are incredible and are impressive technical and literary achievements. Even ones I didn’t like as much were still interesting to think about and talk about, and I’m glad that they were there. I remember many of these works vividly still, these many months later. But it’s just like all other media, really—I appreciate a lot of what’s out there, but despite that, I still find myself always craving for works that feel like they are crafted in some way for me, you know? I guess it boils down to being both gay and particular? It feels less emotionally productive to be bitter about that, and more thoughtful to instead try my best to write the works I want into existence myself.
They say that Spring Thing is an active, beloved festival. Certainly kinder than IF Comp, whose viciously direct scoring system takes a grueling month and a half to calcify its submissions into blunt bar charts that declare forevermore just how many people thought an effort deserved only 2 out of 10 points. The competition drives intense energy and interest, to the benefit and peril of everyone involved. How terrifying! But Spring Thing? Spring Thing, they say, is something a little less fraught. Not so scary. How could it be? It has custom ribbons.
So, what is it that I wanted from Spring Thing? Put simply: connection. What I really hoped for was to learn that there was someone out there who read Radiance Inviolate and thought, “Yes, this is the one that’s for me. I feel seen. I feel understood.” This was my fervent wish (to recall wolfbiter’s turn of phrase that got stuck in my head). For just one person, what I dreamed was that this project was their favorite Thing of Spring.
Did it work? If you ask me honestly, I think the answer is no. I don’t think it did. But there is one person that I did write for, who has now reluctantly noticed. I usually hate—or at the very least, deeply doubt—everything that I make not long after it’s done. But here, well over a month later, I simply do not yet hate Radiance Inviolate.
At Spring Thing 2025, there was a piece for me, even if I had to make it myself. And if it didn’t resonate too deeply for anyone else as I hoped it might, I have little choice but to make whatever peace with that is possible.
WRITING STYLE
WRITING STYLE
If you imagine a dial that turns from hopelessly sparse and unadorned at one extreme, to overwrought to the point of incomprehensibility at the other, I surely strayed a click or two closer to the latter than the former.
To be fair, I feel like if there’s ever a time to splurge on flowery language, “in the midst of writing a moody gay vampire fic” is one such occasion. During revisions, I found that my writing (especially in Parts 1 and 2) was wound up too tightly, and I preferred later drafted parts where I was a little looser with the flow of things. I spent some of my precious final writing hours before the deadline relaxing a few of the more overworked sections. Maybe I didn’t fully succeed at accomplishing that, but I stand by most of my choices.
Does that make me a bad writer? To not yet hate what I wrote?
The fact that there’s anything approaching poetry in this project surprises me. I have never seriously studied poetry, nor do I have that much personal interest in it. But, I try not to fight my writing instincts too much. I found that, while Twine is indeed well-suited for prose, poetry haunts the medium.
In the Harlowe template, every place that text appears is that way because I had to choose for it to be there. (By default, what I saw from a passage is a black screen with a very unpleasant-looking “back” button.) That’s a dangerous amount of agency. After a while I thought, well, what if I did make the text appear somewhere else? What if I added some weird, ominous spaces? Who’s going to stop me, my editor? What editor?
As I went, the appearance of a few vague Shakespearian allusions—like my insistence on naming a character who encounters a fey being “Lysander”—nudged me to experiment with prose that had occasional poetic digressions, moments with a little more rhyme or rhythm than necessary. As far as text placement, in Part 4, I decided to visualize Lysander’s spirit drifting on the page. And by the time I needed to draft the silver hallucination version of Part 6, it unexpectedly developed into what is… a poem? Maybe? It’s not not a poem. But it’s poem-adjacent enough that I worried that the poets would notice that I wrote something whose contents suggest the presence of poetics, and I was afraid of their judgment. So, I probably shouldn’t have allowed it to happen.
Look, I’m not a poetry hater, but I am poetry reluctant. I just really love prose fiction, and my sweet spot especially is when authors write in a way that is artistically engaging without losing sight of clarity. When I’m not tethered to enough tendrils of plot, character, and setting, I get a little cranky. That’s my issue to work through, I guess. I feel similarly about western classical music. I love the periods where there’s a lot of dissonance among the harmony, where things are starting to go off the rails, but you can still see the track. I struggle with approaches like serialism/12-tone rows where there’s not enough tonality remaining to ground my listening experience. You can keep your Schoenberg Suite for Piano, please, just let me be!
There really isn’t anything wrong with writing in ways that are challenging and weird to the point of straining comprehensibility—I know there is beauty and relevance in pushing against the edges of possibility in language. Sometimes, I really appreciate stuff whose meaning I can’t fathom. But as currently constructed, I guess I lack the depth and patience to always truly appreciate that level of poetics. And really, what depth could you possibly hope to find in someone who only wants to hear about Faust if he and Mephistopheles finally admit their feelings for each other and hook up? These are not the thoughts of a serious person.
SEXUALITY
SEXUALITY
I do think that there was room for Radiance Inviolate to have become more sexually explicit. For instance, perhaps a stronger version of the scene between Lysander and René in Part 2 would have progressed past kissing before their interruption, to really heighten the contrast between intimacy pre-attack and abandonment post-attack.
But, I really dislike that trope where gay people are narratively punished with death for having sex (True Blood comes to mind in vampire media). I guess I still kind of did this trope (Lysander is killed instead while in the process of getting to sex). Either way, I have a general discomfort with writing sexually explicit scenes. I feel way more comfortable writing in a way that is sensual and intimate to suggest eroticism without putting the mechanics of sex on the page.
As another example, perhaps allowing Lysander and Gannethil their tryst in Part 6 instead of letting Gannethil’s holy water consumption block it would have made the rescue in Part 7 feel warmer and more romantic. Even so, I don’t think my discomfort and self-censorship limited this particular work too much? It’s not really that focused on sex, anyway.
But, I don’t know, sex between men is still culturally stigmatized enough that I wonder if I should feel more skeptical about my impulse to write in a way that avoids directly depicting it? Is my reticence yet another mark against me for not feeling liberated or brave enough to search for aesthetically engaging ways of portraying sex?
Something else I tend to avoid in writing romantic entanglements—besides, apparently, the actual sex—is highly gender-polarized queer relationships. That is, where relationships orient around “top” and “bottom” roles that have essentially absorbed the cultural associations of “masculinity” and “femininity” respectively. While I have enjoyed depictions like this on occasion, and certainly have no desire to “yuck” that “yum” for someone else, it feels more electric and interesting to me when these roles are contested and egalitarian, where there’s enough androgyny that it’s more challenging to label “masc” vs. “femme” in vibe.
For instance, when Lysander encounters René, I describe René as “rather pretty,” which is a bit more femme-coded. I could have said “rather handsome,” but I didn’t, even though everything else about the encounter casts René as more masc-coded. When Lysander encounters Thibault, Thibault is much more generically masculine—at least, to the extent that it’s possible for me to write that convincingly—yet he is a character accustomed to being bitten, the more vulnerable side of a vampire bite. Surely, inviting a vampire to bite you is bottom-coded? And when Lysander encounters Gannethil, Gannethil is more flamboyant—a confirmed scenery chewer—but performs the more normatively “masculine” role of rescuer to Lysander, while still donning the suit of a professional. Camille has her “rugged shoulders” and of course, being the biter with the “twin pricks” that finish off the human Lysander. And who even knows what Kembrael is up to, gender-wise, as some kind of vampire-making nonbinary fey being whose ex might be Death (she/her), and is being courted by a “fabulous archfiend”? Goodness.
It’s not like I’ve somehow revolutionized gender or anything. But at least, to me, it was interesting to see what sides of these characters I felt drawn to emphasize depending on their situations, and it feels more authentic to my experiences to have dynamic, context-chaotic expressions of gender and sexuality.
THIRD (AND SECOND) PERSON POINT OF VIEW
THIRD (AND SECOND) PERSON POINT OF VIEW
Something that I find distinctively jarring about much of interactive fiction is that, from what I’ve seen thus far, the majority of it is written from a second person perspective.
This took some getting used to. Prior to this, the main things I associated second-person point of view with in fiction were: (1) niche use in literary short stories, and (2) fan fiction that ships a character with the reader (e.g., Astarion x Reader, where the reader is the second person “you.” As for Astarion? Careful… he bites.)
I think second person makes sense in a lot of IF use-cases—It seems to be that the classic parser game format is narrated this way to aid with immersion, so that the “you” reading feel like you are going on an adventure and solving the puzzles. Maybe this works okay when the protagonist is (successfully…) written to be neutral. But I don’t know if second person is really as immersive as it seems. If a player character is meant to come across as neutral, but says and does things that trip my various hangups, I encounter a lot of friction. Similarly, if the player character is written to be a very specific character and I feel opposed to them, rather than siding with them, I resent the second person considerably. Sometimes this is an interesting effect. Sometimes it’s more annoying.
Either way, it does make me wonder, in some cases, where pieces with a sharply drawn and opinionated character in second person might be better served by third person, allowing a cleaner separation between the “you” that is actually playing, and the character whose story who you’re following? Enforcing a third-person gap between myself and their perspective might help me dissociate from the mental blocks I get when the mismatch between what I want to do and what they have been written to do becomes overwhelming.
This is a lot of rambling to eventually say that I did not even consider writing Radiance Inviolate in second person. I come to this space from fiction in a genre where I write mostly in third person past tense with a close point of view to a character, so it would be an extra layer of disruption to also have to contend with second-person and the inhibitions that might put in my way.
I was a bit worried that this might get me in trouble somewhere, like there were point-of-view police lurking in the shadows to tell me that it’s not “rEaL iNtErAcTiVe fiCtIoN” if it’s not in second person.
Fortunately, my paranoia stayed as paranoia. Based on the subset of people who chose to read and comment publicly on this story where I saw it—this never came up. And that’s a relief, honestly. I don’t want to feel pressured to write in second person if I don’t feel it will benefit the work. When I looked through the respective tags on IFDB, it seemed like there were a lot of works under “third person,” so this fear seems especially groundless in hindsight.
Despite this, Radiance Inviolate is not entirely in third person. When trying to be responsive to what the medium was asking from me, I found that the interactive aspect of the project affected the narrative voice considerably. I was thinking about the reader and how they were choosing things, distinct from what Lysander was doing or thinking. There’s an example of this in Part 4: “Unwelcome memories flooded back to him. You know the ones. [bolded for emphasis]” I had an impulse at this point in the narrative to talk to the reader. Or really, I don’t know, give them a poke. Like, I know you’re there. I’m thinking about you. Are you paying attention to the narrator? Maybe you should?
There’s a lot more slippage in the point of view as well, between a closer third person and something more omniscient or removed. There are times where the reader is seeing Lysander’s thoughts as narration, and times where the narrator pulls away. In Part 7, you might read something like: “Warm, sweet blood—like none that came before, or ever would again.” The sentence starts very close to Lysander, the taste of blood on his tongue, and then pivots away, giving an ominous comment from a future Lysander might never see, depending on what the reader chose at this critical juncture. This is the kind of point-of-view slippage that might have gotten me in trouble with fiction writing partners, but it doesn’t really seem like anyone cares that I did this, so I’m glad to have (I guess?) gotten away with whatever my various crimes were.
Second person happens the most during the map screens at the end. For instance, “In Part 7, Lysander faced these choices: / Take vengeance. / Leave it behind. / You chose for him to seek revenge. / How brutal.” The main purpose of the “map” was to make it less clunky for readers to revisit choices. There’s no valid reason to make them, for example, click back through all of Parts 1, 2, and the start of 3, where they have no choices to make, so it serves as a kind of shortcut. However, this more utilitarian premise developed into something a little weird.
Something I had been thinking about all throughout the writing process is that Lysander is constantly in a position to be judged. By René, who looks down at the dying man he was just trying to hook up with moments ago, and uses his agency to get out of there and not deal with it. By Camille, who judges whether Lysander is far enough gone that she’s decided it’s acceptable to drink him the rest of the way to death, and further whether he deserves a chance to become a vampire. By Thibault, who judges from the rim of the pit whether Lysander deserves rescue. By Serge, who judges him undeserving of life (in Part 2) and undeserving of life or personhood (in Part 7). The only subversion of this takes place in Part 6, where Lysander is in a position to judge Gannethil by accepting or refusing his causality-defiant business card. So it follows as well that the narrator—when not closely hewn to Lysander’s thoughts, has judgmental commentary from time to time.
All along, the reader is in the position to decide for themselves how sympathetic they are to what Lysander is going through, and whether or not to allow him to call for the help that he (with a few exceptions) needs to survive dawn. So I thought about the map, and how I could turn the tables a bit. I wanted the reader to get a taste of what Lysander has been experiencing, casting judgment on the choices they made.
As it turns out, this did not necessarily come across as judgmental. Reviewers described this map screen as “friendly” (Tabitha) or “supportive”/“aftercare for IF” (wolfbiter). I’m glad that it felt that way. It’s not like I was trying to be unkind—that’s rarely my intent—but I did want the reader to feel seen for what they chose.
Either way, I hope to adapt on the “map” structure a bit in the future to see what else I can do with it. Overall, I have some plans for how to apply this mostly-3rd-with-some-2nd blend in Pharos Fidelis, plans that entirely pre-date Radiance Inviolate, but the experience here should help me a lot in navigating that.
MULTIPLE ENDINGS
MULTIPLE ENDINGS
In the front matter for this project, I indicated that there are multiple possible endings. Now, after having given you well over a month to find them, I think it’s fine at this point to be direct and enumerate them.
What is there to find in this project? If you just straightforwardly click through the choices, you’ll end up going down one of the 19 paths and arriving at one of the six standard endings. There’s also a seventh, non-standard ending.
In total, accounting for all the ways (excluding the conversation choice in Part 4) to get to an official ending, here’s how many paths lead to each:
10: “Radiance Inviolate”
[7th Ending Redacted]
3: “A Meal of Last Resort”
2: “Diabolus ex Machina”
2: “Thirteenth Night”
1: “Vengeance, Bitter Vengeance”
1: “Vengeance, Sweet Vengeance”
Each readthrough is around 6k words, but in total, there is roughly 14,300 words worth of unique text in the versions of Part 1 through Part 7. If you read through exactly once, and never again, you would have avoided roughly 50-65% of what was available. The most divergent part by far is Part 6, where the reader can encounter one of three completely non-overlapping scenes: a silver-induced hallucination, a flashback in the cheese cellar, and a flashback at Chthontemps.
I did my best to balance a satisfying read the first time through regardless of path, and the possibility to uncover a lot more lore, context, and character details if readers are driven to do more exploration. I think this mostly worked?
(Continues in next post)
