Dragomir the Demon.

So as the up-to-date regulars have discovered by now, the third season of Dragomir's Diary revolved around a quest of self-discovery for our protagonist. He travelled the world, met a smarmy old bastard, and found out... that...

Well.

Needless to say, new readers, there are major spoilers ahead. I'll create a nice gap between here and the rest of this post before I start talking. Go no further if you want to learn about this stuff on your own. Ready?



































Okay. If you're still reading this, it's your own fault.

According to the metadata, I drew this picture on August 13, 2012. The first season of Dragomir was either in the process of ending or had already ended. By then I more or less knew what Dragomir was, though I hadn't fully fleshed out all the details. (I apparently also still thought he'd be in his guard outfit when he got outed.) I hadn't even given the Non their name at this point, and the picture's name is 'dragdemon.jpg'.

When the story began, Dragomir was not a Non. He was just what he appeared to be: a luckless, bored peasant enlisted as a guard. The story, at first an homage to Dwarf Fortress, would have ended with Jeffrey's drilling team breaking through the earth, releasing a horde of demons from Hell, and getting themselves killed. Dragomir would've been on the front lines, because that tends to happen to your favourite folks when you play a game of Dwarf Fortress. They die horribly.

Obviously, things didn't turn out quite like that, and during the development of Mindless Walkabout I decided to convert Dragomir into a semi-Non copy of Traveller, partially because my first drawing of Traveller looked so much like Dragomir... just with brown hair. (As I mentioned in the comments, Traveller is a Metal Gear Solid joke in disguise. Clones? Different-coloured hair? Missing eyes? Yar har har.) Ever since then I've been trying to drop subtle hints as to Dragomir's actual lineage without being too obvious, and I think I was successful in not letting the rat out of the bag too early. Feel free to disagree.

Dragomir's true nature has long been of less interest to me than what he'd do when he'd discovered the truth. His decisions, more than his existence as a Non, will drive the story of season four forward. I'm as interested as anyone to see what he'll do, as my characters still occasionally surprise me even when I'm in the middle of writing a paragraph.

On Friday: A teaser that won't come into play for another year. Stay tuned.