Flora writing notes 1

First off, the Itchy-Itchy arc.

For expedience, I'll use "Itchy-Itchy arc" and similar to describe the whole of White Beleth's story, starting with the outbreak and ending with the esoteric walk through Nowhere after Andre burns them away.

Itchy-Itchy is the strongest part of Floraverse story-wise. The characters involved have actual sensible motivations and the stakes are made pretty clear from the start. Aside from Biff and Beleth, most of the other characters are just set dressing, but I'll get to that later. Biff and Beleth are obviously the focus of the story here, as they're directly investigating the outbreak. Biff doesn't have a character arc, but that's okay, because his job is to contrast Beleth, who is, of course, the main character of the two. She gets the most screen time, and has the most interactions with the rest of the cast during Itchy-Itchy, so she's the main character. She's a dynamic character; she experiences growth by the end of the arc.

Now, while Biff seems like a goofy, somewhat childish character at first, with his enthusiasm about cheesy movies, contrasted with Beleth's self-serious demeanor, Biff is actually the more mature one. He's more comfortable with his emotions, shown when they finish watching the cheesy romance film with the downer ending. Biff is upbeat afterward, even though he acknowledges that the story was sad, while Beleth is distraught over it. Beleth's bratty, child-like demeanor gets played up further when she goes to the convention, causing a scene when she's mistaken for a cosplayer, and when she reads comic books on the job. André highlights this in particular, since despite being flamboyant and appearing to take himself comically seriously, he scolds Beleth for not giving her high-stakes job its due attention.

The conclusion of Itchy-Itchy, for all intents and purposes, results in Beleth dying because of her own childish nature. Biff is dutiful as an adult ought to be, and submits himself to the cleansing process so as to avoid *fucking dying* of flowers. Beleth, however, is embarrassed about possibly needing treatment, and so stays quiet, resulting in her infection progressing beyond the point of saving. This is extremely childish--like a kid refusing to bathe, or avoiding a doctor's visit, even though it's in their best interest. She recognizes her mistake by the end, but it's too late for her to save herself, and so André must burn her away to the esoteric realm of Nowhere.

So far, this is just stuff that *actually happened* in Itchy-Itchy.

There are some big changes I'd make.

First, Amdusias and Orobas do basically nothing in this arc. They don't assist in curing the epidemic (outside of escorting Median to Hell iirc), they barely offer any character interaction for Beleth, and their own interaction goes basically fucking nowhere. They have that weird and esoteric exchange in Before You Know It, and that's about it. With more screentime, they could have been used to better effect. Personally, I would use them as a sort of mirror image of André and Biff respectively: Amdusias takes herself and everything else extremely seriously, and plays it straight, which contrasts André's comical self-aggrandization; Orobas honestly doesn't have much going on here, but given her Pinkie Pie-like behavior in the nsfw comics, I think a good direction to take her would be to make her exceptionally childish on the surface, almost to the point of being insufferable, but to give her the necessary resolve to pull through in a moment of crisis.

Of course, giving them similar comparison points to Beleth's character traits makes them kind of redundant, so they could be done away with entirely. I really like them, though, and I think that putting them into a more condensed arc with Beleth could pay off immensely.

Say Beleth is ordered away from the investigation because something more urgent has come up. She has to join Amdy and Oro in stopping an angel that has appeared elsewhere, and the investigation is put on hold. Biff sets up a perimeter of zombies to see if the flowers spread or whatever while this all goes down. Amdy and Oro lead Beleth to the encounter, where Beleth drops the ball and nearly gets them all killed. Amdusias specifically calls Beleth out for support, and Beleth fails due to their own childishness--maybe Amdy and Bel had some petty argument and the angel amplifies Bel's pettiness in the moment Amdy needs her help the most--as a result, Amdusias nearly fucking dies, but Orobas pulls through for them both and stops the angel. Amdusias calls Beleth out for their bullshit, and that's more or less it for Bel's interaction with Oro and Amdy for this arc. They have important shit to do, and Bel gets called back to the investigation.

Having faced her own character flaw, Beleth must now decide to grow from this experience. When the angel is discovered to be the source of the flowers, the result is another crisis which endangers Biff and André. However, instead of André fucking off somewhere else, he's there to confront the angel. This is a similar scenario to the above with Oro and Amdy now; André calls on Beleth to deliver, but the stakes are higher this time. The angel is more powerful than the last. Beleth can contain the angel's influence, but only by subjecting herself to it or some shit. She becomes horribly infected with flowers, and prevents André and Biff from becoming infected. By the time aid can be administered, the flower disease has advanced beyond the point of no return. Beleth has overcome her own childish nature, at the cost of her own life.

But what made her so childish in the first place?

Now, this is probably going to sound really fucking stupid, but when I first reached the weird dream sequence with Jupet at school, I thought that Jupet was Beleth's daughter. I hadn't read any of the character sheets or anything mentioning that Beleth is literally a doll and can't have sex or make babies. And this is where I start to just make up shit because I think it's cool and tragic.

Beleth's comic book has a smear of cheese dust on one of the pages, later revealed to have been left by Jupet. This is good, this is great. But of course, in this version of events, Jupet isn't Beleth's puppeteer, she's her daughter. Her *dead* daughter. Jupet was into comic books and nerdy shit like that, and was the light of Beleth's life, and then she fucking died. The result is that Beleth withdrew into herself, practically gave up on social life, and became obsessed with all the weeb shit that Jupet was into. Even better if Jupet died because of Beleth being an immature bitch about something petty, because that means the above scene with Amdy and Oro was almost the second time that somebody died because of Beleth's own stupid childishness. She'd recognize this flaw now and try to change herself as a result. This even makes her death somewhat more tragic, or at least a little more heart-wrenching, if the scenes involve something like a flashback to Jupet's death, or hallucinating Jupet's face in the flames as she burns into Nowhere.