One of the backer rewards for my Paper Doll Veronika book crowdfund was a custom, one-of-a-kind, articulated paper doll like the ones I use in the comic. One backer requested a doll of the version of Batman from my fancomic Decadence.
It was very fun to make, and it got me thinking. My sister and I had a lot of good ideas for that comic, and a lot of the images and designs were really cool. But man, does it need a ton of rewriting. At the time, I just didn't understand men. So I was making, as I've described before, male characters behave like Gammas when I wanted them to be gentlemanly, and the main problem was: Well, we wanted to concentrate on the relationship between Bruce and Dick as a very strong parent-child bond. But I recently realized: I wrote it as though it were a mother-child relationship.
Again it was Professor Layton that first clued me in that I wasn't doing this right: I noticed in Eternal Diva that the Professor is not as physically protective of Luke as he is of women. At first this bothered me: didn't he care about Luke's safety? But I came to understand, he lets Luke be brave and take care of himself as he grows to be a heroic gentleman.
Vox Day's sociosexual hierarchy further helped me understand men and male interaction. I heartily recommend the study thereof to writers.
If I am granted the time to return to Decadence, I must revise it so Bruce does more similarly to Prof. Layton, acting not as a Gamma but an Alpha or Sigma, and not a mother but a good father.
