I think this is around where we stop with the “Jill is casually offensive” stuff. Eoin’s chastising her kind of comes off as whingy.

Here’s a great little pre-planning fail: When this page was live on the site, I has no idea how Eoin was teleporting Jill. Was it a power he had? Was it unique to him? Who knows, I didn’t, and I didn’t come up with the Horsestones until basically immediately before they’re introduced in about 70 pages. You might think that the teleporting panel being kind of reminiscent of a gemstone was foreshadowing, but actually it inspired the idea way later.

The idea, never explained in-comic proper, was that the Rabbits, Horses, and Dragons were in an alliance against everyone else, and their advantage was that the horses controlled all ways of transporting from one floor of the tower to another. I had an idea that there were huge Stargate things and the Horses shut them all down. I think there was a lore post alluding to this that went with this page, but it didn’t go over well.

The very first thing I wrote of LotH, a short called “The Stakeout”, actually set this up better. It had Eoin in disguise staking out Jill with the Horse champion. It was very very silly. I’m actually going through some of the cringy old google docs of LotH, so here’s some fun facts!

1. The first draft of the opening involved a Pig, and Ox, and a Tiger playing poker with someone named Jean Dunnit. I have no fucking clue who “Jean Dunnit” is. Some kind of villain? Maybe a Blade Bunny character? She gives a pig an apple of eternal youth (?!) in exchange for info on Jill. Very odd
2. Jill’s character profile says that her weapon is a Jian (no) and that her element is Wood (?). I think I was more into the Chinese Zodiac motif at the start, which is maybe a good indication of how I was going about the series all assways and focusing on Chapter 50 and not Chapter 1 (Saffron and Sage has this problem a little as well, though not nearly as bad)
3. All of my openings for LotH were focused on characters who were absolutely not the protagonist. Even the one I went with is really more about “What a crazy situation!” than who Jill actually is, with a magic rabbit on page 3. One thing I’ve learned writing is that the bit of a story where a character just fucks around waiting for the plot to start is actually really important! It’s easy to think the audience wants to see the cool thing right away, and I’ve even told writers that as advice in the past, but the groundwork needs to be laid! There’s a reason the time machine doesn’t appear until 20 minutes deep into Back to the Future, for instance. If you don’t establish who characters are and while you should care about them, readers will be bored, and the only reason anyone reacted to Legend of the Hare at all is because Jill is a strong enough character to shine through all the structural catastrophes, at least for a while.

Up next, the page on which I have a lot to say.