Chapter 4 - Page 9

Posted November 30th, 2023
 

The mysterious figure went through a number of aliases over time:

-When I was in high school, they went by “The Sunset Rogue” or something like that, because at the time their cloak was a gradient that went from red to yellow, and I played with a few other aliases that were mostly either pretentious or stupid.

-Then, when I actually began writing the scripts, I realized that it really wouldn’t be in character for them to give themselves an alias at all, since they just wouldn’t care enough, so I wrote all the way through, like, Chapter 8-ish with them just not having an alias, and all the characters kept coming up with increasingly silly nicknames (ranging from Vermillion’s “hypercompetent enigma” in Chapter 2 to a yet-to-be-introduced side character’s “Masky Caperton” in a later chapter, which I’m debating on keeping because it makes me laugh).

-And then I realized about halfway through when Chapter 3 was updating that it made zero sense for Ramona to NOT name them. I went through a bunch of ideas, my personal favorite being “Pink Robin,” which is a real animal that looks exactly like the mysterious figure’s cape (seriously, look it up), but I couldn’t do that one because of another rather well-known comic franchise that rhymes with “Batman” and also it’s a little too silly. I eventually settled on “The Phantom,” which rolled off the tongue well and seemed tonally and thematically fitting.

-But months later, uh-oh! Turns out The Phantom is ALSO a well-established comic franchise- The very first costumed superhero, in fact! How did I not already know this? This is like naming your fictional time travel device “Anacronópete”! Gotta find a new name, fast! What’s a synonym for “phantom”?

-Enter “The Eidolon”, the figure’s official alias forever and always as of this moment. “Eidolon” is a word going back to ancient Greece that refers to a spirit taking the image of a living or dead person, with an alternative definition being an idealized person or thing. I’m actually very glad I had to change their alias to its current state, because “The Eidolon” fits them perfectly, in almost every conceivable way. The main downside is that it doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as “The Phantom” would, but alas. Such is fate.

-Quark (she/her, they/them)