Mignon and Shere Ramblings: I Hope You Like Walls of Text Edition
Mignon and Shere Ramblings: I Hope You Like A Wall of Text Edition
So the MigShere prologue is done, and the prologue is likely all there will ever be, but I still have a strange sense of completion. I guess it is less of a prologue and more of a pilot episode that sets up a potential series that has little chance of existing.
Mignon and Shere isn’t a perfect series. It never was going to be, but I certainly had fun writing most of it. I enjoy its weird transient setting that takes place on earth but maybe not earth during the 80’s but also modern day. The settings is whatever was convenient for me at the time and the genre was whatever I felt like writing and I feel like that sort of playfulness fit the stupidity that is Mignon and Shere really well. I think it was supposed to be an 80’s themed buddy cop thing, but then I wanted to reference Twin Peaks and it became absurd and supernatural. It was never mean to be something grand or thought-provoking, it was just meant to be a whole mess of weirdness and fun, and I think at its best it did what it set out to do.
That isn’t to say it was a perfect series. Upon re-reading it, I notice how wildly varied the quality is from chapter to chapter, from paragraph to paragraph. You can basically follow my mental state’s ups and downs over the last year by reading Mignon and Shere. While that’s definitely a weakness for me as a writer, it somehow fits Mignon and Shere to me. That sounds incredibly pretentious and it pretty much is. This series has always been about me experimenting. Does anyone even remember how it started out as music?
The other cause of wildly varying quality seems to be my ineptness at using Shere a character. She isn’t MY character and that lack of comfort regrettably shines through. The Mignon-centric parts are easily the best parts. I think, like a lot of things, that started to be less and less of a factor as time went on. Shere in this universe is starting to separate herself from the DnD Shere, just as Mignon quickly did. While she is still Lukki’s character I’ve begun weaving bits and pieces of my own ideas into her to make this incarnation feel a little bit more like my own. Lukki has helped immensely in this. I don’t want to screw up his character so when I had ideas for Shere I would ask him “Would Shere do this?” or “Would Shere phrase things like this?” and he would help me work out how to do it in a way that fit for both of us. If Mignon and Shere was a full series I believe I would quickly grow more comfortable using Shere as a character and do a lot more with her. That would be a good thing as she’s an immensely fun character and also easily the most important character in the series. The plans I have for the future might as well see the series named “Shere and Shere: On the Case! Also Mignon Maybe Exists Edition.”
I think the series found itself at the end, despite all the ups and downs. I think there is something there, though it might not be as readily apparently as I want it to be. Upon reading it as a whole people might notice the ridiculous, almost stupid amount of foreshadowing MigShere has. Though it continues to foreshadow events that aren’t even part of the prologue, Mignon’s conversation with that weird group in the red velvet room is chocked full of such items. I think most people would be surprised to know there WAS a vision there at the beginning and it wasn’t purely (just mostly) rattling things off the top of my stupid head. Few people know of all the twist and turns this silly series actually has in it, and I think there is the possibility of it being a good series if a few more kinks were worked out and I was able to write more consistently. And Lukki and I weren’t too lazy to do full page comics.
Who knows? Maybe you’ll see Mignon and Shere: On the Case! Some Kind of Second Case: I Hope You Like Words Edition (MaSOtC!SKoSCIHYLWE) someday. Maybe it will be good. Maybe it will be bad. I can tell you only one thing for sure, and that would be that it is going to be fucking weird.
