Scope
The motivation behind building Faraday City
I'm a frequent writer of transgender fiction stories online (on
Fictionmania,
BigCloset, or
DeviantArt), and I'm a huge superhero geek. I even
cosplay! So in some ways, Faraday City was inevitable. :)
Faraday City's Unique Selling point
Superhero stories with transgender elements is actually a pretty well-explored niche. But my goal is for these stories to really feel like a living and breathing location that's explored with humor and heart.
The teenage adventure/comedy stories of Identity Crisis are the core of this series, but I also try to explore other characters and stories that exist in Faraday Cities, allowing people to experience the seedy unlit parts of the world, or how desperate battles for truth and justice may be happening right underneath your nose, and you'd never know it...
Theme
Genre
The world is a pretty traditional superhero setting, where magic and technology and metahuman powers are now part of daily life. It's primarily set in Faraday City, the flashpoint for this new heroic age, so the people who live here are exposed to these elements on a day-to-day basis.
Reader Experience
It's an adventure! It's a world of snappy banter, clever quips, and quick retorts, so there's a definite sense of lightheartedness and fun to a lot of the superheroics.
That said, the stories aren't afraid to delve into some darker and more mature topics. Characters may be killed. In some of the more adult-themed stories, they even have sex. These characters live in a dangerous world, and that's never far away. Courage requires some risk, after all.
But--for the most part--the good guys win in the end. :)
Reader Tone
The tone really depends on the individual story. An adventure/comedy won't have the same tone as an erotic horror story, after all. And you'll see both here! But overall, the tone of the world is somewhere between dark and bright. Significantly in
Identity Crisis, the teenage hero comes to realize that his inital perception of a four-color comic book morality is actually a good deal darker. But even so, he remains idealistic.
Recurring Themes
Given the transgender elements, a recurring theme in the story is transformation, and how a character adapts and grows as a result. The change is often a triggering event for them.
And because transformation is often an element, the characters may often be what I refer to as "transgender by circumstance," as opposed to being born trans as people are in the real world. So, for instance, a cisgender guy who's transformed into a woman may find himself experiencing a bit of the same gender identity issues as a genuine trans person might experience in the real world, even though they got there from a different direction. So in that regard, they're more metaphorical for the transgender journey and experience.
