Four Winds: Back Home, Forever

[writerlove]

Lolotte defies Mordack once more. Will it be her last? The Sphinx also reveals her last riddle. Have a guess? Let us know in this thread.

http://www.postudios.com/fourwinds/?p=1211

[GrahamRocks!]

[spoiler]Poor Lolotte...[/spoiler]

[drusain]

[spoiler]Lolotte was an interesting character to play with. When I was first given the opportunity to write for her I didn't know exactly what I planned to do with her but when I started thinking about what we know about Lolotte, I began to understand Lolotte in a way I never really thought of when playing KQ4.

To me she always had some sort of underlying issue with the illusion of control, and when we saw Lolotte's castle that a very visible issue. She needed people to control (the soldiers) to do her everyday tasks and she brainwashed her "son" Edgar. She seemed to have Edgar's best interests in mind too in that Lolotte saw a good wife in Rosella for Edgar. She treated Edgar like a son, but never let him know who he was or where he came from.

When I thought about the fact that Lolotte was banished from Etheria, I wondered why. Why was she banished and why did she take Edgar? Maybe she couldn't have a child of her own? Maybe she had hurt someone in Etheria? All we knew was that she was banished from Etheria and then took a castle in Tamir to have an affiliation with the Black Cloaks and have people brainwashed.

Developing Lolotte's character deeper than that was a fun process. I liked the concept that Lolotte had once been a good and talented sorceress who genuinely wanted to help people, but was not good at expressing dignity. She hated working under someone else as an apprentice and she hated being spurned by her king. She gets angry and attacks people in Tanalore and then she gets exiled from there and disowned by her family. Lolotte doesn't know how to handle this sort of situation of losing everything she's ever had as a young and talented sorceress.

She searches for hundreds of years to find a new family who will love her but always does it "wrong." In Etheria she tries to marry into royalty, but is spurned. She attacks people and gets exiled, but not without stealing a baby to start a new family again. This time she brainwashes everyone in her castle so she has complete control of everyone, but that ends when Rosella kills her.

Presumably the Black Cloaks recruited Lolotte sometime after she went to Etheria, and they were the only ones who accepted Lolotte for who she was. She stays loyal to the Black Cloaks, but this relationship (personified by Mordack) starts to fall apart in these stories because Lolotte begins to recognize that she was just a tool for them.

The way Lolotte walked away from Mordack when she knew she would kill him was supposed to be a reference to one of my favorite movies: Pan's Labyrinth. When Lolotte knew she got caught by Mordack, Lolotte knew that the only way to achieve independence from the Black Cloaks was to just walk away from him. She could have attacked him; she might've begged for her life. But instead she will die with dignity and accept that, while leaving the Black Cloaks meant death, it was her own choice. In a life where she's only lived through dependence on a family model (even if it's a bad one, like the Black Cloaks), her only real option to break free from her family dependence was to deny Mordack the control he thought he had over her by ignoring him.

Now perhaps in death she can reconcile with her family in the land of the dead.

I'm going to miss writing for her, and I hope you all enjoyed her. It's a little nerve wracking writing for a character everyone knew from the 90's. You have to make sure that people don't think that some idiot writer ruined the character of Lolotte I hope you enjoyed how I wrote her and continue to enjoy these stories.[/spoiler]

And of course...

I know the answer to the riddle I wrote. Do you? Make some guesses!

[Dragonstorm]

I can think of one guess to that riddle.

[spoiler]Temptation[/spoiler]

[snabbott]

That's what I was thinking, too.

[GrahamRocks!]

It would make sense. But, watch them prove us wrong again!

Hey Dru, where'd you get that Riddler picture anyway? Deviantart?

[drusain]

Google Image Search 

[snabbott]

Your development of Lolotte vaguely reminds me of Elphaba in Wicked.

[Thaumaturge]

As a guess at the riddle, perhaps:

[spoiler]A cloud:
- When still light they may be silver.
- While perhaps a slightly tenuous guess, I think that I can see an association between water and death (or rather the cycle of death and life), and the water in a cloud is likely to be very cold.
- With the light behind it, a cloud may seem to glow with its own light.
- When becoming ready to rain a cloud not uncommonly darkens; the rain is the cloud returning to the earth.[/spoiler]