What led to Project Eryss?

 

I’ve been working on Project Eryss for a while now. In fact… if we start from the very beginning of the project, when I first had the idea and started creating the characters and began developing the city of Paragon Bay… it’s been several years. In fact, the first time I was seriously considering making a series of erotic superhero stories was way back in 2019.

It wasn’t a new idea, as such. Ever since I was a horny teenager I’d always thought there was something very erotic about superheroes in general, especially when they got hypnotized or captured and tied up. My fascination with this, my increasingly obvious bisexuality and my growing awareness of fetishes like erotic hypnosis, bondage and forced helplessness, led me to seek out a lot of erotic superhero content online. 

This was back when I was 19 and got carried away in the online hypno-community and just barely managed to pull out before some really sinister predators got their claws in me… but I’ve written about that before, so I won’t go into details about it here. What’s important in this context is that I also joined online “Superheroines in distress” roleplays, I found sites with erotic superhero comics and stories, and I found artists who specialized in “superheroines in erotic peril” art. 

In hindsight, most of it was pretty bad. I mean, even at 19 I could tell that most of these comics and stories were really awfully written and a number of the roleplayers weren’t very good storytellers. Not that I was that much better myself… I’ve probably forgotten most of my most cringeworthy roleplays and ideas… but even back then I had a certain distaste for what I still call the “bitch got what she deserved” attitude. It was all over the hypnofetish scene too, but the  superheroines-in-distress genre was OVERSATURATED with that attitude… that hostile and hyper-misogynistic tone that the superheroines who were hypnotized and assaulted turned into victims had been asking for it all along because they were uppity bitches who didn’t know their place.

…yeah, you COULD argue that the entire scenario is pretty misogynistic to begin with, with supposedly powerful heroines being reduced to victims and their peril being played for the sexy and erotic for all it’s worth. A lot of people have pointed this out and, yeah, I don’t actually have a counterargument here. It’s possible that some people will look at my fondness for damsel-in-distress scenarios, my hypnofetish comics and stories, and my non-con roleplay scenarios and fantasies, and say they’re a sign of internalized misogyny. I can’t PROVE that they aren’t.

My only real defense here is that it’s about attitude. In the common superheroines-in-distress stories… especially the really bad 3D comics made in Blender or Daz3D, with Comic Sans for the speech bubbles… the superheroines were almost always stupid, annoying, self-righteous and preachy, not to mention violently prudish. They had names like “Justice Babe” or “America Dame” or “Patriot Gal“ and talked and acted like exaggerated parodies of early Silver Age heroes, but they were ridiculously easy to defeat even by random street thugs. Usually because the sources of their powers were because they were wearing some easily-snapped belts or necklaces that the bad guys just had to yank at in order to get them off and render the heroines powerless.

And then the heroine got chloroformed and/or raped while screaming, or just thinking if she’d been gagged: “No! I am JUSTICE BABE! You can’t do this to ME!” While the rapists talked about her tight cunt or called her a big-breasted whore. And while the thugs may not be the heroes of the story per se, you could tell that the writer was very much on their side and wanted to make sure they won and the heroines got humiliated. 

Already back then I was thinking about how I would have done it differently. 

I did want the erotic peril. I did want the defeats, the chloroform, the hypnosis and brainwashing, the non-con, the gangbangs. But why did all the characters have to be so terrible? Why did the heroines have to be so annoying and stupid? Why did the villains have to be so one-note? Why did every story seem to begin and end with “stuck-up bitch gets taken down a peg”? Couldn’t we have some heroines that were at least semi-competent or at least made some decent smart-aleck comments instead of preaching all the time? Couldn’t we have some stories that… I don’t know, were actual stories?

It wasn’t all bad, mind. After a lot of time being annoyed at the lack of content that could scratch my itch for erotic superheroines, I found that there WAS some better stuff out there. Metrobay Comix was among the better series, especially the comics by Trishbot. They had much better dialogue, they occasionally had something resembling actual plots, and the superheroines had personalities that weren’t just “stupid, annoying and preachy”.

 

 

 

And of course there was Empowered. I absolutely adored Empowered. Okay, it’s technically not that erotic, but it’s a very effective parody of all those superheroines-in-distress stories, with the titular Empowered being an extremely accident-prone superheroine who’s constantly getting defeated, captured, chloroformed, stripped naked, bound and gagged… but she’s utterly sympathetic. She’s this insecure, neurotic mess with a poor self-image who really just wants to help people, and while her sexy captures are played for laughs and titillation, they’re never portrayed as DESERVED… in fact the comic goes out of its way to make sure the reader know Empowered DOESN’T deserve any of this. And it makes the rare occasions when she actually wins and gets a happy ending that much sweeter. 

(I really should do a proper review of that comic some time.)

 

 

Fast forward to 2019 when I was facing a dilemma: I still liked superheroes, but I was suffering from MAJOR superhero fatigue… especially the comics by Marvel and DC, which were just so much garbage. And the fanboys didn’t make it any better. (The fanGIRLS were mostly just obsessed with the hot male actors from the Marvel movies, or Nightwing’s butt, which got a little old but was better than the fanBOYS were either whining about “wokeness” and “forced diversity” or were fighting about whose fave hero could beat up who, and that was old before it even started.)  

This was when I seriously started to consider making a superhero universe of my own. It wouldn’t be a comic series, because while I love both creating and reading comics, they take a very long time to do and we were looking at a LOT of potential stories here… but written stories would take much less time, and if I added some illustrations to them, they could be like erotic superhero light novels… or maybe more like erotic light novellas or erotic light short stories, since I knew myself well enough that if I began with the big and intricate erotic novel-length stories, I’d never finish them.

So I set about planning. I knew at once that I wanted my superheroines to be a varied and hopefully likeable bunch. Even though they would lose a lot, end up tied up, hypnotized, stripped naked and definitely end up naked and fucking… I didn’t want them to come across as stupid or incompetent like your annoying and unlikeable America Babe or Justice Dame faux-heroes. 

I already had a few superheroine characters I was pretty happy with; Mimette, Miss Metamorph, Ethereal and Ermine… and one villainess, Candykate. Most of them were created for those aforementioned “superheroines in erotic peril” type roleplays. In fact Candykate was my attempt at introducing a different type of villain to these plays. Not a mad scientist or a seductive demoness or a thuggish brute… just a completely amoral and hedonistic girl who was on constant sugar high and who had a power that seemed laughable at first… being able to create candy out of thin air. Just that she turned out to be able to create things like explosive caramels, knockout peppermints, liquorice ropes that could tie people up, hypnotic lollipops and so forth…

 

 

Four heroines and one villainess wasn’t a lot, but it was a start. 

The first thing I thought of to tie them together was… something called “Project Eryss”. 

At the time I didn’t know exactly what this “Project Eryss” was. I based the name on Eris, the Greek goddess of discord, which gave it all a nicely sinister feel, but at the time it was really just a convenient backstory for my girls, and an even more convenient reason for why most of the superhero characters I created were women… Project Eryss had as its goal to create superpowered women. They did this by either creating superpowered clones, or by kidnapping women, experimenting on them, and giving them superpowers. There, I had a reason for why superheroes were mostly women, while allowing for the odd male superhero as well.

Why did Project Eryss do this, though? Why were they so set on creating superheroines and villainesses? I had no idea. So I set out to find out.

It took a long time and included many false starts. I read a lot of superhero stories and comics for inspiration… Empowered and to some extent the Metrobay Comix, yes, but also the classic Astro City comics, whose “anthology with rotating cast of protagonists” format was too good not to swipe… as well as its tendency to focus less on the BIG events and more on the more personal, character-driven small stuff- Astro City had all the classic superhero stories with world-ending battles, vengeful gods, alien invasions, monster attacks and sinister conspiracies, but these things very rarely got the bulk of the attention… they were just things that went on in the background while the personal drama story was happening, or were mentioned in brief flashbacks. And I as a reader never felt like I was missing out on anything. 

Another inspiration was the book series Super Powereds, and its even better spinoff novel Corpies. Where Astro City was a pastiche of classic superhero universes, Super Powereds showed a different take on a world with superheroes, where superheroing was a legit, paying career. Again there was far more focus on character and interpersonal drama than on the big blockbuster battles, I also appreciated that Super Powereds COMPLETELY avoided the “Justice League” trope. 

You know how pretty much all non-Marvel/DC superhero universes have a Justice League or Avengers equivalent, right? It’s always the top superhero team in that universe, the Big Guns, the best, biggest, most powerful heroes in that universe. There’s usually a Superman stand-in, a Batman stand-in and a Wonder Woman stand-in, usually a Flash stand-in, sometimes an Aquaman or Green Lantern stand-in… but we might also see a Captain America stand-in or an Iron Man stand-in. Sometimes the members are a little more original, but you always have like the Big Team, the Top Dogs, the “these guys are the A-league of heroes” gang. But Super Powered didn’t. There were plenty of superhero teams, some obviously more powerful or prestigious than others, but there was no Hall of Justice or Watchtower satellite or Avengers mansion where the Greatest Hero Team met. And I liked that. 

Besides… with stories like the ones I’m planning to write it’s definitely a plus if the heroes aren’t too powerful or omnipresent. If you’re going to have shady people like Project Eryss who kidnaps and experiments on women around, and you have a Justice League equivalent that does nothing to stop them, then that Justice League equivalent is either incompetent or evil. And both ideas have been done to death by other authors. 

So no Justice League, and ESPECIALLY no Superman equivalent. No Captain America or other patriot heroes either… they belong to the Golden Age when superhero comics doubled as war propaganda. Oh, and no superhero schools either… That’d just end up looking like a knockoff of the schools from Super Powereds or Xavier’s school from Marvel or… whatever that school from My Hero Academia is called. 

 

 

…”U. A. High School”? 

Yeah, okay, that. I didn’t want that. I get the appeal of superhero schools, but it wasn’t what I was going for.

I did need a city though. Some sizeable modern metropolis that the heroes and villains could call home, where there would be tall buildings to fight amongst, civilians to threaten and rescue, and plenty of room for secret labs and things like that.  It took quite a long time before Paragon Bay, the city such as it is now, came to me… at first it didn’t even have a name; it was just “the city” and was just a vaguely defined big city. I think at one point I named it “Extra City” or something. I didn’t even know if it was supposed to be an American or European city-

I also had the nation of Ecanria in my notes, as a Latveria-like dictatorship under an immortal dark sorcerer called Lord Waric… with the idea that centuries ago Ecanria had essentially been a techno-fantasy nation like from old cartoons (think He-Man or She-Ra) and Waric had been the Evil Bad Guy constantly trying to take over the nation and being thwarted by the valiant heroes every week. But now, in modern times, he had actually succeeded in conquering the nation and ruled it with an iron fist. 

I started writing a story called Meet the Alliance, which was about “The Alliance of Super Chicks”, let by Ermine, and with Mimette and Miss Metamorph as members, and the story was about them uncovering an ancient conspiracy on why superheroes existed in their world… but the story kind of fizzled out because I hadn’t actually developed the world yet. I still thought it took place in our world, or at least a version of our world with superheroes and a lot of extras, like the Marvel or DC universes, and so there were a lot of references to real-world history and locations, such as ancient Greece and World War II. But it didn’t quite work. So I put the story on hold and decided to develop the setting more.

And boy, did that development lead to places that surprised me. I discovered that no, Paragon Bay wasn’t an American city at all, it was a city-state on a subtropical island, in a world where there was no such thing as America. Or Europe, or Asia, or Africa, or Australia. It was an entirely different world, Ecanria wasn’t the only unique nation here… there was Westhaven, Tir’Galdur, Oceandra, Norwynn and others. The people of this world didn’t drink Pepsi or watch Netflix; they drank Cool Crush Cola and watched the Woodworks streaming service (part of Westwood Inc). There was no World War I or II, but Ecanria had gone through three Waric wars, and there was a hundred year cold war between Ecanria and Paragon Bay.

THAT turned out to be the kick in the ass that the project needed. A different world, with its own nations and cultures, and its own history that was intertwined with metahumans. All of a sudden I was much freer to just go completely nuts with the worldbuilding without having to consider real-world limitations. I created more characters and more nations. I wrote a timeline detailing the history of the world, which included the rise and fall of Ancient Ecanria, the rise and fall of the Westhaven empire, the three Waric wars and the civil war of Tir’Galdur. 

Actually, Tir’Galdur probably deserves a post to itself since much of it was created as an angry parody and subversion of a certain series about a certain boy wizard written by a certain transphobic bigot… there’s a lot to unpack there.

 

 

And so I started creating the stories. One of the major developments came when I developed the Westwood family, most notably Rosalyn ”Dream Jewel” Westwood, who immediately grew a fanbase when I posted drawings and character concepts of her on social media. Which of course meant that she had to feature heavily in the introduction story, which admittedly took me a few months to write… but after a lot of revising and revamping and rewriting. I had the first story, Welcome to Paragon Bay, ready, with the second story, Holly Blackthorne and the Silent Choir, underway.

And it started to grow. I spent ages designing and adding the Project Eryss section of my website, and started periodically updating it, with character profiles, glossary words, location information… and of course the heart of the Project Eryss universe: the stories.

As of the time of writing, Welcome to Paragon Bay and Holly Blackthorne and the Silent Choir are done and up for reading on the site. One story, Watch the Stone Shine, is written but not 100% edited or illustrated yet (but the current version is available for Patrons to read!). Two more stories, Small Talk and Questions You’re Not Supposed to Ask (working title; may change) are in the midst of being written, with at least ten more stories being on the ideas stage. 

Yeah, I’m liking this little horny, hypnotic superhero-verse I’ve dreamed up.