The Epiflairy: Book III Talkback

After 3 years of silence, The Epiflairy makes its return, featuring new stories and new punishment from the gods!

I had developed what would be the first two stories in Book III back around 2022 or so, before I first published Book I online. I thought of a few ideas, including a story where an innocent mortal woman pisses off a god for a very petty and accidental reason and ending it with a fake-out where the punishment seems to be the woman is now a destitute prostitute only to also be the first werewolf (or wifwolf, in this case).

Another story I thought of was a silly version of the Arachne story from Greco-Roman mythology, which was the genesis for the Faïri story here.

In many versions of the story, most notably Ovid's telling, an enraged Minerva/Athena kills Arachne after the latter defeats the strategy goddess in a weaving contest. However, Athena feels remorseful after the act and, still wanting to punish the human for her hubris (and the lady seems to act rather cocky in this version of Metamorphoses), resurrects her as the first spider.

I had first heard a version of this tale way back when I was a kid, when I got a book of Greek myths, possibly from one of the Scholastic book fairs/offers that would happen during elementary school, was that after Arachne showed her weaving, a furious Athena tore it up in jealousy and made her a spider so that the human would weave forever.

To make this version of the Arachne tale silly, I decided to make her final cursed form a major anachronism: a modern day, possibly Fiery, printer, similar to the one in my current workplace that also prints booklets and business cards, but also breaks down occasionally and needs to be maintained whenever that happens.

The use of many deliberately poor similes and metaphors in the Faïri story, such as the one with the leaf, came from a similar one from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, featuring the metaphor for the Vogon ships destroying the earth (paraphrased) "hanging in the air the way that bricks don't." There's also a SpongeBob reference in this book, specifically to the cartoon "Krusty Krab Training Video."

As for the main book image seen above? It's of Onsîn abducting the daughter of Fúrtel, Érmès. "They don't appear in these two stories, but be sure to keep an eye out for them later on," he told the blog readers knowingly.

This is also my first Epiflairy illustration I made in Krita. I can now more accurately simulate paintings made from natural elements, like charcoal and other crushed stones.

UPDATE - 5/3-26:

https://www.doorjamcreations.com/the-epiflairy/book-iii/003

Chapter III of The Epiflairy is now up. It's a single chapter this time around; it portrays how the seasons came to be due to the frayed relationship between the harvest goddess Jârbest (not Fúrtel, as mentioned above) and her daughter Érmès.

If you couldn't tell, this story is based on mythological stories involving travel to the underworld to retrieve a loved one, mainly the Persephone/Hades story and the tale of Innana's descent. The only major difference here is that the mother and daughter often quarrel loudly with one another and when the daughter gets abducted (raped) into the underworld, mom is overjoyed this time.

The relationship between Érmès and her mother is based upon that of my sister and our late mother during the former's teen/young-adult years. They would yell their heads off at one another for no obvious reason. Sometimes, my mom or my sister (or both) would take a verbal attack on the other extremely personally, causing even more intense arguments and yelling.

You may have noticed I said she was my late mother; as mentioned in the talkback for the 8th issue of The Sbuirrels, she passed away in 2020, and my sister became very regretful of their frequent arguments.

The name Érmès came from researching the names of the Persephone character. I discovered that the Latin name was "Proserpina," which I also discovered was also the name of a women's clothing line. I thought of something similar I learned from my French classes at Rutgers-Camden in 2015, about the French clothing store, Hermès, whose name is similar to the Roman messenger god, Hermes, so my character's name seemed really appropriate.

It was surprisingly difficult writing this chapter, possibly due to the heavy amount of circumlocutions in this series, something I point out in the story. I had planned this story to be a little shorter, but it just kept on expanding and expanding, making it possibly the longest chapter of the entire Epiflairy so far.

Additionally, you may have noticed that the main page for The Epiflairy now looks different. That's because I decided to separate each "book" by their individual stories rather than their whole books. I've come to the decision that the whole books online look too lengthy to read and each separate story would be easier to take in. It was inspired by a (possibly academic) website that had the stories of famous mythological books split onto one story per webpage.