Trivia / Heretical Edge

• All There in the Manual: The author is very open with answering non-spoiler questions. A lot of worldbuilding info such as the date and the mechanics of magic come up in these questions before they can show up in the story itself.
  • One bit of information from Word of God that deserves a mention is that Flick's paternal grandfather once got into a barfight with some werewolves and won. For the record, all the supernatural stuff comes from Flick's mother's side of the family. Grandpa Chambers is a Badass Normal.
• Spoiled by the Format: Deliberately averted. A certain character had such a major secret about them that Cerulean used different character tags for her before and after The Reveal so that people clicking on the before tag wouldn't see all of her future major appearances. It helps that she'd initially been treated like someone who wouldn't return for quite a while before The Reveal, so the fact that she was only tagged in one chapter wouldn't be out of place. It's completely understandable why he went to such lengths to ensure people wouldn't be spoiled; Tabby the orphan from the Atherby Clan actually being a Seosten and being responsible for Flick's immunity to possession by possessing her first is one of the absolute biggest reveals in the series.
• Teasing Creator: Cerulean likes teasing readers with little details, or giving non-answers to spoilery questions. The joke tags at that come at the end of the chapters (starting towards the end of arc 6, although some were retroactively edited into arc 5) occasionally dip into Trolling Creator levels.
  • He also loves dropping spoilers or bits of background in disguise as sarcasm or jokes. He revealed one of the key factors in Charmeine's defeat long before it happened via Sarcastic Confession. He outright said that Flick had a sister and that Flick was compromised by a Seosten long before revealing Tabbris again via Sarcastic Confession.
• Throw It In!: The chemistry and Les Yay between Flick and Shiori starting in arc 8 took the author by surprise. He let it build from there and started intentionally writing it by arc 9, eventually turning it into an actual romance.
  • A poster on the SpaceBattles.com thread at one point randomly asked how much money he would have to donate to get a "mini-interlude" to see an off-screen conversation between two characters. Cerulean promptly considered the possibility (warning: spoilers for up to Arc 10 in link) and within a week, Mini-Interlude 1- Shiori and Columbus was released. A second mini-interlude was commissioned hours later.
• What Could Have Been
  • Larissa Mason, Sands and Scout's mom, was intended to be older and be the reason why her husband Liam betrayed Joselyn and Deveron. But Cerulean forgot about this when writing her first appearance in Sariel's Interlude, which took place in 1986, and then forgot about that when other characters referred to what happened in the spoiler tags. When readers pointed out the discrepancy, the scene went through a few edits until it matched Larissa's age as it was originally presented in Sariel's Interlude.
    • One of these edits had Liam mind-wiping and de-aging Larissa so she would be a kid in 1986, then taking advantage of the situation to restart their relationship. Concerns were raised that this new version over-complicated the backstory and made Liam too evil. Cerulean agreed and changed the backstory to its final state, with Larissa being born in 1975.
  • In the original plans, Roxa Pittman was a Bystander and Flick's best friend in Wyoming who was actually a werewolf, and discovering that would have been the catalyst for showing Flick how screwed up Crossroads is. At some point, Cerulean decided to make it so she was a Bystander-Kin Crossroads student from California who had no history with Flick, which led him to create Miranda; he later reused the "Heretic becomes a reformist after finding out a childhood friend is a Stranger" backstory for Gia Perez aka the real Pace. Roxa still becomes a werewolf in the actual story though.
• Word of God: Cerulean is very open with answering fan questions in the comment sections of chapters, as well as the Space Battles and Sufficient Velocity discussion threads and his Discord server.