Traci Loudin is the author of The Last of the Ageless, a post-apocalyptic adventure featuring the shapeshifting Nyr.
BELINDA: Tell us about Nyr, what makes her an antiheroine?
TRACI: Nyr lives in a morally gray, post-apocalyptic world. She can partially shapeshift to gain the claws, fangs, and fur of a tigress, as well as some of the big cat’s less friendly personality traits. Growing up in the Hellsworth Tribe, she learned that compassion is for the weak, and that the only way to survive in this world is to fight, take what you can, and leave nothing for others to use against you.
She’s a member of a smaller clan that scavenges for booty along the perimeter of the Hellsworth Tribe territory, until her lust for bounty lands her with a mysterious artifact that separates her from her clan before the novel begins. From there she begins her transition from more of a villainous character to more of an antihero.
SCOTT: I went and looked up the definition first, just to be sure I didn’t blow it by getting the basics wrong. Wikipedia says, “An antihero or antiheroine is a protagonist who lacks conventional heroic qualities such as idealism, courage, and morality.” By that definition, Kim isn’t an extreme form of antihero, because at the opening of the story she does have a moral compass and can be courageous when she has to be. But she didn’t start out that way. In her earlier life, Kim was a cyber-thief who thought nothing of destroying people in the pursuit of a self-defined “greater good.” She lost her idealism when those decisions came back to haunt her. At the opening of the story, Kim’s been on the run and almost completely alone for five years because of that.
REBECCA: In Mercy and the other books in the series Exile, Muse, Fury and the next instalment I’m writing at the moment, Wraith, I created an amnesiac, exiled creature of spirit who calls herself Mercy.