Ode to My Teenaged Self
About Me
My visual arts background is in fine art and traditional animation. I am classically trained in figure studies and received my degree in Art and Performance from the University of Texas at Dallas. My performance background is in music and theatre. My training in this area began when I was a child and has been ongoing ever since. I have performed in black box, art museum, club venue, religious, and outdoor festival environments. I've also collaborated with other creatives to help realize characters for short film projects. I have commercial audio engineering experience and enjoy creating electronic compositions/sound designs. After a few decades in the professional worlds of art and higher education, I found myself burnt out and in need of something playful, something to make art fun again. I have been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to focus on fan projects now! So I love fan art of all kinds. And I love working with new talent to bring my fan works to life. It brings me much joy and allows me to still apply my skills without the jadedness of the industry. I enjoy mentoring as well.
About Killer-Red
Fan fiction, my training taught me to avoid it. I was told in academia, that it was less than a tacky romance novel one might read on a boring flight. Apart from a goofy Darkwing Duck story I’d written in private for myself when I was feeling especially nerdy, the closest I’d come to making fan fiction was something called, Didder Play (sisters playing).
My sister and I mixed and matched pop culture icons with our favorite fictional characters to make up a comedic role-playing game, which we recorded on about 150 cassettes during our teenage years and it was really fun. I spent a good portion of my college years digitizing the Didder Play tapes and converting some of the storyline into Fairview, a series with my own world and characters. But I’d never, full-stop, written fan fiction before (except Darkwing of course), nor fathomed its popularity online.
In 2019, I felt compelled to explore this genre and decided I wanted to write Sonic fan fiction because man, I really ship Sonadow. That turned into eight stories and the formation of Team Diamond. Pleasantly surprised that anyone was interested in reading my Sonic stories, let alone acting them out and drawing them, I kept going and decided I wanted to honor my love for Teen Titans next. So, upon being introduced to Devil May Cry by my husband, I wrote Devil in My Mind, a crossover story about Dante replacing Trigon as Raven's father. After that, I started to revisit my own characters again.
Two of them kept showing up, Jordan and Blake. They'd rear their heads in various forms, with different names, different genders, and ultimately, I started writing another fan fiction that reincarnated them in Dante and Jason. That’s how Killer-Red was born.
Familiarizing myself with DmC: Devil May Cry's version of Dante was simple. The series is a self-contained story in one game, with Nephilim Dante making a few appearances in a prologue-esque comic and a couple of all-star style games. For Jason Todd, there was a lot more media to explore. I ultimately went with a combination of three versions of him: Red X (fanon lore), Titans (live action), and Arkham Knight (my favorite version).
Putting Dante and Jason together, having them meet, felt right and interesting to me. And I knew I wanted to make this story a little heavier since I would be revisiting two of my own characters, who were sort of tragic and moody. So I created Killer-Red himself. While he is a combination of Jason Todd’s alters combined with Dante’s angelic half, he is also mine in a way. Therefore, I felt more comfortable going a little darker, a little more intense, and a little sadder with him.
I wrote him to be a character my teenaged self would be proud of, as well as someone that at least one of Jason’s anonymous online admirers might gravitate towards. I also took into consideration, that I wanted to direct voice actors to play both guys and tried to create opportunities in the text to revisit the theatrical drama I’ve explored on stage. That being said, this story is for adults.
Trigger Warnings
Violence and Morbidity
Profanity and Vulgarity
Sexual Themes
If you’re still here, thank you for being here. I hope you enjoy Killer-Red as much as I enjoyed writing it, and as much as Team Diamond is enjoying bringing it to life. I’ll let you know when the audio drama version is ready and will continue to update this site on the reg.