Future Haters

Someday I hope Eternal Knight is famous enough to garner its own haters.

You know, the crazy people who just love to rant. I think you have to be pretty successful to reach enough idiots to have an appreciable band of haters.

What made me think of this? A great blog post by my blog-friend Adam Heine. In it he talks about the racists who are freaking out about the fact that Rue is depicted as black in The Hunger Games movie. The haters went nuts! It ruined the movie for some of them.

One problem. Rue is black. It says so right in the novel.

Read Adam's post, and then read the article on Jezebel he linked to.

I know one rant I'll get (in my imaginary world where Eternal Knight is big enough to be noticed):

Matt Heppe copied Katniss when he created Hadde.

How close are they? Petite, black hair in a long braid, gray eyes, archer/hunter in a dying (Eternal Knight) / dystopian future (The Hunger Games) world.

Wow! What a ripoff! That Heppe is a @#$%^&* copycat.

Differences? Katniss has olive skin. Hadde's race isn't explicitly described, I attempted to hint at mixed white/Asian appearance. (I may have failed as one reader told me she thought Hadde was blonde.) And Hadde has tattoos on her cheeks.

Guilty? Nope. I wrote Eternal Knight long before I'd ever heard of The Hunger Games. I came up with Hadde more than ten years ago.

What I am more interested in is what led Suzanne Collins and I to create female heroines who could be twin sisters.

What inspired Hadde's appearance?

I imagined an older version of my daughter. 

Simple as that.