This post first appeared on Ren’s Patreon page.

The Scottish love to tell you you’re getting Robbie Burns’ poem wrong, that you shouldn’t sing “for the sake of auld lang syne” where he simply wrote “for auld lang syne”, or that you should pronounce words like “take” and “brought” in the Scots fashion.

I mention this not just for a bit of gratuitous national stereotyping, but because dialect and idiolect are on my mind at present. At a certain point in the scripting process I like to go through each character in turn, reading only their lines, trying to make them sound distinctive and consistent. A couple of examples from going through this process for Ren Season Three today: “lovingly” became “beautifully” (because this character can’t conceive of the emotional value of an object); “I’ll bring your dinner” became “I’ll be bringing your dinner” (because this character is somehow Irish, despite Ireland not existing in Ren’s world).

Although I completed a draft of Season Three at Christmas 2020, and it pleased me, few things stand up completely to the twin tests of time and exposure to other humans. We tore it apart at the first writers’ meeting in October and only really started putting it back together in early December. Some ideas which I bent over backwards to make work in 2020 seem contrived and confusing in 2023. Many wonderful ideas I would never have thought of were contributed by Kate, Ash and Ash. In fact a few of Kate’s lines are still in there from 2019, when the events which open Season Three took place in episode six – yes, six! – of Season Two. Other ideas have come from Chris Dane’s spin-off novellas.

The push and pull of a writers’ room, the heat of creative friction, forges a script in a way that a lone writer can’t achieve. Kate feels we should concentrate more on intimate dialogue scenes. Ash F thinks we should be more ambitious. Ash M wants to reference (a) Doom Patrol, (b) Snyderverse Superman or (c) Stargate. Or, to be less glib about it: Kate offers an actor’s critical perspective on characters and the realism of their motivations; Ash F brings an archaeologist’s passion for world-building; and Ash M loves to explore the emotional depths of male characters.

The alloy we’ve ended up with, I hope, is a season about Ren and Hunter each coming to terms with who they are. With fights, flashbacks and elemental forces.

Tough decisions had to be made.  Although a season of Ren is about as long as a single episode of a conventional drama, it is not simply a case of writing a “normal” episode and chopping it into ten-minute chunks, even though the five-act structure for a TV series is a useful guide to how the narrative beats should fall across the episodes. I firmly believe that a season of Ren should cover as much ground as a season of The Wheel of Time or The Witcher. That means an incredible economy of storytelling is required.

I’m also a firmer believer that cutting things can add weight to what remains, make it really shine through. Losing the extra gang members who accompanied Ren and Hunter on their journey in early drafts of Season Two was the single best decision I made, because it gave so much more development room for Ren and Hunter themselves, and for the third main character, Commander Othon.

But three seems to be the limit of lead characters you can truly service in a one-hour season. At times, when editing Season Two, even that seemed a push; parts of Othon’s storyline will only see the light of day as deleted scenes here on Patreon.

So certain characters who might have appeared in Season Three no longer do, but fear not. Old acquaintances shall not be forgotten. (Yeah, tied that back to the opening, didn’t I? Boom!) One day they shall come back. Yes, they shall come back.

Until then, tak a cup of kindness and all the very best to you Marked Ones in 2024.

Oh – and remember, December 31st 2023 is the cut-off day for Master tier patrons to be included in Season Two’s end credits. Anyone joining the Master tier after that will have to wait until Season Three to see their name in lights. That’s one part of the season that definitely won’t be cut.