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Lethruel redux
May. 6th, 2026 09:43 amHaving now got the final book of the trilogy up on AO3, I'm now starting to prepare some of my old Shadowrun stories to go up there too; and that means I've been thinking a lot more about Lethruel, inevitably.
As you'll have gathered from yesterday's post, Lethruel is exceedingly genderless. I honestly never knew when I was playing them exactly what sort of biology they had; after all, it hardly seemed relevant. But it occurred to me last night that, in fact, not only did they have a naturally androgynous appearance, but the name they were given at birth was also genderless; if I recall correctly it was Sandy, rather than Alexander or Alexandra. At this point I realised. Lethruel is intersex, and their biology is sufficiently ambiguous that their parents decided not to impose a gender role on them as they were growing up and just let them fall into one naturally, if they were going to... which they never did, in the end. They're good enough at both observing people and acting to be able to pass easily as either male or female, and they do both regularly in their line of work as a detective; they have a few good fake SINs (IDs, basically) in names which would work for either gender, and each of them covers two disguises, one female and one male. Very handy for a detective!
Lethruel, is, of course, their runner name, and it's an unusual one. Runner names are generally more descriptive. Our doctor was known as Ducky because he really liked ducks; Purple was, of course, purple; and there were names like Blackbird, Two-Wheel, Sandpaper (a gnome in one of my stories, who, though it was never explicitly stated, originally called herself Sandpiper, but she was so abrasive that the vowel got changed as a matter of course!), Trapper, Double, Rocksteady, Touchstone... you get the general feel. Lethruel? Odd. And, again, this wasn't really something I thought about till just now, and then I thought... oh yes. It sounds vaguely Tolkienesque, and it's clearly meant to. Lethruel is saying something here. They're saying "OK, I'm an elf, and that's fine, but I want you to know I'm more of a Tolkien sort of elf." Although they are extremely knowledgeable in a whole variety of areas - very probably even because of that - they're very keen not to come over as one of those arrogant know-all types. Of course, in many ways Lethruel isn't really a Tolkien elf either, being small, somewhat dark-skinned, and highly introverted; but the important thing they're trying to convey here is "look, I'm going to listen to you, and there is no way on earth I'm going to look down my nose at you, even if I were the right height to do that".
Ducky the doctor was a very similar type of elf, although his outlook on life was complicated by a truly horrendous backstory from which he spent the entire campaign trying to recover, with the very patient assistance of his friends. (And they needed to be. Ducky's player, thankfully, had never been abused in any way, but, my word, she knew how to play someone who had been and who had internalised it to the point of Stockholm syndrome. No weird and powerful spirits we encountered were as hard to handle as Ducky's internal demons.) I really wish I'd taken notes, because, while the individual scenarios were good in themselves, the overarching plot which pulled the whole lot together, of which Ducky's slow and very up-and-down recovery was an integral part, was absolutely superb. The whole thing deserves to be at least one book.
I have an unfinished Shadowrun story in which the things which can still be put right for Ducky are put right. Ducky was stolen from loving parents who made every effort to get him back and were treated like criminals for doing so; he was then told that his parents had abandoned him. In this story, his parents have been found and he's just about to be reunited with them (indeed, he already has been, but he doesn't yet know who they are), and the person responsible for his ill-treatment is going to be... extracted, I think, is the word we want... and then made to face up to what he's done. I don't know what I had in mind to happen to this person when I originally started writing it, but I think I ought to finish it, for the sake of tying up loose ends. I've forgotten a great deal about the world in which Shadowrun operates, but I do still have all the rule books, so I can refresh my memory.
I still don't know exactly what is going to happen to this person, but I'm pretty confident that if I just carry on writing, he'll get justice.
As you'll have gathered from yesterday's post, Lethruel is exceedingly genderless. I honestly never knew when I was playing them exactly what sort of biology they had; after all, it hardly seemed relevant. But it occurred to me last night that, in fact, not only did they have a naturally androgynous appearance, but the name they were given at birth was also genderless; if I recall correctly it was Sandy, rather than Alexander or Alexandra. At this point I realised. Lethruel is intersex, and their biology is sufficiently ambiguous that their parents decided not to impose a gender role on them as they were growing up and just let them fall into one naturally, if they were going to... which they never did, in the end. They're good enough at both observing people and acting to be able to pass easily as either male or female, and they do both regularly in their line of work as a detective; they have a few good fake SINs (IDs, basically) in names which would work for either gender, and each of them covers two disguises, one female and one male. Very handy for a detective!
Lethruel, is, of course, their runner name, and it's an unusual one. Runner names are generally more descriptive. Our doctor was known as Ducky because he really liked ducks; Purple was, of course, purple; and there were names like Blackbird, Two-Wheel, Sandpaper (a gnome in one of my stories, who, though it was never explicitly stated, originally called herself Sandpiper, but she was so abrasive that the vowel got changed as a matter of course!), Trapper, Double, Rocksteady, Touchstone... you get the general feel. Lethruel? Odd. And, again, this wasn't really something I thought about till just now, and then I thought... oh yes. It sounds vaguely Tolkienesque, and it's clearly meant to. Lethruel is saying something here. They're saying "OK, I'm an elf, and that's fine, but I want you to know I'm more of a Tolkien sort of elf." Although they are extremely knowledgeable in a whole variety of areas - very probably even because of that - they're very keen not to come over as one of those arrogant know-all types. Of course, in many ways Lethruel isn't really a Tolkien elf either, being small, somewhat dark-skinned, and highly introverted; but the important thing they're trying to convey here is "look, I'm going to listen to you, and there is no way on earth I'm going to look down my nose at you, even if I were the right height to do that".
Ducky the doctor was a very similar type of elf, although his outlook on life was complicated by a truly horrendous backstory from which he spent the entire campaign trying to recover, with the very patient assistance of his friends. (And they needed to be. Ducky's player, thankfully, had never been abused in any way, but, my word, she knew how to play someone who had been and who had internalised it to the point of Stockholm syndrome. No weird and powerful spirits we encountered were as hard to handle as Ducky's internal demons.) I really wish I'd taken notes, because, while the individual scenarios were good in themselves, the overarching plot which pulled the whole lot together, of which Ducky's slow and very up-and-down recovery was an integral part, was absolutely superb. The whole thing deserves to be at least one book.
I have an unfinished Shadowrun story in which the things which can still be put right for Ducky are put right. Ducky was stolen from loving parents who made every effort to get him back and were treated like criminals for doing so; he was then told that his parents had abandoned him. In this story, his parents have been found and he's just about to be reunited with them (indeed, he already has been, but he doesn't yet know who they are), and the person responsible for his ill-treatment is going to be... extracted, I think, is the word we want... and then made to face up to what he's done. I don't know what I had in mind to happen to this person when I originally started writing it, but I think I ought to finish it, for the sake of tying up loose ends. I've forgotten a great deal about the world in which Shadowrun operates, but I do still have all the rule books, so I can refresh my memory.
I still don't know exactly what is going to happen to this person, but I'm pretty confident that if I just carry on writing, he'll get justice.
