We Should Talk About Sammy

Sammy is a powerful and complex villain in the Lamentations series. Even though Captain Bram Pannel is the leader of the Contratyrian Faction, Sammy poses a greater danger to Gabriel. For starters, Sammy has the trust of the Captain, meaning his schemes tend to be believed more often than not. Also, Sammy is incredibly clever, able to rally hordes of allies against his foes with ease, typically eluding anyone's suspicions––save those of Gabriel and Boom due to their backgrounds with manipulative people. 

At the core of this character lies an internal conflict: Simply put, Sammy loathes himself. This is a common thread throughout Lamentations, which hopefully teaches that love is the best resolution to a society full of young people insecure in their purpose and identity. My inspiration for crafting Sammy’s persona came from Paramount Pictures' The Lost City (2022) in which Daniel Radcliffe played Abigail Fairfax––an egotistical villain displaying many of Sammy’s signature traits. With Daniel Radcliffe’s photo (from his role in the Victor Frankenstein film) as a guide in Artflow, I was able to fully bring Sammy to life. 

The egotistical villain Abigail Fairfax was not at all something that I saw, and just experienced some magical eureka moment about. No, deciding on the right personality profile for Sammy was very difficult and took quite a bit of time. Largely because I didn't really have a history in mind when I created him. I just knew that there simply needed to be a Sammy in there, mediating between the captain and this new rookie captive. It would just feel weird to walk into a prosperous community and throw the new guy into the right-hand man spot, which was conveniently vacant for some reason. This is when I realized that this community needed a central theme to unify them. Tres Ojos is infact a community, and the characters are not the two-dimensional disposable thugs as we see in classic adventure tales. Tres Ojos is unified in their brokenness, much in the way that the Lost Boys of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, or the children of William Golding's The Lord of The Flies. Sammy had to be very intelligent to have climbed the ladder and earn Captain Pannel's trust, and he had to feel his privilege was threatened by Gabriel's extensive education. As chemistry and mechanics are the key survival skills in their world, his chemical know-how was the ace up his sleeve.

Psychologically Sammy exhibits some signs of Borderline Personality Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which when combined with him being slightly high on the autism spectrum, leave him with an extreme sensitivity to being touched. Such psychological issues are what drove him to find an identity among Tres Ojos’s pirates––most all of whom are found to be victims of childhood abuse themselves. It’s my hope that readers of the Lamentations series will learn how seeking love over pain answers many of the world's woes.