I do wonder how Tintin would have turned out without the political angle to the war. Tintin the reporter was always involved in national disputes, but once the war hit, Hergé essentially remade the character as a adventurer. I mean, it probably didn't hurt his survival chances that Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is essentially an anti-communist hit piece (which happened to be relatively accurate).

I think Tintin and the War Witches would have been an excellent book.

>Yes--the same magical phenomenon as failing to appear in silver-backed
>mirrors.

That sent me on a bit of a research project. It seems that the best mirrors in the Renaissance would have been Venetian -- very expensive, but silvered with a tin amalgam. After about a century of a monopoly on these bad boys, industrial espionage eventually succeeded, and France started mass producing mirrors.

But through history, mirrors would have been made with lots of different things, first water, then copper and bronze, then silver and silvered glass, then steel, then all sorts of plated glass like tin, nickel, mercury alloys, and finally to today's choices of silver-backed glass, aluminum glass, and plastic film.

Though for some reason, of all of the magic that goes on in various stories, the mirror thing bugs me more than anything else because like photons don't have a "bounced of a vampire" metadata bit, like how does that even work???

>The original draft of the scene named Victor as Victor right from the
>start, which made it pretty obvious, but I'd always had it in mind
>that he had changed his name from something more Eastern when he moved
>to Alsace, so I changed it around during editing in hopes of this
>exact thing.

More Eastern? Tell that to my Russian coworker, Victor. )))

Just like to add that the whole relationship between Ben and the Scarlet sisters is turning out to be quite French.