I have always been a huge fan of Lord Skanda. He fits every criteria of a mythological fantasy male lead. He is exceptionally handsome, a fierce warrior, born to fulfil a prophecy and all that.
I have seen dozens of stories about his second wife, Valli and she is much more popular among people. I looked around for more information on Devasena and realized that the only info people had on her was that she was wife of Skanda. In fact, most of my google searches for Devasena ended up finding additional info on Baahubali’s character rather than the mythological character.
I wanted more people to read up on Devasena and understand her better. Through this inspiration, my story was born. In the beginning, it was very difficult to write this story because there was barely any information on Devasena in comparison to info on Skanda or Valli.
I wanted to subvert a few tropes common to the Devasena and Skanda myths such as:-
- Devasena being a typical arranged marriage wife :– in my story, I added a bit of an arranged-love marriage scenario
- Devasena’s backstory and her dynamic with her family :- this topic is barely explored in the original story, so, I wanted to throw more light on this — to build a relation of Devasena with her family — I did more research on the individual characters of Jayantha, Jayanthi, Sachi, Aditi and Indra. I tried to keep the personalities of Devasena’s family members as close to the original myth as possible.
- Skanda being a born prophetic destroyer :– I wanted to explore Skanda’s weaknesses and Skanda’s possible insecurities, his family problems and family dynamic. I wanted to subvert the trope of prophecy by pointing out that prophecies mean nothing if you don’t work hard enough.
- Healer and Warrior Dichotomy :- Although this theme has already been explored in Descendants of the Sun and Kaatru Veliyidai, I felt the story of Devasena and Skanda would be incomplete without exploring how they overcome their differences out of love for each other
