#I should draw other characters at some point

[identityarchitect]

there are many things you can do with ocs! some ocs are simply not suited to complex plots: some worlds are better for short stories centred around a one-off character. some ocs are good for dating sims or esoteric psychological horror rpgmaker games or point and click adventure games or fucking. tetris remakes idfk

you can also make songs about your ocs! or interactive multimedia webseries (link rot is a great example)! or you can make analysis posts of media that doesnt exist and gush about the parallels between smeep and the other guy (those are two ocs of mine and i go crazyinsane about them)! or you can make up plots of musicals! you can make a conlang! you can make items of clothing inspired by your oc! you can make a fake wikipedia page!

and like ,,, what youre describing is, to my understanding, the job of a director. you arent the person doing the lighting or the makeup or costuming or even a ton of the writing, but you are the person in control of the artistic direction. and, not to say that directors just dont do anything because they definitely do and pitching your ideas is a doozy but "i sit around and think about my guys while other people make a show about them" is not an unreachable goal

the current look-at-able stuff ive made for my ocs are in-canon explanations of fundamental parts of the lore. i think its a fun way to impart information!

my point is that you should look at your options for making art because there is so much more than writing or drawing. take my hand. we will install rpgmaker together

making up oc lore: fuck yes a little guy just for me

writing down oc lore: what the fuck

[oriorchids]

@anxiousapplepie 's roleswap au is really cool so!!

made some special attack cut-ins! one for each character/role (funnily enough three are from traveller!odile's universe)

some more thoughts under a read more

siffrin (researcher)

- first one i did

- he has stars in their eyes!! though one is much easier to see than the other

- remember that one idea about sif using their prosthetic to blind people? i think his special friendquest attack would be smth similar. light blast that stuns an opponent for a turn like that one sasasaap sadness

- if everyone else is stunned he doesn't have to worry about being the slowest in the party. or getting hit when they aren't in their shell/cloak.

- i spent a good while just trying to figure out their expression

- astronomy name? light pun name? flash of genius?? supernova?

mirabelle (fighter)

- mira is about to kill a man, or maybe a strong sadness. good for her

- i spent a while just trying to figure out how to pose her

- i think she'd either get a giant paper-type attack (to make up for a lack of paper a V) or a really big self-buff. maybe a giant paper attack that gives her an attack buff afterwards

- isabeau in canon has a lot of support moves but considering mira's party (housemaiden siffrin traveller bonnie) i think she should be more of a dps. researcher!isa can still be a support

- oh or!!! maybe she heals herself/the party some of the damage she deals.

isabeau (chef)

- may or may not have referenced the sasasaap true ending a bit

- i think the cut-in would appear whenever he runs in to take some damage for someone else

- after friendquests he might be able to counterattack? probably for more damage than bonnie could

- there would probably also be a change for when isabeau's hp is low

- somehow his cut-in ended up the smallest

- imagine if you will: cook!isabeau running in the way of the king trying to grab housemaiden!bonnie during the kingquest end

odile (traveller)

- JUST ATTACK BABYYYYY

- massive paper type move that gives no jackpot points. king will die instantly

- grabbed the way she holds her book in the jackpot

- took the longest to draw her hands i had to take a picture reference

- journal has a blank cover

bonnie (housemaiden)

- i thought it would be funny for bonnie to run across the screen every time instead of getting a formal cut-in but i did consider the formal cut-in briefly

- i think bonnie's special friendquest skill would be a really good revive all/heal all because of memory of promise in canon

- also there is no way bonnie isn't getting stressed from being a kid on a pretty much doomed mission (without the loops)

- wonder how many times bonnie's heard pity from people. including the party!! this child is the saviour of vaugarde

- at least if they work hard enough no one else will get hurt!!!

[morlock-holmes]

Okay, guys, after reading a post by @centrally-unplanned I just took that ACX "AI Turing Test" that Scott Alexander did, and I am screaming, as the kids used to say.

You guys are way, way overthinking this.

I thought I would do better than average, and I guess I did; excluding three pictures I had seen before, I got 31/46 correct.

Not great if you're taking the SAT, but I feel like if I could call a roulette spin correctly 2 times out of 3 I could clean up in Vegas.

So, what is the secret of my amazing, D+ performance?

You have to look at the use of color and composition as tools to draw the eye to points of interest.

AI is really bad at this, when left to its own devices.

For example, here:

Part of the reason to suspect that this is AI is the "AI house style" and the bad hands that I literally only noticed right this exact second as I was typing this sentence. Even if the hands were rendered correctly, I would still clock this as AI.

The focal point of this piece ought to be the face of the woman and the little dragon she is looking at (Just noticed the dragon's wings don't match up either), but take off your glasses or squint at this for a second:

Your eye is being drawn by the bright gold sparkles on the lower right side of the piece. That particular bright gold is only in that spot on the image, but there's no reason to look there, it's just an upper arm and an elbow. The bright light source highlighting the woman's horn separates it out as a point of interest.

Meanwhile, the weird aurora streaming out of the woman's face on the left side means that it is blending in with the background.

In other words, the way the image is composed, and the subject matter suggest that your eye should be drawn here:

But the use of color suggests that you should look here:

That's a senseless place to draw the eye towards! It would be a really weird mistake for a human to make! In fact, I think there's a strong argument that the really close cropped picture of the face of the character is a strong improvement. It's still not a particularly good composition, but at least the color contrast now draws the eye to the proper points.

In fact, I would say that a good reason for my performance not being even better was this alarming statement at the start of the test:

I've tried to crop some pictures of both types into unusual shapes, so it won't be as easy as "everything that's in DALL-E's default aspect ratio is AI".

Uh...

So how about this one:

This is a lot better anatomically and in terms of the use of color and light to draw the eye towards sensible parts of the painting. The lighting makes pretty good sense in terms of coming from a particular direction and it also draws the eye to effectively to the face and the outstretched hand of the figure.

It's also a really flat and meaningless composition and subject matter that no renaissance artist would have chosen. What is this angel doing, exactly? Our eye is drawn to the face and hand, and the figure is looking off towards the left side, at, uh, what exactly?

But then I thought, "Well, maybe Scott chopped out a giant chunk of the picture, and this is just a detail from, like, the lower right eighth of some giant painting with three other figures that makes total sense"

This makes sense as a piece of a larger human made artwork, but if you tell me, "Nope, that's the whole thing and this is the original, un-cropped picture" I'd go, "Oh, AI, obviously.

All of the ones I had trouble with were AI art with good composition and use of color, and human ones with bad composition and use of color. For example, this one:

This has three solid points of interest arranged in an interesting relationship with different colors to block them out. I'd say the biggest tells are that the astronauts' feet are out of frame, which is a weird choice, and looking closely now, the landscape and smoke immediately to the right of the ship don't really make sense.

But again; I had to think, "Maybe Scott just cropped it weird and they had feet in the original picture."

Here's another problem:

StableDiffusion being bad at composition is such a known problem that there are a variety of tools which a person can use to manually block out the composition. In fact, let me try something.

I popped open Krita (Which now has a StableDiffusion plugin) and after literally dozens of generations and a couple of different models I landed on ZavyChromaXL with the following prompt:

concept art of two astronauts walking towards a spaceship on an alien planet, with a giant moon in th background, artstation, classic scifi, book cover

And this was the best I could do:

Not great, but Krita has a tool that lets you break an image into regions which each have different prompts, so I quickly blocked something out:

Each of those color blobs has a different part of the prompt, so the green region has "futuristic astronauts" the blue is the spaceship, the orange is the moon, grey is the ground and pink is the sky, which gives us:

Still way too much, so we can use Krita's adaptive patch tool and AI object removal to get:

I'm not saying it's high art, or even any good, but it's better than the stuff I was getting from a pure prompt, because a human did the composition.

But it's still so dominated by AI processes that it's fair to call it "AI Art".

Which makes me wonder how many of the AI pictures I called out as human made because one of the traits I was looking for, good composition, was in fact, actually made by a human.

[greml1nb0i]

I'm fearing the day when human alastor design on screen as I feel like it's gonna really make the show seem very racist as they where willing to change niffty demon design from yellow to a pale pink. But wouldn't change alaster skin nor hair. Like I understand because people are used to the design, but on the other hand, viv probably should have just made alastor not use voodoo and just literally anything else

Omg yes, 2 points to be made here.

ISTG Viv only gave Alastor the "he's half creole" label as an excuse to not draw black features on him, while yes it is true not all creole men are dark skinned, they're still black and have black features, so Viv' excuse is thrown right out of the water, then and there.

For example:

Vs

you see how the melanin is still there even though these are all different images of light and dark skinned creole men, they still have their features that make them creole men. Alastor doesnt have that. All he has is dark skin in his human design and that's it, there's no other black features.

Also idk where she's getting this idea that Alastor would even be allowed his own radio show, especially in the 1940s-50s. He would've had the worst time just trying to get people to take him seriously. Black owned businesses were a thing back then, however it was so difficult because of the racism, that for him to be able to do it all without any sort of mention of discrimination or a hassle is telling me Viv doesnt think that hard about these time periods.

Viv is [imo most def] racists.

Point 2.

I am pagan, i was raised into it. So you can probably understand why a lot of people, not just those who actually practice spiritual/occult practices, closed or otherwise, get real fucking pissed whenever its used for "ooo evil, scarwy, oh no satan aaaa" type bullshit. Its 2024 people dont do this type of shit anymore for horror or evil characters unless theres a literal reason.

for example:

American Horror Story S3 The Coven, uses allusions to paganism, witchcraft, wicca and voodoo, BUT even though it's used in a horror show, the use of the occult practices is used for both morally good and bad reasons, cuz just like nature there is no good without bad and vice versa. This is made especially clear with the character, embodying the real life Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau. Character Marie uses her practice for both good and morally bad things.

SPOILERS: She was responsible for giving Delphine LaLaurie an immortality elixir before murdering the LaLaurie family and burying Delphine alive. Then, Marie imprisons Delphine and hacks off her hand. For those who don't know, Marie is literally punishing Delphine for her actions towards others, [she's racist, watch the season if you really want to know her story and what all she did.]

Regardless of the moral implication, Marie used her practice for, what she considered to be, justice. She has a motive. Regardless of how some people may feel about AHS now, you cant deny at least they did their research.

However for Viv, Alastor's voodoo powers are strictly used for evil and there's no real reason given as to why he chose voodoo or even practices it.

Voodoo itself is a closed practice, for a reason. It also isn't something to make light of. How is it Viv can make a show that supposedly critiquing Christianity but she uses pagan and voodoo practices as stand ins for evil magic?? you are just perpetuating a stereotype that CHRISTIANS came up with. That the Occult/Spirituality is inherently evil.

& If Viv says "its cuz he's black and so he can," im going to actually scream.

Small correction: Alastor died in the 1930s so that makes his radio show an impossible achievement. Also the first black man to get a radio show host was in the mid 1940s. Alastor wouldn't have even had a chance.

Thank you to @bump-inthe-night for giving me the correct information, so to correct myself.

[variousqueerthings]

watching this Paul Gross thing he did in the 80s (chasing rainbows) and ive been enjoying it despite the knowledge that there'd be some kind of a het love triangle thing going on and that the other two characters simply aren't that interesting, but. oh boy. is... is the woman in this constellation meant to be read as a villain???

(ME DOING A BREAKDOWN ABOUT A SHOW NOBODY WATCHED AND NOBODY WILL WATCH ✌)

PG character -- a working class man who is fundamentally good to everyone in trouble he meets, to the detriment of himself more often than not, but scraping by until he gets his big break (which he also works very hard for) and becomes the owner of a relatively successful nightclub

other two characters -- come from rich backgrounds and sort of suck him into their lives by the coincidence of the two men having been at the front in WWI and PG saving the other guy's life and consistently don't realise he's got way more working against him than they do

the lady in this situation initially dumping said other guy "to find herself" when he comes back from the war, which, fair, it's 1919, she's going to college, she wants to be sure she can make informed choices, chill enough

said lady imprinting on our working class heroic character, because he's working class. i just. cannot read it any other way. she clocks him as such at a party (that he was invited to as a veteran) straight away, insults him, throws water in his face when he doesn't take it, but simultaneously is into the whole idk... rugged unpolished nature of him

discovers a diary written during the war with poetry in it that she presumes was written by him -- steals the book and reads it out loud to her college friends and is offended that he's not flattered by this

despite numerous protests that he didn't write the poetry (and he didn't, it was written by a kid he tried to save who was later shot in front of him for desertion), she just doesn't believe him, because she desperately wants him to have the "hidden depths of a poet" or some nonsense. never mind his actual good traits -- his kind-heartedness, his tenacity, his savvy, his sense of humour, nonono she wants a Poet

also, she is a failed playwright. she writes terrible plays about things she doesn't understand (including the war), asks his opinion and is offended when he (under duress) admits he doesn't think they're very good

and now she fucking... copied down the poems without his knowledge and published them under his name with an article she wrote about said hidden poetic depths!!!! gets incredibly offended when he is upset about this, first of all with a "I thought you'd be pleased" then with a "you should be happy for me for getting an article I wrote published in a major newspaper!" (because at the end of the day it's about her)

he initially -- not knowing how to handle the situation -- goes along with it, because what do you do now? go to the publishers and say it wasn't you? out yourself in the news?? I mean??? but pretty quickly re-emphasises He Did Not Write Those Poems!

the plot then mysteriously seems to pivot into saying it was his fault for "stringing her along" because the "hidden poet" bit was the only thing she really liked about him... and she vehemently denies this (but girl, tell me one other thing that draws you to him, and you can't say because he's pretty!) and says he's hurt/betrayed her by lying. i just... don't know... if the plot... is writing her like this because she's meant to be a self-absorbed college girl who has her working class dream-boat fantasy get broken, or if it's meant to be presented as him having betrayed her. it is. unclear

and now she's threatening to write a new article about how he's a fraud. im just. waiting for the plot to point out that she's done all of this herself and she also won't suffer for any of it in the way he will...

this boy can do better than these rich kid tourists 😔

[sakura-no-eclair]

weddingmu because I can.

(I just wanted to draw her hair)

[chiropteracupola]

"Are you finished with my portrait yet? Show me!" "Cipacton, I can't draw you if you keep moving!"

[genericdragon]

Noah fence but if you can't handle thinking about the actual story of Mouthwashing and you just want to imagine silly found family scenarios with the crew on the Tulpar then maybe you shouldn't be engaging with HORROR media...... just a thought.

[dykedvonte]

I keep seeing fanarts of ppl's OC's being on the ship, so do you think that if there was 6st crewmember (specifically, another woman) Anya would've been more safe? Like, someone to actually call Jimmy's begaviour out, someone Anya might wanna trust? Is there a possibility something might have changed (even if a little) or it would not have mattered at all?

-💀

I feel like the game would make it part of the commentary on where she would believe and help Anya but still be sort of dismissive? Like the whole “don’t waste time crying and being scared keep going and move on, don’t let him win”. It’s supposed to be positive and reinforcing but sometimes it does more damage in those times of mourning and grief, it feels patronizing, like you don’t understand what you’re going through but they do. Even if they did call out his behavior it’s still on Curly to act and while another voice would help, it’s still 4 against 2 on guys that don’t get it until they have to vs women who always have to.

I don’t mind mouthwashing OCs but I do get a bit bored as they tend to be borderline saviors or like Jimmy aligned. They are either more complicit than Curly or just Jimmy haters for no reason, outside of what the creators know about what he did to Anya. I am never irked by OCs but in a story like mouthwashing you really need to think about what your character adds to the commentary, especially if they are there during the crash. It’s nice to have like characters on Anya’s side more whole heartedly and interesting to see characters who placate Jimmy but sometimes it’s one note.

I can’t and don’t want to police peoples OCs it’s never my intention when I comment on trends I notice, but I do feel like the way people make their OCs interact with these two characters and especially Curly, really show a grave misunderstanding of the narrative and these characters as people vs roles in the story. Still, I know people just make up characters for fun and that’s fine. Great even, but I guys I’m focusing more on OCs that are supposed to have those serious dynamics. My favs tend to be pretty-Tulpar or post-Tulpar au OCs.

The inevitably of the crash is on Jimmy. He did that not because he wasn’t stopped but because all his means to kill Anya were taken. The gun, the axe. Even if Curly did strip him of his co-pilot privileges and try to keep him contained there’s only so many people. An extra body helps but they have jobs they have to do, he’s the only one steering the whole ship and Jimmy would likely have an out: food, bathroom, etc. He’s not new and if he couldn’t crash the ship directly, who’s to say he wouldn’t sabotage something else? A clunker like the Tulpar wouldn’t take much. An extra person helps but it’s just another thing that prolongs what a person like Jimmy is willing to do to shirk responsibility.

It’s more than just needing someone to stand up to him and think that’s what is missing when it comes to inserting a character into the mouthwashing setting.

[imlisteningg]

Gloria MidnightBurger, the only professional in the joint

do we reckon she still wears the uniform at this point or has she given up?

[carmendeiact2whenplz]

More ISAT au Kinich because I love putting him through The Horrors

Based on this Siffrin sprite

[mildcicada]

[cuteniaarts]

Small drawing collection of my latest creation Emran as a teenager/freshly minted Air Acolyte, for my dear partner in unhinged OC shenanigans @katkastrofa, as promised <3

[dirt-str1der]

This whole chapter with knives is still funny because in the finale he at least had pants but he was straight naked here. Like it was swinging , his millionth knife

[bluastro-yellow]

get it Kim has a lot to unpack do you get it

it's imperfect I'll never polish it just take it as it is I should have put aerostatics not airplanes...

[charcoalstardust]

heyyyy i'm done avoiding posting bendy au art here are three draw the squad ones

one | two | three

also my personal favorite non draw the squad doodles

@draw-the-squad-like-this hi