#aasa attica

[athensandspartaadventures]

OCtober day 30: something silly

@lilcutiebear

I love Laconia and Attica...anything with either of them...only if you feel up to it of course

it's the perfect opportunity to reveal that these two were inspired by Lampito and Lysistrata :) The line here is something like "you're handling me like an altar sacrifice"

[attichoney4u]

After @athensandspartaadventures, I remembered that this silly comic exists, so I made these memes on character headcanon generator.

Am I accurate, or am I accurate?

[allbeendonebefore]

now i wanna know YOUR blorbo takes for aasa!

OKAY let me get my blorbos in order

blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most)

I don't know how to answer this question without incriminating myself because I always deny that Athens is my favourite character, but he is definitely the character I think about the most because he is way too easy to write.

scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped)

Persia. His entire personality is "I am So Shaped and if you work hard and tell me everything about yourself honestly and don't resist and bring something to the potluck then Maybe you could also be Shaped".

scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave)

Ionia I think, because when I look back on past chapters I don't really give her a chance to speak a lot since that initial first chapter all those years ago and I'm intending to give her more of a platform this go round.

glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week)

My gut feeling says Attica on this one just because she has a Personality in my head that never seems to make it into what I write and that bothers me :')

poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave)

It's mean to say Corinth but I'm speaking as the author who only ever represents her in the WORST situations, so even though she's not that unpopular by any means, I think she is my poor little meow meow as an author :' )

horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason)

Sparta. I'm going to make him suffer very soon because he has had it way too good not having to emote or do anything useful for all this time. The issue is he's something of a masochist.

eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell)

greece because idk how to write her anymore i've become so anti-nationalism LOL

[athensandspartaadventures]

OCtober Day 10: Attica Physical Notes

no one will notice I was two days behind again right

Another gal who doesn't appear much in the main storyline, but she will be coming up when we launch into the great war so I'm revisiting her a lot. I am trying to start making her more visibly self reliant and separate from Athens, if that makes sense, and not just a genderbent or nyo!version of him.

[athensandspartaadventures]

hey @attichoney4u i said i'd be right back didn't i

[athensandspartaadventures]

OCtober day 15: Athens Timeline

A little look into Athens' "childhood" in the Iron Age. I really suck at drawing children so I try not to dwell on it too much and just do my best.

I've always been intrigued by this idea of personifications not aging in a completely linear way. Anyone who's ever tried to make a timeline of mythical events can tell you what a headache it is, and I think it's easier to just lean into the weirdness rather than try to force it to make sense, even if it's a bit confusing. So if Athens says that Theseus arranged the marriage between him and Attica, or that he was in the Iliad, who am I to argue?

[athensandspartaadventures]

Popping up to say two things:

Even though you designed Athens' nose to be deliberately large and unflattering, he actually has the most "greek nose" of all the characters (generally speaking, I have noticed that us Greeks have very large nose and few of them have small features and this straight nose you have so often seen in greek sculptures)

If there's a fem!Athens (Attica) and fem!Sparta (Laconia), is there possible to be other gender bend characters of existing cities (like is it possible for a male!Corinth to exist)?

on the first point: yeah i think that was one part of a whole soup of reasons - if i had given everyone a classical statuesque face it would have been hard to distinguish characters; it also dovetails nicely into on the one hand an idea that beauty reflected virtue in classical Athenian philosophy (which Athens doesn't measure up to) and on the other the idea that the point of starting AaSA was to disrupt this (both classical and maybe 19th century) idea that Athens was a paragon of virtue, logic, beauty, peace etc. all throughout history. (The other reason was I was trying to draw more interesting faces after high school lol)

I didn't know at the time of creating these characters that the white supremacists would start publicly displaying classical symbolism on the streets of my city while I was doing my masters thesis 5-6 years later, but it made it all the more urgent and important to lean into that mission statement.

on the second: i mostly designed them because I wanted to indicate that there were differences in how women in the ancient world lived and not because i wanted to represent certain areas, that was a retroactive decision. I think it would get too unwieldy if there were too many of them (and also it would cause problems for how I've written the story - if there was a male!Corinth, then Athens would exclusively talk to him and ignore Corinth and the story just wouldn't progress p: ) So that's why I decided they represented regions rather than just genderswapped or nyo! versions (the complexities of enforcing our own ideas of gender on the ancient world aside)

The difficult thing about writing female characters in a context where they are semi-immortal avatars is: on the one hand, they exist in contrast to the popular assumption that only men were allowed in the public sphere; on the other hand, we don't know a lot about the regional differences between women's lives in the ancient world because the Athenian bias in the literature was so strong. It's both difficult and a little liberating, since we can ignore or play with a lot of our assumptions (or at least, the assumptions of the old athenian men that are mostly responsible for our image of how women should behave.

but if that's a topic you're interested in, stay tuned for chapter 9 :)

[athensandspartaadventures]

Have a day off today so I basically took the last four hours to just sit comfortably and doodle (while watching videos of people sketching for inspo) and it was super relaxing. There's even a couple redraws from chapter one and two if you squint.

[athensandspartaadventures]

Ionian crew doodles

[athensandspartaadventures]

Attica and city sunrise for the palette challenge!

Alas Attica once again does not appear in chapter 8 but I imagine she's out in the country and glaukon (or is it glaukos? lol.) comes out to visit her while the master is away...

[attichoney4u]

This post contains product placement

To celebrate 2022 as the year of "Athens and Sparta Adventures", I drew a fanart of Attica, aka fem!Athens and added a modern spin to her.

Here, you can see her posing wearing a casual outfit and holding a tin with honey. Specifically, "Meli Attiki" (literally, "Attica's Honey"). I'm not sure if that honey is produced in Attica, but I imagine that Attica would love to show off a popular product that has her name upon it.

Attica is a character that I'm quite fond of, despite not having a great role in the original comic (she appeared only once and she didn't even speak), mainly because she's the personification of the region where my town is located.

According to @allbeendonebefore (the creator of the aforementioned comic, as well as of this character), Modern Attica lives on the countryside nowadays.

I imagine her being a light version of her male counterpart, in a sense she isn't as proud and loud as Athens, but she can boast quite about herself. After all, some of the major events in greek history took place there and the capital is located there, so yeah. She isn't as stylistic as him neither (then again, this trait is based on my personal observations: I've noticed that women in Athens dress rather in a messy style [no offense, it doesn't apply to all of them], while the men there take care about their appearance [in Thessaloniki, btw, it's the exact opposite: it's the women who put great effort on how they look, while the men don't really care, but this is also based on observations when I visited Thessaloniki last summer]), but she doesn't really care.

Athens visits her often, especially during Spring and Summer and she's the only one who genuinely likes him, as the rest of Greece can barely tolerate his arrogance and ego, due to him being the capital and the centre of the country.

I believe that Modern Attica is more outgoing than her ancient counterpart, considering she had few rights back then, Athens isn't strict to her and I think he regrets how misogynistic he behaved in ancient times, but doesn't want to admit it (after all, the rest of the world for the majority of human history wasn't any better either).

Attica loves to travel and seeing new places, given she's now free. She doesn't have a "specific" favourite destination, but she likes the Aegean as well as the Ionian islands.

That's all I have to offer. Have a good day (or night depending on what time exactly you're reading this post) 😘

[allbeendonebefore]

i'm laughing really hard and hold on i'll be right back

After @athensandspartaadventures, I remembered that this silly comic exists, so I made these memes on character headcanon generator.

Am I accurate, or am I accurate?