#and making their design relatively easy for me to draw repeatedly and expressively

[kwillow]

Hello! This is really random I'm sorry. In your recent comic with the toy store shopkeeps, one of them is a bird! Inquiring bird nerds want to know, are they based on a specific species? My first thought was Canada jay but the white outer tail feathers don't match perfectly, and my boyfriend guessed they were some kind of tit! Very curious and would love to hear if you had a specific species in mind for the birdy when designing. :]

I DID! I'm pleased you asked.

Canada Jay's a great guess based on the markings, but he was indeed based on a kind of tit. A Long-Tailed Tit, to be exact!

I knew I wanted to pick a round-shaped bird with this kind of head marking (to evoke male pattern baldness haha), and just looked at different species of birds that live in colder environments until I found one I liked the look of. Not the most precise resemblance (I still need practice drawing birds), but I'm happy that I captured the look well enough that his tit-ness was recognizable.

[gotjacobian]

Coming back from China tomorrow. I wasn’t able to do the chronological journaling thing I did from Japan (this was jointly a tourism and “meeting my gf’s family” trip, so I had a lot less solo downtime overall.) BUT I got to do a bunch of cool stuff I want to have feelings about, so instead I’m gonna share in a sort of ranked list. First are Things I Think Are Worth Going To China For. Like, on their own - the once-in-a-lifetime stuff that’s worth structuring a trip around.

- The Great Wall. Probably the least surprising thing I could put here, but like, the name says it. It’s a pretty good wall. We went my second day here, to the stretch that’s near Beijing and is some of the most heavily touristed. The view is amazing. It’s one of the most “wow, this looks exactly how people draw it” things I’ve seen in my life. I couldn’t stop myself from commenting repeatedly on how photogenic it was for something that very much predates cameras. Like, just look at this:

It requires a lot of walking on stairs and uneven ground. If you pay extra, you can take a chair lift up (great if you can handle heights) and a toboggan slide-thing down. It’s like, slightly sketchier than your average US six flags experience? But only slightly. You get a brake that controls your own speed going down. I got assigned “young person who’s eyeing that toboggan a little too hard” by the ride operators and they made me wait a few minutes behind the group in front of us before starting the slide, and I’m proud to say I did still catch up to them.

Another thing, because I don’t know where else to put it - I was expecting to be taller relative to the general population in china than I am in the US. But I was surprised there were a few times I had to squeeze myself into whatever people infrastructure was available. I’m not *that* tall, but have absurdly long legs for my height. In the shuttlebus up to the wall, my knees were jammed into the seat in front of me even when it wasn’t leaned back. There wasn’t really any way to avoid it. I have no idea what i.e. my 6’4” father would’ve done.

One last note - there were cats! No one told me there would be cats, but there were a LOT of them. People were lined up to take pictures of the first one here, who was just chilling on the wall itself.

- Next, the Beijing Lantern Festival. We ended up here as a last minute thing. It was *technically* a Mid Autumn Festival attraction, which was before my trip. But it lasted into October and my gf’s parents offered to take us on a night we had no other plans. Parking was hell, it took us 15 minutes to figure out how to get in, and then:

It’s basically a small theme park of foods, souvenirs, and giant lantern displays. It was gorgeous. Walking through it was maybe my favorite part of the trip. Pictures don’t do it justice - a lot of the displays flashed or moved or reacted when you walked past. The construction and use of the lantern ribbing in the design were so, so cool. I was walking around with my jaw dragging on the sidewalk. Like, let it be known that I’m an easy mark for this kind of thing. But if you also are, I honestly think it’s worth timing a trip around.

You could also buy a small lantern to carry around as a souvenir. My gf and I got this red lotus one. I cannot express enough how gratifying it is in practice to get to carry around a pretty light at the pretty light show.

- Seeing China. Weird thing to include - like, obviously you want to see a place you’re going - but it was a defining feeling on the whole trip for me. I was really struck when we were driving into Beijing from the airport how much less I knew about what places in China look like than I did about Japan before going there. It’s not like it’s a secret, exactly, but I think the additional barriers to western tourism (it’s the only place I, an American, have been that I had to pre-apply for a visa to go. More on that later.) and uncensored internet access make a big difference in how the information diffuses. And China is bigger than Japan (and South Korea, but I feel less able to compare my experiences there bc I was only in Seoul, and only for a couple days). So there’s less of a centralized picture to sell, and when there was, it felt very… politicized. Not to mention that information on China in the US often comes with a lot of political and cultural baggage on the receiving end. The information landscape is just different.

Potentially reflecting that, there were way, way fewer western tourists here than in Japan. I was the only obviously non-chinese person anywhere I went except the Great Wall and Forbidden City. Some of this might’ve been timing? And some of it might’ve been that a lot of my travel was facilitated by people who literally live here, so I probably spent less time in “touristy” areas overall. But even there, the vibe was different - much more geared towards chinese tourists than western ones (think no english audio guide at a museum, or a guide assuming knowledge of china’s history beyond a US AP World History level). My layman’s read, fwiw, is that China feels like it has put a lot less effort into “courting” western tourists in general, and presenting a united picture of China For Tourists than i.e. Japan has. And has put more effort into selling a picture of What China Is to Chinese citizens. I’m now very curious if this is what the US (especially DC) feels like to non-american tourists.

But anyway, tl;dr: It was cool to actually see the country I’d only heard about secondhand. Maybe the one I have the most secondhand connection to, across several close relationships. It was interesting to try and put the cultural diffusion to the US in context. And it was affecting to go there and see even mundane stuff that was hard to see otherwise. I found some of the exact souvenirs I’d been given as gifts by friends in middle and high school. I took a lot more pictures than I normally would. Beijing felt a lot like Dallas to me in some ways (lots of 70s era buildings, lots of highways connecting a wide radius of suburbs) and a lot like a brutalist DC in the rest of its vibes. Chengdu felt like a cross between Chicago and Orlando- a beach city with no beaches. Tianjin was… beautiful but weird. I have too many photos to put in a tumblr post, but would be happy to share more with anyone who’s interested.

[ganymedesclock]

I was thinking about s5 and the development of Lotor and Allura’s feelings and thinking about one of the major reasons why I don’t think Lotor is manipulating Allura.

If you look at it... There is something of an imbalance of power here, but it doesn’t flow in Lotor’s favor.

It flows in Allura’s.

There’s really no positive sentiment between Lotor and Allura while he’s an antagonist in s3 and s4, and before she thinks she can trust him in s5. The closest is in s3e3 Lotor expresses respect for Allura’s capabilities and strategy, and she’s the one to outfox him on Thayserix.

In s5e1 and s5e2, we see that Allura is distant to Lotor, fairly aloof to his propositions. She’s doubtful of him, she’s clear about her position, and she doesn’t let him off the hook for any test he can’t pass. And she can do that- Allura commands an army at this point, she’s surrounded by allies in her bastion of power. Lotor, we see, very obviously doesn’t have the power to stop things he doesn’t want to happen... and while the duel with Zarkon ends, barely, in his favor, it’s clear that was never a gamble he wanted to take. 

There are too many terrified, vulnerable shots of Lotor in both that fight and the exchange leading up to it. The confident expressions Lotor makes in s5e1 are rather practiced and stilted compared to his more casual demeanor in s3, and if you watch him closely in the scenes, you can see how tense, how flinchy, how hesitant he is- how repeatedly the camera emphasizes  the thing he’s confined in and his inability to even stand that close to the paladins, who in every scene outnumber him.

And s5e2 contains the flashback via Haggar that shows us Lotor’s childhood, and it just frankly furthers the theme of Lotor feeling helpless, trapped, and afraid, the way he tries to disguise it, but the youngest, most ‘raw’ form of Lotor we see...

is just screaming and screaming and screaming. Helpless, terrified, miserable, in an environment overwhelmingly bereft of sympathy and comfort. He has a pillow and a single blanket and some kind of medical device studying him- no doctors, no nurses, no sign of Zarkon. As I’ve said many times before, this is a depiction of a neglected child.

That’s significant to me, even though Allura’s not privy to it, nor is it part of an interaction with her. Because frankly, if the point of this was to establish Lotor as a manipulator, Lotor as worming his way into Allura’s favor such that, in event of a twist betrayal we can go back and go “you were a snake all along, you asshole!” ...they’re dwelling an awful lot on Lotor’s helplessness and vulnerability. Lotor who doesn’t even celebrate his victory over Zarkon, but merely stares at his body grimly, and enters an emotional quagmire he only reluctantly pulls himself out of in the next episode.

And that thread only continues.

S5e3′s opening scene is when positive interactions between Lotor and Allura pick up in earnest. Allura’s powerful position hasn’t changed- if anything, she’s been handed a major victory with astonishing lack of sacrifice. None of her soldiers were on the field actually facing Zarkon- she, Lance, and Hunk did cover fire, but the only person who was injured and would require medical attention afterwards was Lotor.

This is our first soft interaction. Lotor, sitting, not engaging or speaking to anyone, and it’s not clear how long he’s been like this. His responses are terse, his posture is very closed. He’s not, in any real way, signaling Allura to take pity on him- he doesn’t seem uncomfortable as much as very, very distant, and we’ve seen enough of Lotor to know that’s a distress sign from him.

But Allura can tell he’s upset, and she’s willing to suspect maybe she misjudged his trustworthiness- so she speaks kindly to him, tries to hearten him. And then the rest of the team arrives, Lance and Coran both react potentially hurtfully (which Lotor doesn’t engage with) and Lotor pushes the concept of the Kral Zera, clarifying his concern.

Killing Zarkon hasn’t solved everything- it’s gotten them out of a frying pan and into a fire that they’re not ready for and Lotor’s tense, sure something bad is going to happen. And he’s basically absent for the rest of s5e3, picking up in...

S5e4.

At this point, it’s established the team’s at least listening to him. (They’re not agreeing with his stated importance of the Kral Zera and being there, per se, but they’re listening to him). We’d expect to see a manipulative Lotor increasing in confidence- starting to assert himself more over this new domain. And while Lotor is a bit peppier than he was after Zarkon, this is where we also see the start of an interesting thread for Lotor.

He hesitates. Repeatedly. First when clarifying the importance of Planet Feyiv, then again when he intends to show them the main contenders for the throne- he stops and asks Allura permission to use her computer. He’s hopeful about the idea of turning Voltron to an advantage, and when this leads the team to argue and split...

The hesitation and uncertainty Lotor seems to feel here are not designed to tug Allura’s heartstrings, or we would see him exclusively directing them to her, or emphasizing them to catch her attention. He isn’t.

Trend continues in s5e5- here’s where I see a lot of people metaing about how Lotor is manipulative, and I think that’s mis-attributing something that does start in earnest in that episode. 

That is to say: Lotor, newly on the throne, becomes anxious for Allura’s approval.

Compared to how haughty, snappy, and guarded he was to everyone at the Kral Zera bar the paladins, when he greets the team at central command, he emphasizes the banner he erected and its significance. There’s an obvious, veiled “Do you like it? Please say you like it.”

He stresses the alliance so much, about the idea that they could have that golden age the original Voltron created again, this time without the nasty ending, and he puts so much emphasis on everything they could be to Allura. Yeah, this could be really manipulative if we had a lot of evidence it was swaying Allura all that much.

But Allura really doesn’t change her stance from where she started in s5e3, that, maybe she misjudged Lotor as an ally and she’s willing to at least hear him out as long as he seems reasonable. We’re getting, at best, some mild indicators of interest from her- threading her arm in Lotor’s while they walk together.

But just this, “I misjudged you, maybe you’re trustworthy, maybe you’re actually sort of interesting and charming,” is such a subdued and casual response to what Lotor is doing.

Because the person really dropping his guard big time, sharing all these personal details relatively quickly, opening up in these very vulnerable ways and, again, becoming very focused on, and needy for, Allura’s approval, is Lotor. The person who you could accuse of being naive in love, swept up in how fascinating they find this other person, putting themselves in a vulnerable place, is Lotor.

Lotor’s pretty clear in s5e5 that he needs Allura. That he thinks she’s special, that everything he’s worked towards, she’s the answer. She’s the key, if there’s a way to continue the tradition of Altean alchemy it’s her, that he needs to get her to Oriande so she can meet her destiny, and then, ideally, Miss Talented will still like him enough to lend him her special gift.

Lotor’s shocked by his own markings and has to rapidly derail and reevaluate his plans. He’s completely sure of Allura’s markings and takes it as an opportunity to talk up how special and magical Allura specifically is, like... his own face isn’t glowing right there.

And it’s also very easy for Lotor to give up on Oriande after being rejected by the White Lion, to say that it was meant exclusively for Allura. But while they’re there, we see, again...

The combination of Lotor making his personal feelings very open, and himself very vulnerable, to Allura, and doing so in such a way that he’s obviously not signaling her to comfort him. He draws away from her, he frames himself in this unflattering light.

There’s an obvious imbalance where Lotor’s very quick to emphasize that Allura’s so important, he needs her, he can’t accomplish any of this without her help... but the two times Allura says she’s grateful Lotor’s helping her, he’s obviously caught off-guard.

Sure, there are manipulative people who try to make themselves out to be a victim to their target, but I don’t think that’s what Lotor’s doing. Again, he has a lot of opportunities to signal Allura to comfort him, or try to tug on her sympathies, and while he’s nearly oversharing, we can see that things that would make Allura regard him in a positive light, like his Altean heritage, don’t come out first or even are given particular priority or emphasis.

Furthermore, the colony story actually sets up a parallel between Shiro and Lotor, that Lotor views himself as a failed hero. More than Zarkon’s fault for sweeping in and destroying everything, it’s Lotor’s fault that he wasn’t smarter, faster, had better resources to stop it from happening. People were counting on him and he let them down.

It’s very similar to how Shiro frames the Kerberos mission. Both times, they’re hopelessly outgunned, the empire is attacking for very petty reasons with nothing to gain. And Shiro emphasizes that he let down Sam and Matt Holt, that “my team was captured once, I’m not gonna let it happen again.” Shiro dwells on their fate... even though now that we have all three of them, we can see obviously that Shiro definitely suffered the worst of it. Sam was a little scraggly and scared but untouched physically, Matt has a single aesthetic scar, but both of them were seemingly disregarded as rank and file prisoners.

Shiro was the one who lost a limb, had his face carved open, was tortured and experimented on in a way causing him lasting negative symptoms both physical and mental. But he focuses very little on what he endured.

In that sense I have to think there’s a lot Lotor’s not telling Allura when he simply says he was “sent away” but lingers heavily on the destroyed colony. Especially because we’ve never seen Zarkon excuse someone from a post that he doesn’t like without immediately either killing them, or handing them off to Haggar, and given his disinterest in cultivating an heir, it’s pretty unlikely he’d hesitate to hurt Lotor.

This makes me pretty sure they’re not setting us up for a Prince Hans moment. Especially when much has already been made of Allura’s arc that she’s struggling to relearn to trust people. It makes no sense when the show puts so much importance on “we are always stronger together” and when Allura did everything right, and never gave Lotor any trust he hadn’t earned, to punish her for that.

I’ve said before I don’t think Allura and Lotor’s partnership is going to consistently work all the way through to the end- I think that we’re going to get something similar to ATLA’s Crossroads of Destiny, where Lotor breaks from the paladins and returns to being an antagonist for a while.

But not, I think, painlessly, and not in a way that he never cared. Because if anything, what we see is that Lotor’s more emotionally invested in this than Allura is. Which makes sense! If the implications of “relationship” and the way the writers talk about it suggest that what’s going on here is actually puppy love... Allura’s had crushes before, she’s had people interested in her before. It’s not particularly a commodity or novel. Again, her response to Lotor is fairly banal once she takes a shine to him, just, “well, you’re actually sort of charming, this is a pleasant surprise. And not bad-looking, now that I think about it.”

Lotor? We actively see that Lotor’s been systematically deprived connections. It’s hard for him to trust enough to connect with people. Allura being kind to him, in ways that she thinks of as only the proper response? Catch him by surprise, he’s unused to this. And it’s clear to him, Allura is such an amazing person, he really can’t do any of this without her. She’s living the culmination of so many of his personal dreams.

If anyone has an overly romantic, idealized view of the other person, if anyone here’s kind of swept off their feet by how amazing this all seems... it’s not Allura.

(And I know, I’ve aired the theory they’re cousins before, but if that’s not canon, I think it does seem like the writers are trying to signal some romantic tropes around Allura and Lotor)

[maiji]

Process and wip images for A House That Holds Long Limbs (Part 8)

Previous process and wip documentation: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Parts 6 and 7

Read the pages here: Part 8 (full complete version will be linked from YYH North Bound master post)

I personally love exploring character dynamics and character interaction! It's definitely what I tend to focus on in comics and stories. Plus you get to draw lots of closeups of people's faces and have a lot of fun with expressions. And that's what Part 8 is full of.

IN THIS EDITION, after the usual script and thumbnails, I'll take a bit of time to talk about expressions and characterization (my thoughts on Raizen and Hokushin specifically, but also some general thoughts on how I approach writing characters and character interactions). More details of some of the panels from part 8 so you can see the faces better!

Script and thumbnails

(If you look closely at the top of pg 2, you can see the page behind was where I started drawing my random dream sequence hahahah)

It’s always kind of funny to look back at the script and see my rushed typing (or texting on my phone, since I’m often doing this on mobile...) - odd typos and dangling/incomplete thoughts like ”my blodd” (lol).

Part 8 was one of the first sequences conceived in the development of this story. As a result, the script and the thumbnails both line up very closely to the final, because I’d already been thinking about it for so long and playing the scene out repeatedly in my head. I had a very concrete sense of how I wanted to direct it, unlike many of the action sequences from previous parts. The main areas I struggled with were historical details (the karaginu was originally labelled “tarp” in the script as a placeholder until I decided what it would be), and the biggest pagination change was probably moving Raizen’s “Maybe you just didn’t take enough off lol!” to the previous page so that Hokushin’s (literal) punchline would be at the beginning of the next.

Expressions

I have a huuuuge soft spot for subtle expressions - the kind where just a bit of extra line or texture around the eyes or the mouth, plus the dialogue or context of the scene, adds nuance to an expression. Especially ones that otherwise can read as relatively neutral. Even a very simple expression that’s just dots for eyes and straight lines for the upper/lower lids and eyebrows can have a lot of variation in how you interpret them, simply based on context and slight adjustments. Here are some examples with Raizen, where his face is super basic:

A: pretending nothing is wrong, calmly answering question

B: pleased with self for being smart - clearly a happer expression than A

C: similar to A, chillaxing and answering question

D: no big smiling mouth so he looks more like he’s focused on intensely sniffing the air

E: same as B basically, but a bigger smile of “everything’s fine!” (when you read the text)

F: extra thickness for his upper lid gives the sense that he’s in the middle of his casual sexy/chivalrous how ya doin’ expression

G: ... which changes in this panel to be more a realization (“oh shit I’m on fire”)

Actually, Raizen and Hokushin are both pretty difficult face types for me, being more “mature” looking male faces with stronger features/jawlines and narrower eyes. Hokushin especially has been challenging because his design has really low eyebrows which result in a default glare. Togashi still manages to make him fairly expressive and not look like he's glowering all the time. With my more limited art skill and lack of confidence, I tend to soften his expressions by really laying on the top line of his eye (this sounds like I'm putting mascara on him or something lmao), and also adjusting the size of his pupils (within reason or it starts to look even less like how I draw him normally, which is a big problem since his shaved head is a defining aspect of his series character design so he already looks pretty different). Here are some comparisons of his face - bearing in mind I had to keep his eyes wide open because of the seals in the story:   

A: crying/relief

B: this one here is supposed to be a bit miserable/self-loathing because he really didn’t think Raizen was going to look for him

C: shock, unexpected

D: thinking + “ugh plan B”

E: worried/apologetic and then “OOF/URK”

F and G: a progression to show the differences in rendering the eye. First is a bit angry because he’s realizing where all the blood for the seals came from, then he notices Raizen’s hands, and G is that example of softened expression (more lines on the top eye, larger pupil) to show how bad he feels about Raizen’s injury. 

One last thought on expressions. They can easily lose their nuance when inking (the slightest shift to a line can change the expression completely), and especially for someone like me who has unsteady hands it can be a bit of a nightmare. The nice thing about ballpoints is that they can retain a bit of the pencil sketch quality, which helped me freak out less when inking the last page with Hokushin’s glare. Here’s a comparison of the progress:

Though this particular expression isn’t that subtle, you can still see some differences as the drawing gets built up. When the pencil lines are gone and the drawing gets rendered in bw only, a lot of shading is lost. The messy lines can be interpreted more flexibly by your brain since they’re less defined and you haven’t “committed”, so the final version looks and feels less expressive. (This is why a lot of artists prefer their sketches to the finished piece, myself included...) Characterization This will get very specific to this comic, obviously, but hopefully my approach (and biases haha) will come through. With something like a fancomic, there are obviously existing expectations around the characters, but the benefit of working with these guys is that they’re not as prominent in the story or the fandom, so I feel more comfortable playing around and filling in the gaps. (This is probably why I like minor characters so much.)

In the case of Raizen and Hokushin, we know these two have a close relationship and history only through assumption and insinuation. We never see them interacting directly in the series at all. Actually, we don't see Raizen interact with anyone except Yusuke in non-flashback sequences (aside from the kudakusushi. In the anime, more scenes were added with his estranged friends, mostly their fond memories of him beating them up lmao). But it's very clear that they're extremely important to each other. Hokushin obviously speaks of his king in an exceedingly respectful fashion. Meanwhile, Hokushin is actually the last name Raizen says before he dies - his second last line, to Yusuke, is "Take care of Hokushin and the others" - or in my Taiwanese edition, "I leave Hokushin and the others to you". (Lol “the others”. Also I need to draw a comic about this at some point.) Despite this zero actual interaction, it's still extremely easy to imagine it because their characters are so clearly defined. In fact, they're both such consistent archetypes with enough particular quirks that they practically write themselves. So it wasn't difficult to extrapolate and imagine much younger versions of them, and how they may have interacted if they had only just met, which is the foundation of North Bound. Archetypes and stereotypes walk a fine line together, but they do serve as really useful building blocks for sketching characters quickly. This is why I really enjoy symbolic systems like astrology (or some of the the modern incarnations - personality assessment frameworks) because of all the character sketching it helps you do really quickly. Astrology in particular because, without even caring about birth dates or charts or whether astrology is "real" or not, the basic idea of a sign and its bucket of traits and symbols is simply a great resource when you want fleshed out character archetypes to build off of. I talked a bit about this in my Lenormand post, but I think of zodiac signs as one of the many games humans have developed in our attempts to categorize our world into recognizable patterns, and since we've been at it for thousands of years, there's a wealth of reference material, scenarios, analyses not only of the individual archetypes, but for all sorts of combinations and relationships. Some of it very well-thought out, and some of it just lots of fun to read. For my purposes, applying this to North Bound, Raizen is basically a Leo. He's dramatic, positive, powerful, passionate, a straight-shooter. Not only does he embody its main traits, he's literally a king (or eventually one in this story, I guess). And he even has a mane, for crying out loud. Meanwhile, Hokushin is a solid depiction of a quintessential Virgo - hardworking, practical, analytical, stoic, kind - and literally the loyal servant that typifies the Virgo paradigm. The Leo/Virgo duo is a classic partnership, and at the point where we meet them in the series, the relationship we can see has stabilized to exactly that. At the same time, there's tons of potential for a hilarious dynamic as well, especially imagining how they got to that point. (If you wanna have a laugh, look up some analyses of Leo and Virgo relationships and you'll see what I mean.) His freakouts next to Raizen's "hahhaa everything's fine!" carry most of the humour (similar to how his freakout at Yusuke's vandalism of the rurimaru stones carried a ton of the humour in that episode lol). Obviously there are other things that further finetune their characters so that they're more than bland cookie cutter personalities (Raizen's deep thinking about the future of the Demon World, for example, and Hokushin's sense of humour and appreciation/enjoyment of fighting), but in broad brushstrokes, these archetypes work incredibly well, and make it so easy to come up with scenarios and write interaction to the point that I'm now ridiculously behind in actually turning them into comics ahhhhh...

[heedra]

Exalted Secret Santa

I’m excited to jump in on @shiftingpath‘s Exalted Secret Santa for the first time! A busy quarter meant I didn’t really have time to get adequate reference material for everyone I wanted to add to this list (there’s always next time!), but here are two of my (terrible) favorites.

Avenging Phoenix- Dawn Caste Solar (Formerly Ravenous Vulture Picks Clean the Bones of Creation, Dusk Caste Abyssal)

Orphaned at an early age, Phoenix was adopted by a Guild mercenary and raised as such. He spent his later mortal life as a city guard captain in Thorns, where he exalted during the fateful siege itself, disillusionment and rage at the circumstances of his death making him an easy recruit for the Mask. His path has weaved far and wide since then, a slow painful crawl from rebellion to eventual redemption; a journey that ultimately gave him a place among the saviors of Creation. He now helps command an organization that trains mortals, ghosts, and renegade deathknights alike to combat the forces of the Underworld (is it based on the BPRD? yes.). As long as his soul is on this side of Lethe, he is determined to fight against the Void- not because he considers himself antithesis to it, but because he has known it and survived it. He has impostor’s syndrome when it comes to his redemption by the Sun, and still feels uncomfortable thinking of himself as a peer to the other members of the Solar Host.

Phoenix is of Western descent, very short, fat, and beefy, with warm brown skin and a round, open face.  He keeps his burgundy hair closely shaved, not fond of dealing with the mess of wavy curls it becomes when allowed to grow out. His eyes are dark brown, almost black, the outside of the iris rimmed with the faintest edge of golden yellow. His nose looks like it has been broken multiple times in the past, and never properly healed. Due to unfortunate wyld misadventures his tongue has been mutated to resemble and function like that of a frog or chameleon’s, though this is only really apparent when he opens his mouth to use the damn thing. He is frequently found wearing his armor; black jade lamellar embellished with cruel-looking spikes, and often a shaggy grey fur cloak made from the pelt of some hunting trophy. A horned skull helm, made from the skull of a nephwrack’s war-body, often completes this ensemble. The helmet is a minor artifact: when worn, it causes his eyes to glow balefully behind its sockets and makes his voice gravelly with deathly menace. He is reluctant to take it off unless he feels at ease in a situation. Phoenix’s casual clothes tend to be simple, comfortable, loose, and in sharp contrast to his prickly combat garb. He enjoys floral patterns. He does not dress fancily unless pressed to for big occasions, and in those cases usually grudgingly follows the fashion direction of the one twisting his arm.

He usually tends to give off a vibe of someone who is tired, stressed, and sad but trying to seem laid back and amiable wrt expression and body language. Other common emotions include: ‘concerned dad face’, polite confusion, grumpy confusion, blank confusion, tired confusion, worried confusion, exasperated confusion, “is it time for me to fight something yet” confusion, and general gormlessness. This all hides a talent for strategic leadership and a stoic determination that gets fiercer as the going gets tougher. On the battlefield, he is brutal and bloodthirsty. He goes out of his way to make sure his enemies are intimidated, and few of his threats go unbacked. 

His anima banner starts as burst of gold-and crimson fire that solidifies into the form of a fierce and predatory-looking phoenix, with aspects of a garda bird and a lammergeier both. It moves as he does across the battlefield, swooping and rising with each swing of his axe, its fierce eyes focused on his prey. Refs: [1] [2]  Quick sketch of the skull helm (messy, sorry!) His grand grimcleaver looks like this, except made of solar essence (a la Glorious Solar Saber).

Example of the sort of casual clothing he wears

Feel free to get creative with the armor if you want. I’ve never had a fully cemented design for it, besides the fact that it is black jade lamellar and has those spiky shoulder pads. The one thing I would say is that it likely has spikes elsewhere as well, and has clawed gauntlets.

Harvester Of Corpses from Bones of the Barren Wasteland- Daybreak Caste Abyssal Necrosurgeon Harvester grew up in a small villages of ancestor-worshipping farmers that had lived next to the shadowlands southeast of Thorns for generations upon generations. He exalted at 19 in an unceremonious manner when he was ambushed and gutted by bandits upon returning from selling crops and wool at the market. Fueled by bitterness towards his previous life of powerlessness and poverty and the rush of newfound power he received, he served as a loyal deathknight for several years, but mounting attacks of conscience and growing fear of his master eventually led him to abandon his increasingly half-hearted servitude and flee with what little he could take. He now lives a destitute life on the run, hiding beneath rags and the veneer of disease, adrift in a world that rejects his essence, still reeling from just how far in over his head he’s managed to get himself. Harv is 6ft8 (or rather, the Creation equivalent in comparison to average height), very thin, bony and gangly, with greyish, clammy skin that used to be brown. The tips of his fingers and toes are marked with the black of necrosis, and his skin is marked by leprous boils and sores. Hardly any of his hair is left, only his big eyebrows and one small, scraggly patch remaining. His eyes are tired, underscored by heavy shadows, and often seem to have a pale, unhealthy yellow cast to them. He has several scars, most of them from his ‘trials’ as a new deathknight and one from the moment of his ‘death’, a giant scar across his stomach that still looks supernaturally raw and unhealed. The scar on his nose, however, is just from a time he got attacked by a chicken as a kid, a scar which got repeatedly reopened throughout incidents in his childhood and is kind of there to stay.

Harv wears an ever-shifting litany of ragged and grimy cloaks and bandages, prefering to conceal his body as much as possible. Beneath, he wears an unadorned soulsteel breastplate, nabbed from the armory on his way out of dodge, which fits poorly on his scrawny frame, and beneath this a sleeveless high-necked shirt, also black. His one accessory is a pair of obsidian earrings, tokens that marked the passage to adulthood in his village, which he wears at all times. His weapon of choice is Famine’s Mouth, a relatively unadorned artifact soulsteel war-scythe. 

Harvester is an unsettling deadbeat drifter with a penchant for drink. He comes off as defeated and glum, prone to melodrama, cowardice, passive-aggression, and extremely dry humor. Deep down he’s still the gentle and caring farmboy he once was, though it is hidden behind paranoia, avoidance, a nasty passive agressive dramatic streak, and immense social awkwardness. Despite his fear of his deathlord and peers and self-hatred towards his abyssal nature, he is also a zealous underworld nerd, fascinated with necromancy and the Neverborn alike (tho certainly not interested in being loyal to the latter). His passion for his craft is such that he makes use of pretty much any corpse he finds, and is not averse to graverobbing (he’s big on recycling). Harvester can often be found with a retinue of equally cloaked and bandaged zombies, frequently with bizarre and dangerous modifications made to them; this has gotten him in trouble one more than one occasion. He daydreams of one day having the workspace, safety, and materials to create much more ambitious constructs. He is also, despite himself, too fond of dogs to avoid them for resonance’s sake, and the local strays frequently trail after him once they realize that he hands out treats. His anima banner is a sickly green and black swarm of locusts that coalesce thickest behind his head in a grim halo. 

Refs: [1] [2] [3] (old, but good outfit ref] [4 (not my art!)] [5 (ignore the silly outfit and tatoos, but there’s colors here)] The top three drawings here show the weapon his grimscythe is based on. I don’t have a cemented design for it, but it resembles a basic war scythe like the one shown here only much larger, crueler, and made of soulsteel. If you choose to depict it, feel free to get creative!

[gyrlversion]

Heres What Its Like To See Yourself In A Deepfake Porn Video

On a busy workday in March, 28-year-old Kate felt an urgent tap on her shoulder. Her colleague wanted to show her a video, so she glanced at his computer and was shocked to see her own face staring back, wincing and moaning. She appeared on-screen to be lying naked on a couch with her legs in the air while a man repeatedly penetrated her.

Kate felt sick. Her co-workers, who’d gathered around to see what was going on, instantly fell silent when they saw the video. It looked real and even identified Kate by name, but she knew it couldn’t be. Beyond the obvious — she’d never done porn — she could tell it wasn’t her body; only the face was hers. It had to be some kind of hoax… but would other people believe it?

“It was horrifying,” Kate, who lives in Texas, told HuffPost. “I’d never seen anything like it.”

The video, which is still online and has tens of thousands of views, is a deepfake — a doctored video created with artificial-intelligence software that can make someone appear to do or say anything. Deepfake algorithms use a dataset of videos and images of an individual to create a virtual model of their face that can be superimposed and manipulated. In Kate’s case, her face was swapped onto a porn actress’ head.

“When it’s Photoshop, it’s a static picture and can be very obvious that it’s not real,” said Kate, who’s been the target of previous misogynistic attacks. “But when it’s your own face reacting and moving, there’s this panic that you have no control over how people use your image.”

At first, deepfake porn almost exclusively featured female celebrities; their television and movie appearances gave video creators plenty of material to work with. But now, as the technology has advanced and become more broadly accessible, ordinary women with even a small selection of public photos or videos of themselves are being targeted too.

HuffPost spoke to six women who have been digitally inserted into porn without their consent. Those quoted here are identified by pseudonyms to protect their privacy, and are speaking out to call attention to an issue that’s been left to fester in the shadows.

Most public discussion on deepfakes thus far has centered on the potential political problems they could cause in the future, even though they already pose a real threat to women. Lawmakers have fretted about how the videos could hypothetically make a presidential candidate appear to say something defamatory on the eve of next year’s election. Satirical deepfakes of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have recently dominated headlines as warnings of what’s to come.

Meanwhile, as deepfake porn continues to upend women’s lives, there’s been little media coverage, and there still exists no criminal recourse for victims.

“The harm done to women when it comes to this kind of sexual objectification is happening now,” said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. “It’s almost like people have forgotten that this is what this technology really started out as, and the conversation around women has fallen away.”

Deepfakes Are Rooted In Misogyny

Deepfakes have been weaponized against women for as long as they’ve existed. The term “deepfake” was coined in 2017 by an anonymous Reddit user who shared doctored porn videos like the one above, which portrays “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot. Today, major porn websites are filled with deepfakes, despite promises to ban them. (MindGeek, which owns Pornhub and other erotic video sites, did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the no-deepfakes policy it announced more than a year ago.)

Other tech platforms have wavered in their approach to deepfakes hosted on their sites, torn between calls to stamp out disinformation and to protect free expression. Inside the federal government, legislators have started to sound the alarm about the videos, and a few have introduced bills to regulate them, such as the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act from Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.). But so far, none have resulted in action.

Once something is uploaded it can never really get deleted. It will just be reposted forever. Tina, a victim of nonconsensual deepfake porn

Without any such intervention or effective policies in place, deepfake porn has carved out a comfortable space online — and it’s thriving. In addition to free, easy-to-use deepfake generator apps, there are now photo search engines (which HuffPost won’t name) that allow people to upload pictures of individuals to find porn actresses with similar features for optimal face-swapping results. There are even deepfake porn forums where men make paid requests for professional-looking videos of specific women, and share links to the women’s social media profiles for source imagery. HuffPost has observed requesters seeking porn with female Twitch, YouTube and Instagram influencers, as well as the requesters’ own co-workers, friends and exes.

On one such forum in March, someone asked for a sex video of Tina, a 24-year-old Canadian woman, and dropped a link to her YouTube channel. Four days later, a deepfake popped up that appeared to show her bent over naked on a bed with one man thrusting behind her and another stroking his penis near her head. The video, which is virtually seamless, is still up with thousands of views.

“I was definitely shocked and disturbed,” Tina, who learned of the video when an acquaintance sent her a link, told HuffPost. “It felt really weird and gross to see my face where it shouldn’t be.”

The video poster and claimed creator is a middle-aged man, according to his profile. Tina has no idea who he is. She thought about trying to get the video taken down, but didn’t see a point once she realized it had already been shared to other websites.

“You know how the internet is — once something is uploaded it can never really get deleted,” she said. “It will just be reposted forever.”

Someone makes an anonymous, paid request for deepfake porn of their crush.

It Could Happen To Anyone

Until recently, convincing, deepfake-style video manipulation could only be done by highly skilled editors. Hollywood filmmakers have digitally inserted actors into movies posthumously, for example, which required a considerable amount of footage of the actors’ faces to work with. Now, rapidly advancing technology has democratized this kind of deceptive video-editing practice at women’s expense. We’ve reached a point where even amateurs with relatively few pictures of their target’s face can create deepfake porn on their own.

One self-proclaimed video creator, who describes himself online as a 25-year-old Greek man and “one of the first guys” to make deepfake porn, solicits donations and paid requests on multiple forums. People have watched his videos more than 300,000 times.

Deepfakes are “no different from a photoshop manipulation or artist drawing/rendering,” the man, who did not reveal his name, told HuffPost. Asked if anyone ever requests that he remove the sex videos he uploads, he replied: “There are no takedowns.”

Despite his disregard for women’s privacy, he seems rather concerned with protecting his own: “I’m accepting payments in bitcoin and other crypto currencies (no paypal/credit card due to privacy reasons),” he wrote in one post. In another, he listed his price range as around $15 to $40 per video.

“Women can tell men, ‘I don’t want to date you, I don’t want to know you, I don’t want to take my clothes off for you,’ but now men can say, ‘Oh yeah? I’m going to force you to, and if I can’t do it physically, I will do it virtually,’” said Franks. “There’s nothing you can really do to protect yourself except not exist online.”

She’s hopeful that as people become increasingly aware of deepfakes and deepfake porn in particular, they’ll become more skeptical of what they see online.

“The only silver lining, if you can even call it that,” she said, “is that the more people know about this, the more they’ll start to question if [revenge porn videos] are real.”

But deepfakes have also broadened the threat of revenge porn, or nonconsensual porn. A vindictive creep no longer needs nudes or sex tapes of a woman who’s spurned him to leak online. He just needs her Facebook or Instagram photos to deepfake into existing porn. And as these videos get easier to make, they’re also getting harder to recognize.

There’s nothing you can really do to protect yourself except not exist online. Mary Anne Franks, president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative

Like so many women, Amy, a mother and business owner who’s based in Los Angeles, has been harassed in the past with crudely altered images that were disturbing but clearly fake. She’d never heard of deepfakes until she was featured in one that portrays her having sex, and labels her a “slut.” In the comments section, people have commended the anonymous creator for the video’s believability.

“It didn’t get really concerning until the technology and skill level of those putting it together got better — to the point where people might actually believe that was me,” Amy told HuffPost. “If we see a video of something, we take it as fact.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense, has been working in recent years to develop machine-learning algorithms that can detect manipulated videos, including deepfakes. Much of the challenge lies in keeping pace with deepfake software as it continues to evolve.

“As the people making these videos get more and more sophisticated with their tools, we’re going to have to get more and more sophisticated with ours,” Edward Delp, a media forensics expert at Purdue University who’s conducting research for DARPA, said in a recent interview with HuffPost. “It’s going to be an arms race.”

Nicolas Ortega

Malicious deepfakes are usually posted anonymously and designed to go viral.

No Real Options For Victims

Maya, a 29-year-old woman who also lives in Los Angeles, wasn’t aware that she’s featured in deepfake porn until HuffPost contacted her last week. She was aghast to learn of the video, which identifies her by name and appears to show her masturbating. But she wasn’t entirely surprised: She’s been receiving a lot of messages lately from strangers requesting sex.

“Being violated in such an intimate way is really a weird feeling,” Maya told HuffPost. “The idea of people sexualizing me makes me feel like I’m being fetishized, receiving unwanted attention, losing respect as a person and no longer safe.”

The unfortunate reality for Maya and other women in her situation is that there’s not much they can do now that the videos are out there. Lawsuits can be extremely expensive, and in order to sue for harassment, impersonation, defamation or even misappropriation of image — which typically only applies for celebrities — you need to know who you’re suing. Like many victims of nonconsensual deepfake porn, Maya has no clue who created or posted the video of her.

And because online intermediaries, including social media giants and deepfake forums, are shielded from liability for third-party content thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, suing the sites that host the video would be pointless too. Platforms can’t get in legal trouble for the things their users post, and aren’t required to remove them. As a result, trying to get abusive content taken offline is often futile.

“As disappointing and sobering as it is, there aren’t a lot of options for victims,” said Carrie Goldberg, an attorney specializing in sexual privacy. Deepfake websites exist “to monetize people’s humiliation,” she added. “It points to the infirmity that Section 230 has caused when there are websites that are so arrogant about their immunity from liability.”

Since malicious deepfakes are usually posted anonymously and designed to go viral, victims’ advocates such as Danielle Citron are urging lawmakers to develop a policy that’s focused not only on punishing the producers, but also the distributors. She and Franks are working together to draft a federal criminal law that would hold platforms accountable for wittingly amplifying hoax videos and enabling them to be spread around.

“If [there are] impersonations or manipulations that do not reflect what we’ve done or said, platforms should — once they figure it out — take it down,” Citron, who’s a law professor at the University of Maryland, said this month at the first congressional hearing on deepfakes. At this stage, she noted, there’s no way to filter the videos from being posted, so platforms should be required to remove them as soon as they’re flagged.

Free speech proponents worry that unless it’s done very carefully, forcing websites to restrict certain content could lead to broader repercussions for online expression.

But as Franks argued, unbridled deepfake porn is already doing just that.

“There’s a massive chilling effect that deepfake pornography has on women’s speech,” she said, “because the way to make yourself safer is to censor yourself.”

Pornhub

Pornhub is still riddled with deepfakes, despite promising to ban them more than a year ago.

Women Are Being Silenced

Investigative journalist Rana Ayyub has experienced firsthand the silencing effect Franks described. Last spring, she was the victim of a targeted disinformation campaign in India that was intended to intimidate and humiliate her.

The abuse began the day after she publicly condemned a political party’s shameful response to the rape of a young girl. Suddenly, screenshots showing a series of defamatory tweets falsely appearing to be from Ayyub began circulating online. She then realized a deepfake porn video featuring her face was spreading across social media like wildfire, alongside her name and phone number. It was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and Ayyub started getting calls and messages asking for sex.

“It was devastating,” she told HuffPost UK. “The entire country was watching a porn video that claimed to be me, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything.”

Even now that the video has been debunked as fake, Ayyub will never be able to fully move on. She can’t undo the damage to her reputation, and she’s afraid of drawing more attention to herself on social media.

“I used to be very opinionated; now I’m much more cautious about what I post online. I’ve self-censored quite a bit out of necessity,” she said. “I’m constantly thinking, ‘What if someone does something to me again?’”

Kate, the woman from Texas whose co-worker found deepfake porn of her, has struggled to move forward too. When she contacted her lawyer, he explained that the case would be incredibly difficult to fight because she didn’t know who was behind the video.

With no viable legal options on the table, Kate reluctantly turned to the deepfake forum where the video was posted and asked for it to be removed. The site owner told her she wasn’t the only woman on the page, then stopped replying, Kate said. She felt hopeless.

“It’s grotesque to know that it lives out there and there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. “These things are so horribly believable, and you desperately want to say, ‘That’s not me!’ But that would just bring more attention to it.”

Like Ayyub, Kate has also started to limit what she shares online for fear that her content could be distorted and used against her without consequence yet again.

“Pornographic deepfakes and revenge porn and all that kind of stuff are only going to make women want to say less,” she said. “As these videos get more prolific and realistic, is this something we’re just going to be expected to accept as the cost of being online?”

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Help us tell more of the stories that matter from voices that too often remain unheard.

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[rpedia]

[Ask RPedia] Characterization of Emotional Manipulators

numbertwooflorien asked: Advice to rp as a emotional manipulative character?

Well okay! This post is how to RP an emotionally manipulative character, and in general a manipulative character. Useful for villains, and grimdark settings, it may include some crap people don’t want to think about. In detail. Major detail. So fair warning, I’m gonna get into psychological shit, and describe what amounts to abuse tactics with lots of explanation so if this isn’t your cup of tea, keep running. You might be able to use this as a way to spot toxic relationships as much as you can use it to play fictional ones, and I hope it helps people one way or another. But remember, keep it fucking fictional! 

This is presented as a way to understand those mindsets as a writer, which is important, and not in any way shape or form something you should do in real life. I acknowledge if you wanna do shit like this you’ll find the details on how to be an asshole somewhere anyways though, so I’m not gonna let you ruin it for everyone who just needs some writing help to make their character’s manipulation/emotional crisis more realistic. Onto the cut.

Hi! So first off, fair warning. I may get a little testy, or sound like I’m talking about shit happening from a first-hand receiving view without meaning to. Spoiler: I am. I’ll try to couch this in writer-talk more, sorry if I sound salty, or slip and don’t notice.

So! You’re a writer. You’re writing a character who is designed to produce conflict, and emotions within the reader by emotionally manipulating others. First things first, look at yourself, and your character’s goals. You need to have relatively firm goals in mind when you're figuring out what to do with a character’s motivations and personality. 

What reaction do you want from the reader or your opposite in a roleplay? Do you want your partner/reader to feel sorry for them being caught up in their own web of lies, or do you want them to hate them and rebel against them? Do you want them to feel sickened, relate to the character, or feel pity for them?  What goals does your character have in mind? Does it just feel good, or are they looking for attention? Do they feel the need to control things?

First let’s look at the motivations of the character. Usually the urge to manipulate others stems from some sort of issue in their past. This is gonna simplify things a lot, but that’s because we’re making shit up and not dealing with real people. Real people are hella complex, they have way more detail to their “backstory” because they’re real, complex, thinking individuals who may have issues we can’t even know because they’re repressed. This is a character, under our control. So we can define what happened to them, and how it effected them, to a minute degree. 

Control is a big player in this ‘game’, needing control can push the character to do things they might not have otherwise. A loss of control in their childhood that significantly impacted them could cause this need/goal. Having someone take their favorite toy and destroy it in front of them? Yeah, I don’t know about you, but if someone did that, I wouldn’t fuckin’ want nobody to do anything I didn’t plan for ever again. The character might then start focusing on ways to stop that from happening.

They might just like the feel of control, rather than fear a lack of it. It feels good to see the puppets dance, so to speak, so when they force others to do as they command by playing their emotions it feels like victory. Victory is delicious, and most people whet that appetite on nice things like cooking a nice dinner, or drawing, or running in races. Characters who are emotionally manipulative instead get their kicks from hurting others in such a way that they get what they want, which may include just getting attention.

The basic issue here is, regardless of other issues for them, they make choices that hurt other people. Logically, they know what they are doing even if they block it out or try to ignore it. They may come up with a complex, distorted, long winded reason why they are in fact the victim, or that their behavior is somehow righteous. They are deliberately going out of their way to look for weaknesses in others, and exploit them for personal gain. This is just the sign of an asshole. Be aware you are playing or writing an asshole.

So, have their history in mind? Have you built up their reasoning for thinking that they are in the right at all times? Have you picked their goals or personality? If so, the next step is actual manipulation. Now we’re gonna jump right into how and why people react to things, and the logical fallacies that get preyed on by the less scrupulous.

We see it in advertising all the time. That commercial with the sad kennel puppies? The time your parent told you to eat your veggies because somewhere out there another kid is starving and would be so lucky? This is called Appeal to Emotion, and is in formal logic classes, considered a fallacy used in arguments to support your point despite it not having actual back-up.  When you use these, you can appeal to fear, envy, hatred, pity, pride, and more. Coherent arguments of course can have an aspect of emotional connection, it’s what makes us passionate. The fallacy comes about when the emotions are the only argument. Since we’re affected by emotions, this fallacy works wonders... even if they’re dishonest and flawed.

So say, the other character went out for lunch. They didn’t invite your character. So, in order to get attention to make up for this, and control such behaviors, the manipulative asshole character would probably confront them about it. Depending on how deep they are with the other character, they’re be subtle. Pouting a little, and sighing. Maybe mentioning they’re hungry, and looking hurt when the other character mentions lunch. Sure, they could get their ass up and get food themselves, but that’s not the point. The point is, their victim did something, and they want them to feel bad about it. 

Subtle is how they draw you in. There could be, if you squinted, some feelings hurt by not being asked to join in. Perhaps they want to hang out with you, or they miss you, or they’re just playing around and teasing that they’re sad. The part that makes it manipulative is when they draw out the sadness until you feel guilty, and then  laugh it off and wave you away. Step one is done, now you think they’re joking, and still feel kind of bad. Hooks have been set.

So your character can start kicking it up a notch over time. Your character might do something else by themselves like a healthy normal adult, and that character will complain. “Why wasn’t I invited?” At first they’ll continue to play it as a joke, so the other character will do it repeatedly. This becomes multiple strikes they can complain about over time, because they never actually explained themselves as upset. Now the manipulator can get pissed at the victim character: you didn’t realize I was actually upset?! Wow, you don’t even care about me at all! I can’t believe you’re so unobservant. Do you just not remember?

Here kids, we get into gaslighting. Events are now happening in a parallel which is sorta similar, but not quite. Sure they were upset, but they played it off. Without communicating, they’ve worked themselves into a victim position. They are being ignored, unwanted, and apparently the character don’t even care about their feelings enough to read them properly when you two have a talk! This is a lie. They were hiding their emotions, they regularly downplayed it until they could use it against the other character, and going out to lunch or a movie alone is not an attack on them just by existing. In fact they’re suggesting joking petulance is now a “talk.”

Now that the victim character feels guilty and unsure of themselves, they do what a normal person would do to a real issue. They try to work it out, to figure out a way to make them feel better. They offer to take them with them. They invite them out, a few times, and try to make amends. Sure it feels a little weird, but they’re a friend. It’s easy to just do something nice! Heck, they might even accept, and the two characters might have a lovely time. This instills a ‘if you’re good, I’ll be good too’ mentality in the victim. There is now a set up where you get reinforced to follow what they want because it causes less problems.

These issues may pop up everywhere. A victim may be told they chew too loud, or they shouldn’t watch a TV show without the manipulator. Maybe they’ll be upset by the toilet seat, or some real things just to make sure it’s realistic. They’ll draw it out, be ‘uncomfortable’ explaining why this makes them upset. Everything is a hardship. The difference between real issues and manipulation here is somehow the only bad things are things the victim likes, or wants to keep safe or to themselves. Things they can take to make the victim less happy. To the manipulator it may look like they’re expressing how much they care by getting rid of their favorite or special things that they can get no where else. The manipulator also makes it hard on themselves to explain, despite things not being that bad, so that they can add another level on if the victim complains: now they’re a burden to them because of all their baggage. Even non-manipulators have hard to explain things, the manipulator however will do this whenever they’re rejected out of hand, very quickly because it produces results. Victims take the time to build up to explaining why something’s important because it’s really hard to do so, manipulators can jump in when convenient.

A kind normal person feels getting rid of someone because of baggage would be a terrible thing, after all they have baggage too! They have special things they like to have just so. The character continues to try and make things easier, because clearly even if the manipulator hasn’t had a particularly harder life, they have had it hit harder to make them so delicate. They deserve happiness, and to feel cared for. The gaslighting continues, the manipulative character begins to point out every time they make a mistake or forget something, and starts laughing about how forgetful the victim character is. They explain situations just a little south of how they actually happened, keying themselves as the victim. Any argument gets heated, but then suddenly they drop all heat and start ‘worrying’ about their own mental state. Maybe they’re wrong, and they’re so so sorry. But can you still not do that, if it ever comes up? This is a fake concession to lure you in by making this the easier path. 

So slowly the victim character becomes used to these demands, even as they grow wider and wider in the net they cast. A manipulator needs their full attention, and to cockblock anyone raising doubts about the issues. So they start fights and burning bridges with the victim’s friends. They might even lie directly to them about being the real victim, far ahead of the actual victim noticing. Getting rid of all of their contacts makes it easier to manipulate them because then they can’t find an outside opinion. Only tainted, controlled ones. The hooks set in a little deeper.

So your victim is alone in the world, or only has a few friends. They begin questioning what is wrong with themselves, and struggle to become a better person. There’s honeymoon periods, there the abusive character is happy, and genuinely makes the victim feel good about themselves... until they get bored and need another mistake. 

Now that they have you alone, so it’s easier to just get mad and ‘need to cool down’. So they abandon the victim character for long spaces of time. This forces them to question themselves, and try desperately to find solutions without any means to use them. This also makes them the bad guy if they try to communicate. Suddenly these brand new created boundaries are being broken. Ostracizing people causes genuine pain, which means that it’s easier to control them because pain is a great way to teach someone they’re “bad”.

From a victim’s perspective this is all normal and reasonable because it’s slowly gained in momentum over time. They feel good, sometimes, and it’s really good. They just keep making mistakes (spoiler: they don’t, the mistakes are manufactured.) and if they were “better” this wouldn’t be happening to them. They get into the headspace of needing to not only obey, but become a god damn psychic to understand what the manipulative character wants next. 

How does this manipulative motherfucker keep things interesting if they’ve already broken someone to their whims though? By adding in things that are seemingly contradictory, but depend on ‘mood’. Mood whiplash is common in manipulators, and they will go from having a great day to having a terrible one based on ‘outside’ forces. The victim character cannot foresee these, nor stop them, so they might get to have a wonderful morning! And then some asshole says something rude, and the manipulator says they’re having a TERRIBLE day now, this triggered a headache, and they’re so miserable. The illnesses will always be invisible, it’s easier to get one at the drop of the hat that way even if it invalidates real versions of the illnesses. Watch for faked symptoms that magically disappear when they want to do something they like, like listen to loud pounding music in headphones during a “headache” while refusing treatment. The victim may try to help, but no. The manipulator now says the victim is making it worse by being clingy and needy. That, or they’re going to blow their cover. 

So the victim learns to stay in their box unless the manipulator wants to take them out and play with them. They suppress their desires and personality because it’s the only way that makes sense and will keep the friendship going. After 6 months, we humans begin developing bonds based on attachment rather than love or lust. The main chemicals involved are oxytocin and vasopressin. Same shit you get after an orgasm, but it cements that you need someone, that your life would be emptier without them. For the characters: The manipulator is not worming their way into someone’s heart and making a hole. They are building additional stress, which leads to good feelings, which all bond together with the sticky sap of lies to CREATE a net around both characters. They’re like a caddisfly creating a burrow instead of finding one where they actually fit.

It’s easy to fall too deep into the spell of a long relationship, even if it’s just an acquaintanceship, or friendship. Dateship is even worse, because then you get to play on heartstrings and they’re obligated to fix them because they made a deal to work things out with you and stay in love as long as possible.

Over time the victim stops being useful. They’ve been turned into a pitiful wreck, who needs the manipulator to tell them what to do every step of the way. Either that, or they make friends and a spark of rebellion means they start fighting back. Keeping logs. Forcing them to sign things. Making sure fights are in view of other people. Once additional not-victims see things, it can be easier for the real victim to find solid footing. A manipulative fuckhead character does not like solid footing. They want to be relied on. Either way, they’ve expired in their usefulness. The manipulative character has to move on.

They can do so by latching onto one of the friends peeled away from the initial victim by seeding years ago that the victim is the bad guy, or from a current group member who has been explicitly warned not to mess with the victim, or even an entirely new group fashioned behind the scenes. Because the manipulator is free to lie, steal, cheat, and have full exciting lives while the victim has to play to their demands.

They can now bring forth a story, that the victim has been holding them back and hurting them for years. Every detail, every piece of their lives is now a way to hurt the victim one last time. The trick is, they have to make sure everyone new knows that the victim is a liar, is bad, is toxic and should be avoided. This is something the victim will also want to say about the abuser... later. When they recognize everything they’ve done while they were tucked under the spell. They will question themselves, for very long periods of time, while the abuser/manipulator character will jump right on that shit. Spreading the lies early means no one will check on the victim character. They can be eliminated as the real liar if they strike first.

Clues that the manipulator character is really the asshole include: Being too quick on the draw while pointing out who is wrong. Victims need time to process and unravel, the manipulator knows the lies already. Prolonging it. Victims want to stop contact, to move on, to warn others but to avoid the situations that make them feel queasy and hurt. Manipulators will constantly check their profiles, leave messages years later to hurt the victim, and spread nasty stories long after the victim character has moved on. They will boil in the drama and prolong it... especially as baggage the next victim has to be careful of and work around of while they get drawn into the net. 

So after that heart rending rendition of how manipulative characters work internally, how do they work for an author/player? Most of the time when an author wants to make a manipulative character it’s to damage the hero or give them something to grow beyond. Think Mother Gothell from Rapunzel. That shit was hella abusive and emotionally manipulative! Drawn on her for inspiration. Research this shit, and then apply it. Do you want to damage the other character for hurt/comfort stuff later? Do you use it as in-character fictional catharsis? It will matter how you word it.

So be aware of what you’re doing. Do not fall for the spell of just behaving like a manipulator in text and going ‘it’s okay it’s fictional’. It will take a real toll on the other player if you do not highlight what your manipulative character is doing. Be a talkative narrator. Explain what they’re doing, at least a little bit, or you can actually fuck up people.

For instance. Let’s go back to the sniffling about lunch.

Agatha was staring at her book with the distant gaze of someone preoccupied, sniffing a third time that hour. Lloyd had, in her opinion, abandoned her for far too long to have lunch. It was time to catch his attention. She pushed out her lower lip, willing herself to look a bit more upset. She gently touched her own stomach, “Boy,” she said wistfully, “I’m quite hungry...”

This is way better for the other player to understand that she’s playing at being sad, without destroying how realistic it looks to the other character. This lays down the obvious in narration, without completely outing her in play. The next is a bad version of this scene:

Agatha sniffled, eyes glazed. Her lip was extended in a pout and her body language writ large how miserable she was, “Boy, I’m quite hungry.” She sniffed, quietly to herself to avoid Lloyd hearing. It was self-pity, a deep loneliness that ruined her reading... 

Good writing! Baaaad for intent. This makes her upset look genuine (which it isn’t) which may make it harder for the other player to respond. Watch how you word things. Explain them from an outsider perspective to give an inside view of how things are working. This makes the story move easier.

Plus, you don’t wanna be that prick who goes from IC to OOC without any real distinction between the two and starts a fight because it turns out an IC woe was an OOC one, and your partner responded “wrong”. That’s you being a jerk, so don’t do that. Make sure you have a clear view of what is in character and what is out of character. It’s important, to keep the scenes strong, and to keep from your partner feeling taken advantage of when it turns out to be some massive manipulation. They may actually fall for it if you ever fall into the habit of actually hiding your intent behind a thin smoke-screen of ‘but it’s IC’.

Double check with your partner often, check that they recognize what’s going on. This may be as easy as chuckling over a scene with them ooc ((Hah, isn’t Aggie being such a jerk? Lloyd would never do that to her! )) to actually sitting down and going ((Hey you okay? This is pretty intense, and she’s clearly got him wrapped around her little finger. I wanna make sure you’re okay and know I don’t believe what she’s saying. ))

Partners are the most important thing here. Readers, on the other hand, don’t have to have an active role. They’re being fed the entire story, so you can fuck with them all you want and it’ll just be a twist happening to someone else. You can play with words, hide your intent, and slowly reveal how twisted dear old Aggie is over time, instead of putting it out there each step of the way so your friend playing lloyd can catch onto which way to write the victim into. Readers are there to absorb and get amazed and shocked and feel relatable pain, loss, and sorrow. They can stop, and walk away if it’s too much. A partner playing another character feel obligation to stick around and see how things play out even if they’re hurt. They have more creativity and time put into the situation. Remember that while you’re playing, and remember they put themselves where the character is to see what comes next. Give them respect as human beings, and don’t fucking hurt them.

So yes, how do we use this in other situations though? A suave magical emperor and his subordinates? Same concepts really, you play on emotions. If the hero is trying to stop you as the villain, you put their family in danger. You make them question their choices, you hurt them. You make them out to be the villain and you a simple victim. You point out all the ways what they’ve done could make them look bad, or hurt others. You focus on trying to make them hate themselves, or feel like there’s another path.

You try to look like a friend, if they haven’t outed your character as a villain yet, and slowly bond with them. Point out that everyone around them is gross, that they should be avoided. Praise them for things you want to see, but make subtle indications other ideas are terrible. Complain about things that other people do, but that they do as well. That’s how you work around directly confronting them before they deeply trust you. Make their world view shift to favor your opinion.

The evil wizard telling you you’re under a curse that makes everything you do seem cruel to others, so you’re constantly second guessing yourself. Pointing out what you’re doing mirrors themselves. All logical fallacies pointing to emotion as reasoning, rather than anything else. It’s a focus on guilt, on making them want to change. You don’t force, you persuade, limit their choices, and break them. The less they’re willing to trust themselves and their friends, the easier they are to sway to evil. They may even start imitating you to get your love and attention. You can train someone to be cruel.

And that, my kiddies, is how you make a villain that people fucking hate. Because the hero seems lost, and they want to yell NO! Don’t listen to Mighty Thorgar The Cruel! He’s using you! Auuugh! The more you explain why they themselves have been stuck in this career choice the more likable they are, but if you go too far you may be travelling from ‘morally grey’ into Loki and Draco fan territory where their fave did nothing wrong it was all a product of how they were raised. You can do wrong things and then grow up and change. Infants scream and fake crying to make mommy do shit too, doesn’t mean most of them won’t grow out of it.

It’s how you write that will define how people perceive things. So double check your writing, always. Make sure it reads your goals, not just reads as well written. Check with your partners, scare your readers, and let your characters prey on people’s feelings. Can they hurt them? Go for it. Just do it safely and with a reasonable definition between IC and OOC. Don’t let it get out of control with another person, ever. It hurts. Good luck on your writing.

Oh, and because I know it’ll happen... I’m sorry if you were abused like this. I’m sorry if you feel targeted. This was written for writers only, and maybe spotting habits so you can get yourself out early. If you feel called out by this post or the behaviors in it, remember that I don’t know you. That if you are offended, I’m reflecting something you don’t like. So look at yourself, and consider if you want that part of you to exist. You can change if you truly want to and are willing to monitor yourself. Good luck, and this disclaimer is so you know I am not pointing fingers at you... unless you’re the asshole who did this to me so I mean, fuck that guy.

[greggory--lee]

8 Benefits You Immediately Receive If You Begin Podcasting Today

The future lies in podcasting.

Let me explain why.

According to a recent Case Study on Podcasting Audiences, three interesting statistics are on the rise.

Smartphone ownership tends to correlate to a greater likelihood of listening to a podcast.

Consumers are more likely to listen to podcasts on a mobile device than on a computer.

Podcast listeners are more likely to listen to streams or podcasts through their car audio systems.

What does all that mean? Well, it all points to a mobile consumer on the move, who’s looking at podcasts as an additional or perhaps alternative source of information. Podcasts stand out for their practical information type of format.

For your brand, podcasting is the new powerful, inexpensive and easy new medium then to reach out to this mobile consumer on the move who wants practical, concise and dedicated information. You already have a focused and passionate audience. It’s now much easier to become a recognized expert in your field of interest or expertise to this group through podcasting, without having to counter the normal conventions of radio, nor the limitations of blogging.

Build your credibility, your sales, your list of customers and gain a fan base very quickly and without the limitations of blogging. Does that sound good?

If these three key indicators listed above are anything to go by, podcasting is the way to go.

Here’s why:

1. Podcasting is still relatively untapped

Armed with positive growth indicators and the move by Car Manufacturers to install podcast players in their New Models, people are gearing up for the future of content marketing and it lies in podcasting. This is a market on the growth curve. Yet it’s still relatively untapped and brimming with opportunities. In the same Research study ‘Podcast Consumer 2015’, by Edison and Triton, they reveal that the age of podcast listeners is evenly spread across almost all age groups. You get an average of 15% listenership among the 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54 age groups.

15% may sound low right now, but consider the impact when podcast players become more accessible and within your reach. And this is across all age groups! What that means is that if your brand will instantly get an dedicated audience, irrespective of whichever age group you are targeting – a nice thing to know as you plan your marketing budget. Slow and steady wins the race. If these are the statistics we are seeing today, as access to podcasts becomes even easier with smartphones and our latest vehicle comes equipped with a podcast player, your audience footprint will naturally grow in the coming months.

Smartphone ownership isn’t going to die anytime soon. We are always updating, improving and searching for a better smartphone model. As you constantly upgrade your phone; and as App builders continually design new entertainment apps, the trend of listening to podcasts on your smartphone will grow by leaps and bounds.

2. Podcasting Adds Value to your current marketing effort.

Even better is the realization that podcasting complements your current marketing efforts.

You don’t have to replace any of your current social media activities. Continue with your Facebook, Twitter, blogging marketing efforts. You can even turn your latest blog post into a podcast episode, add a spin on it and it’s fresh content. Podcasting just increases your footprint and adds you a totally new audience.

3. You will find customer conversion easier with Podcasting

Someone searching for a podcast in a particular topic is already very clear about what they want to listen to. Unlike radio, where the conventional radio listener subconsciously tunes off when the next commercial airs, with a podcast, you have a dedicated listener and one will listen to listen attentively to everything you have to say, as long as you say it well. Because listeners subscribe to podcasts, they have chosen to receive your content. They have already shown interest in your message by subscribing. In addition, a podcast does not get lost in SPAM like with e-mail. You can be sure your message is reaching a focused audience. That gives you a greater likelihood of customer conversion.

4. Become ‘The Voice’

I’m not talking about the popular TV Series. Suppose you have a blog on diet and nutrition. There are over 30 million bloggers competing in that niche and your only chance of recognition is either expensive marketing, or patiently growing your blog audience over months, maybe years, until you reach cult-like status. Plus, you have to learn the essentials of SEO optimization, create fresh content frequently and guest-blogging. Now suppose you focused instead on podcasting? Since its still relatively under-exploited, you can quickly gain that audience you’re looking for much faster and develop credibility as an authority by being one of the few podcasters doing what you’re doing. What would initially have taken you months to achieve, you attain in a matter of weeks. Become ‘The Voice’ in your niche.

As Tom Tate says, “This “first to market” approach to podcasting may be the opportunity you have been searching for to catapult your online marketing to the next level. If you can develop the go-to authority podcast in your niche, you may eventually drive enough traffic back to your site or blog to become the authority on other mediums as well.”

When you hear or see someone on Radio or TV, they have instant credibility. As a podcaster you will enjoy the same credibility. People will value your opinion. You can leverage this position to influence your audience, promote yourself and even make money. The trick is to leverage on a specific niche and do everything possible to dominate that niche. If you have an audience that is interested in that topic or interest, they will come back repeatedly.

5. You Quickly Gain a Very Focused Audience

With the right content, you will gain listeners fast. Your audience is potentially worldwide. You can offer quality content to keep in touch with your customers and keep yourself, your product or your service in the front of their mind.

6. Break Through The Clutter

Podcasting is a great way to cut through the clutter and reach your audience. You overcome probably radio’s greatest barrier with this tactic. This makes podcasts very effective for promotion, marketing and growing a focused audience.

7. You can define and express your own unique style without limitations

Marc Maron interviewed President Obama at his home in Los Angeles, earlier this week. While that’s impressive, it’s the fact that President Obama mentioned the “n… ‘ word during that podcast interview that created headlines.

Wait…

You mean President Obama did an interview on someone’s home? Mark Maron, 51 years old, has a podcast show called WTF. You don’t need much ingenuity to figure out what that stands for. His unique interview style on his podcast can be either comforting or uneasy, which makes it even more interesting that President Obama agreed to the request. But, it’s a style of communication that seems to draw in listeners by the dozens.

“I think what resonates with people is kind of raw honesty and authenticity,” says Maron. “If anything defines whatever the brand is, or if anything defines the success that I have in talking to people in interviews, it’s that there seems to be something very personal and raw in how I engage with people.”

8. Podcasting is a Convenient, Automatic and Inexpensive Way to Reach Your Audience or Customers

Getting started in podcasting is relatively inexpensive. All you need is a good computer, a strong microphone and a broadband internet connection. Later, you can buy nicer gear if you want. For now you can get started with minimal cost. In fact, all the equipment you need at start-up will approximate $ 500. The Blue Yeti USB microphone for example costs an affordable $128. Invest in a good ShockMount, Mac laptop, recording software like Garage or Audacity and you’re good to go. In a later article, we’ll show you this cost breakdown. All you need is something to say and a desire to say it. If you were to try and do the same thing on the radio, you would have to face all sorts of FCC regulations, and unnecessary expenses. Consider how much you currently spend on radio ads. More than $2,000 per campaign? In many cases, this is not even a fraction of the radio budget. Podcasting removes all that cost and trouble. One reason that podcasting has become so popular is that it’s automated. Listeners subscribe to your feed. This means they don’t have to remember to return your site to check for new content. When you post new content, it’s automatically downloaded to your listener.

It’s so easy to get started. In less than a day, your podcast can be on the air and available to millions all over the world. All you need to start your podcast is a computer, a microphone and a broadband internet connection.

If you have any questions about how you can leverage podcasting as a new blogger or as an established brand, let me know by posting a comment below. We will get right back in touch with you! Make your voice heard! Start a Podcast!

Source by David Makuyu

Source: http://bitcoinswiz.com/8-benefits-you-immediately-receive-if-you-begin-podcasting-today/

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Despite being a fairly mediocre artist, I get a lot of comments and compliments on the artwork and visual design in Ikenfell. This makes me very happy, of course. Obviously, those who dislike it are much less likely to say so to me personally, but I love that lots of people are very receptive to the look and style of the game. I’ve been asked several times to talk about my approach to the pixel art, and what kinds of rules, palettes, and inspirations I use for the game. So this will be a large, orderless, and rambling post about all of that!

About Ikenfell

Perspective

Inspiration

Colours

Process

Characters

Portraits & Dialogue

Battles

Ikenfell is a heartwarming turn-based RPG about a school of magic and its troublesome students. It is currently in active development, and we're aiming for a 2018 release on Steam and the Humble Store. Humble Bundle Inc. is publishing the game.

Official Website / Official Press Kit

If you write about the game in a blog or article, please use assets from the official press kit!

A note about "good" pixel art

As with most art styles, there is a lot of contention about what good pixel art is and what best practices should be. I follow some general guidelines, but most of what I do is from just repeatedly doing lots of pixel art and tweaking my style until I get the results I desire. A lot of amazing pixel artists produce work that is far beyond my capabilities, but I do the best I can within my limits.

This overview is not about how to make good or popular pixel art, it is about my design decisions regarding my own game, my inspiration, and my reasoning behind them.

Now, let’s begin!

Ikenfell’s camera, like a lot of 2D games (especially RPGs), has a birds-eye view of the game world.

The camera is looking down at the world, if you imagined it in 3D, at about ~60 degrees (this is a rough estimate, in this screenshot alone you can see I am very liberal with the actual angle of objects). The projection is orthographic, meaning that as objects get further away from the camera, they do not actually look smaller (as in real life), they are “flattened” onto the screen.

Often game developers will just make 2D games and take all this for granted, and just draw the art, but I like to think about camera and perspective a lot, as it’s one of the key relationships in the game between the player and the world itself. Knowing the details of this relationship can make the difference sometime when you’re making a visual design decision, as even technical details can help you highlight where and when it’s most important to break these rules.

Ikenfell’s visual design is inspired by several games. I found a screenshot from each game that was relatively similar to the Ikenfell screenshot I posted above, so you can easily see where I drew ideas from each!

Link's Awakening

I love Link's Awakening’s extremely reserved use of tiles, and efficiency with space. Every room has an interesting shape, the background tiles use a very minimal amount of antialiasing to occasionally introduce interesting shapes and curves, and rooms are often reduced to their very basic ideas. But you don’t want multiple rooms to feel the exact same, and Link’s Awakening does this wonderfully. Here’s a simple 4-screen graveyard in the game:

This simple area is wonderful. You get an off-purple colour and haunted trees to give you a sense of unease (ghosts will pop out of graves and attack you, but the visuals make you ready for it). The little rubble tiles and weedy overgrowth convey that this is an old, run-down graveyard, not well-kept. The cliff in the bottom screens gives you a sense of location (the graveyard is on a raised-up plateau, giving some sense of the burial rites of whoever owned these graves). The exits to the left and top have different terrain types, indicating that this graveyard is a bridge from one area to another, so we know we’re leaving our previous location. And, finally, despite the 4-rooms containing all the same elements, they are each differently shaped and detailed. You have multiple paths to walk through each room, so there is no correct path, just a strange haunting area to navigate through (while avoiding mean ghosts).

I could talk this much about every single screen in Link’s Awakening, so I’ll stop now, but this kind of overthinking is what drives a lot of Ikenfell’s inspiration. What a gorgeous game.

Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire

While I am not particularly fond of the character designs (or the pixel art in general) of Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire, I do like their buildings and interiors a lot, so they served as inspiration for a lot of Ikenfell’s architecture.

I like how, to create the least amount of view-obstructing details, these games often just eliminate the side and bottom walls of interiors. In this screenshot, there’s some subtle shadows on the side to give a sense of the ceiling’s height, and the bare minimum amount of details scattered about to give a sense of this character’s lifestyle:

Interiors were often cramped, but so many buildings in this game have completely unique artwork, which was very inspiring. When a building or a house looked completely different from others, I was always inspired to search it, and it was always pleasing to explore its interior with its wonderful new details. This bike shop, with its tiled floor, yellow/orange highlights, thin interior walls, and details scattered about was such a cool looking little area:

This game inspired me to research dozens and dozens of building styles and designs, and always to try to make new houses, buildings, and interiors look and feel distinct.

Mother 3

The simple lines, bold flat blocks of color, and almost childish flat look of Mother 3 wonderfully disguises its immense cleverness and wonderful use of space. I thought this game was a huge step-up visually from Earthbound, and if, after playing, you go back and just look at a few rooms, you start to see how nicely arranged a lot of them truly are.

Just like in the above screenshot, this screenshot below shows another night-time scene. Rather than use a real lighting system (difficult on a small system like the GBA), the game uses beautiful blue/purple palettes for dark areas.

The game just has this wonderful way of breaking up monotony as well. In the next screenshot, it’s a simple room with a stairway leading up to a door. But the building is run-down, so they create little 3D indents in the walls, break off pieces of the siding, carpet the stairs, stain the walls, and just create a series of interesting edges that turn a room that would look very boring into a very visually appealing place to walk through. All you have to do here is hold right, but somehow it feels like so much more, this place has a history and you can feel it down to its very skeleton.

The dark outlines around characters and objects in Ikenfell is very inspired by Mother 3, as well as the bold colours and inner-edge lighting. If you look at this side-by-side comparison (Mother 3 on the left, Ikenfell on the right), you can see how solid objects have dark outlines at their edges, but edges inside the sprite use a highlight colour instead, rather than another dark line cutting across them.

I really like how minimal this is, makes objects seem whole, and gives a strong sense of shape and body to things without cluttering them up with detail. If all the edges of an object use dark line, even in their interior, they tend to look really messy and ugly when done at such a low resolution.

Minish Cap

This game is so utterly gorgeous, I wish I could do it any justice by saying I’m very inspired by its visuals, but I can’t really. I often look at dungeons, buildings, forests, and mountains of this game when creating artwork for Ikenfell, but rarely can I even come close to making it look even remotely as good.

When colouring, I like to look at this game, because it does a wonderful job of ramps. The way these trees darken closer to their base is just beautiful, and the little way so much detail is suggested rather than shown is expertly done. Notice how the grass is mostly flat, but there are just a few tufts here and there?

Minish Cap, like Mother 3, also makes tremendous use of huge bodies of flat colour. Detail is often suggested with little bits, like the clouds in the screenshot above. It also serves a helpful gameplay purpose: very often, flat coloured areas are places you can walk, and highly textured objects and tiles are solid. I take great inspiration from this when pixelling Ikenfell's scenery.

Ikenfell actually does the inverse of this. Often, floors and the ground are textured, but objects like furniture and walls are flat, so they look like big obstructing blocks of colour, and you know you cannot pass them. If we highlight all the large flat blocks of colour in this room, we can see a very clear shape, making the room very easy to read, despite being cluttered with a lot of details and characters.

So while I take a lot of inspiration from the games above, and it is very clear how they inspired me, I quite often will deviate from their rules where I feel it works best for my game. By doing so, I have a huge amount of other screenshots and locations from those games I can look at for reference, but I’ve managed to give the game its own unique look and feel, despite having very strong influences.

I find colouring very difficult, and it often takes me a ton of experimentation to end up with something I’m happy with. In Ikenfell, lots of the areas will still probably be changed and re-coloured a lot before the game is done, but I still have a few patterns I find myself repeating.

Most areas of Ikenfell can be divided into two colour groups: a base and a highlight. There is usually one or two base colors, and one or two highlights. Here are a few screenshots and their respective main colour pairings:

Here’s an image that shows my general process when creating environment tiles for a new area. I usually pixel a room, and then break it up into tiles after I know what I want it to look like. Then I can use those tiles to piece together new rooms.

Here is an animated version of that same image, so you can see how each step improves the look:

This example environment doesn’t really have much colour. Sometimes I colour it right away, other times I’ll just work with values (like the above example) and then colour it after. It depends how I’m feeling, and how complex the tiles are.

Since the entire game occurs in a single place, the titular school of magic itself, it’s quite a contained story. This makes character design really fun, because I don’t have sprawling cities or huge towns to worry about. There are probably only about 30–40 characters in Ikenfell, and each has a unique design. There is no character template I use, I pixel each one from scratch, and usually have a couple others next to it for reference so I can make sure it fits in the game.

Here you can see twelve of the game’s characters and their respective silhouettes. The legs are the only thing that they really all have in common, and looks kinda templated. If I was able to start the game from scratch again, I think I would like to play around with size more (make kids shorter, have fatter characters be fatter, and taller characters be taller, muscular/etc.) With so few characters, though, they’re all very identifiable, so I’m pretty happy with them like this.

Not much else to say here. You’ll notice that most characters also follow a two/three-colour scheme. The choice to leave out eyes was because their sprites are too small: eyes ended up just looking the same on all characters (which I didn’t like), or they were comically large. Since the game has portraits during conversations, I felt like it was more important to emphasize their faces and expressions there.

Speaking of which…

For a good several months of development, Ikenfell actually didn’t have portraits for dialogue. The sprites would just move around and have conversations, and that was it. I didn’t have confidence to draw large character portraits (I am terrible at drawing humans and anatomy), and I already felt like the game was becoming too large for me to handle.

But, on a whim one day, I drew little portraits for each of the main characters in my notepad, with a pencil. I loved how these little drawings looked, so I drew them again with a few expressions, and I couldn’t unsee them. I decided that it’d be a lot easier to pixel them if I drew them in pencil first, then translated that to pixel art, which is how I’ve done most of the character portraits now.

Here are a few and their respective silhouettes. Notice that every single character is asymmetrical. I learned early on that if a character’s left/right side is a mirror-image, they look really creepy and strange. This is probably normal art school stuff, but I learned it the hard way.

I’m very happy I did this. I think the characters come alive so much more when you see them talking and expressing themselves like this, and now I can’t even imagine the game without it.

Here you can see how they look in action. The portrait and the textbox slide in, but there is no text immediately. Your eye goes to their face, so you first see their expression. Then the text prints out, and your eye naturally moves to follow it. I pushed the face down into the textbox, instead of on top of it, to reduce how much screen space the dialogue took up as much as possible.

Characters can only speak in short sentences this way, longer sentences being broken into multiple chunks, but this allows me to shift between micro-expressions while they talk. Here you can see Maritte’s anger transition into more of a general frustration, which is a lot easier to notice than if it only had the text.

When I originally was working on the game, it was actually an action RPG, more like Link’s Awakening. It was quite a few months into development before I had some issues with this, and transitioned the game into a turn-based tactical RPG instead.

The reason for this was that I didn’t like how, because the gameplay took place in the school itself, all the rooms had to be designed for fighting and maximum movement. Interesting room shapes and cramped spaces suddenly weren’t viable when I wanted them to be, because real-time fighting wasn’t very fun or interesting in those kinds of rooms.

So I moved battles into a completely separate screen, which allows me to design them however I want, while also designing the overworld to be whatever shape I want as well. The battles are much different than the overworld. Suddenly the graphics are huge and details, and the characters are much more animated and alive!

These battles are 12 x 3 tiles, so they are much more horizontal than vertical. Because of this, characters can also only face left and right. This means I can flip animations, greatly reducing my workload. You’ll also notice that the battlefield is skewed as well, but why?

If we remove the skew, it becomes readily apparent:

Without the skew, we have a problem with occlusion: characters on a tile immediately above another character are almost completely covered if the sprite is large. As soon as we skew the battlefield, though…

We no longer have this problem, since characters can only ever be vertically aligned if they are two tiles apart, and most sprites aren’t tall enough for that to be an issue. I also think it simply makes battles look more dynamic and exciting anyway.

I hope you enjoyed reading this! There’s a lot more to talk about, but this is a simple overview to explain a lot of my graphical choices while designing the game. I might do some smaller posts talking a bit more about the technical details of how I approach the pixel art, but this was a good introduction.

I can’t wait until you can all play this game! I’m having so much fun working on it, I hope you enjoy it when it is released. Please email me if you have questions about anything, my inbox is always open.

@ChevyRay / happytrash@gmail.com

Artwork by Darcy Dee