#dez is just one of those people who always writes in all caps

[austerulous]

◈   @oneiira said:   ❛ 🌳 tj to dez!! ❜  // texting starters.

— 🌳 A HAPPY TEXT.

[ text : BOUNTY ]   DROVE 30 KM 2 GET SIGNAL. IF THIS DOESN'T SEND THROATS R GETTIN SLIT. THE SNAX YA LEFT WERE BONZER. BRING MORE. THAT'S A ROYAL DECREE CUNT. SEE YA NEXT TIME IF THE BOTS DON'T GET ME.

[void-botanist]

Happy STS! What kind of clothes do your characters wear? Do any of them not conform to the style of their society? Do we see any character's style change over the course of the story?

Happy ST…Friday from ~ the future ~ and thank you for the ask!

The styles my characters wear is definitely skewed by me growing up in the United States, and that's something I want to work on. But more generally, every character has a vibe or a specific thing they like/do and my sense of their wardrobe is built around that. Anni wearing mostly blue because it's her favorite color is an easy example, but Dez wears only jumpsuits and rompers because he doesn't really see the point of clothes and wants them to be as easy as possible. (He also likes looking cute but it definitely proceeded from "ugh clothes" to "eh actually this looks kind of nice".) Zel is inseparable from the beanie Anni got her, at least for the winter months. In the summer it's crop tops all the way, and whatever goes with those. For almost as long as he's been a character Zalen has worn high heeled boots, and as time has gone on his wardrobe design has gotten more flowy because that fits his personality better. Brandon's wardrobe is full of Ermotlift City Works shirts, and he wears them sometimes when he's not at work because they're comfy. And so on.

I keep societal expectations pretty open because I want my characters to wear whatever I feel like, lol. That and I don't want to write stories where part of the conflict is "you're dressing wrong for your gender". But there are people who commit to the bit so hard that they stand out a little - Anni again, but also Keearo because he wears makeup as an everyday thing, Zalen because he doesn't stop wearing some kind of heeled boot unless it's absolutely necessary, Milo because although he lives on a tropical island where his fellow tree people also don't wear much in the way of clothes, his top of choice is basically just a rope net made into a t-shirt. There are also species cultural differences that may seem weird at first glance. For example, tree and mushroom people tend to have much smaller wardrobes than members of nonrooted species, because they don't sweat or have many bodily fluids to contend with in general, and they usually don't consider something with literal dirt on it as dirty. The result is that Elbas Island is full of people who are cartoonishly almost always wearing the same thing and Dez fits right in. In some cases these cultural differences blend together because of social expectations. I'm thinking of Sal and Ozen and how they both wear mid-horn rings to signify that they're married. If they had been married in Sal's home country, they would probably wear decorated extended horn caps instead, as is more common in sha-nawwen culture. But because of the social and legal complexity/impossibility of marriages between species there, they both moved away and chose to wear mid-horn rings, which are more in line with orea-nawwen style and common among sha-nawwenn in any dual-species marriage, not just between the two species of nawwen.

I can only think of one person who really changes their style in the story itself: Syndy. Previously she was in her postal uniform 24/8 because she never left the post office, and even if she had other clothes, it would have been bad if anyone caught her in them. She also had (arguably oversaturated) red hair to fit the Navaren ideal the palace was going for. But after getting turned back on and finding herself in a world where the rules have completely changed (and where she's getting advice from a blue guy with purple hair), she gets a grey wig and starts cultivating what I think of as a 1950s-flavored silhouette, among other things. I feel like regardless of whether it happens in the story, style changes mostly happen because someone gets out of a shitty situation and wants a refresh to something more comfortable/honest.