#dont u love it when for some reason names fit characters' vibe/personality/design

[hetalia-fannn]

Dunno why but I REALLY love Aph America's name, Alfred F. Jones. If this ain't the most stereotypical American name then I don't know anything lmao.

[katribou]

I just gotta say, I don't know much about Splatoon (since I don't have any way to play it), but I love the characters you've made. They're all very lovable in different ways. If you haven't answered this question before, what was your inspiration for their personalities and designs?

aww thank you so much!! this is gonna be long because i like explaining processes when i can especially with PICTURES!! so…

my squids are pretty straightforward. i designed dottie just with gear available in the game because i liked it and i used her as a little stand-in to illustrate shenanigans i came across while playing the game. her salty personality grew out of the fact that i used to get pretty bitter while playing splatoon, and also back in the day people used to??? hate on the fact that i mained the inkbrush??? for some reason?? guess it was too quirky… early splatoon days were wild pfft

stripes came about on a whim, since all the gear that dottie wears had a matching counterpart ingame, i decided to make a character that was everything she is but opposited. so, a squid with her ink/eye color inverted that is just always in good spirits. i dont get so mad at splatoon anymore really, so i guess he’s become a good stand-in too! i had a friend say they illustrate what it’s like to play splatoon so well because of that duality, which is a pretty nice unintended side effect :’^)

my octos were a more longterm process… so of course for a long while all we knew about octolings were that they were kind of just all soldiers you gotta fight that look like this:

and though we didnt really know much about octos as a species in the game i, like many people, made octo characters. dude octolings didn’t exist yet, so i just kind of winged it on the lad’s hair and just gave the gal tied-up tentacles. and also since i apparently have a matchy-matchy theme just made the gal’s getup white. (this is the first time i drew them… god that 2015 art)

i figured they were soldiers too since that’s all we knew them to be, so as you can see they basically wear the splat1 armor. i differentiated them a bit by giving them leather jackets which are also something you can wear in the game, just because it seemed to fit their aesthetic hah:

(though theirs are a lot more shredded up and torn because of use and also they have that #rebel vibe pfft)

ANYWAY i didnt do much with them because we didnt have a lot of octo lore plus i wasn’t really pushed to make up any for them partially out of fear of having it all like, retconned if we DID get conflicting lore so i kind of pushed them aside and did nothing with em. till we got the new octo expansion recently!! where u play as a lad who looks like one of these

so obviously with all this new octo info i was inspired to go back to my poor neglected octos to touch them up a fair bit:

darius didnt change much, i just gave him the updated splat2 armor (tbh from the start i just always knew i wanted to make him look like a thot, just cuz fkdjlgf. also considering the game always noticeably but unsurprisingly covers up dudes more smh) sherry, who i finally gave a name, i changed up more. i changed her hair a bit just so it was aCTUALLY FUN TO DRAW and also as you can see i just gave her the octo expansion player character gear except white since that color was her #brand.

personalitywise, i’ll be honest with you, when i originally made them i literally just wanted to make them the anti-dottie-and-stripes so i ripped off my own squids personalites for them. darius scowls like dottie, sherry is loopy as stripes (speaking of which YUP it’s no coincidence their names also start with D and S…)

while revamping darius and sherry tho i didnt want them to be too carbon copy of my squids otherwise i feel like they’d get boring. the thing that rescued me there was some of the octo backstory we were given… which made me reconsider more deeply why each of them may have the dispositions they do. so i aged them up and thought them through. darius’s saltiness is less temper in the way it is with dottie, but more fueled by his resentment of the squidrace that’s kind of left his kind in the dirt. on the other hand, sherry’s loopiness and sleepiness became a result of the fact that she’s one of the many octolings that have been brainwashed and whatnot. also on top of that i gave her alcoholism as a result of how bad the octos have it LMAO sorry sherry

BUT YEAH those are my cephalopod secrets!! hope that was insightful or entertaining to at least someone! nintendo has honestly done such a great job with their world that it’s so fun and rewarding to make up stuff based within it 👏