#i'm a massive sucker for coming of age stories touching on platonic and families and romantic love

[russeliarat]

Okay before I forget because I'm really meant to be doing work right now, here's everything I know right now about my newest oc, Mizawt.

(Info under the cut)

Mizawt is an oc specifically for Avatar Way of Water. Basically, Mizawt's story currently takes place in some unknown time after the Sully family begin to live with the Metkayina clan. I haven't quite figured out the timeline of her story yet. Her full name is Mizawt Te Afoe Eisi'ite.

STORY SUMMARY

〜As a child, Mizawt was very close to her mother as her father died prior to her being born and she was an only child. Mizawt was fairly socially awkward but still had a few close friends and was very curious and generous yet stubborn, often arguing with others (especially older teens) about helping out with tasks and doing things her way. One day however, her mother disappeared and never returned, presumed dead after a long time searching, and Mizawt had to grieve her mother's disappearance. She stayed stubborn in her ideas that her mother was simply missing and in danger and needed to be rescued, that the humans she had heard about had only kidnapped her mother and she could save her.

Over the next decade or so, Mizawt became obsessed with the idea of saving her mother and wanted to always be stronger than everyone as she grew into becoming an older adolescent. She isolated herself to train, furthering her poor social skills and ability to connect with others, and often gets easily annoyed and frustrated when others interrupt her, leading to a lot of immaturity. She likes to hunt and often goes against rules put in place for her safety to chase the adrenaline. Despite this, she retained her eternal love of the ocean and usually swam to calm down.

Her life was shaken up when a woman washed ashore, who looked exactly like how she remembers her mother all those years ago, except she has five fingers and toes and calls herself Isla instead of Eisi. Her mother had her DNA taken and placed into the body of an avatar.

Throughout the story, Mizawt has to figure out how to grieve her mother properly, navigate through becoming a young adult with crushes and friends and new-found family, and destigmatise her beliefs against avatars to accept one who looks so much like her mother into her life.

MISC.

〜Here's some more artwork of Mizawt. Some art I'm not too happy with but it's all concept art I was using to figure out anatomy and facial expression and Mizawt in general. I think it's good to be open about my bad art sometimes.

(And the full page of some above images)

I think I decided at some point that despite her incredible short temper, impatient-ness, and sometimes down-right nasty disposition, I liked the idea of her being very shy and sweet looking at first glance to reflect who she truly is behind the tough, unapproachable, stubborn walls she built around herself, stemming from trauma. You see a much softer side to her with how she interacts with children, her crush, and eventually her stand-in mother, Isla, after Mizawt comes to accept and bond with her. It's all an act that she's become so dedicated to that even she's starting to believe it. It's Isla that takes her and everyone else beyond that lie to see who Mizawt truly is.

〜 A character sheet very quickly summing up how Mizawt is as a person.

Key- the pink is how she wants others to view her, the white-ish blue is how she truly is, and the medium tone blue is the way she acts that she cant/doesn't want to hide.