#onyxgladiolus

[godslush]

Hello again! hope your well! So I think I get the premise of this but correct me if I’m wrong so In your comic sunstar doesn’t technically exist therefore if he were to develop a soul like the other stardroids it would be a whole other issue of “being that never existed develops an existence?”(or something similar? I’m not sure sorry ;-;) and figuring that whole situation out (I’m guessing the stardroids have to do that [like babysitting? Kind off??? I dunno]

And in “escape the temple” Sunstar being freed and becoming complacent with his status as a god has the stardroids(terra in particular) having to keep him out of trouble especially with the traps made for the sungod lines. It honestly makes me think of like those child leashes except Sungod size ( that made me laugh a little with sunstar just wondering off and whoever’s holding the leash getting dragged along{however unlikely that he would let himself be made to wear that I just thought it was funny}). I’ll be completely honest with you I live reading oc info pages and seeing art and stories/ storylines for them just gets me excited! I tell you I read through your entire oc list before I got to the comics cause I just love reading them helps get the brain cells moving for ideas lol. Especially cause of how interesting and well written they were! Just really gets me engaged and interested in the stories :) honestly thank you for answering my asks ;o; especially cause your not as active on here as on twitter and this is my only way of really asking ;-;. I hope you’re doing well and I hope you have a good rest of your day/night! Thank you!

Hey there! Since these are getting long and a little specific, I’ll put it behind a cut, though I may opt to shift these to private answers if they start getting too spoily or personal.

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The Stardroid comic is a “years later” followup on Gigamix, so I’m somewhat beholden to what Ariga-sensei has revealed, whether it be on TwiX or in lore-dumps like the Maniax books. Thankfully, he’s also VERY much a proponent of fans coming up with their own stories and headcanons (as mentioned when asked about hairstyles; since fans will frequently take his opinions and designs over the canon ones even when he’s not working in an officially-moderated capacity, and he doesn’t want to cause a rift with Capcom’s control over their own franchise and his own chances to work with them in the future).

That said, there isn’t MUCH 'canon' information on the Gigamix Stardroids, even in Maniax, with the bulk of it being focused on Terra and Mercury... but out of my own preferences, I’d still like to keep what’s available intact, and build off that, even if I end up building a LOT. In Sunstar’s case, he’s not even a robot, just a conglomerate of destructive energy and negative emotion. So trying to work with that and give HIM closure was rough. First, he needs a body and a soul...

Once he gets those, it's a bit rough on the Stardroids, too, but at the end of the day gets resolved by them (and a critical third party) realizing that what they understood of him was incomplete, and trying to figure out how to fix that...

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Escape the Old Temple, in contrast, is technically built off the games (since it’s designed to be a game, itself), but presents a branch where Sunstar didn’t actually die at the end of World 5/V, merely faking his death and then masking the presence of himself and the other Stardroids (also miraculously surviving) so that they could rebuild at the edge of the solar system without further human intervention. The only reason Rock was able to defeat him in the first place was because he had just awoken from a who-knows-how-long slumber, and was essentially still booting up. Once at full power, he’s beyond pretty much anything human technology could throw at him in their current state.

He simply steps in when a ‘relic’ of the Stardroid’s ancient past (in the form of Antares’ trap-filled temple/tomb) shows up. On one hand, if Antares is still active, it could pose a threat to Earth. On the other, if someone like Wily decides to meddle, he could gain access to technology that could negatively impact what chances Earth has at a continued ‘peaceful’ existence. Rock proved that peace was possible, and Sunstar wants to do his part; whether or not the other Stardroids agree is another issue entirely, but their own stability is also threatened by the temple’s presence, so they might as well be the first line of defense (plus, they’d know what to do with the technology they loot, unlike some wacky mad human scientist).

Sun isn’t so much running off on his own, but when the others fail to return from scouting the temple, he and Terra dispatch themselves to get them back and end the threat personally. Sun’s approach to it is just... a little more haphazard and forceful (and frustrating for Terra). It’s less of a child-leash issue... but I will be honest, the mental image of that is hilarious and pretty much on-point. It’s definitely how Terra feels at times!

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And thank you so much for the kind words on the OCs-! But it... doesn’t really change my feeling on the verge of giving up (likely temporary, but no less debilitating)...

Mental Health Dump ahead, feel free to skip, but it’s the gist of things as they stand:

My biggest success with the [REDACTED] fandom pretty much set me up for unfair expectations on engagement, and ever since the thing that made me fall out of that fandom (which involved getting into official development, only to have my soul crushed and disregarded and left to rot under an NDA until it was too late to salvage my emotional state, causing me to lose many friends and all of my self-worth), I’ve suffered from intense RSD. That - plus a constant stream of working myself to burn-out for little to no engagement - has made me more or less a wreck, who can’t maintain reasonable creative function without sufficient external positive reinforcement to keep up my energy. However, because of my past expectations and relative success when it comes to OC engagement, the threshold for what’s considered ‘sufficient’ reinforcement is a lot higher than most people, and not reaching it causes me to sink lower and lower each time I ‘fail’.

Couple that with my bad track record for being stuck in jobs I hate IRL, and you’ve got a recipe for frequent meltdowns.

I know I should be getting help/therapy for this, but attempts to do so have ranged from getting simply brushed aside put on meds that make matters worse, to literally being told by a mental health screener that there’s nothing wrong with me and that my ‘problems’ are all because I’m a woman and my hormones are making me miserable (I’m not joking).

I was able to get decent headway into the Mega Man fandom as an escape born of trying to return to my roots, but I also had, at the time, just gotten a job I actually loved, and seemed stable and fulfilling and it gave me life and energy and enough free time to actually dedicate to larger projects (like the comic).

...And then the boss of that job started loading most of his management work on me (while keeping my title as 'sales associate' so the experience wouldn't reflect for future job hunting/unemployment), before betraying me and throwing the company away to pursue gambling and crypto (presumably, due to his suspicious lack of communication when asked for details), which landed me back in Corporate Retail Hell, which is where I currently reside, living alone amidst rapidly increasing rent, utilities, and general cost of living.

I am once again reliant on engagement... engagement I’m just not getting because the Tumblr environment has changed since the [REDACTED] days to dissuade comments/replies/asks, and the TwiX environment has changed to be so painfully algorithm-dependent that I can barely get scraps.

To be honest, I’m not ‘more active’ on TwiX anymore... and if anything, I’m on my way out there, too, due to the way Stinky ruined everything and made the environment hostile and unstable. But I can’t shift my weight fully to Tumblr, either, because I don’t trust it to not eventually fall into the [REDACTED] trap of people only approaching me hoping I’ll be their friend so that they can get free art out of me (and a few people have already thrown up the red flags of that behavior, making me even more on-guard).

I also get the feeling that this is a community that prioritizes giving the time of day to people actively mingling with all the other creators; I can’t get away with what I did at the height of my drive, where I’d create characters and people would stop by and enjoy them with me. What little energy I have either goes to creating, or to maintenance, and unless I’ve got a reasonable stream of incoming energy to spend, I can’t feasibly mingle the way people seem to expect. It’s too big a space to spread myself so thin.

When I started my comic, I lived in a hole under a rock. The world I knew was small, and a small amount of engagement was enough. Then I stepped out from that safety and into the fandom and saw how large and expansive it really is, and how insignificant I am, and how effortlessly other people doing similar things to me can get all the validation in the world from 5-minute white-background line doodles of their own OCs, while I struggle to get full pieces recognized... and I’ve more or less become overwhelmed by a combination of fandom agoraphobia and personal futility.

If I can make something that looks okay in one go with minimal frustration, I might post it... but seeing how little that gets me unless it involves "popular fav" canon characters means that if I hit any snags in a larger project with original components, ANY frustration at all, I’m more likely to simply stop, out of fear that the energy spent to leap the hurdles won’t be recouped by the final product.

That's why the one Ask still sitting in the Remes box hasn't been answered; I wanted to precede answering it with a larger story (albeit an unrelated one, but I wanted to get that story into people's heads going forward), but hitting snags in that story and realizing I'd most likely post it and get 6 notes total made me just... not feel like it'd be worth it.

I thank you for your kind words, I truly do... but right now I am just one failure too far over the line to be anything more than an eyesore and a liability until I recoup...

[godslush]

hello again! Hope I’m not bothering you (and honestly this is a bit later than I would have hoped I’d have the time to ask this sorry ;-;) in response to my last ask at the end I read “the capricious matter that is sunstar” and I got curious.

just what exactly is sunstar doing exactly? Is he causing issues with the stardroids? Or is it something else entirely? Or is he having a rehabilitation arc? ( that’s what you call it right?[ I forgot the word for it ;-;]) I’m not certain if you talked about this somewhere on your blog if so I am so sorry ;-; but, I hope your having a good rest of your day/night! I’m loving the tokeiwoman.exe story!

Hiii! It’s not a problem at all, really! I honestly appreciate the questions!

As for the two variations, I won’t divulge too much about the comic version of Sunstar, for purposes of spoilers... I don’t know when I’ll get back to that, but it’s one of the few things I feel still has the potential to be something, and I don’t want to give up on it completely right off the bat. What I WILL say is that it’s sort of... complicated. Since you can’t quite REhabilitate someone who... never really existed in the first place. But that’s all I’ll say for now!

As for “Escape the Old Temple” Sunstar, it’s more a matter of... flippancy. Once fully awake and in full control, he starts to be a little more... carefree? Careless? A combination of factors where he returns to his old identity of basically being a robot ‘god’ and as a result falls into a sense of complacence. Not a whole lot genuinely threatens him... which becomes problematic when the Stardroids run into something from their original era that was designed to be nearly his equal. As a result - even though he is more than capable of being very serious and calculated when he needs to be - he... often comes across as a bit of a cheerfully headstrong idiot, and Terra has to be there to pick up the slack where indiscriminately strong-arming through problems (such as ancient 'Creator tech' death-traps designed to contain a star 'god' of similar power) won’t suffice.

And thank you about Tokei~ T~T  TBH, tho... I feel like I’m on my last leg when it comes to OC work... it really doesn’t seem to do well enough relative to the amount of effort it takes to make them feel compelling, and most fans seem to just want to see their canon favs over OCs anyway... which is why I still have some hope for the Stardroid comic in the future. I just need my stupid brain to finally shift gears back to it, and off of the seeming futility that is OC work...

[godslush]

Hello there! I have a question I was hoping to maybe get your opinion on. What do you think about the idea of Terra being effected by the Earths changes if he stays on Earth for to long? Like air/sea pollution and global warming I’ve been playing with this idea in my head for a little bit and was wondering if I could get another view point. On another note I love your art! And your point of view on the stardroids and their lives it’s really helped reactivate my megaman hyper fixation again! I do hope you’re having a good night/day! Thank you!

Heya! Thank you very much for the kind words-! 😭

As far as headcanons are concerned, I'm not one to really weigh in on what other people want to do with their takes. I mean, case-in-point, I have at least two completely different headcanons for the Stardroids, more if I consider AUs and/or collaborative efforts. It really all comes down to individual worldbuilding! If you can come up with a good reason why an alien robot would be specifically tied to a planet he was tasked to conquer/destroy, then sure! ...Even if you can't, there's nothing stopping you! ^^;

I personally don't see Terra as having a particular attachment to our planet aside his name, but again, that's purely my take based on the way I developed him over the two separate storylines I have for the Stardroids. I do think the idea of him being more intrinsically attached to the planet is interesting, even if it's not the way I'd go about it!

I'll leave my takes under a cut here, since I tend to get long-winded about anything:

The Stardroids from my comic are just direct offshoots from Gigamix, so I've been trawling around Ariga-sensei's TwiX for information; he'll totally answer tasteful/respectful questions, and occasionally drops massive infodumps (usually followed up with "べ、別にロックマンの事なんて なんとも思ってないんだからね!" like the tsundere king he is (to be fair, he's also said his feelings on the subject are diverse and complicated and equal parts negative to positive, which I respect)).

At the end of the day a lot of his Gigamix-specific admissions are that he wasn't able to realize a lot of his original plans due to time/space constraints and breaking his arm. The gist I got relevant to this topic was that the Stardroids are Completely Alien to us, and their names coinciding with our own planets was simply a matter of translation convenience. He mentions it here in the ALT of the second image:

I've also been thinking a lot about why they are the names of planets in the solar system, excavated in ancient ruins in space, and the scene where Terra names each of the Stardroids while learning the language of Earth at high speed by taking the memories of a decaying robot on its way to planetary exploration, and I thought it was interesting to think about, but too expansive as a branch (The number of pages is finite…!) In the end, I didn't draw the naming scene in Gigamix.

Past that I did end up doing a ton of independent development on their source civilization, to explain their motivations, their powers, the name thing, as well as why they resemble humanoids and/or animals relevant to our planet. I can't help it, I love worldbuilding-! I have a large G-Doc for what would have been the extension of the comic had my life situation not thrown me into deep creative depression. Both Venus and Neptune were going to have anecdotes specifically addressing how they've adapted to being 'given' the names of our own planets/gods… the only reason I don't discuss it in greater depth here is there might still be a chance I'll get around to fully realizing everything I have written up behind the scenes, it'll just require nothing short of a miracle to get my life together first. But I do have a lot to work from if/when the time comes, and I really hope it does because I feel very strongly about what I had planned!

The other Stardroid headcanon is more post-game focused, and ties in with my OC, Antares, and a 'fake game' idea I had for it that would expand on a different version of their history (built with some input from @dahlia-the-nurd and taken in my own direction over time). In that version, the star-based 'gods' and their planet-based underlings were designed to coincide with their Creators' knowledge of far-off stars and planets (from their perspective). It's no different from humans looking into our own night sky for inspiration for our own creativity, but still doesn't really translate into the Stardroids themselves having any particular attachment or connection to our solar system, aside it becoming a destination for them once they found themselves on the run, simply because they knew it as 'the system we were named for.'

Terra in both iterations is fairly bitter at his defeat, and feels a sense of resentment towards the planet for sending a champion that could best him. As a result, he really doesn't spend a lot of time on Earth, much less forming any sort of connection or attachment to it. Most of his efforts go towards orchestrating the other Stardroids in keeping their space maintained/supplied, and addressing the much more capricious matter that is Sunstar.

[wuzhiqi-enj0yer]

I’m hispanic

I also think robots are hot

i want to learn animation,

@croc-pop

@onyxgladiolus

@lucamisu

@decaffeinated-heads

@littengamer909

@synthraptor

If you get this, answer w/ three random facts about yourself and send it to the last seven blogs in your notifs. anon or not, doesn’t matter, let’s get to know the person behind the blog!

Ohohoh, first time get this myself, but okie :D

Well, hmmmm

I have increased anxiety

I have a sweet thot

I'm a touchstarve person

That's all I suppose :D

Tags: @steffani-milligan, @sebastiannarrator, @thefriendlyneighborhoodidiot, @lilia-arts, @alinoriandklox, @artismeyou-12, @furineta and @/anyone who wants! :D