#still chipping away at the gijinkas

[nonuggetshere]

eurgeh sorry for not being on as much, im exhausted - 👹

Dw about it!! Seriously, it's not a school, I'm not taking attendance KDBDJD

[desultory-novice]

No rush on answering this, I know you got stuff going on

Can I ask about you MariPav process? I want to make a comic too and MariPav is a huge inspiration for me. So, I was wondering if you could share any tips.

The main things on my mind are

How did you come up with the story and how much of it do you have planned before hand

What is the drawing process? Do you do a rough sketch first, do you do a chapter's outlines and then color or do you finish a page then do the next, etc.

About how long does it take you per page?

How did you decide the level of detail you draw in for this comic?

Do you have any monochromatic shading/coloring tips? I'm not very good with working outside of color

How do you keep consistent character design?

You're also really good at speech bubble spacing and comedic timing that doesn't pull you out of the story. How do you do it?

Sorry,, I ended up asking a lot of questions...

; _ ; Ahh, thank you so much for asking questions about my process?! It makes me feel good to know people are interested and I'm happy to go into (lots) of detail about it!

1) [THE STORY]

So, the initial concept of Marionettes' Pavane came from two separate comics I'd wanted to do. One was about how Magolor and Marx reunite after the end of Return to Dream Land. (I had only been in the fandom for a little bit but had already fallen hard for this ship, and while there were lots of stories about how they met, pre-RtDL, it seemed pretty obvious to me that Marx wasn't around for RtDL so I wanted to know how they might have gotten together after.)

Another idea that stuck in my head was for a story about how Marx went from being an innocent Noddy to the Marx we know and love. Neither of these ideas were going to be gijinka to start with, btw - I've mentioned this [one really long Kirby x Marx comic] I read on Pixiv that was a huge storytelling inspiration to me for MariPav.

That, plus a few other good gijinka fan comics, was probably what pushed me to make it a gijinka story, in addition to a few lines that popped into my head that worked better if they were humanoid.

(Initially, I was still going to do the Marx backstory comic separately, but I realized it was just easier to work it into MariPav because it was clearly influencing MariPav Marx's characterization. Then I wrote up a Magolor backstory chapter to match.)

As for the writing, I wrote out the WHOLE script, beginning to end, before I began drawing it! I knew myself and I didn't want get lost as to where my own story was going or pivot directions so hard in the middle that the beginning no longer made sense. Writing it was pretty exciting, so it wasn't too hard to get the whole thing done, though it definitely took a few months of chipping away at it.

(In fact I was so addicted to writing it that after I "finished," I couldn't stop toying with it and added on several epilogue chapters! ^^)

You can additionally get a glimpse at what some of my thought processes/inspiration for coming up with the story were by re-reading my old Marxolor "rant" [here]

As for the process, once I'd jotted down enough lines/conversations to establish the theme ("Was it worth it?" etc etc) I would draft out summaries for what I wanted to have happen in the chapters (interspersed with whatever thoughts about the story came to mind that I might want to include somewhere later, not all of these made it in, such as Magolor trolling Marx with the ladder) and, when inspired, add in bits of conversation till I had enough material for a full chapter.

[Screenshot of a chapter breakdown from one of my earliest drafts]

Inspiration came from a lot of places. I would re-review cutscenes from RtDL or other games, look at inspiring fanart, or indulge in completely unrelated media till something would click as "Oh! Marx and Magolor really ought to have this happen to them!"

[Screenshot of a paragraph of (unused) ideas from one of my earliest drafts]

[An early draft of Chapter 5. I used red and blue text for Marx and Magolor's dialogue early on. The scene is in an early, unfinished state. Notice how figuring out I could work in the Gem Apples was something that came along toward the end, even though now, it seems like the whole POINT of the chapter. XD]

I wrote MariPav before learning about the Snowflake Method for writing stories, but as you can sort of see here, my method did come close to following the "one sentence summary > one paragraph summary > three paragraph summary > write it" style.

When I was gearing up to finally draw it, a month or so after reaching the "end" of the story (though I actually wrote the "end" really early on and it's remained 95% unchanged through multiple additions. Sometimes, you write the ending first ^^) I went back in, cleaned the script up, filled in any lingering <n happens here> lines and added in stage directions, which is the script I currently work from!

--

2) [DRAWING IT]

As for my drawing process, that's changed a bit from the beginning, but here is my current drawing process! First, I'll draw a really loose "thumbnail" sketch in big blocky pencil. This is normally just "Marx go here! Mago go here! Mago mad!!" type stuff. Then I'll copy paste in my dialogue and move it and the sketches around till I have something that looks decent. I'll chop up each "page" and copy into my main comic making app and arrange them on the actual pages.

[An example of some thumbnails from the latest comic, right before I copied it into the main comic doc for cleaning. They're usually not even THIS detailed XD]

After that, I do a second rough, where they actually start to resemble themselves and I figure out things like where their limbs should go or add detail to their expressions (as well as note any kind of effects I will want to include in the finished panel.)

[A secondary rough from Chapter 5. I eventually made a (more simplistic than it looks) 3D model for Magolor's egg to help keep it relatively on model.]

Then comes adding in the panel borders and moving the secondary roughs around so they fit nicely. After that, I ink, though if my secondary roughs are unsatisfactory, I will bring in 3D models or references and draw them again before going back to inks.

I do it all in batches, by the way! Thumbnails for all ten~ish pages, roughs for all ten~ish pages, inks for all ten~ish pages. Because I'm still growing as an artist, if I finish one page before starting on the next, it's liable to look COMPLETELY different than the previous page! XD (Which I've had happen! Then I have to go back and redo the previous page so it looks more consistent, bleugh~...)

Sometime, early on in the inking, I will add in the balloons for the dialogue and arrange the text in them. I do this because :cough: sometimes I can use dialogue balloons to cover up anatomy I'm not that great at XD Then I add in the flat/base colors.

[Same page as before showing how I used balloons to cover un-inked areas. And also how I had to redraw Marx in the first panel to fix his proportions. Although I think his face was much cuter in the first draft XD ]

Then comes a really frenzied period where I do shading and panel FX and sound FX at the same time and it gets really messy and I'm still trying to find a way to clean up that process some ^^;

--

3) [TIME]

It's hard to be sure on a per page level since I jump back and forth between pages, but I spent a LOT of time fixing/adjusting things and trying to make sure things look as good as they possibly can. So a page will be "almost done" for a long time before I'm ready to say to myself, "Yeah, this is shareable!" Coming up with thumbnails that fit my idea for the script can be incredibly time intensive too!

[Here are the "complete" thumbnails for Chapter 5 Part 2]

As you can see, I actually began secondary roughs on this chapter BEFORE I had figured out what two of the last pages would even look like! I tried and just... couldn't come up with a good idea till the very end. Figuring out layouts has been really tricky and sometimes I'll flip open a variety of manga to see what they might do!

(And then I remember that manga layouts and whatnot are often highly differentiated by genre and MariPav is all over the place XD )

--

4) [DETAIL]

Here is the VERY FIRST drawing I ever drew of gijinka Marx and Magolor, when I was testing out what my mental image of them would look like. Everything was quite rough at this time. I hadn't figured out exactly what hairstyle I wanted Magolor to have and Marx's wings are more like attachments than arms. XD

But basically, because I drew them looking more like semi-realistically proportioned adults (figured it'd be easier to get suitable references that way) I decided to stick with that look through the story. That ended up demanding a certain level of bg/prop detail to look right and...it's one of the more frustrating parts. ^^;

It would have been a lot easier to start if I'd drawn them in a more cartoonish-anime style, like how Apologies started out, but I knew I had a few very serious and intense scenes that I thought might look laughable if Marx and Magolor were more marshmallowy looking ^^

Also, since Marionettes' Pavane is, when it comes down to it, a love story between two horrifically emotionally-stunted adults, past the point where innocent childhood mistakes are easily forgivable but without the inner peace, maturity, and knowledge to know how to NOT make these same mistakes over and over, I wanted their body types to reflect the fact that they are both fully grown. (Despite the immaturity they frequently CONSTANTLY display to each other.)

There are many stories about confused kids/young adults making mistakes and getting better. Not as many about adults, despite plenty of us being just as confused.

And I can just switch to a chibi-style if I need them to be small!

(Even Apologies has started to shift in and out of MariPav's pseudo anime-realism style, and I'll notice myself drawing tall, tanky anime boy Noir, even though his initial concept is short, underfed, underdeveloped, squishy-cartoon boy. You can see the reverse happen when I draw MariPav in a rush and Marsh and Magolor start to look more boyish and squishy. So, in short, don't do what I do and try to draw two different comics with two different artstyles at the same time XD)

--

5) [MONOCHROME TIPS]

I say go ahead and use color, and then throw a desaturation filter on that baby, if you can! Now, to ease this process, you might want to make test palette FIRST, draw your characters with their normal colors and then de-saturate that and save it for referencing later!

[I started out making a very nice palette for the two of them, only to accidentally delete it. I still needed one, so I made a second - and while I accidentally deleted THAT one too ^^; I swear, the "lineart" portion of it looked JUST like this. Just scribbles I would daub paint colors on. The key is that your palette reference doesn't have to look good, you just need to be able to sample from it!]

Now, you might notice not everything looks right when desaturated. That's a matter of values, etc! What you can do is take the monochromatic grays you've got and further adjust them from there so they look more like the gray versions of your original colors. 

[NEW OUTFIT SPOILERS!!]

I had to do this with their new outfits too in fact!

I drew them up, worked rea~lly hard on getting their palettes the way I liked, then I desaturated them and Marx looked like a a big dark blob!! You want to be very sparing with including dark colors and blacks in your palette when doing monochromatic manga, because your panel borders, text, sfx, panel effects and your shading are going to be vying for access to those precious dark tones. And if EVERYTHING stands out... then NOTHING does!

So I manually adjusted the grays on both so that they would look better good and communicate the same light-to-dark information.

--

6) [CONSISTENCY]

Because I keep all of MariPav in one big document (split up by arcs) if I forget how something looks, I just page back to the last time I drew it ^^; That said, as hinted at above, I'm...not all that great at consistency myself. Either with artstyle OR tiny details.

"Do Magolor's gloves have trim on the ends or not?" "Do Marx's bangs curl inward or out?" "What the heck do his shoe laces look like again?" "How many grooves are in the back of Magolor's egg?" "Did you forget his work apron again?" "Hasn't Marx's collar grown in size since last time--"

COUGH COUGH COUGH

I hope to get better at consistency down the line, but the truth of the matter is I do most things in life completely frazzled and I just have to do what I can do in the time I have! Outside of having references for yourself (and I have two very slightly modified 3D models I use labeled for "Marx" and "Magolor" to help keep their shapes consistent-ish) drawing your characters a little bit every day will help!

Especially the every day (that you can) part. Let it go too long and you MAY misremember something you'd done, only to canonize it next time you draw them ^^; :remembers how I accidentally gave Hell Branch Magolor his other eye back and lost track of Hell Branch Blade's scarf:

And then sometimes I decide I maybe want to change something up because I just wasn't thinking of all sorts of better possibilities before and "la la la" it is this way now, just go with it~

--

7) [COMEDY & SPEECH]

I've been something of the family goofball since I was a kid, so I'm pretty used to comedy, especially hyper-dramatization comedy.

[This is a pretty good sample of the exaggerated way I talk in real life haha XD]

Some tips I've heard for "timing" is that the end of the page should be a moment that makes the reader want to turn to the next one to see what happens. Or be the conclusion of a story beat or joke. Either use it to build anticipation or let the reader rest.

Speaking of letting the reader rest, I read somewhere that the reason manga doesn't include backgrounds as much as western comics and web-comics is not that Japan hates backgrounds or anything...

It's the theory that the more information on a page, the more mental energy a reader spends taking it in! You don't want them to exhaust themselves looking at detailed backdrops unless the presence of the BG is also communicating something!

That's why so many manga will have those panels that have 3-4 speech bubbles laid over some generic screen tone. The artist isn't lazy, they're telling you "just relax and focus on the words!"

That's also how you preserve flow, by limiting the amount of visual information there is on any given page. It actually took me a while to learn that, and I sometimes regret that the original MariPav script is super wordy for a comic script.

(Because I wrote it first - before I'd done a deep dive study on the art of comic-crafting. That and I was more used to writing fanfic and original stories than comic scripts - which often need to be tightly trimmed. They also have a bunch of different storytelling devices you don't always expect. Like, most manga has WAY more internal dialogue and thoughts than MariPav has, which is written more like a stage play, being told entirely through back and forth dialogue.)

As a result, now, when I paste my dialogue in over my thumbnails, I'll often chop whole lines out or trim them down so they won't just eat up my page space. They say "kill your darlings" for a reason.

Lastly, I actually have a friend who works in comics, and I've pinged them a couple of times for advice on how to get my speech bubbles looking good. They've given me lots of advice, and not just on lettering! (They were the one who recommended using a kind of creeping, broken shadow instead of a plain flat shadow over Dedede's face + the tv static lines over DMS seen here too.)

[I credit their advice with the reason that first comic got so much positive attention. Tbh, it's those little touches that really make it!]

Some other advice they gave me was to make sure your text has plenty of room inside your balloons. You're trying to fit a square peg in a circular hole, after all! But again, sometimes I just place my bubbles in areas where they'll be most convenient for the art! XD

-

Anyway, I hope I did well answering your questions and providing insight. Of course, the biggest thing is that everything takes a combination of hours of practice and also... just some life experience.

I have been reading manga since I was 12, which nowadays makes it sound like I started LATE in life till you remember I'm 40 years old (and back then we had to walk two miles in the... we had to import untranslated single volumes from sketchy web sites with zero preview pics, based entirely on how interesting the title sounded) and in spite of my long history with the medium, I still found that I couldn't replicate the look of it it based on memory alone.

That's because there's a difference in taking in something for enjoyment and taking in some for study. What I've been having to do lately is STUDY manga - very intensely. I'm constantly having to look up "how to express frustration in manga" "manga sfx" "effective manga panelling" "crying, manga-style" to get things close!

(Of course, my years of reading and enjoying it helped in its own way too. After all, the stories I'm writing now are based on years of lived experience, in and out of fictional worlds and that stuff is KEY.)

But yes, get started on that comic of yours! Honestly, the best thing I did with MariPav was start drawing it. I knew I would have a long way to go to get it looking like it does in my head and it's still got a long way to go before it's there, but every page I make is getting me there.

[barnabybugspeopleonline]

as per my wonderful mutual [@gaypplreal]'s request: i will be speaking about THE YAPE AU

[or scissors pmtok: reanimator, the official unofficial title]

CONTENT WARNING: LITERALLY EVERYTHING

[blood, gore, death, surgery, clearly unhealthy relationships that are only fun to watch in fiction...]

also this is long

and a comedy-horror because it is silly, but very bloody

so, for starters, this is a gijinka/humanised au. so that way the gore makes sense.

the way i interpret scissors is sort of like a reserved mad scientist. she's still the dual-blade duelist first and foremost, this is more of a side thing.

this "science thing" is the human-world counterpart to what she does ingame. cutting people up and sewing them back together would be pretty grisly if this world wasn't all-paper.

[handaconda being our main canon example. it's alive! and scissors is the one who gave life to it, somehow. alongside the paper cutout soldiers. in my head this translates to something like a lab experiment.]

so scissors is pretty quick to take life, but she also likes to play with it, since she can somehow give it.

she likes to play with life. killing people and resurrecting them just to kill them again. like windup toys.

in a realistic context, this would obviously be bloody. she'd do surgery just for fun, as an act of intimacy. it's as simple and it's as caring as a kiss to her.

[sidenote: i also see scissors as being skilled at embroidery (and sutures) since fabric scissors are a thing]

so, we're getting closer to the crux of my point. but not quite! this au is scisstape centric, kind of. [sorry.]

i would go into my dynamic for them but then this post would be even longer so to cut a long story short [ha-ha]

i don't really ship them, i just think they're dating and it's horrible. they do love eachother but in different and [sometimes] disgusting ways.

you know how i mentioned surgical intimacy earlier? scissors would take tape's heart out just to hold it closer. [don't ask how he doesn't die: it's magic]

i used a literal analogy for my version of their relationship once: you can't use tape without scissors but once you have that pairing one is just going to chip away at the other. forever.

[so their relationship sucks and i would not condone performing vivisections on your partner irl but fortunately they are not real]

[also i think non toxic versions of scisstape are really cute this is just my version since i'm insane]

with everything established, i think, finally, we can get to my point.

yape.

in this au, yape is a busted zombie-ish copy of tape, created by scissors herself. for a plethora of reasons, and from a plethora of parts.

[she couldn't have both if she took all of tape's parts. just, snippets, if you will. alongside various grafts she had laying around.]

but why did she make him? yape is a love letter to tape, in a terrible way. i'm saying terrible a lot.

"i love you so much that i made another you." "don't you like him?"

tape, unsurprisingly, does not like yape. he's usually tolerant-ish of scissors, but this is just too far.

yape, conversely, loves tape. i described it as christian man following the god whose image they were made in.

yape functions. well enough. he bleeds a lot from places he should and shouldn't. sometimes the stitches peel away and sometimes his guts are out on the ground.

but through scissors' miracle of life, yape can't die. can he feel pain? sure. can he understand it?

yape was a mistake. and yape is a mistake.

because he's still within the present tense.

IF YOU READ THIS FAR I OWE YOU MY LIFE

FEEL FREE TO ASK SPECIFIC QUESTIONS, ALTHOUGH I HAVENT FLESHED MUCH OUT YET [THIS IS A NEW IDEA]

also scissors and tape are both lesbians tape is just really butch. masc-ing tape. ha-ha.

[arsen1cs4ng0]

looking back at old memories...

"you've been reliving those same memories again. yet you still have hope for something that can't be fixed."

2022 doesnt feel real to me anymore now lol a lot has happened since then. watch how a vosim-obsessed kid gets trauma slapped into their face over and over!!

explanation for this piece under the cut!!

the character who's looking at the little memory clouds is called comfrou. in the starlands (a little comfort world i made in my head. its where most of my ocs live), hes pretty much a god, as he represents my comfort characters. the person talking to him is marshie/marshmallow, which most of you know as my vosim gijinka (the fluffy-white-haired one). the two are in starfort lights, where my core memories are stored, as well as it being a safe haven. only a select few are able to access starfort lights.

the memory cloud on the top left shows columbia, my miisona. they represent me in jan/feb 2022. this specific memory shows me stimming to vosim following me on twitter!! isnt that cool??

the memory cloud in the middle shows cake the pink rat and lil guy the 2st both being epic!! that memory represents the time where my vosim jink hyperfix was at its biggest. cake was my sona during that period, so of course i had to include them >:]

the memory cloud on the top right shows care, one of my comfort ocs. that memory shows me realising my chip interest was slowly fading away. :[

the memory cloud on the bottom left shows comet, one of my sonas. that memory represents september 2022 onwards, with me spending most of my time and energy protecting my friends. a lot of headaches, a lot of breakdowns.

the memory cloud on the bottom right shows genghis, my new truesona!! it represents me today, still constantly reliving the trauma i endured throughout 2022. point and laugh at me guys i shouldve moved on from that months ago ;___;

[2liga]

3, 17, 19, 24! :3c

hello dahhhlingk ;**

Of course now I’m looking at my ao3 and I did NOT write that much this year…most of the stuff I posted is wip snippets and suchlike. I gotta get back on the wagon for 2019!

3. favorite line/scene you wrote this year

From Don’t You Forget About Me, there’s this little scene where Gary has a sit-down with himself:

Gary didn’t get maudlin as a rule. Gary Neville did not wallow. It was a point of professional pride. Trophies were lost, friends moved away, and Gary dusted himself off and went again. He always had and he always would.

But he’d put work into his friendship with Jamie. He’d put a lot of time and effort and pints of stout which had cost real money into that friendship. He’s suffered through mockery and honest confusion from his friends and further suffered the same from Jamie’s friends, and what was worse, was that he still wasn’t entirely certain why he’d invested so much in what he would have initially called the most lost of all causes. But he had, and he didn’t want to have to start over from scratch again just because Jamie was a stupid tit who couldn’t drive.

Gary really is such a fun character to write. I love digging into what makes him tick.

17. fics you’ll continue next year

[sighs heavily] probably just keep chipping away at the Napoleonic AU…I need to cut about 80 thousand characters from it to make it actually readable but the problem with the Napoleonic Wars is that everybody in Europe just haaad to throw their two cents in so there’s infinite possibility for cameos and I have no impulse control when it comes to putting my faves in stupid hats, even if just for three lines of dialogue

19. any new fics to start next year

I really want to write more a gijinka fic, because I’m gay af and love those designs so much…but I haven’t really decided the details. Most likely it’ll end up being an overwrought reflection on a player/club relationship that hasn’t been relevant for 3+ years because that’s just sort of where I am as a person and football fan. That or club-on-club hate sex. //SHRUG

24. favorite fic you read this year

oh dang, mm with such a ridiculously talented gang of fronds this is a toughie but I have to go for Irezza’s xabi/thomas space au here. I’m consistently blown away by how flippin good she is: you simply have to read this fic at least twice to catch all the little details she scatters about, and you’ll want to read it at least four times just cos it’s that good. The characterisations are fantastic, even for characters who only show up for a line or two, and she sets up the scene and the wider world so effortlessly it makes me want to write a space au as well, except not really because the bar is so stupid high.

[atlasllm]

Wizard101 stories to celebrate

Since I’ve had quite a few years on Wiz101, I thought I’d share some stories from my past years of playing the game!

 As a beefy life Wizard, I helped some guy defeat The Harvest Lord(?) in Triton Ave. After the fight though, the guy asked me to be his girlfriend in a... very Extra sort of way for an MMO. I was nine at the time so I technically couldn’t say anything out of fear I’d get banned for being too young to play so I just agreed. Except I ran away and never spoke to him again, whoops

I took the Kembalung Village Quest probably 3 years ago and still haven’t done it out of fear it’s too high a level for me. It’s still in my quest log. I also got a quest from Moolinda Wu for a level 60+ life pet but I’m unable to complete it because I haven’t done Wintertusk and would rather do so after completing Zafaria 8(. I still even have the Yarbirds quest from when I first completed Grizzleheim. Help me

Me and my sister, back when we played Wiz together, both got the Penny Dreadful quest as noobs and were both horribly devestated because we couldn’t get into the Dark Cave to get her. Luckily, my sister made a Wiz friend who teleported her there and we both completed the quest after ages! 

When I was younger I absolutely ADORED the unicorn pet, first because I was the typical “OMG OMG UNICORNS!!11!1!” kinda girl and eventually it was because I got obsessed with the Life Wizard aesthetic. I ended up making gijinkas of my unicorn (and future unicorns!) and ended up drawing a bunch of them as sort of OCs of mine! I had Princess Mocha/Luna, Prince Sparky, and the two Nightmare pets I always wanted and got a short while ago, Princess Roxy and Prince Max!

Fairly recently I decided to do a Mount Olympus run, and as luck would have it I was the only girl in a group of guys. I was ALSO the HIGHEST leveled Wizard, as all the guys were no more than 1900 health and I was there with 3200+. While this was okay, I liked helping people and playing support on either Olympus or Loremaster runs, ALL of the guys wanted to take on that secret boss in Eris Goldenapple’s arena. Needless to say, it was HELL. Each of us, me included, had to keep teleporting back with potions again and again as three noobs and a life wizard slowly chipped away at his health. Surprisingly enough, we managed to get out alive! But one dude crashed at one point, and another one simply left instantly (I don’t wanna jump to conclusions but I kinda assumed the dude was younger and got yelled at by a parent for being up at 2am). As tired as I was, I pulled through for the last dude and completed Olympus with him! He even thanked me over and over again for staying with him, cause at one point I had to leave Zeus’ battle to use a potion but still came back. It was kinda fun to be in a group of chatterboxes and be the highest level in the group, heh! I’d... rather not do the secret boss with lower levels again though. Shit was hell.

Shit always happens in Olympus runs? One time I got trapped with a low level Storm Wiz, and I kept having to heal and reshuffle her D: she was a good player since Storm is pretty OP even as a low level, though it made the Ares fight take hours! Another time in the Ares fight I jokingly said “No please I have a wife and children” and one of the dudes said “But you’re a girl XD” in response. I never felt more lesbian rage in my life. I shut up though since I don’t think you can actually say “I’m gay” in chat so >8(

The only Wiz friends that I’ve been close to that AREN’T IRL people were both named Amanda, Amanda and Amanda Pixieshard. Pixieshard was a long time friend, and got so excited when she was back online again! Amanda also invited me to house parties, and introduced me to most of the crowns shop houses! Alas, both of them aren’t in my friends list O_O I was either not active enough or they deadass saw through to my childishness 

I only found out how to properly strategize in battle in Wizard101 after watching Blaze Lifehammer videos in 2016, so that’s fairly recent. I didn’t realize feints were absolutely 100% useful and that TC blades and enchants were also helpful as well. I also didn’t know that gear could help you in battle, I always just bought any gear from the Bazaar that gave me the most health boost. I may be in Zafaria. But I am still but a noob in battle.

I’ve had the same house, one of the Wizard City basic houses, my entire Wiz career. I want to switch houses at one point but I haven’t found anything as comfy (or affordable) as my current one D: 

I would be NOTHING without this one Christmas. One of my gifts a good few years back was a giftcard for Wizard101, one that helped me GREATLY into continuing to play the game again. I’ve been living off giftcards ever since, and I absolutely adore being able to play Wiz (even if it’s cost me... quite a bit...) I’d grinded from level 12 to level 14 just from the free Wizard City areas, and I’m so happy that the giftcards had helped me be level 65 in Zafaria!