#the Mumbler (moomins OC)

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first baby

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teats out

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that thing I’m always doing lately where I doodle mine and Lee’s OCs interacting

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Alois getting to know ol’ Grokemama ft. Grokematron, the Mumbler, and an assortment of morits

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Mumbler in anything that isn’t a floor length dress: aaaaagh I’m NAKED

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How is grokemama producing milk if she didn't give birth to the mumbler? Is it just her hormones kicking in from being with baby™?

That’s it exactly!  I’ve heard that it’s uncommon, but it can happen in real life with some animals.

Grokemama is a very instinct-driven person in addition to her passive attitude.  She found it kinda weird when she started lactating, because her body had never done that before, but she rolled with it.  She already knew what breastfeeding was, and it made her raising and feeding her children a LOT easier.

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Iris, struggling to think of how well-adjusted kids live: children like eating frogs, right??

(Grokemaiden belongs to @tiamat-hatchling)

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(OKAY, I WAS WORKING ON THIS ASK BUT IT SUDDENLY MESSED UP AFTER I SAVED IT GIVING ME AN “Uh-oh! Looks like this post was created in the Tumblr app. Post body content cannot be edited on the web at this time.” ERROR EVEN THOUGH I NEVER MAKE POSTS ON MOBILE AND DON’T EVEN HAVE THE APP SO YOU GET A TEXT POST NOW, ANON)

Yeah I think so?  Voice headcanons are haaaard because I can only hear them saying words in my head and not out loud but I typically have a rough idea what they might sound like.

I headcanon that grokes typically have lower speaking voices than you’d expect because they’re bigger than other Moomins creatures (think of how a small dog goes “yip!” and a big one goes “boof!”) and are made to make loud howling and growling sounds, so you can assume even my girl groke OCs have “masculine” voices when they’re fully grown.

Iris has a very manly voice that really contrasts his rounded long-haired dress-wearing self.  People will see him and go “miss? ma’am?” until he speaks and then they’re like “OH”.  His voice really dropped when he hit puberty. … the closest voice I imagine to Iris’s is Plankton’s from the s1 Spongebob ep “Plankton!” where he’s saying “Yes, yes, that’s grand.”

But unlike Plankton, Iris’s voice doesn’t really pitch up while he’s conversing or when he screams/yells/laughs and such.  It’s ALL deep.

The Mumbler has a much higher voice than Iris.  It’s is still in a “masculine” range, but that’s at least partially due to it habitually mimicking Grokemama’s inflections, and her voice is WAY deep.  The Mumbler’s natural voice is kind of like... when a male musician hits HIGH notes and their voice gets all soft and androgynous without cracking.  Think like the chorus of this song:

(this song has a more “Mumbler” voice but the lyrics better suit Iris, btw) The Mumbler generally speaks rather quietly and, as its name suggests, mumbles a lot.

Grokemama has the lowest voice out of my Moomins OCs... she’s a HUGE woman who’s capable of being INCREDIBLY loud, but tends to keep her voice quiet, and rarely speaks at all to people outside her family.  Her large body gives her a speaking voice thats range typically falls into the octaves of an Oktavist singer:

She nearly always mumbles, slurs, and mispronounces her words.  Her voice is deep enough that when she growls, you’ll feel it before you actually hear it, because it starts in such a low frequency; as it gets louder it reaches the more audible range, but the effect is still powerful enough to make some listeners feel physically unwell regardless of whether they've "heard" her (as it should, honestly. You don’t want even a groke half her size to be growling at you). Her voice can pitch up, usually when she’s scripting, because she tends to mimic the accents and pitches of words as she’s heard them.  It’s strange to hear her speak... she can be very difficult to understand.

Other grokes... I really don’t have solid voice ideas for most of my OCs but here’s a few I’ve got.

Midnight sounds a lot like Grokemama, but it’s harder to say how her speaking voice sounds since she canonically can’t talk, barely even makes little noises.  Her voice is also very low, but I’d say it’s a bit higher than Grokemama’s when she’s vocalizing; the effect is sort of like when an animal is trying to imitate human language.

Snowdrift sounds like Smaug from the latest Hobbit movies!  She can sound very big and scary when she wants.  Thank goodness she’s nice and warm and friendly, nowadays.  Her booming rumbly voice doesn’t seem to match her sweet demeanor from an outside perspective, but she is a groke!  I love her and her growls.

Storm is a tough case b/c I can hear her in my head SO clearly and I haven’t heard something exactly like her... if grokes were dogs, she’d have a yappy little chihuahua voice.  Like, kind of raspy?  Pretty high-voiced for a fully-grown groke woman, but she’s exceptionally tiny.  I guess it’s sort of like if some female voice actress was recruited to voice an alien boy.

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Grokemama’s little family getting to know Grokemaiden (by @tiamatdragongod)’s little family

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more doodles of mine and @tiamatdragongod’s OCs interacting; this time it’s Mutter and Leviskyr

Basically, Leviskyr would initially be disgusted by her kids, pissed off about her impairments, and would leave in a huff... only to return later because he hates being cold and alone, and Mutter is a nice warm groke who’s too dense and socially blind to realize that he’s a Horrible Man.

Mutter wouldn’t like it if he got aggressive around her kids, though, nor would she like how guttermouthed he is (Mutter herself rarely curses, but a lot of the words and phrases she actually understands most fluently are expletives, and she’s kinda Tired of them). She wouldn’t like it if Leviskyr got aggressive towards his son Loathsome, either, since she assumes all grokes are “good” and she could never understand why he hates him so much.  Leviskyr would get very angry if Loathsome got anywhere near Mutter, and Loathsome would be in awe of how much Mutter can get away with in terms of annoying his father.

Pretty much a disaster, but only Mutter’s kids and Loathsome would realize it.  Leviskyr would force himself to tolerate/ignore what pisses him off about her because no one else is insane enough to stand him, and Mutter just thinks he’s a big cold man who needs to calm down and watch his language.

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notebook doodles

first two: Thistle trying to get Mutter to be less pessimistic, and her thinking his mindset is going to get him swatted with a rake

third: in which the gaps in Mutter’s vocabulary show very clearly when she’s saying mean vs. nice things

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sometimes Iris and the Mumbler think back on their childhood with their mama like “man what the fuck was up with all that”

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I had to restart my computer twice to do it but I FINALLY got these scanned

more little pics of this weird little family

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I haven’t been drawing them enoughhhhh

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Do you have any nonbinary OCs? If so, can you tell us a bit abt them? :O

Yes!

The Mumbler has been nonbinary from the get-go, and is primarily referred to with it/its and he/his pronouns.  When I was first coming up with it I often described it to myself as “a creature of uncertain species and sex”.  Even the Mumbler itself has no clue about its gender, and has never felt especially compelled to explore it, either.To the Mumbler, gender is one of those weird made-up things that society likes to pretend is important for incomprehensible reasons.  It’s curious about it, finds gender interesting, but never takes it too seriously.  When its hair is longer it’s taken for female more often, and more often as male when its hair has recently been cut (it gets called “he” more often as an adult due to its voice lowering and being able to cut its hair more regularly).The Mumbler honestly doesn’t care much about what pronouns it’s addressed with, so long as it can tell when it’s the one you’re talking to; the fact that pronouns and their genders are something that Grokemama mixes up a lot when speaking have definitely contributed to this.  It’s been seen as almost every humanoid species and gender out there, too, so it’s used to it.

Storm is an interesting case; I feel like in a modern setting she’d ID as genderqueer, but as it is she wouldn’t know about that since she lived so long ago and spent a lot of that time living in a cave.  She does primarily use she/her pronouns, enjoys being a woman, but is also perfectly fine with he/him and being seen as male (which isn’t uncommon in her experience, since I think that the secondary differences between the groke sexes would be both subtle and obscure).She doesn’t consider womanhood to be an integral part of her identity, despite her being born a girl and using feminine pronouns.  She considers it “fun to be a boy”, and does get a kick of gender euphoria when people see her as such.  Cares more about just having a gay old time than she does fussing over gender roles.  She very much enjoys playing around with her gender presentation (which is not bothersome at all to her husband Rook; they’re both bisexual).

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she doesn’t wanna talk about it