#theyre actually already bug humanoids!!! so its not that big of a change

[pikorinku]

my ocs as trolls

[tumblunni]

Also it still makes me Super Sad to know they were at one point considering giving Viera a similar remake to the Mithra and having them be a both genders race with like.. actual normal people and it being the player’s choice if you wanted to wear sexy armour or not. Seriously i hate ‘they are sexy race’ as a concept for a ‘culture’, it’s like finding the planet of everyone has the same job in some star wars thing, except the creepy version...

Tho also these more ‘sexy race’ designs for them still work MILES better than FF12 when they have sexualized dudes too! Apparantly this concept evolved into (ugh) the Au’Ra, so you can kinda see here how they decided to go ‘nah, extra buff power fantasy dudes and even more over the top fanservice women that also look 12′ instead of like.. fanservice kind of muscly man, at least... :( srsly he looks like that sexy armour guy they censored in that spinoff game or that sexy armour they censored for Ringabel yet nobody seemed to care and instead whined about 1 singular additional belt being added on the sexy costume for girls T_T why do the worst of the worst internet douchebros always throw a fit at the slightest bit of equal ass for all??

wow this ended up going into a big ol lol image heavy post so lets have a cut!

also this sexualized lady armour at least has a different and visually interesting design, and they were thinking of more hairstyles too! like the FF12 viera were even more bad for how they all looked like the same person in 1-3 minor variants of the same xenomorph lookin metal thong atrocity. (and like.. one robe model for npcs that somehow managed to still sexualize a robe?? wtf?? leav whit mag alon)

Another beta viera design that just appeals to me a lot, somehow! I think its the interesting idea of having a fully furred head and then just a quiff of human hair on the top, it feels more like an actual animal man instead of a human in cosplay. Same for the idea of them having big black cute button eyes!

Also look at these other really cool designs for different beast races, even stuff thats not based on anything we’ve ever seen before It’s hard to believe that the Au’ra were even conceived as a ‘beast race’ concept, like holy fuck it should be illegal to throw out 47 Actual Designs and just go with Human Again But More Fanservice...

also they made this april fools thing as a fake Au’Ra reveal and like... it doesnt say much good about your designers when this could legit pass as real like the joke here is apaprantly just that Sexy Bangaa looks ugly, not that having a race with a monsterish man and a sexy lady is a dumb idea, cos they just went ahead and did it anyway...

the au’ra concept art shows pretty much EXACTLY the same ‘sexy bangaa’ principle and I’m glad they at least fuckin toned it down to the man having AN ACTUAL HUMAN FACE, even if its also a lazy fuckin design change. i’d be so fuckin mad if we got a legit cool only-nonhumanoid-race-in-the-game and it was men only!

also like Wow, I am actually getting excited about just the same super tiny demure unfitting lady to a massive man except Less Sexualized And More Magical/Ethereal ...unless that isnt meant to be a dragon familiar but actually another design for the men or something, that’d be going WAY too far! XD

Hello Welcome To Bottom Of The Barrel With Bunni, wouldnt it have been nice if the weird succubus-y ladies like.. looked in their 20s or something i am actually advocating for big fanservice titties cos it would be 99% less disturbing than the same damn camera angles on a ‘childish’ design... also seriously 99% normal fanservice lady with bigass actual monster horns on top would be better than same thing sans the horns

oh sorry they do have ‘horns’ but they look like fuckin this

and i fuckin can’t even.. i jsut fuckin... they don’t even let us have THE MOST BASIC TINY BEASTIE THINGS! why does it bug me so much that male au ra get to have black schelera along with the black horns like even this super minimal actual dragon trait isn’t allowed?? even when removing it makes no sense?? even when its supposed to be a nationality indicator in-universe cos you put a really nice amount of worldbuilding into each ‘race’ having actually two races of sun and moon based designs. which are EXACTLY THE FUCKIN SAME FOR FEMALE AU’RA, seriously why not just make horn colour an option in the editor then... actually is this a thing that has ever existed in any real world country, is there a place where men have [visual trait] and women don’t? I mean aside from like.. cultural or religious outfits, where only one gender’s is different to the west but its not like the west is default anyway lol. But seriously imagine EYE COLOUR! Imagine if blue eyes only happened to american men and like.. american women couldn’t have blonde hair and all looked identical to.. I dunno.. west indian women. Just a whole country where dudes have all the abstract concept of ‘race’ and the women don’t. That’s how nonsense it seems when you make a fantasy species where only the women look human!

tho also i’m still pissed off too that the human nationality thing actually comes with a different body build (FOR DUDES AT LEAST) and different hairstyles and starting outfit, instead of only a colour change. it stands out a lot that they only did this for their first attempt at the concept. also it makes male au-ra make even less sense cos you can already have a muscle human and an even more muscle human who has a dumb ogre face and also elf men are muscular somehow and you kinda only have miquote if you wanna be a skinny dude.. or even just an average dude...

also it kinda sucks that you can’t turn off or choose anything about the weirdly complicated scale patterns on their neck and upper arms only. like why is that even there except to be like ‘hey we did the bare minimum to be considered a dragon’...

ALSO LIKE EVEN MORE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL I would have STILL been happier if we got this fuckin terrible fanservice lady design but she at least had ears and claws as well as we-say-its-horns-but-it-looks-like-cute-hair-decs. like seriously throw me a fuckin bone here, give them SOMETHING to justify the ‘beast race’ category... also did i mention that its really fuckin stupid how they did the worldbuilding too? these guys are meant to be nomads and warriors yet the women look like this. its just.. never explained. its just that all the Lore applies to the dudes and the women are just for ~cyooooot anime girl who does the stubborn kiddy pose with her tits hanging out~ (SERIOUSLY THEIR ANIMATION SET IS REALLY CHILDLIKE AND ITS SO CREEPY! theyre like the sex appeal of miquote with the lalafell animations...)

seriously holy shit looking at this pic makes them it look like dads taking their daughters to soccer practise like seriously fuckin christ

and ALSO on top of fuckin everything else we get to see they even had designs for the same creepy loli fanservice ladies but if they had Some Sort Of Actual Unique Features and Cool Aesthetic Choice like wtf you even abanded like 40 cool horn designs and just gave them plain gross triangles in only one of two colour choices... T_T also like.. that loli lady at least gets to wear an actual gothic lolita fashion style, and i love the aesthetic of armor plates hanging as accessories on a non armour outfit. Do they jingle like windchimes? or does this mean Au’ra were meant to be fully scaled below the neck, so this kinda IS a skimpy outfit but you cant tell? XD

Also l kinda like this aesthetic of this other equally lame and super humanoid design with overly sexualized females. Like i dunno if this is just shading but if they actually had this colourscheme it would be super distinctive! And it reminds me of amarant’s trance form, The Amazing Battle Banana Hammock. Even if it also suffers from the same problem of technically showing a man in a skimpy costume but like his design is supposed to be monsterous and badass instead so it still doesnt deliver the same as the female equivelant. The top left version could kinda be a fanservice guy but like.. only if he was naked like that? like drawing someone in a style that’s supermodel body shape and has giant boob outlines and super sexualized poses and doesn’t look monsterous despite being a monster and ET CETERA, that’s what we mean about a character design being sexualized rather than just sexy. If you put some pants to cover this guy’s impressive bulge then he’d just be another scary boss guy. I mean Ifrit is a nearly naked guy with horns in every damn game but he’s very VERY rarely sexualized! The FFXV version is like the first damn time, except when we had a female version of him. It sucks cos ifreeta has a pretty damn cool design but still its really weird how she’s so much more humanoid and has attention drawn to her having boobs in a way they never did with ifrit’s constantly-on-display pecs and loincloth... Man why is it so hard to explain these weird nuances of how people draw ‘topless monster’ characters like this? its like they go out of their way to try and backpedal on the fact they made a topless guy. he can show more skin but its supposed to be less appealing by the artist, thus its less offensive cos it isnt boxing a character into this one sexualized role while the plot says ‘no, they’re a monster, honest!’ YKNOW?? god am i making ANY sense here? XD

nakey man, not meant to be arousing to audience

nakey lady, suddenly just because she’s ‘the lady version’ she looks like this

the same nakey man, redesigned, this time indeed meant to be just as sexy

and like it sucks that there aren’t many good examples of nakey ladies who ARENT meant to be arousing in this series cos I mean that lady ifrit design is so much more sexualized despite being in a chibi art style game for kids?? this was really not the right time or place!

Also it sucks that ‘is nakey’ is a common trait of monster man characters, because well there’s been an established history of dudes being topless and you’re not meant to be aroused. So then whenever they try and make ‘monster man race’ they go for a topless dude and are like ‘then the woman needs to be topless too!’ except the only way they can draw them is sexy??? except its like a false premise to begin with, you can totally make a beast race that isn’t topless, you guys! or even a beast race that isn’t buff, so you don’t need to be all ‘what’s the female equivelant of buff? oh yeah, sexy!’. or, yknow, just draw a buff woman. it could work... or like just have neither and make a beast creature that’s supposed to be cute or mysterious or comical or whatever.

completely random moment of interjection to say that nu mou are pretty neat

Actually, FFTA’s version of the ivalice races was pretty good about this, aside from the dumb thing of ‘theyre all male except viera, and just coincidentally viera are the only humanoid and sexualized race’. (Tho it was funny that somehow they accidentally made all humans male only too??)

Also another reason the Au’ra’s version of fanservice bothers me more than the simple option to wear a bikini as both genders for every other race: like none of them are DESIGNED FROM THE GROUND UP to be ‘they are all biologically born in an idealized supermodel shape and also look twenty years younger than they really are and also all culturally do j-pop poses for fuckin everything’. Even if you picked the sexy catgirls and catboys race you can choose to play a perfectly covered up version of either. And none of their animation sets or voice lines were inherantly fanservicey. Thats kinda what bugs me more than the Au’ra’s designs, its that they’re all ~uguuu senpai~ anime fanservice lady poses and squeaky voices even if you make their design not sexualized in the customizer. Even tho like.. at least a character in full armour doing j-pop poses is kinda funny/cute, so that’s one consolation. But couldnt you have just made them simple emotes for all the characters instead? I WANNA SEE IDOL ROEGADYN OMG :D

ANYWAY UHH BACK ON TOPIC

we almost got a dreadlocks hairstyle? That looks cool

ok.. okay.. I’m done Okay I’m Done sorry i just saw these concept art pics and got really fuckin wistful for what we could have had...

[tumblunni]

Random rambley development for unnamed zombie-fighting super mum simulator! Today’s thoughts- rules and regulations for how the zombies work in this setting.

* On the sliding scale of zombie origins, these ones are far more supernatural than scientific. They’re not really limited by the more strict rules of movie zombies, and judging them by human standards would be a mistake! After all, the mere fact that the dead are alive is already outside the realms of possibility, I don’t understand why ‘scientific’ zombies in fiction are defined by limitation like this. No matter how ‘scientific’ it is, the basic premis is inherantly supernatural! Making it ‘scientific’ should just be like... a genre decision. A way to add verisimilitude if you want a more real life or sci fi setting. It shouldn’t be an excuse to tone down zombies and complain that stuff shouldn’t be possible, because zombies aren’t goddamn possible :P But like.. making people BELIEVE they’re possible is why ‘scientific’ zombie thrillers are good! Making it excessively similar to real life just harms that, it gets people nitpicking details instead of being scared. It gets people closer to the biggest scientific realism- the fact that zombies will never exist. But yeah anyway, my goal isn’t to make people believe zombies are potentially possible, I’m going more for the sadness, character development and philosophy genre of zombie story rather than the pure scary genre.

* Sorry, I went offtopic rambling there. * BACK TO ACTUAL WORLDBUILDING POINTS * These zombies are more supernatural, and capable of things that you’d probably call ‘magic’. It might be better to call this a supernatural corruption instead of a normal virus. Long-lived zombies will eventually evolve into one of many specialized forms, and start shedding their humanoid appearance for something closer to living shadows made of black spores. Their various powers can include more normal stuff like spewing acid or giant claws, or they could have enhanced control of this shadow mist in various ways, or extremely developed ones can even warp reality to some degree. Trapping you in delusions, rending holes through spacetime, contorting in impossible ways... * They’re not quite as rotten as regular zombies, they’re kinda more like the ‘eternally frozen in time’ sort of undead. Not the pretty kind like vampires, but they don’t completely rot away and start stinking. Its more like... I guess... if you had regeneration powers but they were overcharged? They’re in a perpetual state of metamorphosis, their skin blisters and peels and shifts and rots off and grows back. It flakes off like charred ash, and the flesh underneath begins to petrify. Pretty quickly they become cold, at first its just the simple cold of death and soon it’s crystalline bonelike flesh replacing everything that was once human. And cracking open to leak black blood... and then black smoke... until nothing is left. It seems that what we call ‘zombies’ are just the juvenile stage of a demon. A walking crysalis for something else. * Oh, and their complexion is more greyish than green. Mostly just cos big red wounds would look even more horrifying against a monotone colourscheme, and when the blood becomes black too it would be its own kind of horror... I think the shade of stone they become is linked to their skintone though. That’s a thing that always bugged me about certain vampire stories, how they always turn pale in twilight even if they were dark-skinned in life. (Yes, that is a thing in the books. At least the movies threw a bit more diversity in.) And slightly related, its annoying when all zombies turn the same shade of green. I mean its not really the same thing cos its not like anyone’s saying the zombies are desireable and ooo all hot zombies become white, or whatever. It just gets a bit confusing as a sign that the creators just did not think about POC being in this setting. Also its weird because green isn’t really a realistic colour for rotten human bodies, it always feels a bit too cartoony lol. So yeah weird grey stone zombies would not all be the same shade of grey, and this is a minor detail that should have been obvious but regrettably in a lot of stories it isn’t :P

* These zombies are more intelligent than usual zombies, they’re more equivelant to a simplistic prey animal rather than just a lumbering mess. They’re only that slow and helpless at the earliest stages of infection, pretty soon they start adapting and forming hunting strategies, rather than just walking in circles wherever they first died. They can progress far enough to create dens and packs and compete with each other for resources, and normally display about as much natural intelligence as a cat. Their main problem is more like a lack of awareness rather than lack of intelligence, they retain very little memory of their former selves and essentially behave as if they’re learning how to live again from the start. Left to their own devices they just become animalistic, but considering how they DO remember some things, it might be possible to teach one how to be fully aware again...? * The memories they keep of their former life usually lead to them reenacting old routines that hold no meaning anymore. The places they wander between might be places that were important to them in life, they might gather human things like magpies, they might claw wildly at a broom and start smashing it against things, vaguely remembering that at this time on wednesdays they did the chores. This can be used to manipulate zombies if you can observe them and figure out what things would provide a personal distraction. And global things that’re likely to attract every zombie are A LIFESAVER! Malls are the best scavenging spots because even though they’re the most populated by zombies, there are a million methods to misdirect the whole horde at once, and a million useful supplies inside. So much that if you could clear the place out, it might make a really good stronghold against further zombies. I mean, you’d be pretty much guaranteed to have new zombies coming there every day, in numbers small enough to handle... * The big problem is that these vestigal memories of important things can cause zombies to act in unexpected ways, unrelated to their actual degree of intelligence. You might think no zombie is capable of figuring out how to use a gun on its own, but a military person who died holding a gun might! They already have the combat instincts bored into their brain, it was a large part of their life, their last thoughts would have been to keep shooting no matter what. And their zombie self wakes up with this weird metal rifle thing strapped to their chest, banging against them every time they take a step, making it hard to get through doors. They claw at it a little, get curious about it, and those memories are constantly reinforced every day until they come swimming back up. Any zombie that had a useful skill and was in an environment where its easy to remember will most certainly retain it, no matter how low their self-awareness level is. Your only consolation with the rare gun-zombie is that they don’t often remember how to reload, so you only have to dodge one magazine of bullets!

* Miscellaneous thoughts of things! * I haven’t decided exactly what, but there should be certain chemicals that zombies react differently to, compared to humans. That’d make it easier to craft things to help combat them, and to help deal with your tamed zombie. All i know so far is that zombies are immune to poisons and generally have an iron stomach, so when you collect meat for your zombie you don’t have to worry about it spoiling. And there’s probably something that’s like zombie catnip and makes them sleepy, cos that’d be very useful as a gameplay aspect. * I think zombie vision is limited, and they mostly navigate through sound. The degree of limitation depends on what stage they’re at, it goes on a sort of curve with newly infected and very old infected both at the highest end of the scale. Newly infected eyes haven’t started changing yet, though theyre quite dizzy and clumsy at this first stage. Vision quickly starts degrading around the time that their dexterity recovers, so the difference isn’t really that big. Colour vision goes first. It’s complete colour blindness, not just red/green, so they’re even worse at sight than dogs are. (and, in fact, often compete with feral dogs for food) After that, they can only see blurs of light. Moving things or strong light sources will attract them, and they’re almost completely helpless in the darkness. The problem, though, is that later level infected are absolutely adapted to the darkness! After they’ve got used to navigating by sound alone, they spend all their time there. The only way they can perceive light is as heat on their fragile skin, so they hide away in shady places until night falls. So basically, if you see a zombie out in the light you should run to the darkness, and vice versa! And then when the infection starts to reach its final stages, they become able to perceive the world through the shadows they emit. This new form of ‘sight’ is more like a psychic sense, so there are some limits compared to human vision, and some things they can perceive more clearly. But, generally, they’re back to how good their sight used to be, and you should be wary of that. * Zombies are kinda like snakes, lizards or vampire bats. They only feed once in a while, they gorge themselves and then sleep it off for days or weeks afterwards. So not eveyr zombie you meet will actually try to eat you, just break you. And they won’t expend too much effort on it, since there’s not as much benefit to it, even if their instincts tell them that flesh = kill. Generally you just need to avoid letting them know you’re there, or looking like a threat to their territory. And they’ll quickly forget about you once you manage to escape them, they only pursue you to their full extent when its time to feed. So, for example, if you’ve tried scavenging the same place multiple times then enemies might get increasingly aggro! They start to recognise your scent, and they start to notice that things are vanishing from their territory every time you come there. They might start performing more complex behaviours like staking out the place they think you’ll appear, or readying ambushes and rudimentary traps. In comparison, you might actually be able to tame enemy zombies, to some degree. Its not really possible to save every single zombie, its hard enough to be able to restrain and retain this one single zombie daughter, who’s only this responsive to treatment because she knew you in life. But you can make zombies moderately more docile through certain expert techniques~! For example, if you toss them some food every time you scavenge around their nest, then they’ll start to learn to ignore you, and not really notice the stuff that’s dissappearing. They only care about losing food that they can actually eat, so if you focus on canned goods then you can also reduce aggro. And if you move stuff around you can make certain routes harder for them to cross, but it works even better if you also help them move down other routes. That way you don't just delay them finding you, you psychologically encourage them to turn the other way. “Hey, what’s this interesting new path that I’ve never seen before?” Keep switching the paths back and forth and you can trick them into never losing that excitement, zombies have bad short term memory XD And hey, if you make a big noise somewhere every time you enter the nest, you start teaching the zombies to run over there whenever you get there. Expend some time misdirecting them down a long path with a chunk of meat at the end, and eventually you don’t even need to do that, you can just make the noise and they all run down there even if there’s no reward! * Oh, and this idea was mostly just so that feeding your zombie daughter isn’t too difficult. You don’t have to murder a guy every damn day, she can last varying long amounts of time without food. And depending on how big the meal is and how you train her, you can increase or decrease the time. She’s only a baby zomb though, so generally her HELLISH HORROR HUNGER should be relatively manageable ^_^ I’ll have to figure out what would work best, gameplay wise. Once a month? once a week? * Maybe she can still eat human food, to some extent. Its just that only raw flesh and blood sates the monsterous aspect of her, the rest is empty calories. Plus you kinda need to save it all for keeping our human protagonist alive! But you can give zombiekid treats to reward her for good behaviour, or to calm her hunger when she’s gone without food for a long time. A full stomach won’t actually do anything to help, but it’ll keep her docile. And human food is hard for her to digest now, its usually only okay when its a single treat alongside a full meal of human flesh. Too much of it might just make her health worse, but its what you have to do to stop her from lashing out. It can be a bit depressing to have to lie to her and see her wasting away, not knowing why she's feeling so sick...