PERSONAL

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Getting Somewhere...?

6 years ago2,594 words

I've been working on some concept art for ∞ that "Herbal Daemons" thing I mentioned a few posts ago ∞! It's bothering me that I haven't produced anything noteworthy in ages...

I've also been working on a post about my old work (as I mentioned/hinted at in a previous post), in which I compiled a bunch of old art and compositions. That was... interesting, writing such a thing, delving into the past, but I've just got so much stuff that I wanted to include that it was getting too long. I considered making some kind of archive thing as a section of this site instead, where I'd upload all my old art and music on a sort of timeline thing; that's something I've been wanting to do for a while, since it'd be nice to have it all in one place online. It'd take time though, and I wonder if anyone would actually even be interested enough for it to be worth spending that time on it.

I might post what I did manage to write - or maybe I'll write posts about a few of my old things every so often rather than trying to cram years of my creative work into one mega post - but I felt like spending days just immersing myself in the past wasn't really getting me anywhere.

It's getting to me - or has been getting to me for a long time - that I don't do anything 'worthwhile' or noteworthy at the moment. People reassure me that my work has positively affected a bunch of people and all that, and it's nice to hear, but they're pretty much always referring to or thinking of MARDEK, which was forever ago. There's nothing I'm doing now that's worth following me for, and I get the impression that pretty much everyone who reads this follows me because they found me through MARDEK. It's all just memories, and I want to provide more than that.

It's... interesting, how we get accustomed to certain things, and upset at their loss. I remember back in my deviantART days, where some people would be overjoyed if a piece of their art got like 100 views; it'd be worthy of some minor celebration. I was spoiled by getting quite a bit of attention during the MARDEK days, so now that these posts here are "only" getting a few hundred views, I'm feeling... something that I might describe as embarrassment? Disappointment, I suppose, but it's more self-oriented, and it feeds into the shame I already feel about not having a Normal Person Career and all the other stuff people are 'supposed' to have by this age.

It's not entirely fair to feel this way though, because I feel that the comments people leave on these posts are a whole lot better than what I see in a lot of other places. I come across blogs occasionally through random googling which have a whole bunch of posts, and 0 comments on each one; I imagine a lot of people write blogs where they're essentially talking to themselves. So I should be grateful, and on a more conscious level I am. But then I suppose there are the more social network sorts of sites where people read and comment on each other's stuff because they're all in the same shared space, and I'm not doing that here, and...

Anyway, I'm rambling. I know that getting more internet attention wouldn't make me happier; if anything, it'd certainly lead to more stress. But I do want - need - to feel like I'm doing something other than getting lost in reminiscence and making little throwaway things that few people will ever see and which won't lead to anything resembling a career. Since going out and starting some Normal career isn't an option right now, I want to use the skills I've spent years developing to make something that'll have an extended lifespan.

So I've been trying to focus on this "Herbal Daemons" project that definitely won't be called that, but which I don't have a clear name for yet. I'm not even sure it's something people will even like, or how I'd promote it, or what, but once I get it started, and can update it regularly, it'll feel like something, and maybe I can advertise it or it might slowly accumulate interested people over time. If nothing else, it'd give me something to say I'm making, something to say I do, so I'd feel less bad about asking for support via Patreon, or just in general.

It's a very personal project - what of mine isn't these days?? - but it's not like I'm not thinking about what other people might actually like or get out of it. I'm keeping in mind how people might perceive it, and what I think people like in other, similar works of fiction... but I don't know whether I'll be able to pull of something that's actually appealing. I suppose it's going to be a process, and I'll appreciate feedback once I have more to show.

One of my biggest inspirations is Homestuck, just because it's the closest thing I can think of to what I'm trying to do in that it was an online story thing which wasn't exactly a webcomic or a game, but rather it was something new and different. If you were to look at its setting and story, either just from the start, ignorant of what it'd become, or even after the end without following it as it went along, you might be confused or incredulous that it'd be as successful as it was (I wonder how much it would have been generating on Patreon if that had existed back then). It's strange, convoluted, and the characters aren't exactly the sorts you might come up with if manufacturing a work of media as a committee to appeal to key demographics. And yet it was ridiculously successful, for various reasons. I have some idea of what those reasons might be, and I'm keeping those in mind.

It's not like I'm trying to make something Homestuck-like in terms of setting, story, or characters (though I suppose it'll be more like than than, say, Pride and Prejudice or /Star Wars/), or that I'd even want to achieve that level of success - the thought is terrifying! - but I wanted to say this just because I don't want to seem like I'm doing something entirely to please myself with no regard for a potential audience, and hoping it'll develop one anyway. It can't not be a passion project, otherwise I won't be able to stick with it, but I hope there might be enough in it to kindle others' passions too.

With that said, here's an image of some quite ugly 3D models that make it look like I'm going backwards in terms of graphical quality:



The gist of the story/setting - as I talked about in ∞ the other post ∞ - is that people who show traits we'd consider to be indicative of mental illness (that is, socially deviant behaviour of various forms) find themselves saddled with 'daemons', which are essentially personifications of mental disorders. Someone who's really anxious would end up with an anxiety daemon assigned to them, for example. These daemons are 'sent by God' (or 'the gods') via mysterious means, and once assigned to a person - ostensibly to 'help them' - they don't go away. They accompany that person everywhere, and comment on almost everything that they do. This makes people with daemons social pariahs, who are rejected from society, or at least treated worse than others because of their daemons. And their daemons constantly voice thoughts typical of the condition they embody - an anxiety daemon would constantly fret aloud to its 'owner', a depression one would say depressing things all the time - so having daemons is very much a curse that anyone would want to be rid of.

It's something I feel that people could relate to if done right, but which could be really off-putting if not done right! So I'm having to brainstorm a lot of ideas to come up with something I feel might say what I want to say while holding interest and not being repellent, and I don't think I'm there yet.

I've been playing around with the idea of focusing on two or maybe three characters primarily, because (as I'm introverted) I personally prefer intimate one-on-one conversations over group interactions, and I think it'd allow for deeper exploration of characters the fewer of them there were. Of course it also means that if people don't like them then there's not much for them in the story (unlike with something like Homestuck, where there were a bunch of characters so there's more chance of having a favourite whatever your preferences; I actually didn't particularly like any of the characters in that, but I found it intriguing enough to stick with despite that). Still, developing a couple of key characters seems a good way to start off.

I thought an interesting dynamic might be if one character is trapped by her daemons - imprisoned - and the other one represents a kind of openness and freedom. Stories typically begin with a 'call to action' where the protagonist's routine life is shaken up by an event or a person, and if this main character has anxiety and depression daemons and lives alone as a social reject, it's unlikely that she's going to decide to instigate a series of life-changing events (which I suppose is what stories are) herself; that'd be going against the whole idea that daemons - mental health conditions - restrict or trap us.

At the moment, I'm envisioning this second character as someone who doesn't have daemons herself, but considers herself a free spirit who hates how society runs, how people judge others, especially those with daemons. There were a lot of people in psychology with this kind of mindset, and it represents a lot of my own thoughts too so it'd be easy for me to write. She might be the one who suggests that this shy character go and ask the gods directly why she has daemons. I'm still trying to work out the details of how that'd happen, or if there'd even be some adventure at all or if the whole story would be deliberately restricted in terms of environments (maybe the shy character continues to never leave her house?).



I don't even have names for the characters yet! I'm currently using 'Fetter' and 'Skye' for the various files of them, but those aren't exactly subtle or clever names, and I think 'Fetter' sounds ugly.

These days, I try to design characters' appearances in a way that's sort of a cross between clever and silly. Not the kind of thing you'd see in a work that took itself too seriously or tried to be realistic, but which wouldn't be out of place in something like Pokemon.

Here, the shy character has her hair tied back with a flower thing, symbolic of how her daemons (based on plants) tie her back. She's wearing a thick jumper and what Americans call 'sweatpants' (I call them 'jogging bottoms'... which sounds silly) to show that she's private and isn't used to being seen by other people. Her jumper has a simple lined pattern reminiscent of prison bars. The ends of her sleeves and the bottom of her pants are a darker grey with tassels, suggestive of manacles. Her hair is ginger because that's an unusual colour sometimes regarded as weird (at least in the UK); a clear 'defect' caused by her genetics (it's my favourite hair colour and I know a lot of other people like 'redheads', but those negative connotations still exist for some; see ∞ 'ginger' on Urban Dictionary ∞). She's not wearing shoes because she doesn't leave the house.

On the other hand, the open character wears a revealing, open dress, which is sky blue, all suggesting freedom. Her hair is white, like a cloud, which is also unusual in a deliberately eccentric - rather than genetic - way. She's also got that blue bit on one side of her hair, again a sign of eccentricity by choice. She has feathers on her wrists (in the 3D model at least) and one in her hair to suggest a bird motif. She's also not wearing shoes, in her case because she's a ~free spirit~.

I don't know if I'll actually stick with these characters! I'm mostly posting this just to show that I'm actually doing something! And maybe if this does go somewhere, it'll be interesting to look back on these posts in years to come. I literally came up with these designs this morning though; I'll likely change them as I keep going. They're based to a large degree though on two characters I have called Erin and Gemma, whose dialogue I've been writing for various private projects for a while now, so I'm used to them. These characters aren't exactly the same as those - they're inspired by them, at most - but sticking with people derived from what I've been developing over a long time seems better than just inventing some that are completely new and essentially starting from scratch. They're also inspired by other characters like Oneira from previous attempts at what I'm trying to do with this project, like Divine Dreams, and some characters from Taming Dreams too.





These 3D models were essentially '3D sketches', to explore how the gist of their clothes would look from different angles. Since I could make these low poly, unrigged models in like half an hour and it would have taken longer to fill a page with less-informative mediocre sketches, it seemed the better way to explore my ideas. I wouldn't actually be going with this visual style though, most likely; I don't think it's bad, but it's not something I'd be happy sticking with in the long term. Probably.

I also made this yesterday, for an unrelated private project:



So I could do something like that instead.

That model actually is rigged with facial expressions and everything, and I think it looks 'better' than those sketchy low poly things... though I'm unsure if that being objectively 'better' is, well, better! Maybe a more stylised look would be more distinct and appealing. I'm going to have to experiment some more.

And just because this exists, here's how I designed the face for that character before I made the model:



Anyway. I've basically just been rambling here, writing out my thought process. I'm tired of writing about ideas that I don't stick with... so I'm hoping that I can get somewhere with this one, now that I have months with nothing more pressing to focus on (including the several weeks between now and having brain surgery). It really is annoying that I can do these things, but I'm not doing anything with them...

Maybe there was something of some interest to you in all this if you bothered to read it, though!

(The process I'm going through now is similar to what I did with Taming Dreams, which did end up getting made if not completely finished, so this isn't completely without hope!)