Chira The Nerd Firbolg

elemental smooches

alternative form of THE boys in my original setting

Wolfwood, but he is an undertaker apparition that haunts the narrative of Stampede

Meet the prince of the Afterlife: Booette! I had this done for a while now (and the concept art of Booette for months longer) and figured today would be a good day to finally post it! ^.^

In this AU, Booette is King Boo’s daughter and sole heir to his throne as King of the Afterlife. King Boo and Booette are basically gods like Rosalina, and in this universe, a god loses their immortality once they decide on having a child. This is because they must use a tremendous amount of their own magic to even produce the child (they don’t make one in the traditional sense. Gods are born purely from magic), and once they child comes to be, the transfer from parent to child of all their magic and responsibilities are slowly passed to them.

So, when King Boo expires, Booette will become the new god of death. But that thankfully won’t be for a while yet! Some lore funfacts about Booette herself:

-She is not fully immortal and is essentially a demigod until Boo has passed on. That means that, even with enhanced healing and a much higher threshhold than a mortal, mortal means can still harm her, unlike a full-fledged god. It’s for this very reason that Boo is so very protective of her. Overprotective, in fact.

-She is infatuated with fairytales and the concept of Prince Charming. She’s oh so terribly shy, but aspires to be a charming prince- a heroic brace knight in shining armor, so her people refer to her as “Prince Booette” instead of “Princess”.

-Like her father, she is a shepherd of spirits; it’s part of her duties to guide the souls of the dearly departed to the Afterlife. And like her father, she can will Sprites into existence as her little helpers; they basically solve the issue of being everywhere at once. This is what the regular Boos are! The “design” of the Sprite will differ between  gods, so unlike King Boo’s who’s Sprites are basically your average Boo, Booette’s Sprites are puppy/kitten-like in appearance and behavior.

-For all of her shyness, Booette actually does has a bit of an adventurous streak. She’s so fascinated with the mortal realm and will go on the occasional sneak-out to get a closer look at the mortals. King Dad does not approve for obvious reasons. But he shouldn’t worry too much! Their loyal guard dog Polterpup will keep her safe and guide her home if she ever got lost!

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There’s a protest going on against AI art over on artstation, so I feel like now is the time for me to make a statement on this issue! 

I wholeheartedly support the ongoing protest against AI art. Why? Because my artwork is included in the datasets used to train these image generators without my consent. I get zero compensation for the use of my art, even though these image generators cost money to use, and are a commercial product. 

Musicians are not being treated the same way. Stability has a music generator that only uses royalty free music in their dataset. Their words: “Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues.” Why is the work of visual artists being treated differently?

Many have compared image generators to human artists seeking out inspiration. Those two are not the same. My art is literally being fed into these generators through the datasets, and spat back out of a program that has no inherent sense of what is respectful to artists. As long as my art is literally integrated into the system used to create the images, it is commercial use of my art without my consent.

Until there is an ethically sourced database that compensates artists for the use of their images, I am against AI art. I also think platforms should do everything they can to prevent scraping of their content for these databases.