Commission Archive

Yet another Toon, Fruity? Really?

Yeah.

Early April I asked was invited to a friend's personal D&D game after the game that had both Gardenia and Aseren go on hiatus. I had to throw together another Toon that could fit into their home game's dynamic, and they happened to still use homebrew that out group had somewhat abandoned. And since this was still the first and only game they ran, I decided to not roll up anything too busted.

The material we had was *passed down from a member who used to run a game that initially brought me into contact with them, and had ghosted the table due to circumstances that aren't worth scrutinizing. Amongst them was a homebrewed Alchemist class that directly references the Atelier games. Mechanically it's under tuned compared to others, but for the kind of game I was joining it was perfectly fine. The player [lineages] available also had a fun, if a little over tuned, version of Kitsune that had a fun spin on the shapeshifting aspect of their lore.

*Said member took it for themselves from another game that they had initially been a member of. This fact was learned though some dumb luck coming across a Roll20 listing from said previous group. I also took the opportunity to steal additional and updated material for myself when I cared to run 5E.

According to the mechanics, a Kitsune's fox form size increases each tier from the base size of Tiny, to "Medium", then landing at Large. The reference image really sells the scale of it; admittedly it might not be as drastic, but it's still cool. There are other, more busted, aspects of the [lineage] that I won't comment one; balance in 5E is a psy-op to convince players it's a well-designed game.

Two years ago a friend decided to kickstart a D&D game that they had to put on hiatus for reasons that fall outside the scope of this post in particular. It was a high fantasy game set in an academy for fated heroes that was mostly a vehicle for playing with blorbos. And oh boy I had a blorbo that I absolutely wanted to strap into the seatbelt.

Around this time I had been cleaning up my film degree, and had finished my short film that was also an excuse to write the rabbits outside a fantasy setting. The fact that I got people, actors, to play them still makes me a little light-headed. So off that high, I had humored the idea of casting a friend who I had the gut feeling that could play my blorbo pretty well. And after some convincing, we had both agreed to swap two of our characters for this game. They would be taking on Gardenia and myself taking on their OC, Aseren.

This is a hilarious way to reveal that for the past two years and a small handful of commissions later, Gardenia wasn't a character I was playing at the table this time around.

Artist: @/mintyfreshka

This is the first piece I've commissioned for him; a somewhat masculine, young, semi-generic academic with some bird/howl energy for some flair. His aesthetics fit just as much as the recent piece does. Swagever.

Gardenia had an easy brief that I could hand over for them to interpret; this was still the era that she was still heavily influenced by off-kilter DrakeNier themes. Comparatively, Aseren was a WoW RP character with years of RP logs and relationship baggage. I had some trouble finding a starting place for him that wasn't too sharp. Especially with elements like him being an Empath was something that had to have several conversations at the table for it to not be an abusive element of his character.

One of the elements I thought was fun to establish in his backstory was to make him a ghostwriter for a famous romantacy series in the vein of A Court of Thorns and Roses. Then it occurred to me that it's kind of odd for a dude, even one I was told was gay, to be writing something with a fem lead and the exact kind of gaze one would expect. So I thought it would be fun to make him trans-masc as a minor detail that wouldn't be explored too much.

Artist: @/punklilyyy

Speaking plainly: I'm a cisgender, heterosexual male. Arguably aro/ace. Aseren was definitely a character I didn't really expect to have his identity be something I was playing around with. And very apparent to myself I was playing him from the uneducated position of a Tumblr blogger who happens to follow a lot of queer folk. So I based a lot of it as an element in relation to his parents, wanting to be like his father. Which was an uphill battle once I started establishing further that he's basically a dead ringer of his mother, in both looks and talent. He also staked a lot of it in a relationship he had with another character. To the extent where I thought it'd make more sense for him to pull a little back on being masc since he was getting a lot of external affirmation from that. Until they broke up. Admittedly encouraged OOC by myself since it'd be a fun dramatic shake up.

Artist: @/cloud-ya

This piece is essentially supposed to be him at his lowest afterward, despite how much he's serving; giving up on himself, his passions, and accepting the idea that he can't be anything other than what he was born as. It's gotten so bleak that he was going by his dead name for a while. During this time, sessions were just him lashing out at everyone while he was going down a doom spiral. It'd be a few sessions where he would start looking more introspectively and listen to other party members, which is where the new look for him came from. Understanding that owning his own identity was important to himself, and to look for affirmation from within. Not intended to be an end for his character arc, but definitely the moment where I found out who he was as a character.

"Well that's cool and all, but this is a high fantasy setting right? Why not just use magic to not deal with the dysphoria?"

Well that's kind of easy and boring to do, although there was some of that when it came to explaining how the initial portrait turned into someone a little more fem. Aside from that, there wasn't any further use of fantastical elements with regard to his identity. To some degree this is what the Combat Wheelchair is, a part of reality that exists within fantasy for the sake of itself. A relevant example is what Granblue Fantasy does with Cagliostro and Ladiva; the former using magic to become her ideal self, and the latter is just textually trans without making it a huge part of her character. Both are characters that essentially at the end of their own stories, but nonetheless exist. Having Aseren be a more openly trans masc character wasn't intentional thing I wanted to explore, but I'm kind of proud of what I've done with him.

The game went on hiatus, again, for various reasons I won't speak on. Selfishly, it really cements that I'm kind of cursed to never play a character I like to their conclusion. Although I can claim that Aseren is the first character I've played who had an arc actually see it's end, so that's a plus.