i'm your host, the gay ghoul

hello ghosts and fellow ghouls, I'm offering my inked art as skeb-style commissions! if you've been loving my inked work lately, now's your chance to get some for your own ocs on my kofi ✨️

HIIIII THANK U FOR THE ASK ILU....

I think some of my favourite worldbuilding has been for the supernatural groups i put in the world. I think the witch coven lore I have is my ultimate favourite so far agshdgh.... it's also pretty important in that it ties a few of my main yeehaw ocs together :3 Since the world is still really high fantasy it means I get to go WILD and CRAZY with what magic does and means to people >:)

For the covens I have a couple favourite tidbits.. they have a pretty closed off society and usually refer to each other with feminine, familial terms of address (mother, sister, etc), regardless of individual gender. Those terms specifically are used as honorifics and denote things like seniority in the coven, so they're seperate from like. Regular gendered words, which they still have and use (just not as often). Another thing I came up with was the way they elect individual aspects of the natural world as deities and protectors, whom they also derive their magic from. In turn, they give these parts of nature more power as well, which means large covens with especially empowered protectors can gain interesting, specialized magic. My girl Shuteye used to be a part of a coven dedicated to the moon, and since its an especially large and powerful coven/aspect of nature, some of its members are said to be gifted with anything from the ability to divine the future, transform into different animals, and much, much more. The moon in particular is so powerful that in my setting's mythology, it's also the (literal) mother of the first werewolves to walk the earth.

Seeking forbidden texts i see....

Agsgddh not all of what I have on them is spoilers so I can share!! I think they'd both be surprisingly open (but maybe not as honest) about their pasts together, at least insofar as how they met and where their eventual break happened. I'll give you Scoria's side of the story since she's probably who everyone will hear from first!

Scoria met Victory when he was nothing but a deserting soldier, discheveled and starving in the back alleys of Port Silver. On any other day she'd have passed him by, but there must've been something funny in the air because she ended up dusting him off and offering him some charity instead. They'd have drinks together and talk, and he'd tell her about his time as a soldier and what he suffered through, expound on his dreams of justice, and so on so forth. Something about him really drew Scoria in, she can't really explain what it was. She just took a particular liking to him.

Eventually they had to part ways, but Scoria decided another bit of charity wouldn't hurt anyone, and she genuinely wanted to see where and to what lengths Victory would go for his particular brand of justice. She pulled some strings and got him hired as a deckhand for another ship's crew and figured that if he really meant business, he'd do just fine on the sea and she'd hear from him again. And she did!

Apparently Victory took to piracy like a fish to water, according to everything she'd heard. Over the next few years they'd maintain a close friendship with plenty of late nights spent drinking and talking together, whenever they could manage to meet. It was a pretty good thing they had going!

Of course, Scoria would soon find the answer to her question of how far Victory would go to meet his ends. He ended up betraying her in a nasty, ugly way a few years ago from present-day, and Scoria is none too eager to get into the details of what happened. Ever since then she's sworn to get justice of her own for what he did and she's not above killing him over it if she has to, all sentiment aside.

Follow-up: what about them captures your attention so much?

EASY QUESTION YEAH. Yeah. Yes. I do. My yeehaw ocs. They're spinning around in my brain like it's a particle accelerator in here God Damn

I love my wild weast ocs so much its unreal. I'd always been at least a little interested in classic wild west stories and that sort of aesthetic because I grew up around it (coughs. southern californian) so I was bound to make ocs based on that interest one day. For my yeehaws though I ended up making them during like. The perfect time in my life to hyperfixate on them forever AGSHDH... I was deep into my first playthrough of RDR2, I was super invested in my field of study at university but still had enough free time to be creative, I'd just gone on a bit of a spaghetti western binge, and to top it all off I was starting up field school work excavating a historic "wild west era" (late 1800s) property. I got like... a LOT of education injected into my brain on the time period, the history of the land and its people, the developing culture, etc. It all came to a head when I decided to incorporate and use all that knowledge as inspiration for a cowboy dnd character for a one shot!

The second i finished my first drawing of them it was OVER FOR ME... I ended up expanding the world and adding more fantasy elements and added more characters to fill everything out, until I had basically created my own setting/universe to play dolls in. I made an unreal amount of art for my blorbos lmao... I made comics. I never have that kind of energy but I made comics... I'd do anything to go back to that era where I had the kind of time and inspiration to stay up until 3 am doing that lol

I guess what captures my attention about them the most is the fact that they're like... wholly mine, if that makes sense? Like they're not based on anything besides the whispers of classic fantasy/dnd elements and just 1800's western history. Everything else came from me.. I have my own lore for their world, I made up my own history and got super deep into the worldbuilding, and I got to put every ounce of my personal interests and personality into these guys. I gave them relationships and personalities that made for interesting dynamics, I think about how they'd grow and change and react to certain situations endlessly, and they give me the opportunity to continue researching and learning about a period of history that fascinates me and is relevant to my career as an archaeologist. Idk, they feel like a love letter to myself and they make me so extremely happy!

WAHH THANK YOU... it means a lot to me that you wanna know more about my little guys 🥹

Since I havent talked about him in a really long time, I'll give you a crash course on my precious little guy tycho!!

my bf is a singer and i made an oc based on them / one of their band’s songs back when i was Just A Fan With A Crush (tm) so i could draw gay furry fanart without losing plausible deniability but now we’re dating and I just. have this OC. that I don’t know what to do with. and i think about them a lot. and that they deserve to take on a life of their own.

WHATTTTT THIS IS SO CUTE ILY ANON LMAO...

Congrats on manifesting your dreams through furry band fanart?! The world is so beautiful sometimes genuinely.

I definitely agree they deserve to take on a life of their own!! You should develop them and bring them back and start drawing them again!! Especially since it seems like this oc brought you a lot of joy back when you made them, it can only bring you more joy now :D

LOL I have a lot of really flexible ocs... I think of all of them, Artemis and Destreza would be #1!! Artemis had plenty of acrobatics training from his performance troupe days, and Destreza's, well, y'know 🫳

Also, I think Destreza and my tiefling, Angel, would get on like a house on fire (pun intended) 🖤

OUHHH ARTEMIS MY BELOVED!!! hes one of my [[Big 4]]... I have a rotation of like 4 tieflings from past games that are always at the top of my favourite characters list (destreza, tycho, and a mystery rotating fourth being the others lol)

SO MUCH TO SAY so little ability to decide... i'll give you a fun fact!! His horns and hooves are actually a pretty drab, woody brown, naturally. He paints/glamours them gold to keep up his beautiful princess unicorn visage and because he's a diva

Covid tore his game apart and when our group got back together was when I made Destreza (until things fell apart yet again), so I lowkey ship des and artemis together as like a joke/crack ship agsjdgdjkd

Destreza would be into artemis no matter what but I think artemis would want to gore des with his horns. Love LOSES</3

OHH Thats such a good question... I made a ton of ocs back when I was a kid and was super obsessed with anime, etc. My oldest brain blorbos were probably an angel and vampire duo that I liked to imagine in cute romantic situations lol, but I never had any lore for them or even names!! They were just character designs that I gravitated toward when I drew :)

If we're only counting characters i put the full breadth of my creative energy into, with backgrounds and a story for them, I'd say my first ocs were a detective pair that I made right off the back of playing some professor Layton games (in around 2013/14 id say?)! I named them Rue and Elliot and they were old friends who solved supernatural crimes together, while in the background they were trying to find clues on how to lift a curse placed on Elliot. I drew them sooo much while I was in high school but sadly I have no idea where all my art of them has gone 😔 since I doodled most of it in the margins of my class notes lol

If I remade them today I think I'd keep a lot about them the same! I still love crossing classic stories with supernatural elements and supernatural mystery is like. My all time favourite genre still afsgdh

I think if anything my changes would be to add more coherence to their story, expanding the world i created for them (which was based on 20th century France) and giving them more links to each other and the place they live. I remember Rue was super feminine, bubbly, a huge sweetheart, and didn't really dress for her work (cute dresses and silly outfits), and Elliot was more subdued and down to earth, a little bitter/unpleasant to strangers, and only wore like. Button ups and suspenders + slacks lmao. I think I'd probably switch up their designs and make them more period-accurate and add some characterization to them, so you can learn more about the characters through how they dress. I can imagine Rue in more masculine clothes so she gets taken more seriously in her profession (while still keeping her sweet personality), and Elliot would probably stay the same since I love a grumpus but I'd give him a bit more flair in the way he dresses like I love to do :3c

hope she doesn't drop any of those 💧