As in, Laplace’s Box

Filter the Visible Bones in Your List

No brainer, right? Looking at the left is a nightmare.

Do yourself a favor and only activate the group you’re working with, like the mouth group on the right.

Make an Expression Pack (or several!)

When it comes to expressions, the best advice I can give is: go through the vanilla expression emotes with your character and save them as .pose files. It’s a little time-consuming, but it WILL be worth it if you’re making enhanced poses often enough. And you don’t have to stop there–if there’s a full-on emote with an expression you adore, pause it during the expression and save it the same way. You can load that face onto other poses.

A note on pre-made expressions with the new face bones: Expressions will not carry across races, nor will they carry well across faces of the same race. This is particularly noticeable for the mouth. For that reason, you may want to label your expression folders like this:

Gender > Race > Face –or– Female > Viera > Face 4

Eye Movement with Sibling Linking

This has always been the go-to, but I think it’s good to share. There’s a button that lets you move one bone while also affecting its sibling bone (for example, you can move the left eye, and the right eye will move too).

“Link Rotation” will move the bones in the same direction. You will use this the most. “Mirror Rotation” will move them in opposite directions, but the amount of movement will be the same.

I use this for eyes and eyelids to ensure I’m getting even movements and looks across the board (like below), but it works for ears, limbs, hair, you name it! If there’s a left and a right version of the bone, they can be moved in tandem.

Mouth Movement with Position

With the new mouth bones, I’ve found position to be far more helpful than rotation. Switch your transform mode to position, zoom way in, and lift those lip corners, or shift them in or out.

Here's the expression we just made from a blank face!

Adjust Some Settings

Consider adjusting your settings so that the bones and their connecting lines fade or disappear while you’re mid-movement, so you can see things more clearly. Some folks don't want to dabble in settings at all, which is fine!! But if you have the time and inclination, try it out!

Try Bone Offsetting

This is a lifesaver. You can adjust the position of each dot, for a more clear view of them. This takes some time and patience, but I found it to be worth it because I'm always on that damn gpose.

ESPECIALLY useful for the eyes, where the bones’ default state is stacked on top of each other. I’ve also adjusted the abdomen/waist/lumbar area and viera ear bones to my taste.

Bone Offsets only affect the specific race and gender you adjust them on. Here you can see the pile of dots on the unadjusted fem miqo's eyes, and then the fem viera's bone dots spread out to more legible placements.

“Horizon” just plays into some visuals. The open sky during an apparent day contrasted with the reality of a distance sunset. However, I show Izayoi “failing” at first, and revealing a success through a hidden plan from the start. Also, “measured and proportionate response”

“Third-Rate” ”Reticent”, and “Cloud Nine” somewhat act as a trio, with Cloud Nine explicitly following up the present day part of “Third-Rate”. “Third-Rate” is especially important to me, as this character has really been inspiring to play in roleplay on Light lately, and this expands on some very traumatic background themes which lurk behind a character initially conceived as “a more down to Earth and approachable Izayoi”. The warning tags are mostly to be safe, but it also contains my hardest hitting internal monologue.

”Stamp” is worth a mention as it explicitly ties into a piece by Koi, as an in-character reply to that. This is one of many pieces this year that I’ve written in a Mielikki-WoL continuity, with Izayoi here having been coincidentally requested by Koana prior to Mia being sought out by Wuk-Lamat; and here I play a little with some Urianger-adjacent vibes of having promised to be open and not lie to those few Izayoi genuinely holds dear, only to be expected to anyway and it tearing her apart. Don’t worry though, she makes her frustrations towards her current employer very known in “Morsel”, which might just be the funniest thing I’ve written all month.

”Telling” acts as another example of “Izayoi uses an apparent defeat as a ploy” and also “means entirely divorced from raw strength to succeed”. Granted, “not-Bonharve” gets his ass beaten, but as he says, that wouldn’t help their case. What did, happened before that. My tongue in cheek nickname for the villain comes from him being inspired by an antagonist from an rp plot which didn’t quite take off.

As per my usual trend of avoiding the actual word itself (where I can), “Hackneyed” proved especially difficult for me as I didn’t know what, in-universe, had lost its appeal. So instead I went for light-hearted meta commentary about observations in roleplay in the LRC.

“Stable” was the result of some MAJOR “future child” brainrot, as well as wanting to write about one of the possible “bad timelines” we know about. Very Future Trunks/Silver the Hedgehog. After a lengthly discussion with Koi about details, this is what I came up with. Since this is the Black Rose timeline, some details are different from Koi’s own piece about this character later. I don’t name drop him here, ironically for future-proofing. Stable refers to the unstable device/temporal travel, but also to emotionally ground himself for a moment.

Length alone should tell you that I had fun with “Duel” - which I notice was also one of last year’s prompts. The challenge here was figuring out a way to write Izayoi’s ancestor working against a vastly stronger foe and impressing her (for consistency with some rp backstory things), without all of Izayoi’s tricks for a true “anyone could beat you this way” win. But it also let me write some direct power mixed in to represent the unrefined form of this character motivation from the ancestor, as well as toy with aesthetics, ability, and personality more or less from scratch.