Holding Hands and Killing People

Hanna is (in my ex's canon) a very "cutesy assasin" type trope. I decided I wanted to change this aspect to some extent and practice my ability to do cyborgs by utilizing the removal of autonomy. I made her more deadpan but still tries to lighten the mood with jokes that often fall flat.

Although I learned once again I'm not very good at drawing anything technology related, I still like how it turned out.

I wanted to blackwash Amaris as my ex actually had 0 named black (or darker-skinned) characters despite having 90-ish OCS taking place across several dimensions. He has lived in white-only (or close to) communities in his entire life, so I can see why—but considering he's scared of talking about race in any way, I'll use my artistic freedom to make fun of this fact.

Several dimensions and everyone is white or... that one spider woman who is technically pitch black but literally is forced to live off the energy of his white ocs?

Yeah. yikes.

So! With that out of the way, let's go into the design elements!

I tried to nail down the serious, focused, and somewhat enigmatic personality he had originally in the design.

Instead of having a set plan, I decided to draw something I could build off of story-wise. I do not particularly remember Amaris's lore and I believe it was not well-explored despite him being quite an important character.

The glorious crown of doritos (THE GEM BEING WRONGLY COLORED ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE TIARA IS DRIVING ME UP A WALL.)

In my ex's lore, Aspar's parents, I believe... died early? She was thrown into rule as she was heir. Anyways, she did heinous genocidal shit to her people but that's Normal in my ex's story.

Again, Kavi is her servant (previous redesign)

Immediately I looked at Aspar and knew that her design did not convey her royal title. Of course, the one thing my ex did right was make her seem like a child playing pretend due to minimalism. This was not his intention, and I decided to Not Make A Child (my ex also made it an incestuous relationship between her and her brother. I should make a drinking game out of this.)

The only real notes about her design build off directly from Kavi's.

- Cold color palette to contrast Kavi's warm one

- Cane used as an accessory despite its intrinsic purpose being a mobility aid. See Kavi's commentary for why.

- horns are synthetic and meant to mimic that of Kavi's species (which does not yet have a name.) This is because I decided Kavi being coded as black works, as she appropriates physical features of [species] (race) yet coats it in a hue usually unnatural to them, making something demonized into something stylish. The horns are also... literally whitewashed.

Now this should be immediately jarring to you. HOW DID WE GET HERE??? THIS ISN'T EVEN A REDESIGN??

Well, objectively... kinda. Same name, same personality. The point of making him this... dog-dragon thing actually has a lot more to do with how I'm steering the allegory.

In my ex's lore, he has a sister named Asper. She's royalty, and despite him bloodline, he is treated as her personal servant. (Also they were incestuous and their blatantly toxic relationship woobified because Why The Hell Not. Thanks, ex.)

Instead, I'm making them non-genetically related, and Asper a humanoid. I like the idea of him being her exotic "dog", an accessory. With the role of being her servant, she often asks for what he cannot obey, as he lacks opposable thumbs nor arms, yet all the intelligence to rival her (e.g physical disability) and belittled for his inhuman appearance (loose ties to public discomfort around physical disability) along with inhuman mannerisms (loose toes to public discomfort around neurodivergence.)

I could go further and dig into his culture and make him generally non-white coded, as Sapient Dog Things would hold quite a difference to the social norm, starting with background. Though there may be a problem with depicting a racially coded character as dog-like. Unsure.

I refuse to think this thing is super relevant to his story's lore. Actually the first big antagonist which did god awful triggering shit, then proceeded to woobify her.

I wanted to breathe new life into the design with legs that take up Half of The Fucking Canvas and Arms That Can Reach God. I ended up taking some inspiration from tailless whip scorpions. I like how it turned out!

In lore I might make her evil w/ no redemption arc or something.

The krita filter for the background is ing the GMC-qt or Whatever It Was Called under contours, towards the top there is a filter called "Edge Offset"

This was actually his self-insert. My favorite part is how he didn't both to remove ANY part of the watermark so we just. Have "Photoroom-oomoom"

Instead of doing 3 sets of wings, I went with drawing the wings in 3 segments to put honor to this without being Too Much.

The Neko features were entirely removed as they added nothing.

I had to capture the whole "This individual is a maternal older sibling figure who overworks, is empathetic, and has a witty bite to them" that the original design put NO justice to.

As for the context of "All roads lead to Ireland" (the secondary text below the name.) This was. This was an inside joke after I pointed out how I accidentally made most of their color palette the TransIrish flag <- I DON'T SUPPORT RADQUEERS I HAVE TO MAKE THIS CLEAR

And so my dumbass friend said "Instead of all roads leading to Rome, all roads lead to Ireland" as we were joking about the flag before I even started my design. I made her canonically (Cis)Irish to honor this.