sketchy stuff: art blog

(My apologies ahead of time because this is going to be long.)

First off, to be clear: whitewashing is a thing. Artists are guilty of it. Franchises are guilty of it. Casting directors are guilty of it. I am guilty of it even when I genuinely love the characters as they are. My shortfallings as an artist often come from a place of technical 'whatthefuckery' when it comes to coloring. Skin tones. ALL skin tones. How to not make your nice human person look washed out. Balancing tones to still let features shine. Color theory and shading, because if we get into it, skin color isn't just tan, or brown, or pink. It's green and red and purple in there too. And trying different medias, digital, traditional, a limited palette? Hell, it's partly why I keep on stupidly making so many blonde OCs. Because the hair shape reads easily in black and white.

So part of it is that. Color is challenging, at least for me. Maybe others have better approaches, but every artist learns and suffers differently. Art is hard and frustrating and resistant to easy improvement and sometimes it drives me nuts. But I love it, and keep coming back and want to keep learning. Improving coloring skin tones. Improving coloring fuckin...everything. Improving BACKGROUNDS, not hating hands. How to draw ears as more than just one shape. How to draw interactions, because I am less-practiced and draw LOTS OF SOLO ART. And I do this for myself, because I love it and it brings me equal amounts joy and frustration.

(I guess my conclusion to this is that I am no perfect artist but I am trying, and trying to learn and do love characters and people. Please be patient, kind audience. Art is hard. All people are still beautiful.)

But back to Crosshair. I have thoughts about this man, as you may have guessed from the hyperfixation of content. I love fandoms, have my share of characters I obsess about, but something about the Bad Batch and him and particular hooked me in to an extent that he has grown far beyond his canon character, because their story told so much more in layers that lingered long after.

Crosshair is absolutely a fucked up chosen one archetype in canon. Down to his design, especially with his design, he is wrong compared to other clones. Tem and regs have broader faces. Crosshair's is narrow, with more delicate facial features. Regs: dark hair, rare blondes and a few reds (Tech, Emerie, and the female clones). Nope. Cross is fuckin SILVER.

Regs: broad build for strength and multi-task range (from Tem). Nope. Toothpick man with pencil legs and simultaneous runway/thin old man vibes. Regs: many tasks, generalists, go in blazing. Crosshair: the only fuckin single named SNIPER clone in the entire TV canon? Watches from afar? Sees the whole field, goes unseen, lies in wait. Regs: work together. Cross: works ALONE. Regs comply, he is resistant. I could go into speech patterns and voices but you get the gist.

Nothing about this fuckin little blorbo is normal and he is not supposed to be.

He is wrong by design. This defines him. He is, I believe, painfully aware of it on multiple levels and can do jack shit about it. So he makes himself everyone's problem before they can hit first. At least that way it's justified.

Circling back to that grey hair. It's not just blonde, but gold star anime chosen one SPECIAL hair. And why grey?

It's a deliberate design choice, and I think it does two things among several. One, it strips him of youth simply by design. Grey is old. And he's seen too much, he's jaded, his humor is dry and deadpan--he does not think like other clones. HE THINKS LIKE AN OLD MAN WHO HAS SEEN THIS SHIT. He's the eagle-eyed sniper, bred for sight, yes, but I think he sees more truth than is easy to carry. He is a fuckin old man on the inside. Even if he's like. 12.

Two, it archetypes him as some sort of chosen one, yes, leaning into anime hair tropes. But am I wrong? Plot points exactly to that. He probably wants to blend in, but on the other hand, fuck regs, no he won't. So, chosen one. Don't talk to him about it. He won't be nice.

Beyond design and canon plotlines, though, Crosshair contains an archetype that maps painfully well onto stories and experiences beyond canon, and most of what I draw or write or headcanon now has diverged outside of the SW world. I stick him in modern AUs. Other AUs. No longer Tem Morrison's copy paste man, in identity. Moreso, his core traits and build features mapped on to stories that resonate to me outside of the Star Wars universe. Hell, the fic that got me actually, finally writing and permanently changed my brain wasn't set in canon. It was absolutely a fucked up raw nightmare, and absolutely fleshed out the worst side of this character that I had ever seen and yet it hit so hard because I understood. This version made horrible, horrible sense and I saw things I feared for those I love in him.

He draws parallels to closer things in my life. My family, siblings, patterns of addiction (not in canon, but god it fits and maps well), weaponized bitterness, secrets, internalized intelligence, complex loyalty that resists easy understanding, body dysmorphia (too tall, too thin, not what a guy is supposed to look like-). He doesn't need a lot of tweaking to start hitting close to stories I know, and there is definitely me layering my own experiences onto this character.

(And if he kinda looks like Gregory House and Clint Eastwood, well. They fit his vibe, as fucked up grey haired archetypes.)

Yeah cloneshipping is one of those things that merits its existence simply because cloning in SW universe is, *deep breath*, so fucked up. There's a split of identity, I believe, between how the viewer may assign meaning to blood kinship and how the clones are shaped to perceive that. You churn out copy-paste identical super slaves soldiers on the scale of millions (billions??) while depriving them of all natural human connections? Of course they will seek some sort of human bond with each other, presuming you haven't wiped that out, and we see clones demonstrating humanity at all levels again and again, so it's very not gone.

And for a 'society' with non-existent family structure, spanning on the order of millions, it's simply. Fundamentally divergent (read, again: fucked up) on a scope that pushing for normal/organic/family-typical relationships is just laughably foreign. Try stepping in their shoes.

And nonetheless, we do see that when given the chance i.e. isolated from the Republic/Empire, clones can and do choose 'standard' family bonds, for lack of a better term. We see Cut and Suu, Omega and her brothers, Tech and Phee (albeit, rip Tech before that could gain footing). I'm probably missing some others here but you get the drift.

Cloneshipping is its own product of their circumstance. It's survival, and I'm not getting judgy over their choices because they are literally. Conscripted slaves! With no other options!

Ahem.

Other ships, yes.

I do enjoy reading other people's MayCross and genuinely like Mayday as a character. He's such a good foil to Hunter and is desperately what Cross needs at that point in his life. I've seen some great MayCross from other artists too (Binkyisonline is a GOD at them). But MayCross is like. Stable. Normal-ish. My brain is terminally unwell and latches to ships that are also. Unwell.

I still do enjoy reading or checking out other ship art! I've got some personal recommendations for non-CrossHunt ships! (A few well-written favorites even involve original male characters). But at the end of the day, when it comes to obsessing and creating, my brain wants toxic old man yaoi. Like I said, it is unwell.