Rainbow High AU

Ah. Well—

In short, it’s an “art college” AU. I’m pretentious and think “Rainbow High” would work better as a college. Maybe Rainbow University? Who knows ✨

Hey hey hey!

Headcanons and drawings below the cut!

I do! Nothing is 100% decided though, on the off chance Rainbow High makes any of them canonically lgbt+

I like to create headcanons based on colour palettes tbh 🙈

Trans and Pan Sunny!

Lesbian Poppy!

Agender Lesbian Jade!

Bi Ruby and Skyler!

Are we totally shipping Sunny n Poppy or what?👀✨

Oh absolutely.

I’ve thought about this and I’m not sure. I might wait and see how their relationship is handled whenever the next episodes with them come out.

I like Bella, I do find her… mildly boring? I still love her, I just don’t think the show has spent as much time on her. I think it would be cool to see her have a close relationship with some of the characters besides Jade.

Amaya is cool, she reminds me of Frankie from Monster High? She has a lot of main character energy. I wish they would have done more with her seeming to be anxious at the beginning. I would probably write her as being really unsure of herself and constantly trying different things to figure out who she is and where she belongs. I do like her friendship with Sunny and I wish we got to see more of it.

I love Sunny! I wish there were more serious episodes with her as the focus. In my head, I like imagining character arcs where she and Violet grow apart, but in a healthy way. Sunny learns that she can find more valuable relationships outside of just Violet and gets the chance to be the center of attention, and Violet spends some time alone, learning that fame isn’t everything and not everything needs to have an audience. The show kind of tries to do that but they really don’t spend that much time on it.

I actually like Violet, not because I think she’s a great person though. She takes Sunny for granted and cares too much about what other people think. I like to write her as liking Sunny, but not knowing how to deal with those emotions or not wanting anyone to know, so she starts to push Sunny away. I think characters like Ruby and Jade would probably push her to step away from stuff like social media for a bit. I specifically like drawing interactions between Ruby and Violet (arguing lmao).

Jade seems like the person you might expect to be really rebellious or irresponsible, but she honestly seems like the most responsible to me. She tries to stop Bella from breaking the rules. She’s a little intense but she also seems like one of the most focused or levelheaded people in the show, and I like that. I could see her being slightly younger than everyone else and, because they don’t take things as seriously or disregard her advice, she might feel like nobody listens to her.

Poppy might be my favourite, she might be tied with Sunny. I relate to her in some ways, and have a lot of headcanons for her. The show has one episode focusing on Poppy being homesick. I would probably do more with that. I mean, monarch butterflies migrate a lot. Maybe she moved around a bit when she was younger. Maybe she gets attached to people and struggles with missing them. Poppy is described as being a social butterfly. I might write her as being someone slightly similar to Amaya, not in an anxious way though. She might not know what to do with her life, or who her real friends are, flying between different friend groups, personalities, styles, music genres. She fits in with a lot of people but tends to get lost in the crowd.

I have redesigned a lot of the Rainbow High characters. I’ve redesigned Series 1, the A’s, Series 3, some of Series 4. When I redesign characters, it isn’t necessarily because I think the original designs are bad, I just feel like it makes it funner for me to draw them and put my own spin on their themes and styles. It’s fun to take what’s already there and push it a little further. A lot of the characters have obvious motifs that are fun to lean into and design cool outfits for. Ruby has fire motifs, Poppy has butterflies, Skyler has clouds, Daria has roses, Georgia has peaches etc.

Series 2… kind of lacks that? And I don’t want to say that that makes them boring or bad. I know some people love the Series 2 characters, but these are just some things that bothered me about their motifs or lack thereof:

Stella Monroe’s theme colour is magenta. Her last name is a nod to Marilyn Monroe, an American actress. Even though Stella is British. And not an actress. But her name, colour and beauty mark is a reference to a pink dress Marilyn Monroe wore. Other than that she doesn’t really resemble Marilyn Monroe, I don’t think her second outfit is reminiscent of Monroe’s other looks. Why she’s British royalty, I genuinely don’t know.

Bella Parker’s theme colour is pink, with her name possibly referencing bella pink. She’s implied be a nod to Barbie because of her first outfit’s shirt. Overall her outfits aren’t really “Barbie”ish though.

Karma Nichols’ theme is neon green. I think two of the Kardashion’s have sported neon green hair before. All of the Kardashion’s have K names (hence, Karma).

River Kendall’s theme is teal. Rivers can look teal sometimes? He doesn’t have any motifs in his design though. His name is really the only justification for his colour. I guess his personality is kind easy-going and go-with-the-flow-y. Oh also Kendall might be a reference to “Ken Doll”.

Krystal Bailey’s theme is indigo. …We all know her original name was Jett. We know why her name was changed. I don’t know what she was renamed to Krystal though. She isn’t really crystal themed at all. And why it’s spelled with a K is also something that confuses me because it kind of undercuts Karma’s inspiration (a family that names all of their kids with K names even when they originally began with a C). I can’t think of a reason for her to specifically be indigo or named Krystal. She wears a lot of watches (probably as a nod to her always submitting her articles on time) and her headband kind looks like bunny ears, so some people have speculated that she might be inspired by the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. But that still leaves me wondering why she’s indigo specifically.

Amaya Raine’s theme is rainbow. She definitely is rainbow. That’s… kinda it.

These characters don’t need to have motifs and symbols associated with them. …But it does make me really bored with them. I love symbolism. A lack of symbols makes it really hard for me to associate things with these characters and get excited about or connect to them. Usually I use motifs and symbols to help me redesign characters and decide what needs to stay present in a character design. And because Series 2 doesn’t have these symbols like a lot of the other characters do, that can make it either really easy or really hard to redesign them. On one hand, I could probably go in a lot of different directions with their designs. On the other hand, I’m not sure how much I can change them and take away from them or add to them without changing them drastically. So with this all in mind, how would I redesign Series 2?

First things first, Stella isn’t royalty. At all. I’m sorry if you like that aspect of her but for me, it’s so tacky and annoying and unrelatable. I think in one episode it’s implied that first years aren’t allowed to be on the cheer squad but Stella (a first year) bought her way on or used her status to get in and it’s so ew. She can still be rich and British and like tea, but she’s not royalty in my redesign or AU. I’m going to keep the Marilyn Monroe inspiration for the most part but I’ve also added some inspiration from some other actresses (British ones, so my brain can cope). If you can guess who they are, great! The only hint I’m giving is that I took inspiration from the magenta dresses they wore. I also wanted Stella to have strawberry blonde hair, because pink!

I went in a bit of a different direction for Bella’s inspiration. Instead of Barbie, I’m thinking… Minnie Mouse? I just think the bows and polka dots and soft pink are really cute and fits with her theme colour a little better. The iconic “Barbie pink” fits Stella’s colour a bit better.

I don’t feel like changing Karma up that much, I just gave her roots back.

Krystal’s name is spelled with a C in my AU, it highlights Karma’s K name better. I also gave her a crystal necklace. Maybe it’s Tanzanite? I probably changed her the most. I wanted to keep things like hair hairband and watches, but I really wanted her to have a more interesting hairstyle, so I drew her with curly hair. I wanted her to look more “reporter”-y, so her outfit is different, she has more of a blazer instead of a denim jacket, and a sleek dress. The characters in my AU are adults so I guess I wanted her style to look more mature. I also gave her glasses because I wear glasses and will impose this onto any character I see fit.

River’s design is mostly okay, but his hair and absurd amount of layers bothers me. I took away the shirt tied around his waist, gave him sweatpants instead of jeans to make him look more sporty, changed his hair up a little (took some inspiration from Jock from Boyfriends.) I imagine Amaya dyed his hair and painted his nails.

Amaya is a bit hard to redesign because I can see her trying so many different things. She seems like the type of person to change up her look and style a lot (specifically her hair). Maybe some days her hair is dyed blue and other days it’s dyed red. Sometimes she tries cute looks and other days she tries something edgier. I just think it suits her “rainbow” theme when tries new styles a lot. In the show, Amaya is a fashion focus, but I think in my AU she’s going to be more of a hair and cosmetology person. I love the look of BIG!Amaya, so I mostly went off of her design. I love the gold accents on Amaya.

Am I saying that any of the Series 2 designs are bad? No, I’m just being pretentious and trying to figure out how to design them in a way that’s fun for me personally. So if anyone was wondering why I hadn’t drawn them, this was why.

I wander what they would look like if they were in this AU…..

I love them! Some of them have issues I’d have wanted fixed before they came out but overall I think the series 4 girls are really good. I’m probably going to try and get Jewel.

But yeah, I do wonder what they’d like like in my AU—