Runeclan

What does that mean? It means over the hiatus, I decided I wanted to change up a lot of things for the series. I wanted to redesign most of the cast to drastically improve the designs I’d gotten deeply dissatisfied with over time. I wanted to start writing a script instead of improvising my writing/dialogue/scenes/plot on the fly, so now I actually have a fully-fleshed out story in mind with over 15k words of script. I wanted to shift fully into embracing the new style of how I draw the webcomic pages, with more “standard comic-like” page layouts, a greater emphasis on composition, backgrounds, perspective, design, etc. I remade the designs, the family tree, added an allegiances page, I’m remaking the main pinned post, I’m readjusting the content warnings for the series, and more. I’m redoing how I write, draw, and design the story, fundamentally from the ground up.

Now, that probably sounds like a lot, but from your perspective, very little will probably change at all. It’s mostly a reworking of the internal/back-end side of things, adjusting myself and how I approach the comic. Like, for example, before I very much lived by the rule of “make all of it up on the spot and fly by the seat of my pants” in everything with the comic, with my writing, my character designs, the sets, etc. Everything. Many times I would literally come up with the character design for the first time on the same page they showed up for the first time lmao. And I feel like the weaker points in quality in older Aphidclan pages reflect that! Maybe this is just me being my own worst critic, but I feel like you can TELL at times that I was literally making up the designs and the dialogue on the spot, page by page, with zero planning lmao.

But this time, I’m shifting my own perspective on that. Instead of improvising my scenes and dialogue on the spot, I write my scripts months, even years in advance, thus giving me a better under of the bigger picture and allowing me to do more foreshadowing and sowing of long-term narrative seeds. Instead of making up characters on the spot, I have them go through rounds of concept design and pre-development work first (all work that you can see on the Patreon), giving myself the time to really perfect them before they’re ready for presentation in the comic. From the readers perspective, your perspective, nothing changes (except for maybe the quality). You still get pages as normal and character redesigns as normal! It’s my methods and my workload that’s changing drastically lol.

The story is still pretty much the same, I’m still using the same plot, the same story beats, etc, just this time instead of crossing my fingers and going “man, I sure hope I can find some way to work my way around to those story beats someday!” I’m actually scripting them out and have a defined, set finish line now lmao. I’m fleshing it out more!

Hence why I’m calling it a “soft reboot” though, and not a full-scale hard reboot (like a new generation of my little pony). I’m rebooting behind the scenes production. Hopefully to tell the same story, with the same characters, but this time with significantly higher artistic quality. It’s actually been really nice to have this hiatus, because it gave me the opportunity to put myself through what was essentially a heavy-duty, self-taught, art masterclass workshop, pushing my limits, testing my skills, and driving myself to improve a lot in just a few months. I feel like I put myself through some form of creative crucible, and came out radically changed as an artist on the other side lmao. And I’m glad for it, because I really want Aphidclan to be a project I can be proud of. I’ve been struggling motivation-wise ever since the comic began, living with the goal of “minimal effort, as much minimal work as possible, take shortcuts, make shit up on the spot” clashing with my need to create something high-quality, something excellent that is worthy of my pride. It was draining and demoralizing to produce something I wasn’t fully satisfied or happy with, when I always craved more. I’m glad I’m getting that “more” now.

But that does also mean the characters might be changing a bit, too. I feel like a lot of my old writing for the characters was very shallow and surface-level, at least by my definition lol. They were too simple for me, they didn’t feel like fleshed-out, complex people with rich inner lives, with positive traits and negative traits and trauma and motivations and interests and mannerisms. I struggled to emotionally connect with them not just as characters, but as people. And part of that was because I was scared to give them flaws and trauma and angst and negative sides. But I’m not now. I’ve fleshed the characters out a lot more, and I want to explore more of their trauma, their past, their scars and their angst. I wanna explore their flaws and acknowledge how it would impact their relationships. I want characters that are straight up wrong about things but believe in their point of view unshakably, I want characters that lie to the audience, I want characters that lie to each other. No one perspective is the 100% perfect correct perspective, and no characters perspective/beliefs is that of the narrative’s, or my own. It’s theirs. And they can be wrong. I want them to be wrong and make mistakes and fuck up. I don’t wanna be scared of writing that anymore.

Like, to me, Shadebreak, Icesheep, and Sparkspeckle are all huge anime fans, but each specialize in their own niche genre of anime, and Stormwhisper is the “normie” brother who doesn’t like anime or cartoons much at all. Shadebreak would watch more shōnen anime and gothic anime, like Chainsaw Man, Hellsing, Castlevania, Death Note, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, etc, human au Icesheep would 100% be a furry and would dabble in a lot of furry anime, but also have a lot more variety in other genres with a leaning interest in deeper stories and romance and tragedy. I’d say his tastes are a lot closer to mine personally, with being a fan of Beastars, InuYasha, Dungeon Meshi, Aggretsuko, Neon Genesis: Evangelion (Rei is his fave, Asuka is my fave, we would have debates over this if he was ever made real, and we’d both agree that Kaworu is top tier), he’d be a total nerd and I think he’d be especially drawn to the classic quiet, gentle anime boys, usually with white or silver hair, the love interests with more brooding backstories that conflict with their tender, sensitive hearts—which I think would mean he’d really love and resonate with Legoshi as a tender, sweet, gentle, quiet, kind, romantic soul. and also he’d find the carnivore x herbivore plotline absolutely fascinating, and also he’d be a brony too, but to move on to Sparkspeckle— Spark would be more interested in magical girl anime specifically. Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Little Witch Academia, the likes. Anything fantasy that’s whimsical and feel-good and adorably nostalgic I’d say. Icesheep’s interests are likely to overlap with his siblings, but Shadebreak and Sparkspeckle have very little in common TV-wise and refuse to have movie night together, while Icesheep has movie night with both of them.

Nimble, Berry, and Goldshine wouldn’t be as interested in anime as the 3 siblings, but they would all be gamers and very interested in video games. Goldshine is a cozy gamer to me, he’d like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley (he’d adore Sebastian, Abigail, or Harvey), Harvest Moon, and maybe a bit of Zelda here and there. Nimble is a FNAF fan. Foxy is his favorite. Berry is a Sanrio fan. My Melody is her favorite. They do not get along. But they do compromise on both being Pokemon fans. I do think Nimble is also a fan of the TCG and competitive aspects of the game while Berry is not interested in competitive Pokemon or the TCG at all.

Blisswhistle, Spiderglade, and Pearlstar are all characters that I could like…probably feasibly say they’re kinda interested in video games? Like for my sake I could say they dress up as deltarune characters because they both like deltarune, and it wouldn’t be a terribly inaccurate offense to their character for me to claim that. But they’re not Certified Gamers in my mind. But if they were gamers, I could see Pearlstar liking NITW, all of them liking Deltarune, and I think Blisswhistle and Spiderglade would bond by playing FPS games together, and Blisswhistle would reluctantly, masochistically, angrily be a fan of Souls-like games, like Hollow Knight and Silksong. Blisswhistle would make angry tweets about not being able to beat a boss in Silksong while Goldshine is vibing on his 5 year old, undeleted Animal Crossing island doing his dailies forever, and managing to find the whimsy in them.

If anyone dabbles in horror media, it’s Nimble, Blisswhistle, Pearlstar, and occccaaassionally Shadebreak. Lmao I actually like to imagine Shadebreak has a low scare tolerance? Like they’re the exact kind of horror fan who goes “I’m not scared! You can’t scare me, I’m untouchable! I’m not scared of anything!” Only to yelp and jump a full foot in the air when a massive spider crawls out from under the fridge. They enjoy horror media from a safe distance. They’re interested in horror, but they’re also scared of it at the same time and don’t want to admit it lmao. Blisswhistle is a DOOM fan and has played through the entirety of the MyHouse.wad mod and is still not okay about it. Rainbow is now reading House of Leaves. Pearlstar has an untouchable scare tolerance level and just finds pure enjoyment and entertainment in it all. If you showed star a gory slasher film, he’d never jump or flinch, he’d just smile, a bit too giddily, the entire way through and say “that was nice! ^u^” at the end of the film. I can see Goldshine avidly watching video essays about indie horror series on YouTube, but rarely if ever actually watching the horror series themselves. Nimble is exclusively a mascot horror fan, and you bet your ass he’s one of the 10-13 year old boys in the audience watching the new FNaF film in theaters. To him, it is the peak of all media ever.

Gravepaw is from @intothe-graveclan and I CANNOT wait to know more about this wet mop of an animal.

Seafoamrise from @drownthesun-gen has the best but most complicated design ever. I want to know everything about him. (double fanart beaaaam)

Rootpaw from @rooted-clangen my beloved. I ADORE the creepy aesthetic of Rooted pages.

Rookfeather from @fallenclan is a character I am so fond of + i love maple seed accessory. Fallenclan going on for 300+ moons is a feat that both amazes and frightens me.

Flintpaw is from @runeclangen which has suchhh amazing art, all the pages are a visual feast.

Brackenshine from @glitterclan is such a compelling character and reading Glitterclan is ultimately what inspired me to make a clangen blog, so she's got to be here!!

Finally this moon is done!