me and your mom fr

normal style:

so to start small, i once again loc'd his hair! as said in the ifà redesign, it's a really simple and easy way to keep the shape language of the original hair without compromising the character's visual blackness. additionally, as someone who is clearly inspired by the punk subculture and is also a farmer, he'd likely want something fun, but practical, and so locs would definitely be the way he goes. (i hc citlali as the local loctician since she raised ororon and learned how to take care of his hair from when he was little.)

i also darkened his skin. it works better with the concept i had in mind for this design and also fixes the issue with aggressive contrast in his design, imho (that is, giving him darker skin makes his dark clothes stand out less so the stuff that actually needs to stand out (i.e. the details) actually get to shine). plus he's based off of a yoruba deity so like. duh.

(apologies for the horrific quality folks)

in addition to the locs, i also swapped out the under eye tattoo for yoruba face paint, and added some to his lips and chin as well, for continuity's sake.

i also changed the size and placement of his ears. in his og design, his ears are supposed to be that of an iktomasaur, which is pretty clearly has massive ass ears. additionally, the ears perched on top of his head makes no biological sense, so i moved them down to where ears actually start from. i think the deal with the ears in the original was probably to give the vibe of being a wolf boy, which is weird to me when every part of his design seems to say bat. i didn't really reference the shape of the ears of the iktomasaur (in another pass at a redesign, that's probably gonna be imperative) but i just enlarged the ears he already has. (i imagine that the other ear is flopped over under his hood lmaoo)

speaking of hoods, i kept his hood mostly the same, but i got rid of his ugly-ass leather cloak thing, and made it into part of his scarf instead. i think the leather cloak/cape makes literally no sense since they live in a tropical/desert climate, especially when all his clothes are dark. in fact, i got rid of all the leather, minus boots, gloves and belt.

torso time!!

so i exchanged his top for what is essentially a short agbada (a-gba-da), which is a part of traditional nigerian formal menswear. now, i don't usually like to repurpose things, and it doesn't make sense for him to be wearing formalwear... but it doesn't make sense for him to be wearing multiple layers of leather either, so who cares. i couldn't pass up the bat-wing silhouette potential of a cinched-in agbada, so that's exactly what i gave him ^^. also the patterns on it are a riff of of that eye motif he has.

i extended the back of his scarf too to keep that bat-wing look, since i liked it, but that was kinda all i kept from his original design on his torso.

i gave him a leather utility belt also, because that's fun and cool, and fits with the fact that he's a literal farmer. i obviously had to put beads somewhere on his design, and i decided to go for his waist to really soup up what's a pretty plain utility belt.

the one question that was playing through my mind with this redesign was: “how can i preserve the punk and the leather, without compromising the practicality necessary for his design to be readable?” and so the main way i did this was by making some of the most obviously farmer-y aspects leather and more punk inspired.

in keeping the darkness of his color scheme too, i think his more emo/punk/alternative style comes through, even though you can tell that its tempered by the requirements of his manual labor job. hence the big, strappy, leather farm gloves that match the design motifs on his boots. i also added a reference to his archery in there, since his last two fingers are gloveless, like on an archery glove. plus i thought it would look cool.

along with the gloves, i thought turning his tattoos into body paint not only preserves the alt feeling of the character having tattoos in the first place, but also feels more culturally relevant. it also serves to emphasize the fact that he actually works on his appearance, because the existence of body paint implies that the wearer puts it on.

with the bottom half of his clothes, i wanted to stick with simplicity for the pants so that it wouldn't take away from the complexity of the boots, which for me was really important, because i didn't want to overdesign him, like genshin has a propensity to do. the rips in the pants i kept because it works well to add visual intrigue without making it unnecessarily complex, and definitely contributes to the 'roughness' one might expect from a farmer.

in matching his boots to his gloves, it not only adds balance, but adds to the narrative that this is a character who cares about his appearance to some extent, considering both the practical and aesthetic aspects of his presentation. i made the boots a little more practical-looking also, by taking away that weird zipper thing he had going on, so they look like something a person could actually do work in.

i think that the keeping of the leather serves as a nice contrast to the material of the agbada and the scarf, alluding to the fact that he's considered a weirdo in his community. black leather is uncommon among farmers and the already alternative, flashy style, with the purple palms of his gloves and the shape silver clasps on both them and the boots, i think it serves to show how much he stands out, not just in his community but in his design as well.

nightsoul state:

his nightsoul state was way easier to do than ororon’s since there didn't seem to be any specific design motifs i needed to watch out for the nightsoul blessing of the masters of the nightwind, since citlali's seem... citlali specific. i just lit up the patterns on his hood and added a few extra patterns, along with lighting up his body paint also.

closing statements:

the main take-away from this redesign i feel is that a character’s design has to relate to their in-universe experience. a person should be able to tell, at a glance, some major aspect of how they live from their design, not necessarily just their personal aesthetic, especially in a fantasy world like genshin, where showing is far more important than telling. it needs to be incredibly difficult to decontexualize your character, if its readable. you shouldn't be able to completely remove the character from their lived experience completely unaltered, otherwise that character isn't tethered at all to their story and world, which is a mark of a bad character design. obviously, this only applies if a character isn't a standalone figure, which ororon, as a genshin four-star, definitely isn't. people should be able to rely on their eyes to tell them who a character is and does, rather than on a story quest or lengthy explanation.

basically: a good design should show you almost everything you need to know about a character from the jump. ororon doesn't do this at all. he looks like a regular degular emo boy from someone's sketchbook age thirteen, rather than a hermit farmer guy who's a little different and sees his vegetables as his friends and might be the hero of his adoptive tribe. and i hate that for him.

i think he's fun as a character, he's silly with ifà and sweet in general. but his design and blatant lack of respect for the culture his name is taken from, makes him really hard to get past. either way, its imperative to not only respect your sources, but also your character and their existence in their world, and for me, thats probably the most important part.