#kidd hammersmith

In theory, being home for a month means that I would get a lot of drawing done, but in practice, I lose my tablet pen in a stupid place for 3 weeks and spend more time laying around than looking for it.

Inktober 2018: Day 26 - Stretch

Inktober 2018: Day 14 - Clock

"That's a nice watch. Too bad you won't be able to tell the time on it once I've broken the face. Your face."

THIS ACTUALLY KIND OF CAME UP THE OTHER DAY...So I’ve been thinking about it!

Kidd has a very casual way of speaking and has a tendency to slur her speech or drop off parts of words. (but she definitely speaks more eloquently than her mentor, even with evidence of his influence in her voice.) Kidd cleans up her speech when discussing business, or when she’s teaching someone something about metalworking.

Hikari is a very unclear speaker, especially around new people and in crowds. She has a tendency to mumble and mash her thoughts together, cutting herself off mid-sentence and rephrasing herself in a different way. And she stutters. Or, lord, does she stutter. Get her talking about something that she’s passionate about, though, and she tends to speak much more brightly and with less uncertainty. Especially if that something is some kind of living creature.

Svanhilda had proper speech drilled into her from a very early age (the cost of having a retired Ishgardian missionary for a father), and even though she will speak in fragmented sentences, she always enunciates every word clearly and to completion. Her father used to pretend that he couldn’t understand her whenever she pronounced words incorrectly or abbreviated them. In certain situations, her experience as a soldier or working as a deckhand show through in how she chooses her words.

Baeyl usually speaks with clear, calm eloquence, in an effort to be taken seriously and maintain a respectable image. By and large, she keeps her language pretty soft, if serious. It’s rare, but her time as a Redbelly will sometimes rear its head...much to the surprise of those she is close with! (let Baeyl say ‘fuck’.)

Inktober 2018: Day 6 - Drooling

What makes you the most emotional about your muse? (Baeyl) 

The biggest themes I think about when it comes to writing Baeyl are themes of recovery, and it is something I get emotional about with her. 

Baeyl by nature is pessimistic. She assumes the worst by default. Hope is hard for her to come by, and harder for her to hold onto. She expects that some day she’s going to be alone, either by driving others off or having them taken from her. She hates herself for conscious choices she made, people she hurt (and worse), and she can’t forgive herself for any of it. That self-loathing and her expectation for loneliness make me the most emotional for her, and the fact that she has to struggle to move past that and end up somewhere better.

Why do you think you connect to your muse? (Hikari) 

whew

i’m about to make a really embarrassing admission here and say that Hikari is a derivative of a character that…started out as a self-insert character when I was 13, lmao. Which becomes much more painfully obvious when you know that my name irl is Kari. 

It’s…kind of embarrassing for me to think of sometimes. But it’s one of those things that I’ve had the character for so long that there are some fundamental elements of her and themes surrounding her that she never strays too far from, even when she gets re-imagined for a new setting.

OBVIOUSLY (hopefully obviously), a lot of things have changed over that time and through different iterations of the character. There are still many traits I share with Hikari (and…that said, all of my characters have traits of mine, to some degree), but I think with this version of Hikari, the things that I hit closest on area - she has no idea what the fuck she’s doing half the timeb - deals with discomfort by being avoidantc - easily distracted, loses focus if too much is going on from trying to pay attention to all of it at the same time

There are other things that connect me to Hikari, but by and large, all of my Dumb Anxious People-Pleasing Brain Shit gets put in her and cranked up to eleven.

Do you genuinely want your muse to be happy? What do you think would make them most happy in life? (Kidd)

This is a hard question with an odd answer…?

Most of my characters have some point want them to be at by the end of their development. Things they have to come to terms with, get better from…some goal in mind.

But Kidd stops being interesting to me if she’s too happy.

Like…the thing that would make Kidd the happiest in her life is if she just accepted and fully embraced the fact that she isn’t a happy person. And she doesn’t have to be. And that’s okay.

There are some things that she’s never going to get closure on. There are some things she will never stop being afraid of. But having baggage and having fears doesn’t make you an incomplete person. Finding happiness doesn’t make you a complete person. She’s going to spend her whole life being a high-strung trainwreck of a person because this is just what she got. And the people she’s closest to are also trainwrecks.

“Ah…Hell.”

Kidd trills her lip and reels back on her heels, one hand rubbing at the back of her neck. Looking up to the sky for a few moments, she shrugs.