#our anemies

Some revisited doodle concept art of my characters from one of my other "indie animation" pilot animatics I am holding hope to continuing to make: Our Anemies

I actually reposted an old animatic for it here:

I hope you can find time to watch it. The characters and world-building are getting a soon-to-be refined design update, if Parker's raincoat doesn't give that away, but I hope this old animatic can still be enjoyed because the core concept is still within it.

From the youtube video description:

The gist is that the story takes place in a world where people's inner souls and true selves are reflected through an external, creature-like companion called an Anemy. Anemies are viewed as a violent problem in society, not a cool monster companion, because they are prone to storing and then becoming oversaturated with their human's repressed, volatile emotions which can lead to them violently attacking people and lashing out if not kept under control. As a result, training them to be obedient is required and mandatory from a young age and it's actually forbidden for a human to form a personal relationship to their anemy because of the tangible threat that if they become more immediately connected to their human, they will store those volatile emotions and lose control, and by extension, outright harm their human and others around them. It gets even scarier when if an anemy loses control, they can double, or even quadruple or more in size and actually become destructive, property-damaging, rampaging monsters.

The story follows the main character, Parker, on his first day of high school, trying to fit in with the other kids around him except for one massive problem: In private, he got too attached to his anemy, Mae, because she was his only friend after he was relentlessly bullied his whole life, and now he has to try to keep anyone from knowing he is both breaking massive anemy obedience rules, along with being way too sensitive and girly in his behaviors to be treated like a "proper" boy by the other kids around him, resulting in his bullying and social outcasting.

In the animatic, Parker had to hide during lunch at school after running away because he got picked on by another student (who as it turns out, was bullying him with his old childhood best friend, Nathan, who refuses to acknowledge they were once friends), and he couldn't let anyone potentially catch him crying or hugging his anemy for comfort.

Despite his attempts to hide, he is found by a girl named Emely, who approaches him to make sure he's alright after she was trying to stop another girl, Lou, from battling with Parker's bullies, though clearly NOT on his behalf but due to an overt pre-established hatred for said bullies.

To Parker's surprise, Emely is extremely friendly and chillax about him having a more connected companionship to his anemy, and seems to share the sentiments, despite how reputation burning it is.

Here's some of the OLD beatboards preceding this animatic scene I roughed out if you want some more story context.

Please enjoy them, I thought they were a fun read.

If people are interested, I can put the old pitch thumbnail/beatboards back up online in full but it never got much traction.

I have yet to see anything even remotely similar in concept so I hope people can notice it. I have a lot of other old concept art I can always repost as well if anyone is interested while I find time to update the story.

That's the really loose vision for it, I hope to bring this story back a lot harder with updated everything, and will be posting art of the characters soon.

If this project or any of my other projects interest you, please subscribe on my subscribestar (though be aware I tackle darker more mature, proship-centric themes in my work)

and be sure to support me on ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/amazynglyme

WIP of Constance from my pilot i'm making for Our Anemies...

She's a major character that shows up pretty early on so I was trying to more finalize her design. She's uh, a sexy "i crave death" mad scientist type character and her hair is never doing anything coherent due to story reasons. She's Lou's much older best friend LMAO and keeps enlisting the kids in her experiments for jerky and shady reasons,,, perhaps.. you'll have to stay along the story to find out.

There was a reply I made to a comment on this animatic I drew a few years back, but I wanted to repost my response here because I like being able to start sharing my story ideas and what is occurring in my head with them... spoilers don't matter to me in a world that isn't giving my art room to be here, i'd rather talk about my stories than let them die in obscurity because they weren't allowed to be noticed until they were "finished" and there was no way to keep making them without my stability or even passion shared back with me (so thank you, commentor).

For context to my reply, it's following up on lore I established from this post here, so you would need to read that first: https://amazynglyme.tumblr.com/post/812648215135633408/some-revisited-doodle-concept-art-of-my-characters

Parker's design is shifted from the original animatic, this is closer to his final draft with some tinkering still needed.

On the animatic, the commentor says: "I can imagine it's extremely hard not to form a close personal bond with your Anemy, especially since they can talk and seem to have human-level sentience."

My response and feelings:

Actually, YOU'D THINK THAT and I was back and forthing on the same logic despite having resolved it, but I think it actually isn't too hard to keep a personal relationship to one's anemy at a distance, at least outwardly, if there's a large societal taboo around it and a genuine fear of them attacking people from lashing out from getting to connected to their human's repressed emotions if they have a closer bond. people who do have a closer bond to their anemy would just be extremely outcasted because they'd have to stay hidden to not get caught, and it can lead to actual law-breaking and trouble because it's considered a hazard to the safety of everyone around them, so it'd be a more underground community.

I also think about how irl, people can't even easily connect to their repressed emotions or understand them (or we wouldn't all be glorifying therapy for answers) or easily "love themselves", so when an anemy is like an external representation of what is happening within you beyond your conscious awareness, I can see it being easy for someone's self hatred to be taken out on their anemy, especially if the anemy isn't shaped properly to give them a better status or reputation, the person wouldn't even need to want to form a close bond with them because their own feelings of disgust would get put on their anemy. The way your anemy looks is very important because people use it to identify the kind of person you are and will determine what you're fit for in society based on it.

This was stuff I was hoping to really sell harder in the pilot animatic as I revisit finishing it… i want to actually take a little more time around this particular scene establishing the shame around Parker's situation and Emely's reveal of being actually scary (to him) laxer than anyone he's ever met in his life and even showing her own position, but didn't get to grab it as hard in this version because I was simply trying to just get the basic scene down as fast as possible for my own reference.

I want to really dig into these concepts pretty deeply because I rarely see people explore emotional states and self understanding of who a person is in our world the way I need it explained, and the anemy external counterpart is made to be an extremely easy, on the nose reference to it while getting to more easily say what needs to be said and then get into the complexities under it because that inner world is now externalized to be a starting point for it instead of all the guesswork of who a character is under the surface (without an anemy) in any other media being the final reveal.

Example: A headstrong character with a frightened anemy tells you the person has some insecurities under their personality, and in a regular story you'd be having to learn that this headstrong person is possibly more cautious with context clues and that'd be the final reveal in a big episode where you learn they actually had struggled with those feelings. Meanwhile in this story, you see it portrayed in the anemy from the get go and WHAT and WHY and how it shapes the person is a deeper exploration and I can't wait to break everyone with showing how much more you can explore character and story than just getting to talk about the basics.

Emely's anemy is really shy, skittish and standoffish, unlike Emely who is more chill, social and outgoing, but it gets publicly overlooked because Alligator just "looks cool" which boosts Emely's popularity and no one is really talking to their anemies in public for people to know what kind of dynamic they have. It's very clear that Emely is actually more anxious and worried about what she's up to and how she is perceived by others, but doesn't outwardly show weakness about it, so she may not be as chill and popular as she is, thankfully no one knows that if Alligator is just there to stand close to her and look badass.

Parker on the other hand is a walking target with Mae, he's a boy who just can't even have a social life because Mae is fluffy and PINK and he can't even figure out how to shift how people perceive him so he doesn't get to live away from it no matter how he tried to talk about himself. He understandably is sensitive and scared and has a lot of repressed anger about his life that Mae is always biting and at risk of exploding with, and because he already has such a deep social isolation he turns to her for comfort he can't receive elsewhere which endangers him further. why he's such an important "sensitive boy" main character to me is because he actually was a character i wrote years BEFORE Steven Universe or Izuku MHA existed based on my own life and how i was bullied for being too sensitive and "Crying too much" (no joke) and so I have a very different world to talk about it and those stories never really maintained their own logic in what these personalities traits were for imo. ANYWAYS BIG RANT, I will leave it there thanks if you read it.

Then for my own sanity and not part of the comment response:

This is intended to be such a different story than say a digimon "monster-companion" rehash and beyond that superficial overlay just because any storywork needs to be lined with pre-existing ideas to start having a foundation here at all to be actualized by others, it really has little in common with it. Believe me when I say the world-building is incredibly different and much more fleshed out and explained. It has very vague flavors of The Golden Compass but that's because it drew from a similar source of inspiration, an external representation of a person's inner world, and TGC doesn't even begin to rationalize or express any of the ideas for what that dynamic can be in it, like at all. It's largely lost imo by people not understanding how people actually work within their own unawareness and subconscious. I say this as a psych nerd who went very hard on this concept back when I was in high school of all age ranges because when I was an even younger elementary school kid, I had that real life existence of being able to communicate with inner identities and companions that were written off by those around me as having a "vivid imagination" while I was actually learning what is happening within us and what our minds are and can be capable of. So I just really have a lot of my own things to say on the concept that I need to drag out into a story. I don't like to delve into talking about dissociative identity disorder because it's a very broken concept and an experience ill-defined and stigmatized exhaustingly (in the big ol' year of 2026, how much human intelligence devolves is plain as day) by people who never even began to understand their own baseline behaviors of what was forming their ideas and words and mind limitations, let alone what identity and mind fragmentation even is to have any right to think they are superior for denying its complex role in anyone's way of existing, but I have a huge tangent on that which I don't like speaking on to not have to walk around that violence and abuse, and would prefer to explore it pretty deeply in this story as well because it's dire to me people actually learn what the hell they are wrong about with everything when it comes to piecing together their own inner worlds and just noticing what their minds are generating in the most ABC learning way. They don't want to know what is truly coming through them to even deny that others may lean into experiences that deviate from their rigid thinking but have full flexibility in a world as vast and capable as the mind and its feelings itself.

Talking about this story has always been walled off to me because I can't meet people on the same page if they can't even start to understand even their own shit version of psychology to know where I'm leaning the world-building, and I feel I have to sort of poke my head around ideas that don't truly encapsulate what the story is even about to start a line of communication. I long to get to a place where things are just sane enough for me to start making the story with the living stability needed to keep moving it. I know the concepts will differentiate and speak for themselves pretty plainly as it unfolds.

I've never in my life seen anyone want to go this angle in extracting ideas like this into their storytelling, and no steven universe "song about anxiety" PSA will ever begin to meet anything head-on about the darkness of the world we exist in and how it touches our minds and inner worlds and what is actually ripping through all of us. I see this story as needing to explode about the messiness and sickness of our reality and what happens to our own minds and ideas and lives as opposed to trying to walk over all of it as a "but look at the easy lesson I learned" because I cherish real story that takes people to real needed places to feel like they were able to find out something about themselves and the world that made them want to meet it differently, not just discourse about how well it superficially moralized its imagery or lessons.

And so I really live with needing to see it exist under my own life that I know has the lived experiences and inner work I've done to know what I want to say and why and really get into the darker themes with how our world tears people apart from the inside out for how their own existences are looked through.

I plan to make this an indie animation pilot. I know people like to criss-cross the idea of "pilot episode" into delegitimatizing it because "everyone and their mom" is grabbing for it, but I had been planning this for easily more than half a decade now and as a comic before that, and between it all I just want to stop getting false starts into it.

I wish I could figure out what kind of shading this story needs, more finalized looking character sheets ? A mock up pitch packet? More explained story? To want to just say I want to support the making of it. (People aren't even watching the animatics I do finish so that's clearly not what is holding it up otherwise i'd have folded more of it easily, i've seen people get support and funding for their projects by just wanting to make an animatic so I wish I knew what I was apparently not getting across properly)...

When I get this working, i hope the interest doesn't stop. I can try doing a mock up pitch packet just to see if it'll hand more people to want to stick around so I can actually finish the animatic because right now i don't have living stability guaranteed to meet ANY of my projects in a reasonable deadline which is heartbreaking for me and why I can't just follow through consistently. Every month I happen to just not lose my housing is still a month lost to doing any work and finalizing because I had to fight to not lose my housing for that next month. I wish my situation was safer.