#pt asks

Firstly: thank you!!

As for lore headcanons, I'm feeling something of the equivalent of being asked what I want for Christmas and immediately losing all earthly desires. That, and the lore I focus on the most is that which is directly relevant to the comic.

If you want to do some lore reading though, I'll point you over to this older discussion I participated in about the Dungeon, Hell, and Jungle lore, something I've been intermittently trying to untangle.

While at a certain point everything turns into headcanon/comic-specific story+lore, I do try to at least base things off of in-game content where I can. Terraria doesn't really have much in the way of lore deep-divers (which- fair enough. The game's lore is sparse.), so a lot of my interpretations come directly from digging through bestiary entries/etc. and extrapolating from there. It's fun, if a bit slow-going at times.

& Yep! The comment from Malik was a reference to exactly that.

[The page in question where Andrew is shown stimming as a child.]

This is a complicated question because while a lot of a character's behaviors and personality wrap back into their themes and the story I'm trying to tell with them, to a certain extent I cannot divorce myself entirely from the characters I write. Which is to say sometimes neurodivergent traits are intentional, and sometimes they're just external influences creeping in.

That being said: compared to other characters, it is the most intentional/explicit with Andrew.

Let me summarize it this way:

Andrew has difficulty connecting with people/forming close bonds, and struggled as a child with the knowledge that many people saw something "off-putting" or strange about him that he fundamentally could not also see/conceptualize.

Andrew has always preferred the company of nature -- spacious, silent, calm -- over the chaos of other people.

Andrew is 463 years old, and thus (even in the face of changing societal expectations) has had a lot of time to learn both how to mask and create/rely on coping mechanisms. So the way he expresses himself as an (immortal) adult is very different from how he acted as a child.

It makes me very, very happy seeings folks' reactions to this scene. The comic has been dancing around Andrew's actual feelings towards things for a while, and this moment marks the beginning of the end for him -- Andrew is powerless, and despite how he slips into that helpful Guide persona for Chris, there's a part of him in there that's being dragged to his death kicking and screaming.

This chapter, and the next two to follow, are what l started the comic for and I am so, so excited to finally be here.

Thank you as well for the kind words on my art -- progress isn't always linear, but I do try to push myself and improve in the comic. I often struggle with motivating myself to put effort into one-off pieces, so working on the comic has really been instrumental in actually keeping myself drawing.

For sure! 👍

It did not! Alalia used her magic to help it bloom on this page.

A few fun facts about this scene:

First: This was one of the very first scenes I ever conceptualized for the comic. The actual contents of the scene have changed a fair bit, and the meat of it ended up split over 3-ish scenes (at the party in chapter 9, now in chapter 10, and one final confrontation in chapter 12), but specifically the idea of Alalia growing an orchid during an argument about purpose/autonomy with Andrew has been around since the start of the comic, and I'm glad it finally made it in there. Andrew's reaction to the orchid has changed in the script a few times too -- originally, it was shock/resignation, then anger (him cutting the blooms off) on-screen. The final iteration makes it a bit more subtle, as the scene cuts away before showing his direct reaction to it, and he removes the orchid from the table between chapters without directly addressing it.

Second: Since the orchid was based on an actual, IRL orchid I used to have, it was originally going to be a normal-looking orchid. This was changed last-minute to instead be a Moonglow flower, for a few reasons:

I felt that it blended too much into the background, and using a glowing plant was an easy way to make it stand out.

It felt silly using a regular, IRL flower when there are flowers in the game I could have been using instead. (Yes, there are non-herb decorative/crafting flowers as well, but I liked the idea of using a more recognizable herb from the setting.)

Moonglow grows on jungle grass, the Dryad's preferred biome. Moonglow being a jungle plant [that blooms at night] also explains succinctly why it never bloomed for Andrew -- he took it away from its preferred environment, and while he keeps it out of the sunlight, he never puts it out in the moonlight. Andrew should know this -- he's a Guide, after all -- and yet he still attempts to make it bloom where it is, thinking if he just gives it the right amount of water and better soil it will bloom eventually. Which could mean nothing.

Touch of symbolism once again nodding to Andrew's previous connection with the Lunatic Cultist.

So, I redrew it to be a Moonglow flower last minute (literally -- it was one of the very last changes I made to that page before posting it).

They might as well be OCs at this point so no worries. Sometimes I see screencaps of them and I'm like "oh my god, what have i done to my precious bois!!!"

Anyways. Yes.

13. how do they carry themselves when they’re upset?

For Yuuri, there's levels to this. I think he's trained himself quite a bit to school his emotions and expression and keep things bottled up. He developed this sort of "autopilot" habit back when he first did that bullet extraction as a kid, if you remember. I'd say he's rather robotic and cool when he's feeling stressed or upset. When the stress and negative emotions get to be too much, there is no "carrying himself". He falls apart completely like we've seen in the most recent chapters. He usually tries his best to fall apart in private, never in front of an enemy.

Phichit is interesting... I think it would be helpful to define upset.

Hey, thank you so much! This comic’s story has been an idea lingering in my head all the way back in 2015, so it’s had quite a lot of time to be developed even before it became an actual comic :p I’m glad the story was enjoyable so far!

As for this poor Mr. Strange…

1) Nathan(Andrew's brother)'s body was never recovered; his tombstone was symbolic and just meant to give the family closure and something physical to mourn and remember him by. This is also why he never carved a tomestone for the mage; there was no one except him to remember them.

2) Yes, the mage became the Lunatic Cultist. They suggested creating the doll and performed the initial work on it, and once their condition progressed to the point where they were unable to hold a needle and thread, they mentored Andrew on how to finish it.

3) Andrew originally believed that his situation was as follows: "He is immortal. Eventually, someone will ritualistically sacrifice him in Hell. This sacrifice will serve as the catalyst to release the old magic back into the world." He hoped that, through the doll/dolls (and some very careful spellcasting), they could "trick" the world into thinking that Andrew had been sacrificed.

The problem with their plan was that they fundamentally misunderstood the real situation: "Someday, Andrew will burn and die in Hell, and in so doing, be reborn as the physical manifestation of the barrier which traps the old magic in the core of the world. If this incredibly powerful monster is slain, the barrier will die with it and whoever felled the monster will be able to wield the old magic to fight the Moon Lord. If it's instead the challenger who dies, then Andrew will be resurrected once more as a human until another challenger arises and a new attempt to kill it is made."

Their plan failed because they didn't understand that replacing who was sacrificed was irrelevant. Andrew's sacrifice doesn't summon the Wall of Flesh -- instead, Andrew is the Wall of Flesh, and the sacrifice is merely the catalyst of his transformation.

Their plan did not, and never could have, worked.

As far as Andrew knew for a very long time, the mage died in Hell to the Wall of Flesh, and any other dolls are still down there, causing Andrew quite a lot of pain. At least he won't have to go directly with Chris when it's finally time.

4) From a cursory glance at the game -- I think the recent generational trauma of having their entire world almost destroyed by Cthulhu would probably put her off enjoying it, but I'll give you points for the joke!

The simplest way of phrasing it is that neither one of them actually has a set schedule or obligations, but also, they both chronically invent ways to be incredibly busy.

Chris had a fairly strict sleep schedule back when he was running a store pre-canon, so he still tries to stick with it and get up early, but since most terrible things happen at night (thanks, Moon Lord) it's slowly unraveling. He spends most of his days exploring, collecting loot, and fighting monsters. When he's at home and not eating/sleeping/cooking/cleaning/etc., he's usually either crafting or researching/studying (reading nonfiction, usually books about the old world/old languages/astronomy/astrology/spellcasting). He struggles a lot with downtime/relaxing/nonproductive hobbies since he's always been so busy prior to coming to Purity Town, always either running the store/helping around the house/caretaking for younger kids/etc., so when he has time to himself he usually immediately finds a way to fill it. He does hang out with some of the townsfolk from time to time, Malik especially, but he doesn't just "chill" very often outside of maybe some occasional solitaire or other card games. Pre-canon he was in a relationship and participated in bar trivia with a small team, but he broke up with his boyfriend and hasn't really kept in much contact with any of them since moving to town.

Andrew's sleep schedule is somewhat less reliable -- he only goes to bed when he's at a good stopping point in his work and remembers he's tired -- but he's always up with the sun. His main work is doling out advice/acting as a mediator/acting as Google for the townsfolk; people ask him questions and he answers, they ask for his advice and he gives it to them, and he weighs in on arguments to deescalate things. His "other" line of work is translating old books and compiling his historical research into, effectively, textbooks. He's in a very unique position as someone with a perfect memory, native fluency in older languages, and the unique and irreplaceable historical context that comes from actually having been around for (or only 1-2 generations removed from) the actual time periods he's writing about, and so he uses that to its fullest.

Despite living in an actual society now, Andrew's spent a long time on the edges of civilization, and so also likes to spend his time hunting, gathering, preserving, brewing, and so on. He's not entirely used to having good infrastructure and the ability to acquire food that you yourself haven't grown/hunted and stored for later, and also just enjoys the process of hunting, making his own things, and the likes, so that fills most of the remaining time he has set aside for "hobbies."

And then of course, there's all the time that Andrew is giving advice to Chris, usually in terms of suggesting what to do/where to go next or assisting him in crafting.

Thank you!! I had a lot of fun with that pose. Chris gets to be a little divine and scary, as a treat.

Here you go! It's a pretty simple cosplay, so it's fortunately very comfortable to wear for long periods of time. I've posted some other pics on my main blog!

First: It's awesome to hear my stuff has inspired you! Keep on making characters and keep creating stories!

Second: Malik has a backstory, but it's a fairly loose one -- I've gone into it a little bit here, but it skips over a lot of his life. The main points are that Malik has always had a very strong danger sense/sense for the evil and eldritch, and because of it grew into a monster hunter with a thrill for being "the predator" when fighting monsters/exotic animals. This turned into a similar enjoyment for his preferred weapon type and eventually becoming a proper arms dealer as a job. He moved out to Purity Town both for its location and potential unique dangers, and was very close with the previous Guide before Andrew.

I'll also present Malik's theme song.

It's loosely intentional! The specific shadow you're looking at is technically the shadowed side of a mountain in the background of the mural, but the original draft had Andrew's silhouette almost entirely scratched out from the mural, and parts of that stuck around as I painted and influenced how I did the background and paint around Andrew specifically.

Not on screen, for a few reasons -- primarily that that would be REALLY hard to draw, and secondarily that that opens a gigantic can of worms insofar as worldbuilding questions go that just aren't relevant enough to the plot/themes to justify the time I would need to dedicate to it.

Yeahhh. Despite knowing for a very long time what his ultimate fate would be, it was always something nebulous, for the future -- now, it's very quickly become very real and very current, and, simply put, Andrew does not have the time or support system to cope with it in a healthy manner.

(And thank you!!)

Hah, yeah, you caught the reference! I listened to the original campaign years ago.

This chapter also has a thematic nod to the "Not all exits are made equal" narration.

In the meantime, I recently finished another one-shot -- this one following Andrew from childhood to Chris leaving for Hell -- and have some more ask responses typed up below the cut!