#sulum

I wanted to do this 3d so i wouldn’t have to draw it by hand because i think that would have been awfully time consuming...... so i did this in Blender rendered in Cycles with the denoise filter on and using the indoors world... thingy for the lighting reflections (cause i felt it looked better with that than the plain render lighting i had)

I wanted to get a better idea of what the soda colors might look like from Vadpukh, where Sulum hails from, and I wanted to be able to have examples of them for reference for.... some reason? idk i got fixated on it. spent all day fucking with blender.

1: TOP row: these are yer red sodas... and watermelon. Why is watermelon soda yellow?! Because where Sulum is from, sweet watermelon is yellow, and citron melon (not used for soda) is white. From left to right: watermelon, strawberry, redcurrant, pomegranate, and blackberry.

Now, Vadpukh is... I suppose the best description is that it’s a semi-temperate coastal area that’s like... if the french riviera was a little more north? There are lots of berries available and so there are probably a lot of other berry flavors using these four shades of red but do not ask me to list them out. These are essentially just the most popular, quintessential Berries. and watermelon.

2: coconut soda comes in four different colors. blue is the classic, cause boy do they love food coloring, something about the ocean being blue, coconut crabs, and: marketing/fun. clear is moderately common but less fun and recognizable than blue. brominated white coconut soda is usually more of a coconut milky type flavor, less coconut water... but really not that much different. PINK coconut soda is (F)AU(X) NATUREL because coconut water turns pink when it oxygenates (i think) and some brands want to emulate that naturalness with food coloring. Though there are totally all-natural sparkling coconut waters that are pink too, so, check the ingredients i guess.

Also right here i’m going to mention it: Brominated Vegetable Oil. It’s not good for you. Most countries--nay, continents--had already banned it in drinks and various US soft drinks have also recently stopped using it (ie mtn dew, powerade, etc.) Because it’s bad for you.

Vadpukh is a fun country. Vadpukh is a semi-socialist democratic country which is attempting to recover from the problem at the root of all problems: Capitalism. It’s sort of working but there are still a lot of problems, notably in the health industry, politics, and the food industry. The country is notorious for a scandal with human flesh from like 20 years ago (one time, someone finds human meat in their pork, and suddenly that’s all anyone talks about.) Anyway. They’re at a very weird juxtaposition of like, still using BVO in a LOT of drinks, using a lot of artificial and natural food coloring alike, but also are really far ahead on the green-packaging front which is why actually these plastic bottles are wrong. Most soda is packaged in metal bottles or cans, or glass bottles, though plastic is used to some extent too. I just needed it to be clear.

Anyway. so yeah. lots of brominated sodas.

3: a whole row of grapes. you got your typical purplish-bluish (depends on manufacturer) grape soda made out of those kinds of grapes that are real dark, usually in a dark brown bottle but not always. then, green grape soda which is often straight up the color of mountain dew but it’s hard to tell cause it’s always in a green bottle. then you have your WHITE grape soda which i believe is just a culinary differentiation in which wine grapes are white and table grapes are green but anyway white grape soda, while also in a green bottle, is usually a light straw color or sometimes a pinkish gold... usually similar flavors tho. then we have our second blue soda: anise grape. It’s hard to tell partially because it’s a very deep blue, but it is, also, brominated. idk how that would look irl. the alt color is teal. why? because i was looking at anise syrups and liqueurs and thought, hm, these are all a kind of cloudy yellow, yellow plus blue equals--well, green, but in smaller amounts, teal... also brominated.

ah, the colors of gatorade fierce grape and gatorade frost arctic blitz.

4: stone fruit sodas, aka, the best kind? i’ve never had plum or apricot soda but it sounds good. Peach-rhubarb, a bit red, a bit peachy. Regular peach soda is also this color sometimes. Plum is yellow! Because many plums are yellow inside. This is a more muted amber color but it can also be as yellow as the watermelon soda depending on who’s making it. There’s also: green plum soda because I tried greengage plums and they are VERY sweet so i figured that would suit a soda well. And apricot. Color ranges from calmer more light oranges to full on orange crush neon orange, and it’s also used for plain peach sodas as well. and maybe some more specific oranges like tangerines? idk

moving on

5: Citrus. ALL the citrus sodas are brominated, which made me suffer because I could not render them to look nice at all. Grapefruit soda is a lovely shade of pink usually but it can sometimes come in more salmony, more red, or rarely yellowish-white (like Squirt). orange soda is supposed to be like, the color of orange juice... i struggled with it and it’s basically impossible to find pictures of how it should look because most orange soda is the color of kraft mac and cheese. maybe the best color comparison would be like.... if you mixed lemonade with a bit of OJ. lemon soda, lime soda, and lemon-lime soda (they all exist) all tend to look the same, generally resembling the cloudy whiteness of... Squirt. again. They can come in clear bottles, but lemon soda sometimes comes in sunny yellow bottles, and lime or lemon-lime can come in green ones. (like i said, usually glass, but sometimes plastic)

6: using citrus as a weird stepping point... the Herbaceous Sodas (and pistachio cause i had nowhere else to put it and it was green) For those who like a bracing soda, juniper-grapefruit. I don’t think I would like it but I’m sure some would. It’s usually the same color as regular grapefruit, sometimes a little more orangey. Pine soda is next, and includes stuff like juniper but also spruce. It was... basically impossible to replicate the spruce beers I was looking at but it’s roughly a sort of semi-cloudy translucent straw color... like--and i am realizing ironically the reference i was using was not spruce beer--spruce soda co’s hopped cola. OOPS.

Pistachio and pistachio-rose are both VERY popular flavors in Vadpukhi food and that extends to soda--both flavors of soda tend to be that pale pistachio green, either way. And the other green soda: cucumber. Like the pic says, sometimes it’s colorless. Basically, comes in the same weird color ranges as irl cucumber soda, ranging from colorless to a light minty green to that hulkly abomination of a color in the pic. flavor i’m sure wildly varies. i’ve tried dry cucumber soda, it’s pretty good (if unusual). I have also tried cucumber-lime gatorade, which tastes like extremely sweet pickle juice (bad) (it COULD be good but the pickle flavor... i can’t do it)

7: FLOWERS. lavender and rose are, again, very common flavors. they smell good, they taste good. Not pictured, but rosehip soda is probably one of the many red sodas you can find. But this floral section is lavender two ways: lavender soda that is a pale purple color itself, and clear lavender soda packaged in a lovely purple bottle. Then, rose, which is generally always a lovely soft shade of pink tho sometimes includes lemon or orange flavoring (at which point it probably is made cloudy to communicate that)

8: NOT colas. Vadpukh doesn’t have cola sodas (as in, based on the flavor of the kola nut) except in some specialty/ethnic shops and restaurants (or made by individuals.) This is the brown soda section. First up we have barley-malt and we have hops soda. They look very similar and are often packaged similarly, ie brown glass bottles or brown cans, and there can be a lot of overlap in ingredients ie a lot of the hops sodas have malt syrup. However most of the time malt soda is used to distinguish like.... malted milk powder flavor... but soda. Hops is beer soda. lol. Then it’s caramel soda which as I wrote on the pic is somewhat like vanilla cream soda but it doesn’t generally have vanilla in it. It’s caramel flavored. Delicious. Cinnamon soda is cinnamon spiced and often includes other spices as well, including ginger...

Then there’s honey soda which I have two nearly identical renders of lol. Most honey soda is a light ambery-yellow color, roughly the color of honey, maybe less warm tones... It can be salted, or spiced, combined with apple flavor... The other honey soda, barely distinguishable in color, is usually a warmer, redder amber tone and is used for things like berry-honey sodas.

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NOT PICTURED: Tea soda which I completely skipped over on accident, sparkling juices (including apple and pear and everything else, more natural, less sweet, less dyes, no bromination), apple and pear soda which i guess i forgot too for some reason but lbr sparkling apple cider is better anyway. Ginger ales and lemonades. Like. Those are fairly self explanatory. Ginger ale ranges from straw to amber, ranges in spiciness, etc... lemonade can be plain, or pink, or lime, or what have you, similar to lemon or lemon-lime sodas but with extra flavors like pomegranate or peach.

Also not pictured are the Vadpukh “cream” sodas or milk sodas. These are not like American-style creme sodas, there’s no vanilla or anything. They’re more akin to Milkis or like... Calpico if Calpico wasn’t yogurt flavored. They’re carbonated sodas with dairy in them basically, like an ice cream float without the extra work. They are almost universally somewhat opaque, come in many of the same flavors as above, and tend to be like, soft pastels or off-whites. ie, orange milk soda would probably be the same color as mango Calpis.  A lot of people just make milk soda at home either by adding ice cream to soda or by adding heavy cream or milk, but the convenience of pre-bottled is nice. Plus it usually stays carbonated longer than if you pour your soda full of milk...

There is ALSO a sparkling carbonated yogurt drink similar to Calpis btw... which looks similar to the milk sodas but is tangier, fermented... probiotic. (i could drink it without destroying my digestive system)

Sparkling water, mineral water and club soda are also all very common and some come in flavor infusions. The Vadpukh citizens like bubbles. A lot.

There are also non-carbonated drinks like electrolyte drinks (tho those often also have carbonated versions), flavored milk, nesquik-style carob drink powder... and teas and stuff but I didn’t want to spend like, the whole week doing this 😂 Milk tea is real big (but not like boba, no chunks or tapiocas (Tragic), just milk tea and fruit milk teas and stuff)

What else... wine.... kefir... lassi-style drinks... fruit juices (usually unclarified but sometimes clarified)....

Anyway if you want to know, Sulum’s favorite soda flavor is basically any of the berries--blackberry, pomegranate, apple-berry, and darjeeling (rasp)berry especially. they love a blended darjeeling raspberry slush in the hot summer... they also like the simplicity of a nice ice-cold, unfiltered apple juice.

sometimes they like to add spicy pepper flavors. lol.