#swordbearers

Made a fan-character for the webcomic Swordbearers. I love the comic a lot! Highly recommend reading it on ComicFury. Context: In this fantasy world, unicorns (swordbearers) of different gender cannot speak the same language.

-Helhe is pronounced “Hel-heh”

-She is about the same height as your average middler and while Helhe is half mountaineer, the only mountaineer traits she displays are her short tail, her longer coat length overall, and her grey coat color.

-Helhe has XY sex reversal syndrome, ie, she outwardly appears as a mare but has the chromosome combination of a stallion. Helhe and everyone else have no idea because Helhe is saphic, has never tried to conceive a foal and for the most part she looks like a standard female swordbearer. These characters have no access to medical care or testing thus have no way of finding this information out, so to Helhe she’s just atypical from most mares and she has no idea why. She can understand stallions when they speak to her but they cannot understand her, and like Chiro she sounds muffled but understandable to mares. Helhe and Chiro initially bonded over being able to understand each other clearly in a world full of swordbearers who do not.

-Helhe was born in a small herd of mountaineers, with her mother being a full mountaineer and her father being a wandering middler rogue. Until she left, she was the tallest member of the herd and thus stuck out like a sore thumb, and Helhe was not treated particularly well by the others in her herd who held less than savory views of outsiders, which is why she left with Chiro.

-Unlike Chiro, Helhe is more involved in social life in the Matriarch’s herd. She still lives on the fringes of the group, but is more present and involved with their affairs and she gently encourages Chiro to take part every once in a while. She acts a lot like the bridge between Chiro, who is much more used to being solitary, and the other mares of the herd who aren’t sure themselves how to close the gap between them.

-Helhe hates conflict and violence, strongly preferring to run rather than to fight, and she’s not good at fighting as a result. If she’s forced to fight, her kicks are clumsily aimed, she’s more likely to beat you over the head with her sword than she is to stab or cut you and she’ll only fight as much as needed to escape the initial altercation. Helhe struggles to summon the willpower needed to actually land a blow on an enemy that actually hurts, mainly because growing up she took a lot of hard knocks from her herd and the memory of how it felt sticks with her and makes her hesitant to hurt others. The one thing that can motivate her to fight is if she is fighting in defense of someone else, but when it comes to her, she’ll hang her head and take the hits because she genuinely has an easier time taking the mistreatment than she does fighting back. She’s become more confident with Chiro’s support, but she has a long way to go.

-Growing up an outcast and not well liked, Helhe’s already present during foal-hood speech impediment was exacerbated by being isolated and only rarely speaking, and even then only in single word sentences. Helhe feels very self conscious about it, which causes her to be hesitant to speak to others which in turn feeds into the impediment because it worsens when she’s anxious or stressed. While it has improved since she first met Chiro, Helhe still stutters, hangs onto syllables in words too long, repeats words and generally experiences cluttered speech. The only ones Helhe barely stutters around are her younger half brother and Chiro.

-Helhe’s favorite foods are lichen and lingonberries, both of which were common where she was from., especially reindeer lichen. They’re less common outside of the mountains and craggy woodlands her herd claimed as their territory, and she is very giddy when she actually finds some.

someone made a comment talking about its so sad people dislike Cassio (a cis man and canonical mysogynistic abuser) because oh look hes doing the bare minimum and calling the main character by the correct pronouns

Found the comment thread. I wonder if the "heated" comments were only made against the Cassio defender or someone did snuck in a critic against the comic wich prompted the full elimination of the thread. Very bad faithed theory, but this is SD we're talking about.

Swordbearers OCs, a trio of siblings who left their herd after beating up a bunch who beat up their sister. (Designed before the thought occurred to me that breaking the sword might kill the Swordbearer? Hopefully not???)

Runa is quiet and gentle, moreso after the attack. Atthew is a chihuaha in a deer-shaped unicorn body. His horn is itty but he's quick and crazy enough that he usually wins. Jet is mostly just Big. She doesn't talk much but she'll stomp on anyone who threatens her family.

Started reading Songdog’s comic Swordbearers and I thought the world building was super interesting so I decided to try my hand at designing a swordbearer of my own. Balancing my more complex character designs with Songdog’s more simplistic character design schemes (No more than three colors in the body, solid colored eyes, hooves match the darkest fur color) was challenging but super fun, designing characters with other peoples design guidelines is fun af provided the guidelines leave room for unique, individual characters who can be recognized in a crowd. If I didn’t have concerns about my phone’s storage I’d make a CF account so I could interact more directly with authors or other audience members but alas.

character notes;

-Chiro is pronounced “Kai-roh”, the CH at the start of her name pronounced like a hard c like in the words “loch” or “chimera” .

-Chiro is around the same height as a mountaineer, and a fully mixed middler who doesn’t really resemble any specific type. Her parents were middlers and their parents were as well.

-She would probably live in the Matriarch’s herd but on the fringes of it, basically right on the edge of being a loner but still in close enough proximity to be considered part of the herd. Chiro doesn’t know how to socialize properly and thus wouldn’t be super popular, but if a wolf attacked the herd Chiro wouldn’t hesitate to plant herself in it’s way and attack. That’s actually how she got her leg scar, a coyote went for a foal in her birth herd, Chiro got in the way and took the bite and then she grabbed the coyote by the neck and shook/stomped it to death.

-Like Bruxly, Chiro can understand other mares but they sound muffled. The speech barrier has resulted in Chiro becoming aloof and very introverted as she’s come to associate social interaction with conflict. She could understand Wik, or individuals like him, very clearly, but swordbearers like him are in the minority. If she’s not acting standoffish, she’s not really sure how to behave, so she has two modes of behavior; Defensive aggression and painful awkwardness.

-While the standard for swordbearers (or any equine) is to tend towards flight and not fight, if Chiro feels like she cannot outrun a predator (or aggressive swordbearer), or if she feels like she has a good chance of winning, Chiro will absolutely stand her ground. She tends to fight more like a real horse than a unicorn, favoring biting and kicking to clashing swords or shoving matches. It’s a little different with stallions, if a stallion approaches too quickly with obvious intentions to partner before even trying to introduce himself she’ll try and run or keep her back end facing him so her sword is as far from his reach as possible and will kick and squeal until he either leaves, gets physical, or the commotion attracts the attention of another more physically imposing mare. Her goal is to either stay out of range of the “song trance” or if the stallion gets too close, interrupt it. Physically, if need be.

-If you can get Chiro to be comfortable in your presence, she’s much more meek than you would expect when she’s not being outwardly aggressive. She prefers to listen while another talks, only adding her own thoughts if she feels it’s important, or if she’s directly asked. Sometimes other’s take it as her not wanting to be around them, but Chiro opts to be quiet more often than not for fear of saying something offensive, but in doing so she still offends others. Pain and suffering on planet earth.

-Chiro’s favorite food is water weeds and catmint. She enjoys eating catmint but she also enjoys the scent of it and will roll in a patch of it if she finds it, so she often has the scent of catmint clinging to her coat. Because she also likes to eat water weeds she also often smells like mud and pond water, which is the more common scenario because ponds and creeks are easier to find than patches of catmint. In the summer and late spring she also likes to stand in/submerge herself to the shoulders in a body of water to stay cool.