#tarsi

Since it’s been a while, here are the next stickers in the Lifeline Mug series hot off the Redbubble press to add to your growing collection of out of context Lifeline Merch to weird people out. 

And this one is a set because they are always together! You guessed it: Videk and Tarsi! 

Videk’s is the best cousin, featuring his fruit sharing, barely qualifying as a captor ways.

Tagged by @samusisagirl! Thank you! I cant believe someone actually wants to hear about this!!

So the Visual Novel i’m starting to work on (and i use that term loosely because its largely going to be text based at first because i cannot draw and am commissioning a friend for concept art for the characters but would maybe have a kickstarter to help hire an artist to actually make full sprite packs/backgrounds should people enjoy the story) is called In the Dark! I’m gonna really start heavily working on it after the semester ends next week. 

1. What was the idea that inspired your story?

I was like damn, i just started writing and am an aries  relatively confident I can tell a decent story and after playing a bunch of dating sims I realized there were a few consistent things i thought i could just...do better. Or that I wanted to see? 

I knew i wanted a story where trans people existed and had access to any medical care they desired (so scifi-ish), and where you could romance cool creatures. So i started with designing the creatures and when i designed Chaen’s species to be extremely cool and teethy and predatory, it sorta snowballed from there. Why have a species that hunts humans in the dark if not to surround the central conflict there. 

2. Did you make an outline, did you stick to it?

I have not made an outline yet, I sort of want to try to make an outline at least a little bit. Each route is going to be different from each other to avoid overlap of scenes (which was something that bothered me a lot in wtnc) so I want to make sure I actually have enough factual overlap that you can make sense of things. 

3. What’s your favourite part of the story?

Happy trans people who don’t experience dysphoria but are still trans, happy trans people (including nb people) who have medically transitioned in every way they can or partially and also happy. Does that count? If not then it definitely is the idea I had for MC being a largely unspecified creature that is the only one of their kind, so that people can make up their own fan species for MC to look like! 

4. Who is your favourite character and why?

God i really love all of them, but Tarsi is .....my husband. Hes a chubby hairy trans guy who works as a barista at an underground almost entirely dark tea house. Why entirely dark you say? Because his species (The Rhine) are mostly nocturnal, have huge eyes that let in a lot of light (he wears sunglasses when he has to go out during the day) He also has extremely long fingers and toes with little suction cups at the end. Anyway that was really just a biography but i love everything about him. Create the chubby trans nonhuman being you’d wish to marry is the new motto. 

5. Did anything happen that surprised you as you were writing?

Yeah! I ended up with subplots! I was sort of thinking this should be dipping my toe into the field of writing something like this and do something kind of boring but straightforward but nope! I was like “what if in addition to the age old human/creature conflict, it was extra” and there we are. Also as each of the characters fleshed out their own personalities and the way they’d interact with the main plot, things came up and all. I’m barely the god of this story. 

10. What lie do they most frequently remember telling? Does it haunt them?

F) What do you feel when you think of your OC (pride, excitement, frustration, etc)?

10. …You had to pick the almost silent character didn’t you?

So, Tarsi doesn’t tell a lot of lies. But he does strongly remember the last major lie he told. Earlier on the day of the raid on the South Pole, he told his parents he was going to help out some of the elders in the village. He was actually going on a secret hunting expedition with some of the other boys in the village. By the time they saw the black snow and turned back, it was too late to help anything. Both his parents were killed in the raid

So, the last thing he told his parents was a lie.

I don’t know if it haunts him per se, it might have at some point earlier on, but overall he’s a lot more conciseness of what he says because of it.

F) My emotional status with Tarsi is usually something like bemused. My OCs are very much my wild cards, Tarsi especially. Because he doesn’t talk a lot it’s harder to connect with him than some of the others. He started out as Videk’s sidekick (it took so many scenes he was in before I got a single word out of him) but he’s slowly developed into his own person with a backstory and will of his own.

Whenever there is a moment for him to say something, it’s a few words that can sometimes change the course of a scene. He’s a really fun exploration for me into the concept of less is more.

Middle spread of my comic-in-progess, “Tarsi”. It’s about a girl who gets lost, is starving, eats a magical mushroom and it turns her into creepy-ass fairy who can shoot lasers. 

Oh yeah here’s a creature called Tarsi which I created for a class project and ended up liking her a whole lot She has a cool back story and everything. Might post it later. Hope you like her!