I can’t draw properly and THEN I made the weird decision to not give myself enough time to work on it so… ugh. I’m sorry 💀 I tried to draw Zaragoza… it… it doesn’t look good.

This was supposed to be my peace offering so you’d forgive me for how abruptly I barged into your dm 😭

*looks back at the drawing*

Actually, no. You absolutely should NOT forgive me LMAO

Anyway (before I completely perish from embarrassment) I’ve got a question. I don’t know if you’ve already said it before, but I’ve been REALLY curious: why is Zaragoza called Zaragoza? Where did the name come from?

LMAO I thank you for the valiant attempt XD and don't worry all was forgiven a while ago

Zaragoza is named after a city in Spain! It used to be the capital of the Kingdom of Aragon. I mostly just thought it sounded cool and Aragon made me think of the Eragon book series and the dragon in them so. Dragon connection, yippee XD

I was looking at names from Spain — not just Spanish names, but from Spain particularly, not Latin America which I fear is far more popular — because I love Spain and I really want to live there some day, even if it's just for a study abroad. I went there once my senior year of high school and it was gorgeous. Just like Italy (which I've also been to, twice now) but in Spanish, which means it'd be much easier to learn the language of since we have Spanish in the U.S.! So I have a vague long-term goal of going back to Spain some day, and I wanted Zaragoza's name to reflect that because my trip to Spain was so inspiring (it also just sounds hella cool XD). So the name itself doesn't really mean anything, like how most names do, but there is a story behind it :D

Hello! :)

Your blog looked interesting and I realized that I have one of your stories in my to read pile!

Thank you, the banner was a fun one to do. I thought the prison dimension was unsettling and strange, so I wanted to try my hand at painting it. If you haven't found the post with the close ups of the painting yet, it's HERE :D

If my cats were cryptids, they would look like soot sprites 👇

Incredible shapes, really.

Enjoy a fancy Pepper 🎩

(I don’t know much about your OCs yet, but I noticed you gave that trait, and it caught my attention)

Oh hey Vic! Thanks for the ask! I'd recommend going through Panthera's master post (linked on my pinned post) if you'd like to learn more about him :D

It's a little bit of projection, I'm not celiac but I am gluten tolerant (and lactose intolerant, which both my feline OCs also have bc no other animal outside humans can drink milk after infancy) and I see a lot of stuff about celiac since I'm always looking at gluten free stuff, and the default assumption is that gf=celiac. I'm very very on top of looking at ingredients and being incredibly careful with gluten, moreso than I probably need to be but better safe than sorry lol, and since Panthera has an insanely good nose he can just sniff the food to detect if it's safe for him and he'll refuse if it's not. He's like his own service animal for allergies

This results in him never eating in front of other people because he rarely mentions it unless asked why he won't eat. And he'll answer honestly cause it's not that big a deal to him, he's used to going hungry, he'll make something on his own later.

As I was imagining with how Panthera would deal with all that (since celiac wasn't a word when he was a kid, problem of being born in the 1160s) I kept having him describe it like "it would make me sick" or "violently ill" and overall have a much worse time then I would if I had a single bite of bread.

Then, in one of my times thinking about Panthera when he served a Chinese emperor at 14 years of age, my train of thought drifted to "Panthera's hungry all the time because his newly mutated body needs a lot more calories than it used to, and more than what humans would eat, so he's sneak into the kitchens at night to find scraps" and that turned into him eavesdropping on a conversation with two other slaves, and him finding bread and eating it in front of him, resulting in the other slaves staring at him and one going like "... You know that will kill you, right?"

And then boom. I realized that's celiac. And I thought, great! Celiac representation! Because I've never seen a celiac character before (canon or OC) so I threw it on him. It gives a smidge of diversity within my characters, and is a nice kinda parellel between him and Estrella (the other feline character who is both gluten/lactose intolerant) since he has to worry about it a LOT because even just cross contamination will lead him to having a bad time, he has to worry about counters being clean, new cutting boards and knives, etc, wheat is NOT allowed in his safe house or whatever bedroom he stays at throughout his life; meanwhile Estrella sometimes ignores/forgets her dietary restrictions because there's muffins on the counter and "they look so good". And the Rise gang have to swat her hand away because she will absolutely put herself in harms way to eat what she literally describes as poison because it smells good and she's hungry and she has very little impulse control since she is so baby. But Panthera wouldn't even be tempted by that. He could very well kill himself from eating a muffin and he dies often enough, thank you very much

Probably bad joke, ignore me xd