#wolfieolfie

so first i'm going to have to mention 'i play a lot of yugioh and some of the more fucked-up looking yugioh monsters were probably in my head.' none of them were like, direct inspirations, though, so i couldn't direct you to a specific guy. somewhere in the middle of writing it i went "oh right i like smt games" so shin megami tensei or, if you're more familiar, persona 5's monster designs are also probably rattling around in there somewhere as inspiration. idk, my specific monster design inspirations are disparate and i probably forgot to list like, a lot of them.

my general goal with the monsters was "somewhat nonconventional, i want to be able to describe them with animal words the audience will know in order to conjure an image, but i don't want them to just be animals, outside of maybe the dogs. i want them to have memorable aspects to each of them; every monster should have one clear hook that the audience can picture and then some additional weirdness as needed".

so my process was: the monster is x thing. this is what is weird about x thing. the flower monsters, for example, were just a dude and a large snake. however, they had flowers growing out of them, especially in their various body cavities and their faces. that's the part the audience will remember. flower monster. the light monster is made of floating lights. it appears in the gas station. it chokes people, despite appearing intangible. that's its "thing". the monster in the stairwell is called that in my head because its exact appearance wasn't meant to be what was memorable; mumbo stabbing it and having a fucking breakdown all of five minutes into his rescue mission is what is important about it. it is insectoid and creepy because people are afraid of bugs and "it is an insect" is a fast way to establish that the monster designs are scary. it has rows of teeth because i think i was picturing a purple worm when i wrote it.

etc, etc, etc. the designs themselves in the narrative are simple because it's hard to be scared of things if they're too complicated to picture. but i also did try not to make them A) too human (even grian's design i was very careful not to make human, only one of the flower monsters and the xisumas get to be humanoid) or B) too much of "that's just a really mean animal". i think that B factor is why i think the dogs are probably the weakest monster in stuffed bird, though some people may disagree. the dogs were like... basically just an obstacle they didn't serve as hefty of a narrative weight, AND they were basically just "kinda fucked-up mean animals", a thing i partially got away with because at that point in the story "these are humans" is still really fresh.