Confused? Don't worry. I am too. Let's fix that. This is gonna be another quickie.
Northy has always had sort of mandatory themes that worked their way into the design. But these themes have themes of their own. I want to break them down with you. Let's start with the current set of traits I have floating around between the three current design ideas.
For those of you out of the loop, yes, three. Dragon, Doll, and Dragon-Doll. I realize I didn't make a blog post about the last thing, so since these actually get some good traffic, I'll cover it here: I've been hesitant about just making the two the same character for a while because this has, in many past iterations of the character, been a nightmare, but at the same time it actually seems like a good way to navigate the contradictions of Q.C./Thia's design philosophies. She's simultaneously powerful and delicate this way without having to resort to background information to explain why- there's lots of potential there. But don't worry, it gets worse. There's other concepts I can't quite put to bed- maybe this little exercise will help, but maybe it'll actually draw me more towards one of them. Hard to say.
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First Matrix
When we look at her most basic features, Northy is defined by three traits: She's a Monster character, a Construct of some sort, and has a thing for Weapons. These are fairly constant and I feel like I'd feel a little weird without any of these traits being at least somewhat represented. But what do these entail?
Second Matrix
We can tear these down a bit. The monster aspect is appealing because it combines two things I like. One is that she acts non-human and tends to require non-human accommodations- ie, aptophilia, which is cute. The other combines with the weapon affinity because I tend to rant on the topics of weapons and monsters- the real kind at least- very often, so the affinities for both of these are significant to the character's background. The weapons also feed into various gags and gimmicks I could pull on stream, as does the third major trait from the first matrix, her nature as some form of artificial, constructed being- there's a lot of little tricks that could be done, from animations of her holding her head in her hand, redeems where an arm falls off (and I have to play games accordingly) and so forth. This also leans into a bit of uncanniness at extremes, which loops back into the Monster aspect of aptophilia. Being a construct also adds a third aspect to her that's come to a headway in the recent tweaks- she has no past.
This is something that has created tension with the zombie aspect, because in that case she'd still be born. Giving her amnesia would also just kinda make the problem worse because that'd frame it as a big mystery. Look, things aren't great at home and the idea of plopping off an assembly line with a gun for an arm is sort of appealing. If we want to stick strictly to the No Past aspect, Zombie is ruled out- as would be a Cyborg, both of these otherwise ticking most of the Construct boxes. Dragon-Doll can sort of stay, because even though there's a past to how that happened- the Dragon parts came from somewhere- she's broadly disassociated with it.
Third Matrix
If you're wondering this won't take much longer to get through don't worry. Anyways.
The Gags and Animations and No Past traits aside, the Body Horror construct elements and innate inhuman traits play together to create an overall aesthetic and characterization that I like. Meanwhile, you can kind of slot a lot of the creature design traits as having a similar motive to the rants- they're things I like to do and talk about. This is why Northy generally can fly, swim, etc- those are abilities I'd want, alongside all the rant topics.
However, this also is where I realized that there's a distinct section in the Aesthetic beats reserved for creature design. It's possible, albeit not something I'd wholeheartedly guarantee, that I might not be satisfied with an appearance that isn't somewhat organic. Like, an Android- it'd be a little strange to put big ol' Dragon wings on an Android, at least not without a level of suspension of disbelief that is personally beyond my design process. I'd have to try and essentially make miniaturized plane wings, and I'm not sure I like those visuals quite as much as the wings Thia currently has. No offense to a certain friend of course- but this is where that MHO species I did a doodle of comes in, as they provide a more biological aesthetic, aaaaaalbeit still a distinctly artificial one.
Fourth Matrix
And this about does it, right? Tracing these down the trails they leave, you can sort of see the reason I made the choices I made. I hope. Probably not. I'm not normal. Anyways.
One thing we can do by combining the Happy Place approach with the No Past principle that swings it in the favor of an Organic design is another thing that kind of rules out Androids I think. I've not got very much of a computer background- I can do some stuff, as you've seen, but I don't think I'm able to be one of those nerds that grew up in a hard drive. Obviously not fully ruling it out, but, well, I feel like it makes less sense than the gag that was going to be a thing with the Dragon (and still might be) where she's actually pretty magically inept by Dragon standards, despite Dragons having magical aptitude by default.
This pushes us towards magical constructs, hence, Dolls and Zombies. I feel like there's more for me to work with there. The rest is essentially distilling and reshuffling everything else into two related but contrasting aesthetic beats. On the one hand, there's the desire to design a character that is, basically, able to do the stuff my favorite animals do. Albatrosses, Loons, Penguins, and so on- they bring to mind images of serenity and peace. This is in stark contrast to the urge to give weapons rep by making a character with horrible rebar limbs and guns all over- and while mashing these two ideas together could be interesting, a sort of corrupted once-serene being, well, still, at its core, what would that be? That's not a character, let alone one that needs to last the screentime a sona does, which tends to mandate lots of details and lore- you've just made a moodboard. A cool moodboard, but just a moodboard.
It's injecting those details and lore fairly painlessly that I have an advantage in, because I have lore for a lot of how this stuff works. I've written up the bones of a setting with a lot of species at play, and they're all waiting for a character to be assigned to any one of them- but until they are, I'm not sure how far that character can go. That, I suppose, is the dilemma- hung up on what Northy should be, because I can only go so far in designing how she acts or looks before answering that.
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