Well it's been a minute hasn't it? Yeah I've kind of gotten a very dysfunctional sleep schedule over the past few days in conjunction with coming down with something and my healthcare provider revealing that they do not, in fact, have object permanence. Consider this a mini-update in the saga, I plan to have a true part 2 soon.
Spoilers, the rebrand has already happened.
Told you it'd be a soft one.
Look, I'm going to try to avoid being mopey about it, but the more I thought about it the more I felt... bad. Bad about my current decisions with my design. Like, yes, the person with the funky OC by all rights can make bizarre choices- but sometimes you need to step back and realize that, yes, you made the wrong choice, and it's not just some hypothetical third party saying that. I feel like that may be the focus of this article- getting all the negative emotions I have for Pterosaur Northy out of the way so I can focus on the merits of each design on their own terms in the next. So let's talk about this.
Fitting, or Fitting-By-Proxy?
Something that occurred to me, and maybe I'm going to struggle to put it into words now because of how long I dragged my feet getting to writing these, is that there are so many things that I believe represent the cohesive conceptual "through line" I described, but only after zig-zagging. For instance, it occurred to me that I'm not necessarily, like, pterosaur vibes. I'm bird vibes with a scary slant- which is why a harpy has always been in the running. The Pterosaur has to kind of bend to meet that halfway, which just kind of convolutes the intended cohesion between character design and personality. This especially leaks over into the many ways that I, even visually, use the Pterosaur theme as an Albatross proxy with a reptilian slant.
My nose, for instance, Buller's Albatross. Hair, Giant Petrel. I have scales that we're not sure Pterosaurs even had to differentiate me from a Harpy. I'm part Dwarf to justify my obsession with metals... And, come to think of it, weapons. Yeah, this is why it started to become an issue- this obscure factoid started to bear narrative weight.
Half-beasts that are reptilian- even reptiles we understand to be endothermic- are called coldbloods in-canon and are sort of seen as a distinct thing because they never get along with the warmbloods too well. But their humanoid bits also play a role. Coldbloods have instincts towards minerals, using them as gizzard stones and finding warm rocks comforting- Dwarves have a natural inclination towards minerals that not only fueled their proto-industry but also plays a role in their development and metabolism, as they are reliant on natural mineral supplies to form certain vitamins that they cannot form via normal pathways as well as to simply build more heavily-mineralized bone, all of which combine to give Dwarf/Coldblood mixes a distinct and obsessive lust for minerals that has earned them a distinct reputation as greedy and obsessive.
The Dwarves call them Fafnir.
Fafnir was a Dwarf turned Dragon.
This has all been lore for a while, I was building the Dwarven Coldbloods up as a sort of Dragon-by-Proxy species. The through-line leads here, no matter what, and this cuts out the middle-bird.
But there's sort of more to this. I know people are really supportive of me having a complicated character, but I feel I need to elaborate on one specific part: The way I've portrayed myself is really not fitting to dino VTubers.
No One Who Goes Outside Is Able To Comprehend Pterosaurs
This is probably the most damning thing I've come to realize about my current design and it's going to sound like a dig at first. I think that in designing Northy in the way I'd design a tiger-girl, ie, by, step one, acquiring a tiger, step two, mixing it with a person, I have made a mistake that everyone else connected by the theme of being a dinosaur ("dinosaur" in my case) managed to avoid. I think that when I went on a rabbit hole of designing an in-depth reconstruction of a generalized Ornithocheiroidean pterosaur, mixing a few favorite stand-out traits and taking influences from both biomechanics and living analogues, I doomed myself to have an unreadable design.
The vast majority of Dino designs don't really... Well it's tempted to say they don't care, but they do. You don't make your sona a dinosaur without at least knowing that a lot of them probably had feathers. But the relative lack of that, the leaning more into the pop culture essence of dinosaurs as kaiju-lite, that's not something that I was innovating by breaking the mold in.
Yeah, uh, to be clear, that's the part that I feel might feel like a dig, or at least backhanded praise. Honestly part of me might have intended it to come off that way a while back, subtle disappointment that we don't see very many raptors with primary feathers and the non-humanoid tyrannosaurs don't have lips. But, well, now I know why. When you actually reconstruct paleofauna, you end up with a chimaera, and this is a trap I fell into face-first. By leaning more into tropes, you can still have a great design that's actually readable.
I don't think I have a great design. Not in that context.
Dragons, though, are tropey. People don't ask questions about their details, the parts where you have the wiggle room to do something original, until they are very much ready for the answers- I can still be a complicated Dragon without being a complicated character, just as with every single other dinosaur vtuber in existence, even ones with obscure taxa. With a pterosaur based on a blend of Azhdarchid, Ornithocheirid, Nyctosaurid, Dsungaripterid, and Istiodactylid traits that has an albatross nose and petrel plumage with an allusion to Loon mating plumage in the neck and crocodilian hands, well, the design is fucking incontinent.
This isn't to say I necessarily think my design is a bad idea all-in-all. There's gonna be an entire species of Northies running around and they're probably not gonna change all too much from the trajectory I've been on- which, to be frank, alludes to another problem. Literally the only thing about me that says "extinct species" is that I'm undead and that's not even related. Like, yes, I am one, but that feels like tell-don't-show. By contrast plenty of Dino VTubers work it in more efficiently. Clones, time-travelers, canonically in the past just broadcasting to the future, I think someone got in good with a goddess and became her pet or something, so on and so forth. Northy was born in like 1897. She's not mesozoic. The funny coincidence that we have all these living dinosaurs and the only pterosaur is undead, just like how dinosaurs survived the K-Pg extinction as birds but pterosaurs entirely went up in smoke, isn't really enough to make me really feel like there's any narrative weight to it- being a Dwarf, in fact, quickly became far, far more relevant. The Pteranodontid-shaped rifle hung on the wall never fires. Is this a requirement? Not really but it feels like the only thing that my current iteration could have over a Dragon.
This is all sort of where that one poll comes in, the option that a pterosaur theme would be "better if focused." It was a trick answer, honestly. I've never been a pterosaur first, it was just the easiest explanation for having wings and being called "Northropi." So it's always going to be that story, and it's always going to be a zombie. I will never be a pure pterosaur dino-tuber.
I look forwards to the eventual Pterano-S/Chan's debut and if they are in fact trans I offer unto them the mantle of "Ptransgender."
No but seriously if anyone is interested I could totally design that. It'd be nice if someone could pick up the torch I'm dropping, and now that I'm a Dragon the least I could do is light it back up for them.
I'm a Dragon Now
And frankly, I couldn't be happier. Now maybe this is just a phase and I'll be crawling back soon enough but for now this is the way I'm going. Salty-ass Sea Dragon back from the grave. We'll be exploring how and why in a bit. Hopefully sooner than that first gap...
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