I feel like when I reach out and ask for people's opinions, they are far, far too nice to me in ways that are hard to explain. I think the fact that I have a kind of "out there" design has made people assume there's meticulous thought put into every aspect when a lot of the time it's really just brainworms. What I don't think enough of my friends realize is that I've been in a closed loop for far too long and I think this has led to me, in a way I am desperate to break, getting very up my own ass about my character.
A breaking point for me hit when I realized one day that the way my lore works- that I need to go on these long tangents to explain things, and if you've talked to me personally you know how I get about it, NOTHING is self-contained- isn't just a cute quirky oopsy-doopsy I have a convoluted story but at least it's interesting and coherent kind of thing. And I'll give myself credit and say that in its current incarnation, it actually succeeds in the latter. All this shit is going somewhere. But I can't even describe my fundamentals without talking about the origin of the universe and that's not just a tradeoff, it is, on a very twisted level on my part, a means to the end of forcing people to listen. All the people I've given had that talk with are my friends, they're not gonna say no. And I've used Northropi as a tool to force interaction with them. And I'm genuinely sorry. Like I don't think anyone's too beat up about it but, fuck, imagining all the people I've given the shpiel to, that's a bit heavy.
And what happens when they're not my friends necessarily? What do people who just see the Zombified Pterosaur But I Guess For Some Weird Reason Only Discernable If You Listen To It Lecture You On Cosmology And Evolution Starting With The Post-Big Bang Formation Of Heavy Elements And Also It Has A Gun think when that is their introduction? Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to rebrand to an uguu big-eyed no-nose pink catgirl for clicks (I feel harsh saying that catgirls are nice), but this is... deeper, you know? I don't want to be indecipherable. And maybe I'm not- maybe what I've told myself to keep it together for this long is true, that "Zombie Pterosaur-Girl" isn't actually too hard to grasp and the rest can wait for when I do a big lore reveal at my debut or something. But for a while now I haven't been feeling that way. Maybe it's just anxiety- and for being honest, I'm not sure I can even make this decision until I've at least put some more time into my current path, with this coming in the form of a soft rebrand before I get too deep into lore. Maybe it will work out. Maybe it won't and I'll at least know that a change would benefit me.
I think the first thing you need to understand with this mess is where it all comes from. I essentially designed Northy in accordance to the rules and species of a setting I've been working on for an absurdly long time. In a way, there really wasn't that much thought put into her per se. And now that shortcut is coming back to bite me, I think. She's at once a great ambassador for what I've worked hard on, but also tied to it more than I wish she was. She's kind of something that makes sense only with that context. Without it, she just comes off as a pile of disparate ideas- and, well, for a while...
She was.
Maybe this was easier at some point. Look at this thing. Do you know what it is? No. Are you gonna ask? Also no. The idea, for the record, was basically... So this is gonna come up in the current lore too, but, "The Work." The idea that true, worthy strength comes from iteration. Lifeforms evolve, Machinery improves, Magic itself is written. That which does not is sacrilege and will be crushed beneath the three, if not their own failures- superheroes, deities, the power of friendship, magic and machinery that are sought without being understood. Northy was to be- and to an extent, is to be- more-or-less worshipping The Work as if it was a deity. The idea for a long time was that her constant mechanical, biological, and magical iteration was mutating her beyond recognition. A cultist for a god that wasn't real, that she knew wasn't real, and that she liked that way.
Even further back, ADB- the mercenary company she worked for- was to be involved in a giant plot to outright drive humanity to extinction for its worship of things not of The Work. That's kinda edgy- plus designed for a very different format- so that's not a thing anymore but that is effectively the fatal flaw of the collapsing society Northy's current iteration exists in- drawing a parallel between superheroes, gods, human vanity, authority. Fascists love those muscled-up marble statues after all.
Put like this, it sounds good, but there was just something aesthetic that wasn't clicking. The focus shifted to a more industrial vibe, and that started to push against the other elements- even in that silhouette above, you can see how the mechanical part is just sort of there without a lot of cohesion. This also came with a doubling down of the hitherto present but sidelined undead motif. This led to that mess of a design I had earlier this year. And I do mean mess. I hate to be mean to that cute little face on the ref but thinking that I went around saying hi to people being like "yeah this is me lol" just sort of stuns me now. Essentially the idea I came to was to just block out all animal motifs spare, well, obviously the humanoid one but also my favorite, the pterosaur wing-legs. I became a zombie pterosaur.
However, there was a nagging need as this was going on. I had to... Reduce it, right? Try and streamline it as much as possible. Now, in my head, there's a through-line here. Undead and Industrial Horror mesh well. Industrial Horror+Flight is a vibe, and Industrial Horror meshes well with lanky shapes so Pterosaurs are easy to work in. All of it goes together neatly. But how does she end up like this? Is it fair to just brush off the mechanical motifs as a variant of "zombie?" This is what lead to the debate a while back I was having with myself about if I should make my origin story have me be a robot instead of a normal life-form- and while I'd love to see someone take up the concept of "Zombified Robot" I eventually decided that would alter my vibe a lot and push me back into the Eldritch Horror powercreep hole- which is a tangent we'll save for Part 2.
And this brings us to today. It feels like being explicitly a Pterosaur adds too many things. Now, in my head, I can play it off as one thing. But it's more than that, and I think a lot of people seeing me for the first time think so too. For one thing, the specific kind of pterosaur- and the animals that feed into how I think this kind of pterosaur would look- is a whole debacle. I'm technically a Nyctosaurid, Azhdarchid, Dsungaripterid, Ornithocheirid, Istiodactylid, Loon, Penguin, Heron, Albatross, Petrel, Leatherback Sea-Turtle, Crocodilian, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. I just can't seem to escape being a ton of different animals at once. Annoyingly this is probably only something that A) I care about B) I made into an issue for OTHERS to care about because I tried to think out my ptero-bits how paleoartists do- look at the research and facts and then mix in a few pretty motifs from nature that fit the look. If I was just, like, a green bat with a pointy nose, this wouldn't be a problem. But no, I needed pycnofibers.
This is on top of the fact that paleofauna, among VTuber animal motifs, seems almost as if it occupies both the "species" and "modifier" slot. Like you can fit a species, and you can fit a modifier, and they can be played up different ways, but you start getting complicated if you get more. There's a rule of two at play. Undead-Cat, Slime-Dragon, Eldritch-Brittle Star- I still need to make that OC I hope someone adopts them- and I'd think Zombie Pterosaur works into that. But there really aren't a lot of <x>-Dinosaur (well "Dinosaur" in my and a few cases) designs I know of- sure, I've seen a few with backstories for how/if they're alive in the present day that result in subcategories of "genetically engineered" and "time traveller" and stuff. I think the fact that I call myself a bird so often, despite how wrong it is, is really telling. We encode a raptor or tyrannosaur design as <x>-Dragon or <x>-Lizardfolk. In my case it makes me Undead <x>-Bird or Undead <x>-Dragon, depending on if or not you squint. It's three things, four if we add in Undead Accurate <x>-Bird, or why not five, Mechano-Undead Accurate <x>-Bird- I think we can normally slot the mechanical stuff into the zombie stuff but that gets harder to do if we spend so much conceptual room on just wings, a tail, and a funny nose.
And this is all entirely forgetting the stuff that exists as background lore that, sure, people might not immediately question, but comes up. She's part Dwarf- the humanoid parts aren't human, they're Dwarven. This plays a role in some fringes of her appearance as well as her personality. How do I have the "I'm a Dwarf" talk with someone while I have fucking wings and a light in my face, and then go on to have the mercenary talk on top of that? And that seems like an easy thing to cut, my urge to adhere to the established rules of my worldbuilding (where as fortune would have it none of the animal-people are truly part-human), but the problem becomes that it's arguably more relevant to the way I play this character than her being specifically a pterosaur. Like, seriously, I canonically do covet metals and act as a blacksmithing snob, but I'm not actually from the cretaceous or anything, I'm not like the last of my kind or a genetic experiment to resurrect an extinct species, I functionally am just a funny bird. The Dwarf stuff is handy. It's very hard to choose- and one of the alternatives happens to line it up very nicely. What if, hear me out here, there was some other winged reptile that also happens to have coveting precious minerals and snobbery built in? Hm?
This isn't about being "marketable," strictly speaking. It's exhausting, for me and I imagine for everyone listening to me, that I have to break out a lore tome to explain the basics of what I am. I, well, yes, I do care about growth, but not to the extent that I'd just tear everything down to follow a popular archetype. The alternatives I've been thinking of would be relatively painless. I could probably slip them in overnight and just gaslight all of you into thinking it was always that way. What do I have to lose? A dino-tuber card that I technically shouldn't have because PTEROSAURS AREN'T DINOSAURS BUT BIRDS ARE and would come second to the zombie one- which is FAR more relevant to my portrayal- anyways? The tentative "Only Pterosaur VTuber In History" title? The "Ptransgender" pun? Ok that one is pretty good- but I can make adjustments. I feel like over the past year I've just been on one big slow-motion rebrand. Every miniscule change I've made has helped clear things up and I don't think I'm ready to stop yet. Maybe I'm just in some kind of funk and I'm taking it out on a character that really is fine. Maybe, and perhaps more worryingly, I'll never be "done." Maybe every character's gonna have a finite lifespan before I move on to a new design. Maybe I just need to stick it out with the current design and see if my fears are valid.
So, for hopefully the last time until I can put it out there in a way that's actually palatable to read, join me as I present to you what Northropi, in her current incarnation, actually is. But before that, because this is going to be a real trip, I beg you:
Please be honest, brutally honest with me about what you think. Like, within limits, if Tony236xXx walks into my DMs to tell me the design sucks dinosaurs aren't real and I should stop the gay shit then I'm In His Walls but, friends, moots, people who just have a reasonable synthesis on what I'm saying, please just comment on the post that brought you here. I've been in my own head- or maybe my head's been in my ass- for so long that I just don't know whether something's a good idea anymore. I'm too used to the treatment autism therapists always used to give me when I started rambling, how I'd keep going but I could always tell they weren't listening, how everyone, for the better part of my life, has listened just to placate me. I'm starving for feedback and I'm concerned that people are letting trying to be nice poison it. Maybe I've not been the best at taking it, but I'll try. I need this to go somewhere. I need to get better.
Society.
It will probably make this all come together a bit easier if I first explain that the way this origin story works is intended to solve a few issues in interesting ways. The first is exactly how a "god" would work if it wasn't just a giant ball of magical woo- a being that casually chang
es its form over time, never ages, and seems just incredibly powerful. The second is to provide a fairly reasonable explanation for the sheer amount of times a generally human bodyplan shows up.
So the Big Bang. As the universe cooled enough for heavy elements to exist, the first life-form emerged. Tiamat was the first of what would become both Dragon and Giant, though at the time was just sort of a mass. She divided herself up into offspring and they said what the fuck let's explore. They did this by just growing FTL drives- they weren't bound by a fixed physiology.
Planets they frequented were bombarded by radiation from their FTL drives, and ended up growing life-forms. The chemical reactions of this life tended to make atmospheres more volatile, on Earth in particular manifesting the Oxygen disaster, though this was a fairly common trend elsewhere. This ate at the bodies of these progenitor-beings and they withered from the sizes of continents to the sizes of just really big things as they rearranged into a more chemically stable form. Then they felt upstaged by the way life was becoming increasingly cool-looking, so they just became Dragons.
Goblins. Goblins and furries. The Goblins lived in caves, which has implications for their geographical range- one cave tends to be a lot like the rest climate-wise, so, while environmentally picky, any cave would do. They set up vast road networks as they claimed land on the basis of the caves in it- and would rarely show themselves to the people of the world above. The occasional tax and tithe aside, this wasn't a big deal to the Beastmen of the time, who used the roads the Goblins so preciously built to minimize the time they had to spend in the sun and the rain to trade and intermingle between tribes. However, the Beastmen were trapped in this intermingled state once the Goblins basically did a little Rome. While also not an issue initially, it did start to show in time- it was a situation that left us with snake-people trapped in Alaska, Trout visiting deserts, Polar Bears in jungles, and Lions among Antelope. The Dragons- and their Elemental buddies who I just didn't mention- didn't pay this much mind, because they were, and to this day are, fucking assholes. They took the occasional student in for magic but that was it- they never realized, nor would they have cared if they had, that there was a massive human(?)itarian crisis going on.
Their cousins, though, did care. They cared in a very bad way. Rising out of the Black Sea were the true first humanoids- towering forms, built for presenting the most imposing frontal image possible. Two arms, two legs, flat faces, often adorned by horns and wings. The Jotunn had intended to wait this annoying little "life that isn't us" trend out at the bottom of the ocean, but had had enough when they started making fire, so they followed a path analogous to the older Dragons. They offered security in exchange for control to the scattered Beastmen. They'd take even more.
These Giants, by any name, were vain. They wanted servants like them. If you had asked they would likely espouse some fabricated practical advantage, or say they simply found them more relatable. The truth was grosser. They set to work on the Beastmen, shaping many strains of them into custom forms. Flattening their feet, reducing their tails, shortening their snouts. This could only go so far- they struggled to get any closer when the starting point was already semi-humanoid. They needed a blank slate.
One band of entrepreneurs found a tantalizing answer. They traced the evolutionary roots of those Goblin conquerors, their Troll relatives, and, surprisingly, found even the mighty Hydras shared a distant evolutionary root- and that lineage still had some members around today! A salamander-like amphibian was their unassuming subject, and with it they struck gold. They were lazy on the specifics, perhaps- taking after Goblins a lot, they created the Trow, warriors with troglodyte tendencies. Seeing open spots in the market, they made another strain, aiming for the polar opposite- delicate, agile, acrobatic, and fancy Elves. The middle-market needed something though, and a second band formed to rival them. They picked up a xenarthran of some sort, which specific branch of that clade is unclear and muddied by the fact that a lot of mixed traits seemed carried down into their creations- they made, first, the Dwarves, practical and durable and built for artisanship. Second, they aimed for those more nomadic giant kingdoms, and offered the Ogres, towering counterparts to the Dwarves that were absolutely indefatigible. But there was still room for improvement...
If you were a Beastman in this time, you would have dreaded this statement- these new species were rapidly replacing Beastmen from Jotnar rule, both inside and out. Either they were being conquered by the often superior numbers of these species, or they were being displaced as their god-emperors phased them out in favor of them. But there was a glaring issue, carried over from the Beastmen. If you looked at all the Trow, all the Elves, all the Dwarves, all the Ogres, you would realize each was actually a vast species-complex, each strain specialized to a particular environment- and fairly weak outside of that ideal. So, thought this lone Giant, why not make a one-size-fits-all subject? Everyone could buy it, and with the promise that the bounds of their empire would not be limited by the physiology of their citizens, surely, many would. To save some time, he would start with these primates that were already vaguely close, and shape them up...
His hypothesis was brutally correct. Humanity was to the men as they were to the Beastmen before them. Humans were, perhaps, the marginally weaker species, but they bred more reliably, ate more efficiently, and spread thoroughly across the globe. It was only here that the Dragons took notice, and struck the Jotnar down- for ulterior reasons, the Giants insist to this day. Humans were left in the shadows of their slain gods, their weakness outside of strength-in-numbers starting to show- pushed into their walls from the outside. Meanwhile, all others were free to make their own fate. They found their own Magics- be it from the Dragons and Elementals of old, Giants that had a change of heart, Angels and Demons... or that nagging voice in the back of their head, leading them into the wood.
They hadn't known exactly what they were until those few followed it there- of their artificiality. As life itself spoke to them, they were appalled by their forms, and formed a commission to tap into this creature-shaping force they had found, this supposed tailor of evolution, to fix themselves. Among their results were an assortment of new species- collectively, Demitheres, and that's what catboys and centaurs and faeries and Northy and mermaids are.
Humans, however, had become a stick in the mud, easy to avoid but hostile when approached. Finding the idea of fighting them to the last individual a little offputting, understandably, avoid them they did- all that was magic left Earth to its own devices, only showing itself on occasion. They'd come down, someone would come at them with some random horseshit their grandma said would cause a werewolf to immediately burst into flames, and they'd take that as a sign that, no, they hadn't gotten better. This hit a tipping point as humanity industrialized. Starting to get claustrophobic in their homes away from home, and concerned that humans could start greatly overexpanding and take what space remained for the others, they decided to, quietly, nonchalantly, and all at once, just set up shop at the edge of their towns.
Of all the vast tragedies in this story so far, this of all things actually worked without a hitch. News of the local Dragon by the farm or the family of Lycans living in the mansion on the hill spread slowly but surprisingly mildly among the greater human populace, because, like, no one's gonna put that in the newspaper, and this gave them time to get connected on a personal level. By the late 1800s, Magic had demystified itself. While many humans could still be surprised to learn that a specific "mythical" being was real, they'd probably have known a couple from back home- and aside from when these interactions, and the politics around them, went sour, there was a place for nonhumans in this world. But there were sour spots.
One of these sour spots was exploitable. The governments of the world needed black ops and wet work. They set out to form up mercenary organizations for mixed purposes- secret R&D, Anomaly Containment and Experimentation, assassination, and paramilitary services. And what better to enhance the plausible deniability aspect than to say that it wasn't even humans doing the weird occult shit and high-profile assassinations?! As the whole "Industrial Revolution" thing started to reeeeally get Industrial Revolution-y, they made the Dragon by the farm and the Lycans living in the mansion on the hill offers they couldn't refuse: stay out of the steel-mills and meat-packing plants, take a complimentary gun, and if anyone asks, we never had this conversation.
USA, 1915. World War 1 was happening in Europe, America would not be involved for a while, but there were concerns. In particular, Human mercenaries were being reassigned from the merc companies to the regular military- a bit of a backdoor to treaties surrounding the usage of the large, often international mercenary forces being kept out of war. While the regular military would only take the humans, it was enough of a blow to their numbers that the companies were incentivizing new hires. So some creature from the outskirts came flying into town on long, thin wings, hobbled down the road, turned into a rather shady backalley, and opened the door into the semi-disguised front of ADB Defense and Containment.
USA, 1922. She starts her patrol shift- around a vast anomalous lake- and several minutes in becomes aware of a single-engine, single-seat aeroplane of a flying-boat type. She moves to intercept, weapon in hand. After several passes and gestures, she banks, flying from one wing to the next, and shoots a few holes into the canvas of its wings. Aligning back into formation with it again, and gesturing to the pilot to turn around, he returns the favor and shoots a hole in her left orbit. Her head shears off at the second cervical vertebra, and her body is torn to ribbons as she crashes through the treeline. Her severed wings are recovered and returned to her family by ADB.
The pilot has already recovered the rest of her.
USA, 1938. There's some trouble in Europe again, but still research is being done at the lake- slowed by disappearances of personnel. The area is simply too vast to reliably tell what's getting them, and temporospatial warping is considered a likely culprit. It wasn't until they all showed up again that it became apparent what was happening- shambling, walking corpses milled around aimlessly, surprisingly benign once approached. Scouts found a shack containing one in such a bad state it had to be held together with what appeared to be salvaged aircraft components, standing over the marred remains of a man half-eaten, equipped with necromantic gear, and a pilot's license that read H. Erebus Eastmann.
All but that zombie were screened by a Necromancer under contract with Caelan Mercenary Services to determine whether or not they were still conscious, or mere husks operating as pure thralls to his now-absent will- by surprise, all of them were the former, and with some work he restored them to conscious status in-situ. This special example, though, was harder to discern. As government officials took them in, prepared to send the rest off to resume their lives while setting her up for further screening, the Necromancer contacted his mentors for a more absolute check- and the two liches showed up unannounced, simply walking through the walls of a high-security facility to perform their work, finding that indeed this specimen was still conscious- but a damaged brain would prevent her from returning to normal until repaired. With the availability of spare brains in pre-WWII America being what it was, one of the liches eagerly proposed that they might have luck instead in installing computational systems to take its spot, given how well this individual had taken to bodily prosthesis.
Of course, the CIA was more concerned with learning what hurts a zombie. This continued through 1974, when Datum Integrated Paramilitary offered their latest microprocessors to the government in exchange for the promise that one of them be used to restore their long-suffering comrade. The exchange was honored, and the CIA continued pain threshold testing on Quentine Coatile Zaelus, who, while considered the product of a government R&D project rather than a person, was now capable of screaming about it. ADB Defense and Containment arranged a contract to buy her in 1995.
They shipped her in a cardboard box.
That should explain a lot.
Whether Pterosaur, Bird, Dragon, Robot, or Eldritch Monstrosity, this is I think the most compelling and suitable backstory I have so far come up with. Adjustments will be made accordingly, and there's more I could get into, but I think this is a good basis.
So... Now what?
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