Well.
It sorta came as an epiphany, you know? Two levels, mostly. One was the realization that the more I designed Northy as her own character apart from just an avatar, the harder it was to be in her headspace. It's a little cringe to admit I suppose, but Northy being a tough character encouraged me to act tough- and maybe tougher than I should have been.
I've been... Angry. For a while. Just at the world, at serious stuff. Pointless, impotent rage about things that I can't change much. Not anything helpful. And that ground me down, hard. Life has been, while not necessarily hard, quite miserable for me for a long time now, and let's not mince words here, this was a dangerous combination. I don't want to worry anyone, let alone touch anything sensitive, so I won't go there, but suffice it to say I kind of broke down one day. I didn't want to squeeze myself into a cast of strength, and by and large that I've ended up in this position at all is sort of accidental, and this led into the second level of that epiphany.
Modeling a character after me yielded a character that was, in many ways, rough looking. A little cold, strong features, and in some subtle ways a little... Masculine, really. What happened to lead me where I got was that I looked at these features and started to recharacterize her around them. I made a character that acts like I look, which was obviously a terrible idea, because I'm trans, and my personality and body kinda don't agree with each other that's the whole thing.
And those features- I think I did good designing around them, but I still get mistaken in good faith for a dude constantly when presenting my character. It... Gets to me. I've never been one for escapism, but, well, why not idealize a little bit? Maybe having a cute girly-girl avatar would make me feel a bit better.
And so here we are where I've designed a new character largely from the ground up (outfit is a placeholder hush) and this new character is a fucking Doll.
I'll try to frontload the most important stuff from here. Things will get rantier as they go, but first and most importantly:
Name Change Incoming
My name kinda worked when I was a pterosaur, but now it's honestly a liability. I've always found the jokes people make about it to be a little in poor taste. So, I'm almost definitely going to be dropping it.
As we go further into this document, I'll be referring to the three phases of my character each with their own names. Northy will refer to the old Pterosaur design for the rest of this document. Thauriodh, or Thia, is the Dragon incarnation's name (the latter would obviously be the one I'd put on my account if I went with that). Finally, the Doll has taken up the old canon "True Name" of Northy as Quentine Coatile Zaelus or Q.C. And, yes, my profiles will eventually switch to using one of those, I'm pretty sure. Maybe not. Northy does sound cute. Maybe I should just be Northy instead of Northropi, I don't know...
There Can Only Be One
This is a constant recommendation from people I vent about this to and I should address it up front: I don't want multiple sonas. Northy, Thia, and QC are all competing for the same spot. Sure, I might retool some elements of them into different characters- the pterosaur-person race still exists in the background of the lore, and Thia's true form is probably going to be a character even if everything else about her gets scrapped- but I can't have several characters that are just me running around in the setting. I can't make these characters anything but just me because then they won't be sonas and I won't be using them in the same capacity. I can't have multiple settings to support all of them in their own world without crowding because that's tiring- and even all of these aside, I simply don't have the mental energy to switch between multiple characters a lot.
Look, you know me, kayfabe is always up in a sort of teasy half-on way. How does that work if I just straight-up have multiple sonas? How do streams work? Would I be doing some streams as one and some as the other? Would I make a redeem that switches me? I don't really like those ideas- and most of the people who do this have some lore-friendly reason, like being a hivemind or something. So, no, running multiple characters at once isn't a practical option for me. Just know that not much is going to waste here.
Designing a sona that improves on the last is a fun little game! And by that I mean a little bit of a struggle. It's hard to have it both ways- sometimes I need to just learn to let go of bits I don't want. But, I know what I do want, and I've already had a lot of it.
Flight Mandatory
While I intend Q.C. as a clean slate out of a desire to "break the curse," and intend to reuse very little lore and assets from the previous designs in hers, the truth is that for as long as I've had sona characters, they've had similarities- and this is because there's just stuff that I like enough that it's important to any sona I make. This is another factor in the difficulty of having multiple of these things running around, you know? They're gonna be suspiciously similar in more ways than just characterization.
I want to reflect the topics I gravitate to via a design that implements them. Mostly these are weapons and animals; Northy and Thia are exercises in creature design that have extensive amounts of technological weaponry built in. Q.C. will have a bit of this too- the animal motifs are pending a little as I hammer out more solid lore for homunculi.
These lead to themes surrounding just what I want to spend my life doing in this fantasy setting, of course- and so flying and swimming are universal motifs across all iterations. Again, you'll see how this works for Q.C. You'll all see.
With Northy we had an armorer working on weapons in a mercenary base by the sea, with Thia we had a little less emphasis on the armorer thing and a little more combat, living in a small lair on base. With Q.C., she's a doll living a lonely but idyllic life on a tiny island, circling about and tinkering on stuff she collects. So on and so forth, they all implement certain themes that I keep coming back to- but there's a definite outlier there with Thia.
Cool Rebrand It Lasted Five Months
Thia is a good character and I don't regret designing her. I had a very good time working on her, but it stagnated when I started trying to implement mechanical bits. If I do end up sticking with her as a sona, I'll probably significantly cut back on those, with very little externally-visible metal or stitching- a much cleaner Undead aesthetic versus what I have right now, and the reason for that is simply that I don't know how to do the prosthetic heads/arms bit without just making it look worse. I've done some rough sketching offhandedly and it just doesn't ever come out well, and this is a major factor in her being disconnected from the themes she, as my sona, needs to convey.
One of these is definitely that she's too strong. It's cool kind of just having a character that's a fucking kaiju, don't get me wrong, and I looked forward to the idea of having a true form model I could use for some gags and whatnot- but she was never intended to be this... Genuinely threatening. She's kind of supposed to be a whiny pissbaby- and Dragons being as prideful as they are have an element of that, but that's gatekept behind the fact that they're Dragons. It's pretty hard to put them in their place. I feel like this definitely shows in the way the death scene evolved in my head when the switch happened- it went from being caught off-guard and brutally killed suddenly to being a monumental battle involving several assailants ganging up on her because, well, Dragons don't really get one-shot very often. That's just not me, you know? I need a character that just isn't so high on the power scale.
And if you're reading these last two sections and screaming something, let's address it.
No, that Bitch is Staying Extinct.
Not once have I seriously considered just going back to the Pterosaur-era design. I feel like that design entered a death spiral and salvaging it would require basically redesigning a parallel concept from scratch. All the ramblings I wrote about how she was like part dwarf and her bones were denser so she did better in water than most pterosaurs- that's all a sign that I need to go somewhere but where I'm at is just stagnating.
The biggest issue is actually one induced by realism, because by the end of it Northy wasn't a Pterosaur so much as a Pterosaur-Loon Hybrid. See, Pterosaurs were probably not highly aquatic- we have biomechanical studies showing they'd be able to launch off the water just fine, but they're not like a bird or even a person where they can assume a passively comfortable floating posture, and they're so radically low-density to save weight that they wouldn't be able to dive very easily either. While exceptional fliers, maybe better than modern birds in some cases, even highly oceanic, piscivorous Pterosaurs that landed in water would probably just want to get out of it.
Sure, maybe there's something to be said of having a design that's a hybrid of a hybrid. But I already was that- Zombie Pterosaur. Zombie Loon Pterosaur is a lot of baggage, and, frankly, look, I don't want to sound like I'm bashing anyone, but let's level on what made me take the jump from that to Dragon, right? If you're like a WolfLionBirdFoxSealHawk, well, why not just be an alien? That way you won't have to list them off every time. That's essentially what I did- Thia is a weird Dragon, but still recognizably a Dragon. With one fell swoop I not only removed lots of conceptual baggage, but gave myself tons of artistic freedom.
Basically what that all means is that if I do go back to a Creature-Person design, it probably won't be a Pterosaur. While Pterosaurs are cool and I prefer most Pterosaurs to most birds, I now realize I prefer some birds to any Pterosaur. So, I guess that means my next bet is gonna be a Harpy. But, until then, this fight is between Thia and Q.C.
Consider that my conclusion to the Dragon rebrand thing, too. I'm far happier as a Dragon than I was as a Pterosaur, but maybe that's not going to be the end of it now. Maybe this ends with a rebrand within a rebrand; maybe I just take the best parts of the Doll model and work them back into the Dragon model.
At this point I just hope that, finally, something sticks.
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