PROCESS: Character design

I promised a breakdown of the character design process for a sponsored comic where I had some characters make some in-universe fictional characters. Expression through fictional settings is kind of an important idea to the main comic, and it's certainly one of the things that might be worth deep-diving on here.

It's not necessarily a process examination either, since the trolls here are certainly by no means fleshed out characters in their own right, but their existence serves to reinforce existing characterizations.

So let's talk about it, let's discuss the process of "character-making as characterization" as I am going to call it.

TROLL NUMBER ONE: TIGRIS FUSCIK

Nepeta's was kind of a slam dunk. I think this might be my favorite design from this comic, actually. Nepeta as a character is kind of pulled in two directions, expressed in the dissonance between the reality of her existence in isolation and her existence in company. The two aspects of her, APEX PREDATOR and BABY FUJOSHI are in tension basically all the time, and Nepeta as a character winds up kind of unfocused, since the binary of cruelty/kindness that Homestuck eventually develops is kind of undefined at the time she's introduced. This is something Hussie himself admits - during her introduction, the author commentary laments taking a crueler approach to her than he might have after Act 6 or so.

Anyway, in the process of attempting to make something of this, you isolate one aspect of Nepeta, and what she finds interesting in herself and others, as well as the aspects of her character that exist in a party.

I doubt Nepeta would feel the same, but I find the aspect of fantasy as an exploration of a fictionalized past - usually medieval European pasts - pretty interesting? It's not necessarily true, but as terminally-online fascists claim that Camelot was real, it's certainly... salient, so to speak. This is put in direct terms by the text of Homestuck itself, as Vriska and Tavros roleplay their ancestors' pasts at each other, constantly in tension with their own wants. In this sense, Tigris winds up a warped reflection of the Disciple. The bushy hair and huge fuckoff horns are directly pulled from her design, though the Disciple's horns are more conical and smaller. She's also a little bit inspired by Noi from Dorohedoro. I haven't seen that but I extremely see gifsets all the time. I look respectfully at gifsets all the time, and that's why she's got stupid ult!Dirk ace bandages on her arms, though that being a Heart player thing is a fun idea too. It's not but... what if it was? The world is your oyster.

I try not to pull too much from existing names, when it comes to trolls. I tend towards mutilating the scientific Latin names for whatever their lusus may be, but for Tigris, it was too good to pass up. Tigris is named for Tigris of Gaul, who was a real person, I assume, but then was fictionalized in Gladiator, and played by Sven-Ole Thorson. Tigris's role in the film is to aggress Maximus (Russell Crowe) and the audience demands that Maximus kill Tigris. This doesn't happen, and Maximus is given the title Maximus the Merciful. I think that parallels nicely against the role of the Disciple, after the Sufferer's death. The name Fuscik is also a misspelled extension of "Fucik", the last name of Julius Fucik, the composer of classic gladitorial music, Entry of the Gladiators. If you'd like to read into it, the panel depicting Sebastian and Tigris fighting in a boxing ring can be a reference to this, since the scene is bathed in clown-purple and atmospherically bears a resemblance to some Vast Error panels, where other clown bullshit goes on. Maybe Tigris is secretly a clown. There's no indicator of her blood color. Maybe she is. Who knows! Maybe we're all the clowns for diving into a character who exists in three panels total.

TROLL NUMBER TWO: STAFYL MORTEM

Stafyl Mortem. What a name. This is the first one I designed, and the one who is most like the future trolls we'll see that have this context for their existence. Most notably, Stafyl wears Doom colors.

This is kind of a fun thing where it's maybe not even true - none of them describe any of their characters physically, and the diegesis of the ghostly apparitions that appear in each panel is entirely up to you, but I think it'd be pretty sudden if every character in Homestuck suddenly had the ability to draw directly onto the panels. (shoves those goofs from Birthday Train under the rug)

But it conveys what the character is about in a really clear way. Aside from Tigris, the gang has kind of a tie back to The Adventure Zone: Balance, which is probably a bigger influence on Burning Down the House as a whole than it has any right to be. In contrast to Merle Highchurch, a nature cleric, Stafyl is a grave cleric, which means that they are very invested in the line between life and death. This kind of clashes with Aradia's own beliefs, that death is something to be celebrated.

Stafyl's lusus is bacteria - they're named for staphylococcus, a genus of bacteria that causes infection, and is the predominant cause of food poisoning when it comes to rotting foods. The shape of staphylococcus is spherical, grape-like clusters, and this reflects in the design of Stafyl - the tied-off ponytail and beads on their horns are the most obvious example, but if you were to see them closer than the panel they get, you'd see piercing clusters as well.

Stafyl bears the least resemblance of the three actual original characters to the ancestor in question, but I don't think it's entirely non-present either. The Handmaid is wrapped up in some racist tropes that can't really be excised from the character, but that's neither here nor there, it's just something that's gotta be said when addressing Damara/the Handmaid lest it come off as condoning it, but the idea of being the handmaiden to death itself is the thing here. In the panel they're depicted in, Stafyl is casting blight on some skeletons. Why's Stafyl so high level? Who cares. It's a cool spell - bypassing the damage on plants is really cool flavor, IMO. (Blight does 8d8 damage to nonplants, by the way. More tabletop games should use D8s. No, I'm not biased.)

Stafyl's outfit is based on a fan classpect - the Monk. This wasn't necessarily intentional, but it is actually kind of a funny story - I started with the sprite, and in lieu of wanting to draw the outfit myself, I looked through that Homestuck.net art asset pack that was ludicrously unsourced, that I downloaded before putting together "oh this is all ludicrously unsourced" but then... didn't delete. And in my search for a source, I actually found out that the artist is someone I know pretty well, even if this art is 8 years old. That's a funny coincidence, I think. Small world, huh?

Hm........ There's also the they/them angle. This mostly comes from me writing Aradia as nonbinary, and a they/them themselves. I try to do this organically, like Sollux using they/them while others don't, but I have already packed so, so many transgender arcs into the story, and putting every single one in the story would wind up feeling really weird and bad, so Aradia's nonbinariness winds up as a kind of background element, even as their role in the comic grows.

I think that's all I have to say about Stafyl. Who's next?

TROLL NUMBER THREE: SEBASTIAN

I forgot I gave him this name. I pulled this name from another character I made just a few nights before I started this comic, and Sebastian (the tiefling swashbuckler) is so cool. Sebastian the tiefling is a hesbian pirate queen. In practice, the immediacy of Tavros's whole deal kinda pulls back from what Sebastian could have been, and well… the name Rufioh was already taken. So it just kind of stuck.

Tavros has a fun kind of dynamic where he's invested in struggles, but doesn't ever do shit until he can be the hero about it. This is most exemplified in [S] Wake, but that's dangerously vriscoursy for a character breakdown. Anyway, this was kind of a perfect storm of characters to attribute Adventure Zone-ness to, because Magnus Burnsides, a protection fighter, exists.

The relationship between Tavros, Rufioh, brain ghost Rufio, and the Summoner is all probably pretty interesting, if you've got brain rot like me and think of characters in juxtaposition all the time. Tavros and brain ghost Rufio have the same dynamic as Vriska and FLARP character Mindfang, but it goes unstated by the comic that it's kind of the same dynamic, and it pulls the two of them in completely different directions. Tavros channels a lot of that energy into Sebastian.

There's three main sources of shapes and ideas - Magnus Burnsides, Rufioh, and Yugi, from Oh. I don't necessarily think Yugioh was a big inspiration for Tavros, but it's wound up being kind of a cool touchstone for his character, since Yugi's kind of a chump. Way more earnest and fun than Tavros could ever be, but I think the relationship between the two could be really cool, like. Tavros and brain ghost Rufio could have a similar dynamic to Yugi and the pharaoh.

From this, we get some belts and some spiked bracelets, and the stupid hair colors - though to be fair, those are also picked up from Rufioh, and to a microscopic extent, Sabine Berare from Vast Error. The way Vast Error (and some select panels of HS^2) looks has a pretty big bearing on this comic, even if I don't really engage with it on levels other than "damn, this comic looks good".

The horns are derived from two parts, one is the classic Homestuck bit about Nitram horns being kind of inverted. Instead of expanding out, they curl in. I can't imagine they're any more convenient though?

The color choices are a bit strange here too - the teal shield comes from Alternian worldbuilding, where the wood is just Terezi-teal for whatever reason, and the red is just kind of an absent choice to tie it all together. The gloves also have metal plates because of a goof I make in the main comic, though it's not out yet at the time of writing, so here it is in all its beauty:

Bam, now this also serves as a comic preview. I am just checking off all my beautiful boxes today.

Another note of intent is that when on screen, his hair has a similar, but not identical silhouette to Dirk's - while Tavros's hair is made up of two shapes from Dave and June's hair styles, Sebastian's is made of Dirk and Rufioh's, with a bit of the pharaoh from Yugioh splashed in.

There's also some ideas I considered but didn't execute on - his gloves and boots are made of real musclebeast leather, but musclebeasts are usually depicted as white in comic, since we usually see musclebeasts as lusii. Following through on this would mean white boots and white gloves, but it doesn't quite look right in-comic, so the regular brown works instead.

FINAL TROLL: YOU CAN (NOT) PLAY DUALSCAR

This was a funny goof character, because the experience of coming up with a character on the fly? Not that fun, actually. I long a lot for the feeling of rolling up some characters and improvising a tabletop game on the spot, but I'm also not the best improviser in the world, and Eridan in this case, winds up… floundering. Heh.

There's not a lot to say, this is the outfit that Taako wears in the graphic novel, mashed up with the funny hat that June puts on Bec Noir during their short fight in A6I3, using the dice-rolling power of the Pop-o-matic Vrillyhoo Hammer, right before meeting… ghost Vriska. Even now, in this goof character design, the ghost of Vriska looms over the story.

There's some stuff to be said about the relation between this sort of gender non-conformity, the symbolic presence of wizards, and Eridan specifically, in a post-Pesterquest world. But I don't really have all of my feelings spelled out to myself on that, and I would rather not unpack those feelings in front of a crowd. C'est la vie.

Here's a panel that I started, but didn't finish because I didn't want to finish it.