Friday Update #37: Holding the World in the Palm of Her Hand (Patreon)

Hey folks, this is both a Friday Update on Samantha Taylor (Zach's mom), particularly her hands and what she does with them, and an update on the sketches from TiltSHIFT for her second pose, which are complete outside of very simple things like a tears and sweat drops layer and an adjustment to the wedding ring. The cleaner lines here should give a better idea of what her outfits look like compared to the messier lines from her first pose, and the captions are likely of interest for explaining what each outfit is in a way that the first pose's captions weren't.

Like her first pose, her eyes can look in a lot of different directions, but unique to this pose are the held accessories (except the drawing clipboard, which the first pose has as well). Those items, and their use in the story, will be the focus of today's Friday Update. Still around until the end, because I have an important announcement to make about handfuls of a different nature.

First up, let's cover that clipboard and pen.

Samantha is an intellectual titan who has set an impossibly high bar for her child to match, which has caused them to live in the towering shadow she casts, even though she's only 5'3". Part of that is that Samantha is an exceptionally talented artist across a wide range of mediums:

• Music - She likes piano the most, but she's particularly talented with jazz instruments like a saxophone and a trumpet as she's the daughter of a relatively prominent jazz musician and got some great childhood lessons from him. She doesn't like to play in front of anyone except her husband, who is a moderately skilled guitarist who prefers playing an acoustic Spanish guitar over something that would work better with his wife's play, meaning that duets are more discordant than harmonious, but Zach has heard her play from distant rooms in their large house on dozens of occasions.
• Painting - Samantha particularly loves landscapes and watercolors. Her own style is primarily influences by Impressionism, but she's more than capable of varying her style or mimicking other styles. She's got a studio in the house devoted just to painting. She was planning on it being her home office, but shit happens in life and her professional plans got scrapped.
• Photography - Samantha's mother was a very accomplished photojournalist and correspondent for the wartime propaganda department in Japan. For complicated and spoiler-filled reasons stated in Friday Update #36, Samantha refuses to "develop" (ha!) her considerable potential with a camera and creates memories for others to view with her other artistic skills, but what skill she has displayed with photography is impressive.
• Architecture - Samantha's husband, Jeff, is slightly jealous of her skills and still considers her to be the better designer despite her abandoning a very promising career to be a full-time mom and him staying in the field for over 20 years. The two designed their two-story house with a small basement together, and it's a postmodern design largely of a neo-Colonial style, with hints of blending Queen Anne and Folk Victorian revival styles and even Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie style for a large and open living room and kitchen. Every member of the family is an architecture nerd and nobody can fully agree on how to define the style of the house, but it artfully blends historical styles and features into a creative design that is distinct and functional. Ever the engineer, Samantha is the reason that house is more "functional" than "distinct."
• Cooking - Samantha considers this an art, (unlike baking, which she considers a science, and yes, she's also good at that), and she got so good at it because she was competing with her father-in-law and trying to win his approval as his daughter-in-law. She never quite earned that approval, but she earned her fantastic cooking skills by busting her ass in the kitchen.

But her most proficient and by far her favorite is sketching, either with pen, pencil, or charcoal. She likes to stand as she draws on a clipboard as it gives her the ability to pivot around her subject and find the best angle, and her particular technique comes from her ability to move both pen and paper independently from each other in a way that an artist sitting down on drawing on an easel could not. This might seem trivial, but this lets her dynamically adjust the angle of her paper and her strokes on it in a way that almost no other artist could match. Most artists would struggle with a variable drawing surface, but Samantha has long since mastered this technique that gives her drawings a unique style and precision.

In another lifetime, Samantha would have wound up a renowned artist, as her own natural interests and talents gravitate more toward that than her considerable intellectual capabilities. Samantha's biggest regret in her life is that she doesn't have the time in one lifetime to be a full-time mom, a devoted wife, an artist, and a genius designer all at once... which is probably why she's been trying to live through her child and won't accept that they can't be a prodigy capable of matching her talents.

Next up is the wine glass.

Samantha is struggling with some pretty severe mental health issues (very strong OCD, BPD, PTSD, some APD, and crippling loneliness, among some other minor issues that are hard to differentiate as quirks that do not qualify as mental illnesses). She has a very Asiatic view of mental health ("mental illness is just laziness and can be overcome with sheer willpower, and if I am suffering from mental health issues, the answer is to be stronger") and has only somewhat recently started to secretly see a psychologist/psychiatrist pair for treatment, but she doesn't like taking her prescribed medications as it makes her brain feel so slow and dull.

Her nonstop mind might be destroying her, but it's also been her lifelong companion. In a way, it's her only true friend, and it's the only one she's ever truly trusted. Can she betray a friend like that?

Source: Legend of the Galactic Heroes

It's not been a healthy mindset for Samantha or her mind, and one of her ways she "medicates" in lieu of proper medication is day drinking. The effects on her mind are predictable, and while alcohol dulls her brain, it's not in the way that scares her like her medication does.

It's nothing too worrying (if you ask her), and she gets drunk so easily that a full glass or two of red wine is enough to floor her (just ask Zach, but don't ask him what his mom considers a "full glass"), and that's not enough to damage her liver with sporadic day drinking (just ask her doctor who hasn't been informed about her day drinking), and she only drinks a little bit when she's having a particularly bad day (just ask her, but don't ask her what a "particularly bad day" is defined as), and she only really pounds back the drinks when she has guests over (just ask anyone she's ever met in a social setting), and she's a cute drunk anyways (just ask her husband).

Okay, so Samantha is a little bit of an alcoholic in denial, but you don't need to ask me since I'm going to just tell you that it is currently in a manageable state, I am playing up how severe it is, and she can easily cut that out of her life if she stops needing to run away from her personal demons (but that managed state might not be that way forever and the trajectory she is on is definitely a slippery slope).

On the home visits (or the blursed Mom Route), Samantha is both more secretive of her drinking and more willing to partake in it in a social setting (like a dinner where she's trying to apologize to her child for smashing their phone and leaving them trapped as a woman forever).

Source: a deleted tweet by JoSal

Source: nyahpa20 on pixiv

In other words, she's comfortable drinking, and her wine glass is held with an easy grip and has three sloshing levels of fullness: really full, halfway full (what a normal person would consider a full wineglass), and empty. As a dinner setting is going on where she considers it acceptable to drink (Thanksgiving, Christmas, her husband's birthday, etc.), that glass will cycle in fullness as she refills it.

They say there is truth in wine, but for a woman who has never fully trusted anyone, there are some things not even a bottle of red wine can pry out of her.

Third are Samantha's glasses.

Zach got lucky and has perfect 20/20 vision (which is actually closer to 20/15, meaning he's got more visual acuity than even "perfect" vision). He's even able to see in very low light levels, and outside of having to be careful with damage over time from sunlight and the unavoidable stigma of everyone's curiosity his red eyes mark him with, his eyes are an asset, not a liability.

Hell, he's even got fantastic motion tracking skills and even has an excuse to constantly wear sunglasses, and when you're a weeb with edgelord hacker tendencies who loves cyberpunk, being able to wear sunglasses indoors like you're a digital cowboy or secret agent trying to stay incognito is a neat bonus!

Source: Deus Ex (seriously, play this game if you haven't; the Revision mod is suggested, but there's also a mod to play as a female JC Denton)

His mom wasn't so lucky with her eyes. She's got her own quirks with them as outlined in the previous post about Samantha's sprites, but she's got some pretty terrible vision. Most days, she wears strong contacts (because he husband likes it better when she doesn't wear her glasses and that means she does too), but she supplements her vision as needed with reading glasses. She usually has a pair on her somewhere, but she also has several pairs lying around the large house.

The contacts correct her distant vision, but when wearing them, she needs to have these reading glasses on to draw, read a book, or do anything requiring precise vision within 3 feet of her face.

If it's only Zach at home (or Zach and a guest she feels more comfortable around) (or Samantha just thinks it'd look cuter with her clothes for that day), she wears her full glasses. They're a lot softer on her face because of the rounded shape, but the lens are noticeably thick and she's got a personal stigma about relying on her glasses. Samantha, the girl, wore glasses. Samantha, the woman, doesn't want to be that person, and has tried very hard to distance herself from that past before college and meeting her husband.

When you've got a photographic memory and an inability to forget the past, hindsight is more than 20/20. In a way, Samantha has even better vision than her son/daughter... but she's not able to see the future nearly as well as that child thinks she can.

Regardless of the knowledge of her lack of personal foresight and her metaphorical shortsightedness, Zach also doesn't know quite how bad his mom's vision is. She is in fact legally blind 3 feet in front of her without her contacts or full glasses on, but Zach has assumed from how perceptive she is and how much her hobbies rely on visual acuity that her vision problems aren't that bad. Her vision hasn't degraded with age as Zach thinks: it was always this terrible, and she's just more comfortable using her glasses more as she's aged.

I definitely want to write a scene someday where Zach is showering under very hot water (Zoey has turned into a heat vampire), and his mom comes in with her glasses on. They fog up badly enough that for a brief moment, Zach thinks he is in the clear despite being topless in front of his mom, but then she wipes her glasses off on the fresh towel she barged into the bathroom to bring him and sees that her son now has tits (and they're bigger than her F-cups).

Let's just say that she makes the face below when trying to process that either her son has turned into her daughter or that some stranger who looks so much like her and her son is showering in her home.

Last up is the knife. Like a desert, I've saved the best for last.

As most people know (because I keep hooting and hollering about it in between breaths about how much I want to fuck Zach's mom), Samantha Taylor is a yandere, and as such, she has to have a knife.

She's never actually killed anyone (just ask her), but she was fully prepared to at several points in her life should a threat to her love with her husband become a threat severe enough to warrant that response. Literally, she has drafted very realistic and detailed plans to get away with the murder of several dozen people in her head (of course she'd never write any of this down), and there was a time where whenever she met a woman, one of her background thought processes (she has several running at a time) was evaluating whether or not she was a threat, usually deciding they hypothetically could be, and hypothetically coming up with a plan to remove the threat from the board with a permanent solution.

One could argue these are just intrusive thoughts from her obsessive aspect of her severe OCD, but it gets a bit murkier. The intrusive thought was the thought of losing her husband, usually centered on him falling in love with someone else because she wasn't good enough for him. Those caused her so much distress that she was only able to calm herself by coming up with these elaborate plans to murder what she viewed as "competition."

While Samantha is a yandere, her husband is a shounen harem anime protagonist who never realized that he effortlessly, unintentionally, and repeatedly would draw women toward him with an abundance of kindness and a borderline magical talent for bumping into a woman in her darkest moments and saying the precise words she needed to hear the most.

Before Samantha entered the fray, Jeff had a dozen women around him who were varying degrees of interesting, fascinating, and beautiful. All of them were interested in him romantically after Jeff unintentionally "rescued" them, and unlike Keisuke, Jeff was too oblivious to notice the effect his actions had left on these women and usually thought a version of "a guy like me sure is lucky to have so many pretty female friends!" A girl would have to actually confess to him to realize she had feelings for him, and he would always accept them, but only because he was trying to be polite.

Of course, that isn't how romance works, and his many girlfriends broke things off amicably once they realized Jeff wasn't truly interested in them the way they were in him. This all stopped mattering once Samantha rose to the top of the pack and scattered her competition, and she serves the unique distinction (outside of Jeff's first girlfriend back in middle school) of being the only girl Jeff has ever asked out. She considers that moment to be the start of the victory lap she's been running for nearly 25 years.

One day, if I have time and decide that working toward finishing re:Dreamer is a fools errand and that I actually want to work backwards, I might cover that topic in more detail beyond what you see in Samantha's expansive World Information entry, (or if I finish and get coerced into making a prequel "dating simulator" concept that someone suggested with Samantha from Jeff Taylor's point of view where a wide pool of dateable women in college would decrease over time until Samantha was the only one left).

Going back to the knife... the only person in Samantha's life who has ever both realized how batshit insane she is and stuck around past that revelation was her father-in-law. To paraphrase Kevin Taylor's World Information entries, he was understandably greatly concerned about this delusional woman who had enraptured his son, was taking him for a ride, and was too busy looking at him to see the road, and he tried to warn his son, who didn't listen. Realizing she had been called out, Samantha had a private conversation with the man, and when she realized the crushing pressure of her usual method of intimidation didn't work on a union organizer who negotiated with people who wanted him dead every other week and weren't subtle about it, Samantha realized she was going to have to get his approval the old-fashioned way of showing how capable of a wife she could be.

A good part of this was improving her skills as a chef, as Kevin was an incredibly talented cook who had developed his skills as getting hostile people to sit down together in a home for a good home-cooked meal as that had an almost pacify effect on tensions (and a great home-cooked meal would keep them coming back). Samantha busted her ass to get good at cooking and had to work harder at it than anything else she had before, but she did so since she viewed this as a vital "ingredient" (ha!) to winning her future father-in-law's approval.

Samantha, to her great mortification, was a terrible cook once upon a time. It took years of dedicated effort and far more failed attempts creating unspeakable culinary abominations than she would like to admit to get to where she is now. She's now an extremely good cook, but like the tightly wound bundle of anxiety and self-deprecating intrusive thoughts that she is, even the slightest blunder in the kitchen is enough to make her a little depressed. She's come so far, and yet she's still got so much further to go and an endless amount to learn...

Anyways, she might not be a serial killer (just ask her), but she has found it useful for enforcing obedience to make her son think she might be.

Before I go, let me share the line art of Samantha's Thanksgiving outfit for the first pose.

TiltSHIFT and I are satisfied with the sketches and are moving onto the line art for both poses. I can't give a precise estimate for Samantha's completed sprites as there are a lot of moving parts (literally, the sprites have to be quite modular), but they are TiltSHIFT's current focus and he's said the commercial use commissions between us come at a higher priority than his slew of personal ones.

Myumi is also working on sprites for another character now, which you can see the details of here. I won't reiterate the points of those here, but I'm quite excited for those too, especially since she's the first character in the game who won't have a fucking massive chest and I finally get to write meaningful breast envy (Britney mostly just feels sorry for Zoey and is glad she doesn't have those H-Cups, if they even truly are that small in size).

And here's that thing I've mentioned...

Between those two sprites, things are looking very exciting with the art, but I am also laying the groundwork of the viability involved with planning a later commission to standardize and reduce Zoey's breast size on her sprites from "these are grotesquely large and any attempt to hide them is laughably absurd as they are the size of her head" to a slightly less ridiculous "these are very big, but the sizing is consistent and yes, there's still suspension of disbelieve involved, but they're not breaking Zoey's back." I need to do more investigation into this, fully disclose the opportunity costs involved with an art shift of this magnitude (lots of money and lost time to change thing, mostly, but how much of both?), and stage a formal poll lasting for at least 2 months to get everyone's votes in, but I want to toss the prospect out there as something I am very much considering.

I hate to be so wishy-washy about the wording of this, but there are a lot of variables I have to look into since so much is involved and I don't want to definitely state anything either way before I am ready (and this really needs to be a vote). I'll have the Friday Update "A Tale of Two Titties" and that vote ready in March, but until then, leave your thoughts on the matter in the comments or the re:Dreamer Discord server (invite) as a preliminary gauge of interest.

See you all next time!