Weekly Update - 92 (Patreon)

Based on the poll I posted, I think it's pretty obvious that Riley will be the next character posted to the Character pages.  That should be interesting.

Also a very special thanks to Ikato!  Who joined us this week at the Trader tier!  Thank you so much for your support!

Comic This Week: Yes

Drawing: Page 125 and Riley Character Page graphics

Playing: 7 Days to Die Alpha 20

Rambling:

This week my husband went on a business trip, and in my boredom I watched the entirety of Arcane on Netflix... nearly twice all the way through.

Holy shit did it leave me with a lot of emotions.  If you haven't watched it, I highly, highly recommend it.  I won't be spoiling anything about it here though.

It may surprise you to learn I've never actually been a fan of League of Legends. I've never been a detractor of it, either, I've always just been neutral/indifferent to its existence. MOBA games have never been my thing, so I don't play them, and Riot has built their entire empire off of a MOBA game, so they never caught my interest with it. Though I'll admit some of the related music has crossed my feed a few times and I've watched a few of the entirely impressive animations that often accompany said music.

Suffice it to say, I went into Arcane without knowing anything about the world at all, and I gotta say, I am now a huge fan. Of the show, its characters, and its setting at least, I still won't go play the game.

But I can now see why a few people have suggested that I had drawn inspiration from the setting.  There are a lot of similarities between some of my characters and the ones in Arcane.  Which, is hard for me. I because with the way I build my characters, I take a lot of inspiration from media and stories I've consumed and while I'm always trying to spin them in my own unique way, I constantly worry about overlapping existing properties too closely.  But it's usually the characters and settings I DON'T know about that I run the risk of overlapping the most. Two creators can easily feel inspired by the same source and develop similar products in parallel.

But at the same time, I think it's a compliment to be compared to such a thing as League of Legends. The care and attention to detail that Riot puts into their stories and characters is apparent even to an outsider like me. People can find similarities between any two things, if they look deep enough. There are a finite number of details in any given character, after all, once our brains break their complexity down into simple stereotypes for the ease of memorization and categorization. I'm more than happy to have my ideas compared to characters and a setting that people really like, as opposed to being compared to one that is grossly disliked.

It is unlikely that any of my stories will ever be as good as Arcane, that's just the truth of it. I'm only one person of amateurish skill, not a huge team of passionate and brilliant writers and animators. But I hope that if I can continue to pour my love and my passion into my stories and characters, maybe some day they will be good enough to stand out on their own.