Weekly Update - 201 - 1/15/24 (Patreon)

I work on holidays because I want to! For those of you who are not working today, I hope you enjoy your holiday!

Comic this week? Yes! Finally! Woo!

Drawing: Page 183

Playing: Bunch of Ratopia, but also back to WoW cuz the new patch coming up this week sounds great.... but let's face it, I'll be at least TRYING the new Cult of the Lamb DLC when it comes out tomorrow. Having beaten it once, I'm not sure if I can through that game a second time because it doesn't seem super replayable, but maybe the new DLC will change that.

Listening to: Cult of the Lamb OST, Start a Cult on repeat because I watched a stream the other day and I can't get it out of my damn head.

Ramble:

It's a fun challenge to have a character that doesn't speak in my webcomic. They CAN speak, as we saw when we first met them in Chapter 8, they simply choose not to. It means that instead of trying to express their personality in what they say, I have to do it with the art alone, with their expressions and demeanor. And I kinda love that about them. Taisuko is similar, in that they're unable to speak Shtago, (the language represented in the story by English), so when I write for the character I have to assume that most of my English-speaking readers cannot read Taisuko's dialogue, (even though we all have access to Google Translate, I don't expect everyone to use it for everything).

However, according to Stephen King, I'm committing a grievous sin as I have yet to actually NAME this white-furred character in the narrative. They have not, and certainly would not have introduced themselves to Kiva, and nobody else in the story has yet named them. The only person in the story who knows their real name is The Ancestor, and their interactions with the Ancestor are, thus far, quite terse.

As Kiva and this... white-furred person... are currently in the middle of a fight, I have limited options at this point for forcing a name into the story, so that we (read: me the author and you the readers) have a name to use when referencing them. I have tried to inject one into the story, I wrote and even sketched a page where Kiva's newfound bestie gets a name, but it felt so unnatural I had to toss it out.

In any case, for my own reference I've taken to calling this character Snowball, as suggested by a friend. I'm telling you this so you can call them that too! Because since I missed my chance to introduce them properly, I don't know exactly WHEN their name will be revealed in the comic in a way that makes narratively-logical sense. It might be quite some time yet. Hopefully why we're calling them "Snowball" will become evident in the narrative eventually, (Hint: it's not the name they would have chosen for themselves), but in the meantime, I'm comfortable at this point with my Patrons having this name to reference them by, so we don't have to keep describing who we're talking about every single time we want to talk about them.