Glad to see you here, my friend! In this post you can find answers to the most of questions that might appear if you never heard of Budgie City!
ARTICLES:
What is “Budgie City” in general? Where did it come from?
What is the lore of “Budgie City” and its plot summary
Character designs and trivia can be found by searching the tag #character design in this blog.
Concept sketches and art can be found by searching tags #sketch and #concept art in this blog.
My personal blog (mostly fandom stuff, fanart and reblogs, not connected to Budgie City topic: @diamondzart
Hi, I’m Nastya, I go by she/her pronouns, 21 y.o. English is not my first language so there may be some mistakes in my posts, but I’m trying to improve! I write my book in another language, but it will be translated with the help of native speakers when I finish it, and I’ll publish it on the internet for everyone to enjoy! All concept art is also drawn by me. If you have any questions left, feel free to ask me through Tumblr asks!
Fenya is a quite a tough subject for anyone who knows him personally and/or anyone who had any interaction with him at all. Being a spoiled nestling coming from a Royal family, he was raised with the idea that he is better than others, that he has some ultimate privilege and everyone else should respect him unconditionally. His parents, Clemetine and Jack, are not better, thus they never really cared about giving him a proper upbringing, practically abandoning him oh the wings of their housekeeper zebra finch, Zhuzha.
Zebra finches are known for their pugnacious, chaotic and impudent behaviour, they love causing mayhem and have fun without thinking of consequences. One finch is not a big deal, but the bigger the flock, the more unhinged and unpredictable they become. Fenya loved that in them. He could relate to these little creatures of pure chaos, and Zhuzha enthusiastically encouraged his naughtiness when he was a nestling. But the time passed and the naughty nestling grew into a rude, narcissistic and confident in his impunity young parakeet.
Fenya was already a huge pain in under the tails of countless citizens, but the chain of unfortunate (pretty much fortunate for him personally) events led him to the mayor’s chair. And now you have the immature beast itself sitting on the highest post in the city, what’re you gonna do?…
The best way to highlight the age of the Budgie City concept and my progress in art is redrawing a character art I did exactly ten years ago. Here is Milana – for some reason I colored her cere blue in 2014, I guess I wasn’t that aware of biological differences between male and female budgies back then, or maybe I just did that accidentally, idk :D
That was a long way of simplifying very striped birds into something cartoony and animation-friendly, but at the same time keeping them recognisable as budgies. I think I pretty much achieved this goal, though there still will be tweaks in their designs in the future, of course. But I think I established the general style with them by now.
Work on the trading base is considered one of the hardest in Budgie City – if not in a physical sense, but in psychological for sure. Constant running around, several times a day flying across the forest that surrounds the city, guiding travelling traders to the base, writing things down, sending reports… Milana is good at that. Her nerves are pure steel while she is on her duty. She may not look like someone who can yell a macaw into the quiet obedience but she definitely is one, if you piss her off with your clumsiness. Because the trading base is the last place where you can be clumsy in this city, move, move, MOVE!
Away from the loud platforms full of bags, baskets, papers and dozens of birds that constantly move in an endless mass of organised chaos, Milana becomes one of Gesha’s favourite flowers. Her way to deal with the impact from the hard work is spending quiet evenings in his small burrow full of plants that don’t talk and don’t move. Gesha and his lifestyle is like a relaxation medicine for her.
You could say she has leadership skills, but not like she’s gonna use them at first opportunity on her own will. She has her breaking point, of course, and she tries to be careful enough to not reach it.
Color variation: green single factor dominant pied
Dancing has always been her passion – she loves learning new movements, new combinations, new numbers. It brings her joy to see smiles on others’ faces after her performances and she wills to share this joy with everyone. With her husband Gosha she runs a club/tavern called “The Den”, where her life-long dream to have a cosy place for everyone to come and dance together came true along with her loved one.
To Gosha she is a life guide. After the loss of his leg, he was depressed and didn’t know where to go and what to do – his life turned upside down. She was the one who managed to stop his endless spiralling into the abyss and gave him a new passion, which was her own – dancing. She taught him both how to dance and how to live on, despite his trauma.
Glasha is very supportive, but she also has her strong opinions – she won’t defend Gosha if he crosses the line with his excessive enthusiasm or anger control issues, she will stand her ground and try to show him that he should control himself better and she won’t unconditionally agree with everything just because they’re married. The tenacity kinda makes her a leader in their relationship, even though Gosha thinks that he is actually a leader. Though that doesn’t really bother him.
Reviving this blog because why not, I mean, I draw these guys a lot and I don’t plan on abandoning this setting, so I think it’s worth showing new things to Tumblr.
Reblogs are appreciated! Come to see some budgie drama lololol
Color variation: green single factor dominant pied
Being an open person at first glance, he is quite mysterious. His real past is unknown to everybody in Budgie City who knows him, even his own wife – the only way to find anything out is just listening to the stories he tells. He claims that he was a lone ranger who fought birds of prey, and that he lost his leg combating a harpy eagle. No one really believes him though. Most just prefer to think that he simply got stuck somewhere with his leg and made up these stories just to save his dignity. You can choose yourself whether you believe him or not…
He and Glasha run the club called The Den [name may be changed in the future, work in progress]. Quite popular place on the Seventh Baobab with nice music and regular dance performances. To take a rest from loud work days, Gosha regularly visits the checkers club – the very place where he and Gesha met. They play together a lot, but don’t really talk much about each other, so they know about each other’s lives very briefly.
Has anger control issues. In other words, he is quite easy to piss off. Also he is very enthusiastic when it comes to beating the crap out of “bad guys”. In a nutshell, he is for everything good against everything bad, but sometimes he gets carried away.
A traveler from distant forests. Since his childhood, he dreamed of getting away from his tiny village (consisting mainly of his numerous younger sisters) to a big city and staying there to live. In the place where he lived, Budgie City was treated more like a beautiful legend than a real place. But he believed in it. And reached his dream.
He achieved this dream by himself, but his arrival got really badly timed, so instead of a bright city life full of new friends and possibilities, he started getting wild and not very pleasant adventures...
Hyperactive, clingy, fiercely sociable and does not really understand why everyone around is so tense. Gesha finds him annoying, Gosha tries to cope, but fails miserably.
He’s the central character of the book, from whose perspective most of the story is told. One of the main trio, consisting of himself, Yasha and Gosha.
His prototype is my very first budgie, now long passed, but the memory of him immortalized in a book. A quiet introvert. It is easier for him to build a peaceful conversation with his favorite flower than to actively communicate with someone. But he does not mind quiet conversations, especially with friends (more precisely, with a loved one, because he has practically no friends, except for his girlfriend Milana; he prefers to keep the rest in the rank of "acquaintances").
Long and active conversations quickly tire and irritate him; and although the former daycare worker is not deprived of a good supply of patience, it is still not infinite. It ends even faster when he sees injustice.
He is essentially a walking botanical guide book, and if you ask him about the plants in his collection, he will enthusiastically begin a two-hour monologue and will not stop, even if you slip away at the tenth minute and never appear in his field of vision again.
Welcome to this informational article where I will be explaining what exactly this "Budgie City" is, where it came from, and in which direction it will be going. So, sit down comfortably - there are some interesting things waiting ahead of you! If you are interested in the lore, visit this article.
What exactly is "Budgie City"?
It is a fictional world that I am actively developing. At the moment, I’m in the process of writing it in the form of a paper draft. I write long texts by hand, and it seems to me that spelling out each letter, unlike typing, helps to approach the composition of sentences more thoughtfully, and to more successfully avoid strange and crooked constructions that will then have to be rewritten and corrected. It is far from the final, but I want to warm up people's interest in this world before the release of a full-fledged work, which is what I am doing now. I will not publish too many pieces of text until I have finished the story completely (though I probably will show some sneak-peeks). For now the content on "Budgie City" is mostly limited to drawings — concepts, sketches and character designs. Gradually, I've been starting to bring this topic to my YouTube channel in order to introduce the setting and concept to my viewers.
You may have seen my first video of Budgie City since 2014, which I have released quite recently — “I am not insane”, a video that focuses on one of the secondary conflicts of the story.
Where did this concept even come from?
It's quite a long story, and it's funny that this year is the ten year anniversary of me registering on the forum called "Budgie City". Yes, it all started with a regular internet forum — a by now almost extinct site format, which in the early 2000s and until about 2016-17 was the main place for interest groups on the internet. Now this has moved almost completely to social media, but before almost any hobby or interest had its own forum with different sections and topics. It saddens me a little that the golden age of forums has already passed.
In 2012, for the New Year, my parents bought me my first budgie — a classic green one, and I named him Gesha. At that time, I was not a regular "user" of the Internet yet. I only started to comprehend the vastness of the virtual network a few months later, and at first it leaned purely on me viewing memes in Google pictures and all sorts of videos on YouTube.
But in the spring of 2013, I discovered these wonderful things known as forums. And it was that point in time when I, having had a budgie with me for a year, decided to find a forum thematically fitting. Upon the request from my country, Google led me straight to the “Budgie City” forum.
The topics on there were something like rooms in a big house. The users randomly surfed through them and followed each other's daily lives. Therefore, Budgie City did actually feel really like being in a virtual society where everyone knows each other. I was getting used to the frequent people, getting to know each person individually. I went to their topics to write comments and answers, they wrote in mine. That's how we existed as this cozy club of interests.
There is an interesting thing with almost every child that is on the Internet — no matter where, in which community — a person with the admin/moder status is perceived as an absolute authority, any response from which causes awe and delight. And there were certain, more active and sociable admins in Budgie City — Anya under the nickname "Phoenix Bird" and Olga under the nickname "Olivka". The "Phoenix Bird" nickname spoke for itself — the image of a large bird of fire that walks around the city and receives admiring glances from everyone, was drawn in my head almost instantly. Olivka didn't have an image yet; I started turning her into a character much later.
Phoenix and Olivka in their modern designs (2022)
In the early summer of 2014, I read "Warrior Cats", and that’s where the whole story took off. I suddenly felt like I should become a writer too and write my own book. And 12-year-old me, who was spending 80% of my online traffic on the forum, decided to write a story, turning part of the admin staff and the budgies of familiar forum members into their own characters. Phoenix and Olivka turned into birds, the latter in particular acquired an image in the form of a wompoo fruit dove with olive-tinged wings, the budgies of the forum were also turned into their respective characters: Gesha and Yasha (mine); Glasha and Gosha (Hoatzin); Clementine, Jack, Fenya, Nira, Mouse, Castorka, Mithril and Small (Phoenix); Kuzya (Dmitriy68), Milana (Radujniy), Raisin (yyna) and others.
Sections of the forum have turned into parts of the city — the restaurant, the mayor's office, the registry office and nursery, and suburbs with parrots of other species, located on trees surrounding baobabs.
This is how the novel of the same name with the slogan "Feathered Metropolis" was born from the "Budgie City" forum. I posted it in its own topic, had about a dozen readers and, judging by the reviews, they all really liked reading the story. Although, looking back at the writing now... I wouldn't call it something breathtaking. Rather the opposite. But then again, I am now judging from the perspective of a third-year animation director student, and not the fifth grader I was at that time.
A couple of my original illustrations from 2014
The story was successfully brought to an end in about seven months, and after a while I started writing a sequel — however, the central conflict wasn’t thought out the slightest, so the plot quickly crumbled and was abandoned after several chapters.
Now the original text is lost in the vastness of the web — somewhere there is a piece of the prologue, somewhere even a couple of chapters. But the full version no longer exists — it was published only on the forum, and the said forum, unfortunately was — somewhere around 2019 — ruthlessly deleted from the Internet due to the desolation. All that's left of it are snapshots in the Wayback Machine.
Rewriting from the old version into a new one
In 2017, three years later, I made an attempt to rewrite "Budgie City" from scratch — leaving only the main conflict, the structure of the world, and the set of characters the same, to write a new text out of this "skeleton". Progress did not go beyond the prologue and the first chapter however, and rewriting was abandoned.
The same story with 2019 — a couple of pages, that’s all.
Two artworks from 2019
The next approach took till early 2021 to happen, when the original story turned almost six and a half years old. At that time I was already in the middle of my first year of animation directing at SPbGIKiT (Saint Petersburg State Institute of Film and Television). I wrote the prologue and part of the first chapter and went to proudly tell our master Galina Voropai about my "really cool" world. Galina interrupted me in the middle of the impromptu presentation, after which followed a forty-minute roast, thoroughly and in detail explaining that the "Budgie City" in its concept is a piece of junk that does not have the right to exist in its current form. And all this was in the presence of my classmates in the workshop. I gave up trying to defend myself halfway through, and when it was all over, I got up, quietly thanked Galina for a detailed objective analysis of the shortcomings of my project, went down to the first floor, huddled in a bathroom stall, and burst into tears.
It was the first (and yet the only) time in my life where I was literally crying over my work, and the girls from senior courses came to my howls, and we sat together on the windowsill of a public toilet. I was all red, shaking, and dropping snot, as they tried to calm me down.
(my mental state that day)
After that, I did not return to those written several pages for about a year and a half. I began to doubt whether I should continue at all or if it would just be a waste of time.
After the roast from the master, I went through all five stages of grief:
Yes, that was tough. But after so much time, I was finally able to evaluate the message of this scolding with a cool head and understand that most of the comments were actually really helpful - the conflict and the world did require a lot more careful study and rework. With the next approach, I wrote out all the conflicts, all the character motivations, and made a proper plan. And since the end of last autumn, I have returned to writing. Now I know where the story will begin, where it will head, and how it will end. All the actions performed by the heroes are finally based in actual logic. And, although Galina will not see the final result (she sadly passed away at the end of 2021), I hope that the new version will be one that she would have approved of.
A small FAQ:
Q: When will the book be released?
A: I don't want to make any promises as of now, because writing is a rather spontaneous and uneven process. I write more when I am inspired, and inspiration is impossible to predict. So the answer is simple — it will come out when it's finished :D
Q: Will it be released electronically or in a printed book form? Will I have to pay for reading it?
A: I plan to release the final version "Budgie City" in the same way as the old one — in open access, so that everyone can read it at any time. I will not charge money for reading the electronic version, but if there will be a demand for physical copies, I may release a small print run, which will cost money for those who want to get a copy. But it's a little early to think about that anyway.
Q: How does the world in Budgie City work? How do they live? What is the main conflict of the story?
A: All of this you can find out in this article!
Q: Where can I find more content to this world and story?
A: On this very blog or on my YouTube channel
I hope this article was helpful and informative enough for you to know where "Budgie City" comes from and in which direction it is currently heading. Thank you for reading!
Huge thanks to @annchanorsomethin for helping with translation of this article!
"Budgie City" — how is it organized and what is the story about?
Hello, I'm glad you decided to read my lore article about "Budgie City". The second article talks about where this world came from in general and how I came up with the idea. If you haven't read that article yet, you can check it out here. This article right here will tell you about the world itself and the society of the budgies, as well as describe the plot of the book in general terms. I remind you that the book is currently in the process of writing and will only be published when I have finished it completely.
Fundamentals of the "Budgie City" world
Yes, this is a story about talking animals, in particular, about birds! Set in a world much more wild than our own, filled with lush forests and untouched lands, you can meet the wild variety of birds (the story focuses on parrots though) you may know from all across the globe. From Australian (Cockatoos, Cockatiels, Grass parrots, etc.), African (Lovebirds, Ring-necked parakeets, Grey parrots), and South American parrots (Macaws, Amazons, Short-tailed parrots) to Weavers, Sunbirds, and occasionally even birds-of-paradise - you may find a broad spectrum of non-predatory birds residing right here.
But, of course, the bulk of the population of Budgie City, the main setting of the story, consists of colorful budgies. The city is essentially a large colony that has developed enough to turn into a complex system that depends not only on internal organization, but also on foreign trading. Trading between colonies in their world is based on barter, though inside cities there are local currencies — in most cases they are not metal coins, since metal is a rare and heavy material for birds, but they have their own kind of money equivalent.
The only species that has mastered metallurgy are African Grey parrots. Their colonies settle near volcanoes, and they are one of the only birds strong enough to handle such heavy materials. Therefore, metal is the main trading resource for them.
To show you what other species living in the city have to offer, I have this small excerpt from the first chapter that summarizes this quite concisely:
"Large parrots, due to their large carrying capacity, could easily transport quite bulky baskets with all kinds of food or raw materials, therefore, instead of independently transporting goods to other colonies, the budgies simply unloaded the goods large parrots brought, loaded them with their own and sent them back. Macaws most often brought figs and wild apples, cockatoos were famous for their special success in growing berries and gathering wild bee honey, grey parrots were the only birds in these forests who tamed metal... each species could provide something of its own to others, and as a result, all neighboring forests lived on trade links with each other. Budgies were skilled craftsmen in the manufacture of wooden utensils, and their chicks were believed to have the softest fluff among all parrots. So the fluff of the chicks that came down with molts was carefully collected, and other birds used it for the most delicate bedding in their own nests."
For such mentioned exchanges between the different birds, there is a trading base in the city — a group of large platforms on the trunk of the main baobab, where birds arriving with cargo are received, and cargo from the budgies is sent to other similar colonies.
The Budgie city stands "on seven baobabs" — an analogy to one well-known large city in our real world, which I came up with in 2014, and has since then remained more or less unchanged.
As can be understood from the scheme, the Seventh Baobab is considered the main one — it stands in the center and it is surrounded by the main structures that secure the functioning of the city. The remaining six baobabs are mostly residential. Instead of roads there are rope bridges connecting the structures to one another, which prove quite convenient in the case of carrying something around or to simply reduce the energy consumption that continuous flying demands. They start from the platforms on the baobabs, form multi-tiered intersections on the lower and branching trees standing between the baobabs, whereby, of course, this web converges on the seventh central one.
As for common areas, there are the market, the canteen, the baths (some are located on the Third baobab + the pool in the crown of the Seventh) and numerous interest clubs scattered throughout the city. For example, there are several board game clubs based in the crown of the Fifth Baobab, which the main characters tend to visit, especially Gesha and Gosha (since the two initially met at checkers).
Seventh Baobab concept art (artwork by me and @blackteaarts)
How did Budgie City come into being? Are there other cities in this universe?
Budgie City was founded by Phoenix. A bird whose species is unknown to anyone, so she is considered unique by the other residents. In addition to that no one knows her real age — she outlived those who helped her founding the city, outlived their children and their grandchildren, and so on. At this point no one is even trying to guess how old she is and where she came from. There were rumors about her, which had long become urban legends that every chick knows — they say she has magical abilities and can control fire. But there is no real evidence of this anywhere. In fact, no one living in the city has ever noticed anything supernatural about her — she is just a wise, kind bird with beautiful plumage, who treats every citizen like a mother treats her chick — with love and care.
Chroniclers often tell stories about how she herself was once raised among budgies and considers them part of her kind, and therefore decided to create a place where her sworn brethren can live in harmony and prosperity. Until then budgies had never lived in a colony this large before — usually they resided in rather small communities scattered many hundreds of square kilometers away from each other. Therefore Budgie City is the biggest known colony around. In number of citizens, it surpasses almost all others, which is why it is the center of attention of all the inhabitants of the surrounding forests.
Other parrots and some weavers live in a similar way. Small colonies have built their settlements right around the baobabs — in so-called suburbs, but similar formations exist in other places very far from the Budgie City as well.
What is the plot of the book?
I want to clarify that the book is currently in the process of writing in the form of a paper draft, and will be published only after the completion of the full work. Here I will give a brief description of the plot in general, without spoilers or delving into details, but so that you can have an idea of what this story is about.
In the peaceful and steady life of Budgie City — a life without any prerequisites ever before, there is a sudden turning point — Phoenix disappears. Moreover, she does not just go missing, but literally incinerates, leaving behind only one golden feather. In its entire history, the city had never had to change its mayor before, since Phoenix had ruled continuously since its foundation, so confusion and panic among the residents ensues. The so-called Royal Family, a circle of Phoenix's close advisers, who are direct descendants of the budgies who helped her founding this city, decide to hand over the reins to whom they deem the most responsible and emotionally resistant of them — Clementine and Jack.
But in a fit of desire to preserve their relationship with their son Fenya, who is slowly distancing from them, the couple, without putting it out as a question to the rest of the advisers first, use their new powers, and hand the reign to him. Subsequently, Fenya is now at the head of the city — an unstable, egocentric, arrogant yesterday-teenager. Having been partially raised by a zebra finch nanny, he sees more traits of finches in himself than those seen in other budgies. Therefore invites them to live in the city and he certainly does not go into details about why finches were never favored in the colonies of parakeets. Because there are good reasons for that... Finches are not just small and harmless birds, especially when there are a lot of them. And very soon the residents of the city will feel the effect of the appearances of the uncalled visitors…
In the midst of the ever growing chaos lives Gesha. A quiet florist who loves his routine filled with greenery and quiet pastime, who had always rested in a rather small circle of acquaintances, is forced to get out of his comfort zone and starts acting against the messy situation at hand. All because, it seems to him, that everyone around him prefers to believe and hope that everything will get fixed by itself, when this is clearly not the case. His friend Gosha is of the same opinion — although he often gets a bit carried away by his desire to administer justice (periodically turning into stupid brawls). He's just like that — against everything bad and for everything good, but tends to cross the line sometimes. Together they decide to create a secret society where they keep records of everything that upsets the citizens in this new reign, and try to find ways to solve these problems. While Gesha wants to deal with the situation through negotiations, Gosha, as usual, is more eager for a showdown.
Further down the line, Yasha appears — a native of a remote village who came from distant forests, where Budgie City is only considered a legend. He is a hopeless dreamer and a restless talker, but just as he is looking for a cozy home in this, for him, new and magnificent place, it is meanwhile literally bursting at the seams. Which soon forces Yasha to take off the metaphorical rose-colored glasses and, together with his new friends, face the harsh reality head-on.
Will the united citizens be able to solve the problem of the finch invasion and pacify the restless Fenya? Or maybe even bring Phoenix back? You will find it all out when the book is completed!
Huge thanks to @annchanorsomethin for helping with translation of this article!
