I really like how more artists draw him with glasses; it creates a kind of contradiction in the image he wants to express and build. But I think he'd start wearing contacts at the first opportunity. I love him.
And yes, Max Goof. I'd like to headcanonize their friendship, but there's little interaction. Personally, I only know that in the film, Max mentioned Donald as Goofy's best friend... and the triplets were a little surprised by Goofy's presence in DT. And that's all, I think? Anyway, Max has his best friends, and the triplets have their best friends. So, just a passing thought, whats makes me smile.
Headcanon: Della forgot like 15 words while on the moon 'cause she couldn't Google it and didn't actually bother trying to remember 'cause she had more important things to do.
Bonus headcanon my sister came up with: Scrooge thought she was an imposter for roughly 24 hours after he found her willingly reading a dictionary.
The chapter that everything has been building up to, waiting to show the fate of Jasper's debut heist (AO3, Fanfiction.net).
Cut Passage
Jasper blinked multiple times, but one look back to the metallic slides and he complied. The room blurred, with him barely noticing the other metal sesh that dived from the other hallways. So much that he almost didn’t the huge splash of color arriving from the wall’s corner.
Jasper’s neck jerked when he did. His arms took control, lifting his bag from his shoulders over his head, toes pointing forward. It made his body touched the ground, slidding under the gap between legs.
He immediatley got up, springing forward. Yet he he peaked back, seeing that it was Luggins, head bent down to where Jasper passed through, cap on the ground.
Jasper saluted back to her, sniggering. If he gets caught, at least he finally saw the bun that was under her cap.
Reason for cutting: Meant more to be a funny image, but I realized it could be deleted without confusing readers. Besides, the chapter was already long and it may weaken the tension the chapter was at that point
2. Concept Map Outline
Miro was pretty much a life-saver for planning the entire heist, as I had a lot of requirements for the heist and still needed to improvise some parts.
3. The Jump
Spoilers for the chapter.
I knew early on that the jump is cliché, something anyone who watched enough TV can recognize the moment a character gets cornered to a ledge. I even saw it coming in the prequel series’s ‘Heist on the Run’ episode.
But I had the image in my head for so long that I got attached to it, so I tried to focus on its execution. One way was to have Wolf slowly panic more and more so there would be at least some build-up. That way, the Bad Guys getting caught after Jasper took such a big leap of faith wouldn’t be anti-climatic.
When I happened upon the former supermodel and heir to the Agreste fortune, he was sitting in the park, writing in a notebook with his lips pursed in concentration. Upon noticing me staring, he smiled and greeted me, and despite my awkward opening, we struck up a conversation.
Unlike his father, Adrien was friendly and sociable, and when he asked me about my profession, I took a gamble and asked if he’d like to do an interview– not about his relation to his father, but about him. To my surprise, he agreed, and dumped out the contents of his bag on the picnic table.
The ‘what’s in my bag’ trend has gripped fans of celebrity since its origins in the pages of magazines. It feels personal, almost voyeuristic– that’s the appeal. To the public, it feels like you can glean so much more from the contents of an idol’s everyday bag than a celeb endorsement or a sponsored interview. Looking at someone’s possessions gives you a more real picture of them in your head– Adrien’s pill case (3) was his ‘second favorite color’, and he explained why he took each pill and what it was for, and crammed next to it, a half used tub of Vaseline (5), a pack of gum with discarded wrappers stuck inside (4), and a metal tube of medicinal smelling hand cream (6) in the bag of a boy widely considered perfect, made him more real, more touchable.
Despite how plain he considered himself as he spoke to me, Adrien’s taste in on the go snacks (2) and literature (8 and 9) suggested a more intellectual side to the model. “The Last Unicorn is my favorite book,” he said, turning over the worn paperback copy, the back of the book completely torn off with age, “the way the words are written makes me want to pick up a pen, you know? I like fairy tales a lot. And this one resonates a bit more than the usual ones, because it’s kinda sad. I like it. And um, this book..” he then picked up a book that was half book and half stick tab annotation, “I really like learning new languages. It’s cool to me how things change in translation because of grammar or like, the culture around the language. I know Chinese, French, English, and Japanese so far, but my friend is in Brazil right now and I decided to learn Portuguese in case I visit him.”
When I looked through Adrien’s possessions, most of them had a story about a friend to go along with them. “My friend Nino got me these for… I can’t remember if it was an occasion or just because he wanted to.” Adrien said, fondly admiring a pair of headphones (1). “He told me that I should care about the audio quality of my music, because at the time I was using just the old corded Apple earbuds and I listen to a lot of jazz music, so it didn’t sound as good. It was really nice of him.” Likewise, going through Adrien’s pencil case, he snorted to himself. “Most of these are stolen from my friends,” he admitted. “I don’t try to take them, they just end up in my pencil case somehow.”
For as social as he appeared to be, I was surprised that Adrien didn’t own a smartphone, instead opting for a sliding dumbphone that eschewed even a QWERTY keyboard. “For my whole life, I’ve had days where I was in too much pain to do much of anything. It’s just how my body is, you know. And I used to be pretty isolated, so I got in the habit of watching the news or going on the computer all day because I was so bored and it hurt to play video games or do physical stuff. But that’s kinda unhealthy, you know. People say a lot of stuff about me and people I care about, and after the Alliance went haywire, I decided I didn't want to deal with that level of reliance on tech. Now, if you want to talk to me, you call me or send me a text.” He laughed as he explained it. “My friends hate it, because I don’t see the stuff they send me anymore, but I never got the jokes to begin with!”
To entertain himself without constant internet access, Adrien has a 6th gen IPod loaded with Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway (11), a Gameboy in his favorite color (12) that he plays Harvest Moon on, and his journal (7). “I use these up like crazy so I don’t decorate them.” Adrien said, caressing the leather cover. “I don’t write about my personal life much, but it’s very stream of consciousness. Only I really understand anything in here.”
That thought resonated, even after Adrien began packing his bag up. There was an aura his possessions had, this feeling of effortlessness. It was genuine *being*, no product placement or curation, and I felt strangely guilty for expecting something of the sort. This was a person I had spoken to. This was a person who had simply had pictures taken of him. And yet when I waved goodbye to him, I still found him utterly perfect.
Good news for those in The Bad Guys fandom, I didn't abandon the fanfic as some may worry. Here's the part I been waiting for, the debut heist (Fanfiction.net, AO3).
Draft of Beginning Scene
Shark finally murmured the words. “How did you get it?”
“See for yourself,” Tarantula showed Shark her laptop. He didn’t miss the way the Bad Guys’ faces were one muscle away from sniggering
Shark leaned over to it. There he was, going down the hallway and filling one dark corner with light for a few seconds before moving onto the next. Shark squinted, only for his eyes to widen upon looking behind. It was Jasper.
Tarantula switched the screen to the angle behind him, showing Jasper behind Shark as he went down the hallway. Each step, Jasper followed. Shark leaning forward would earn the same with Jasper. Jasper’s legs moved in sync with Shark’s, except much more waving.
When Shark had that smirk forming on his face, Jasper slowed down seconds before Shark did. Shark swinging his flashback over to him had Jasper swinging himself along with him, staying right out of Shark’s corners in his eyes.
Then Jasper waved at the camera on him and Shark’s back.
Shark jaw-dropped.
Once Shark in the footage shrugged, he twisted around back, Jasper following along. When Shark reached halfway to the hall's door, Jasper slowed his steps. There was when he snuck into the other door right before Shark would check the hallway one last time.
Shark gaped, “Did you become a shadow or something?”
“You can say that again,” Piranha crackled.
Inspiration: A Cat In Paris movie, where a burglar has a cat as a partner-in-crime. The said burglar snuck into room by walking right behind a heavyset guard like a shadow.
Reason for shortening it: Pacing reasons and to get to the heist already, as it was already pushing to the longest chapter since the second one.
2. Jasper's Heist Speciality
For some time, I had a hard time picking a role for Jasper. Here are the categories I put the roles I considered but dropped that I set:
Roles that Jasper would've bored to tears in: Lookout, Inside Man, Coordinator, Communicator
Roles that the other Bad Guys already have: Escape Artist (Snake), also Coordinator (Tarantula), Decoy (Shark)
Roles Jasper can’t due because he’s young and inexperienced: Logistics Expert, Art Forager
I almost stuck with Gadget Guy, a role where he creates tools and handles mechanical obstacles. I thought it be interesting for a guy who needs action to have brains as a strength. But while I was working on my outline, I revisited the Fanfiction.net site and discovered that another fanfic called “The Bad Life of Billy The Kid” by JOE1992 already has that premise. I know that originality isn’t everything since every story except the first ones stole ideas from others. Still, I wanted my work to stand out, so I went back to the drawing board.
To see what role Jasper could have, I visited the “Caper Crew” TV Tropes page, and the Burglar is the one who caught my eye. Even though I would've placed it in category 2, I figured that Jasper having that role can allow the Bad Guys to focus more on their specialties.
So that was the one I stuck with, and I ended up enjoying coming up with cool acrobats and stealthy infiltrations more than gadgets. So JOE1992, if there’s any chance that you are reading this, thank you for stealing the idea before I could use it. Though I wish I found your fanfic sooner since it meant rewriting a lot of my outline.
3. Overlap with Snake
Another issue I faced was that the burglar role overlapped a lot with Snake, who is essentially the safe-cracker and grease man of the team. I tried to make them separate by having Snake be the one who helps the Bad Guys enter their targets while Jasper is the one who sneaks in and snatches the good.
Especially as when I saw the sequel, where Snake sticks under an aquarium to saw a hole in it, I thought, "That's exactly what I would have Jasper do."
By then, it was already too late, as I included foreshadowing of Jasper's future role in the very first chapter.
But then I thought, "What if they were forced to work together?" If you read the fanfic, you would see that they don't have the best relationship, with Snake never accepting Jasper and refusing to learn sign language to communicate with him. Imagine the tension it can bring. So in the end, I made a plot issue resolve itself. Yay!
Helloo!!
I don't know if you can answer this but...
Every time I make a story for my ocs (such as the plot, settings, backstories, etc.), I stick to it for 5 months to a year but then scratch it out because I feel it isn't... right.
Like I can't stay with one story without changing it. My dream is to one day make a comic/webtoon about it and share it to the world, but I don't think I can complete it without thinking that my stories/characters suck/doesn't make sense.
At first, I thought it was normal. Normal to find that some ideas make sense or some doesn't but sense it comes up frequently, it's getting frustrating for me. Have you ever felt like that before or close to it?
Thank you for you answer and I hope you have a great day 💛!
(sry for my grammar/English... not my first language 😅)
Well, the simultaneously beautiful and terrible thing about your own writing projects is that no one else but you can ultimately determine if it's "right". Sometimes it takes a little bit of willingness to proceed despite feeling a bit embarrassed or unsure about your ideas. But if the ideas are coming from a genuine place in you as an artist, and you commit to them, your readers will tend to accept them too - your premise, your characters, the rules of your universe, and so forth.
Changing a story as you work on it is quite normal. Perhaps it would help you to perceive it as a work in progress or an idea in development for a longer period of time before dismissing it as "not right". Maybe you just have to let it cook a little longer.
One specific thing that might help you with making sense of your writing is to plot out where you envision your characters being at the start of their story (physically, emotionally, philosophically), and also where you want them to end up by the end of the story. As a writer, this can really help solidify what you're trying to achieve. It's like drawing yourself a map. It can also really help you identify what themes you're working with. The next part is plotting out the middle beats that bridge point A and point B.
Feeling frustrated and stuck at turns is completely normal. It's normal to discard a lot of ideas before landing on the ones that feel the best to you. Remember to have fun with it. Take a break from the writing if it's starting to feel like nothing but a source of stress. A rest can be so useful in refreshing your perspective on your work, and sometimes you come back to it only to realize a solution was right in front of you all along.
Most of all, remember that all of it is hard to do, so give yourself some grace and some time to work it out.
New Year, new bio. This one being @jeriandcompany's Lackadaisy OC.
Just by the design alone, she seems like someone I could trust and confide in for hours. So here's the bio.
After years of writing, I developed this sense of rhythm with sentences. Said sense seems to be fond of short sentences for declarations or punchlines. Given how Tracy's bios tend to have long, looping ones, I mourned having to give it up to match them. I was quite relieved when I checked the bios and saw Lacy's "She's just not sure why" and Rocky's many clipped sentences...
Yeah, now you got an idea of what happens inside my head.
unfinished stuff from august - september ... might refine some of this later & might not! We will see. The only recent one is the height comparisons ;;
A couple of these are courtesy of @help-the-lesbian !
ALSOOOO the words in the second pic are from this song if anyone's curious ..... listening to it again i realized it could be a rly good fluffyvenom song i just dont have it in me to draw smth more intensive for it rn
Taking a break from my The Bad Guys fanfic because of finals coming up, but still felt words begging to spin in my head. So my first thought was @powow-arts's OC.
God, I just loved looking at his facial expressions, on top of him containing my favorite colors. Powow wrote a character bio of him, and I wanted to do my own spin.
Here y'all go.
A tad more backstory-focused compared to Tracy's official bios, but I didn't want to leave it out.
Took much Googling '1920 slang/fancy word for (insert common word),' hoping that said slang aren't actually from a decade or two early/late, idea-in-the-shower moments and asking powow if Shane remembers his parents despite the word 'estranged' in the original bio implying he made that choice and remembers deciding it. :)
Jasper finally tries on what will help him fit in with the Bad Guys, and gets to go on a regular day of the life, for better or worse... And I have nothing much else to say.
Rewatching "Hello Rosie" after "It's A Deal" made so many things click.
His smile is less manic than usual, with less teeth. This is after Charlie stopped rambling about her relationship with Vaggie.
I'm starting to suspect the writers had Charlie annoy Alastor and make his smile more subdued so we would pay less attention to his smile often staying the same way when with Rosie.
It may be odd for Alastor, who isn't exactly humble, to describe another Overlord as more dangerous than him. In fact, she's the only Overlord other than Zestial that he doesn't press, and he pressed the King of Hell. Unless... Alastor has a reason to hold back.
Remember, one lyric in "Don't You Forget" in "It's A Deal" is...
This implies that it wasn't the first time Rosie had to knock down Alastor a peg through song. Now we know it wasn't just Alastor's usual jests. It's was Alastor showing his resentment.
The chapter (Fanfiction.net, AO3) where the kid the Bad Guys took in prepares to settle into the life of bad.
But first, I have one little half-serious theory about the universe of the Bad Guys.
Theory of the Bad Guys Universe
Many people questioned how the universe in the movies evolved to be how it is, where non-human animals can walk bipedally and talk, as well as do heists.
Some even wondered how there can be this
And this
It's not like there may be an explanation from the books that would the movies in an entirely different genre...
Anyway, I spent a little too much time thinking about the movies and realized that the explanation is connected to something else that could be confusing
And it's how the Bad Guys and other such humanoid animals can achieve this
Why do humans fall so easily for their disguises, especially a great white shark stealing the Mona Lisa disguised as the Mona Lisa?
I realized that the answer is evolution.
Unlike our world, where being alert to danger allowed a tiny minority of humans to keep surviving, humans became socialized into not noticing danger. After all, something is not going to go wrong for you if you don't notice it.
This allowed the animals to evolve, as the less noticed species tend to have more room to become smarter and stronger.
With the humans not noticing them as much, they don't tend to get hunted down or domesticated. The animals targeting the humans more easily meant that they learned to talk, walk, and think like the humans, over time getting more humanoid traits. Aquatic ones like sharks and piranhas even gained the ability to walk on land.
In fact, some humans tend to be more oblivious than others. How else could the police chief Luggins…
hold Snake and mistake him for a drink without noticing that martini glasses shouldn't have scales?
Or not smell Piranha's fart escaping from the security room Tarantula was in? Whether she would get accepted into the police academy in our universe may depend on your opinion.
Of course, with them becoming more evolved meant that when the humans do notice them, they get far more scared of them. After all, the universe, God, Allah, or whatever deities or creators of the universe people think there is, has decided that there still must be a balance.
And that's how the Bad Guys could be the Bad Guys, and get away with their crimes as much as they did. :)
2. What's to come next
Oh boy, quite a deep dive in the last section. Bet some of you want an idea of what may come next… Here's a hint
Artwork by Amethyst Thorne
Who could that be? Did a human get hit by a laser beam that transformed him into another animal?
The talk and debate before the big decision is here (Fanfiction.net, AO3).
The Bad Guys' backstories
Sharks: The reason why I had him trapped in an aquarium to perform for humans is because that would explain where a lot of his hidden talents and... unique idea of 'subtle' came from.
But after I read this in 'Bad Guys' movie's art book, I thought of matching the description of him coming from a 'bloody past' by having him join a literal group of loan sharks, which deeply disappointed his mother. But I felt the aquarium was more interesting.
Tarantula: I debated for a long time of whether it would make sense for a human school to allow a spider to go to their school. But after I watched the sequel, where Kitty Kat mentions having to gone to school, my thought was "I'm such a nitpicker."
As for of a side note, I have a headcanon that the reason why she wore braces was because humans consider them an ugly trait in spiders and spiders feel pressured to seem less scary. Then the Bad Guys told her they wouldn't mind any tooth gaps she has, so Tarantula stopped wearing them. This came from @3lif3brar's post.
Piranha: I wondered why Piranha reacted so badly to Tarantula saying he'll totally blow the 'walk the old lady Wolf' goodness exercise. So perhaps him having to come from a very critical family made sense of why he's so sensitive to it.
