GDU progress @great-dragon-university - Tumblr Blog

Thinking fondly about my favorite ship in GDU.

They happen to be two of the only three characters who break the established world building rules for biology of sapient life.

Anybody seeing them will notice they're atypical. Perhaps they'll assume it's hair dye, contacts, shape-shifting, maybe they'll clock the intersex aspects to go with their thoughts. Being seen together will make people quicker to pass off their differences as intended, but also gather more stares than before, so they'll have to decide what they make of that if they want to go out on dates.

But at the end of the day, they're two people who will see each other in all their uniqueness and find a connection in their difference.

Being different can be scary. But it feels special to know you're different like her.

gaydelgard

i hear a good lyric and start mentally holding up blorbos like im in the home depot paint aisle comparing swatches

prokopetz

A fun thing about fiction with large casts of characters is that sometimes you'll have a Spicy Bananas moment where every single character has an identical yet wildly atypical experience of some very mundane thing, and slowly you realise that the author isn't Making A Point, they just think that's normal.

notsomeoneyouknow

fruutbaag

great-dragon-university

I'm constantly worrying about this in my work lol. It's already occurred to me that I struggle writing allosexuals, and I've got plenty of weird shit that I know how to write characters without, but I know some day someone's gonna find something I never knew wasn't normal.

I recently committed to changing the cast from primarily men to primarily women, and it's interesting seeing how genderbending changes my portrayal of them.

Changing an incredibly paternal character to a woman makes the audience immediately read her as intended, legit just very parental. When as a man I had to emphasize the point.

But turning the lascivious woman into a man means he wont be default read as a femme fatal but a womanizer. And I need to show his positive qualities more if I want it understood why people still like him.

Turning a misogynistic man into a woman who hates men, makes her more sympathetic to an audience living in a misogynistic world. I need to emphasize that she's unnecessarily mean.

Woman pretending to be a man is a lot more accepted than man pretending to be a woman. I need to make it clear right away that Kitty is questioning their gender and only into men, because they can be very easily misunderstood. Which I can actually use in the storytelling.

Thera loses the way that on first glance people think he's gay, I'd have to change her personality completely to make her heavily butch. Her story is unsettled and changed greatly.

Marcy going from the only sister, who's delicate fashionable unlike her brothers, to the only brother, whos delicate and fashionable unlike his sisters, is going to have certain people wondering why he's so intent on being a man, when he's more "feminine" than his sisters.

Also, depending on the platform I wind up putting this on, I'll have a harder time getting away with naked Mermaids, and may have to censor more than I want. I'd like to let them have their tits out if they please. I don't want my work labeled as sexual when it really isn't. That'll just drive off the intended audience and disappoint those who get it assuming it's actually sexual. I'm happy to offer censorship options. I don't want the default to hide nipples on characters just existing non-sexually.

All in all, fascinating to look at this and see how my gender biases snuck into the world, and how other people's biases will look at it differently now.

#ask me anything

dateamonster

i wish i had the post on hand but a read i really like is vampirism as disability. you cant work a regular day job, in fact you physically cannot leave your home most hours of the day, you have specific dietary restrictions that alienate you from the social act of breaking bread, you feel condemned to navigate the world at its fringes, maybe your body wont change and develop the way it does for your peers, maybe your body is changing very rapidly into something that frightens people.

its tricky territory because i feel like the trope of the vampire as parasite is very dominant in the cultural consciousness and thats obviously not a connection i wish to draw, but like, you know who else the capitalist ableist world treats as drains on Normal society? in a narrative where the vampire character(s) arent being played as villains i think theres a lot of fertile ground here.

great-dragon-university

Fun Fact: in the world of GDU, vampirism exists as a bloodborne disease. Some people with it are able to exist peacefully, and many more could, if it wasn't stigmatized to the point of them being starved of blood until their brain shuts off. There are characters who see the illness as a death sentence, and one particular character who would agree with them solely for the point of being dramatic regarding the fact that vampirism, like the most common bloodborne diseases In our world, can also be transmitted through sex. And what's the point of near-immortality if you have to be careful about sex?

great-dragon-university

For some drawing practice I've thrown a bunch of things including all 135 currently existent GDU Characters (mostly Background without much substance, I rigged it to favor characters more the more important and fleshed out they are) into a randomizer. I'm gonna draw busts based on the random choices, which will look like:

[character] from [perspective] making [facial expression] with/without their usual makeup or accessories, plus it's drawn with [twist, anything from specific lighting to another species and style]

Wish me luck. It's 3am rn so I start tomorrow.

great-dragon-university

First one is Aaron!

A third year student and prefect, Aaron is really sweet and friendly, especially to animals.

I feel the need to clarify that this isn't the peak of my artistic abilities, but specifically me choosing to draw something that challenges me, and trying not to spend too long on it. We're hopefully gonna watch me improve in real time as I continue this.

#artist talk #drawing challenge #Aaron Cheken #Beastkeeping

For some drawing practice I've thrown a bunch of things including all 135 currently existent GDU Characters (mostly Background without much substance, I rigged it to favor characters more the more important and fleshed out they are) into a randomizer. I'm gonna draw busts based on the random choices, which will look like:

[character] from [perspective] making [facial expression] with/without their usual makeup or accessories, plus it's drawn with [twist, anything from specific lighting to another species and style]

Wish me luck. It's 3am rn so I start tomorrow.

Beastfolk, merfolk, avians, fae, humans, these are the races most know of in the world. But is a cat beastman truly the same as a rattlesnake beastman? Is a siphonophore mer the same as a tuna? Is a humanoid with penguin wings and flippers, who mainly interacts with mers, an avian or a mer themself? These are the questions I keep asking myself. But at the end of the day, I don't know my own race to any level past "white", so do the characters really think about any of this? This is what i think about in the middle of the night. I need sleep.

#world building

So, what's this account? This is our way of sharing progress and things we're excited about for the ongoing project "Great Dragon University". GDU is a visual novel where you play as a spectator able to follow and unlock various characters as they go through their lives in a Magical college. Some characters live out comedic stories, drama, romance, mysteries, everyone is the main character of their own life, and you are a witness to how their stories intersect. GDU has around 500 students, and whenever a character you're following meets one, you unlock the ability to follow them, so there's a lot to see. And for us, a lot to make. This is a true passion project that likely won't be finished in this decade, but if you want to see the inner workings of complicated story writing, artists learning to code, or just wanna look at handsome men (this has a lot of those), maybe you'll join us for the ride.