whats your take on a barf bag gijinka? i like thinking about her
Okay so I've been giving this a lot of thought because if you know me you know I don't half bake gijinka shit I go all in. Beginning notes as I move forward with the design process: Barf Bag is a bookworm. She has external organs, and her illness symptoms change depending on how much she has and what she has in her system, similar to that of IV and TPN fluids. She is, literally, brown. She faces object-specific ableism due to her bodily functions be viewed as gross, but also she is visibly seen as gross due to her vomit being aesthetically displeasing.
Since I have been wanting to give a character neurofibromatosis and I was literally just talking about how people will villainize "lumpy/puffy faces" with some friends on Discord, I actually considered giving Barf Bag neurofibromatosis to reflect the type of ableism she experiences, but I decided to walk back this decision since her name is. Yk. Barf Bag. I didn't want to imply even accidentally or make the association of her face being gross or barf-like. I might give her an eyepatch though, because eye patches have less of a charged association with barf (while still experiencing differential treatment) and I still want to represent in some way the fact characters treat her differently because she is, well, visibly different. A character like Fries has external organs but is not treated with the same disgust because Barf Bag has a trait that repels others and immediately treat her differently. I's compare this to a character like Taco who I also made visibly different for this same reason because people will make disparaging comments about her little fishy.
I was looking for a condition that would properly reflect her chronic illness symptoms as well, and I ultimately used phys.liz on TikTok for inspiration, so I think Barf Bag as a human would not know exactly what she has and doctors don't know either but she has some kind of rare connective tissue disorder. So she would have very weak connective tissues that are not strong enough to hold up her internal digestive organs. I think the closest would be vEDS (Vascular Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) but since I am basing this off a real person's symptoms that's just what I'm using to base Barf Bag's illness off. This can cause vertigo-like symptoms if she is not receiving enough IV and TPN fluids, intestinal collapse, bowel perforations, thin skin, severe dehydration. I think this also plays well into her fear of having her internal fluids messed with, and would follow well into a human scenario where she develops a fear of someone else injecting the wrong fluids or injecting incorrectly.
Since Barf Bag is just a paper bag with vomit in it, I started looking in the history of paper bag usage for some ideas on where to place her and what ethnicity to give her. A few sources say that the paper bag was manufactured during the industrial age in the United States and continued to face major manufacturing developments there. I might put her in Pennsylvania but not sure. I decided as well to make her a Black descendant of chattel slavery in the US due to the history of paper bags being used to discriminate against Black USAmericans and determine social privilege. I think this would be an interesting angle to go in when also incorporating her many health problems and how she would navigate being chronically illness as a black woman, and how her being lightskinned further plays into that.
Since she Is a bookworm I want to give her a style that reflects that because I think people forget this part of her. She gives professor vibes. For a while now I have pictured human Barf Bag as an English professor! Something cozy but also pretty simple methinks... Maybe a brown scarf and sweats and a green and brown plaid sweater?? Hmmm. I gotta figure out shapes too. She is not exactly square she is more like trapezoid, I think she would be bottom heavy.
Bah.... not sure. Things I like: Her having a trapezoid face shape. Short face. Sharp "W" shaped nose. Zig zag coils, her wearing an African wrap. I am gonna mess with her eye shape some more and some different styles combining the zig zag texture and a headwrap.
Okay this is what I landed on after some experimenting. I ended up giving her brown and green plaid sweats instead. Her stoma bag is peaking under her shirt and her Hickman line tunnels under her shirt and is connected to her TPN bag, carried in her handbag.
I think I am satisfied with this for now. I don't have a name for her lol, first one that comes to mind is Beth? But yeah idk lol. Talking out and sharing my process for these gijinkas is really fun!!!