Some of y'all need to understand this isn't about blowing up countries with the giant red button, it's about abolishing tyrannical and oppressive governments that go by the names of the land they hold hostage.
Between the two of them, Lucy is the one with bigger commitment issues. They both have some, but in different flavours.
Lucy is scared to commit in a way that she never wants to feel trapped. Natsu is scared to commit in the sense that he's afraid of people leaving him, once he shows his true feelings. The conflicting fears cause some bumps in the road, and more than a few awkward pep talks from other guild members, especially Team Natsu.
I like to think that everyone would assume that Gray would take Lucy's side on this topic. Any excuse to go against his frenemy is welcome. However, I can completely see Gray going the opposite direction and taking Natsu's side, or defending him in this one instance.
Who do we know, other than Natsu, who has a long history of parental and sibling figures, as well as mentors, disappearing, dying or walking down a dark path they almost never came back from? Who else in the guild can relate to never knowing, or hardly remembering their birth parents, only to have their adoptive parent seal themself away to protect them for years, being largely unaware of their whereabouts for years, only to find them again and realize that it was all part of an elaborate sacrifice, or something which ultimately led to it? Oh, and who might Natsu be able to sympathize with, when it comes to discovering an older sibling who might be a bit evil, might not be, and only redeems themself completely, once again, through sacrifice and tragedy?
I feel like, aside from the dragonslayers themselves, Gray is the best at understanding Natsu's issues with commitment, because just like Natsu, he has had people disappearing and dying on him, and generally disappointing him for his whole life too. And now, there's someone in Natsu's life who might make it all better, because Natsu would be willing to put in the work for it, maybe just like Gray is willing to start putting in the work for Juvia.
So, Gray goes to Lucy, maybe after a big fallout on needing space and needing attention between her and Natsu, and she's expecting Gray, Natsu Hater #1 (though, not really) to completely take her side. He doesn't. She's shocked. He's gentle when he tells her Natsu's potential feelings on abandonment and needing closeness. For such a smart girl, Lucy feels like a complete fool.
Who goes to Natsu? Realistically, everyone else. Part of living for these people is reminding Natsu of when he's fucked up, done something stupid, overstepped, yada yada yada. But if I could choose one? Erza. Unlike Gray and Natsu, I think Erza and Lucy's origins could not have been more different. Debutant vs child slave? Nah.
However, Erza is really cool, mature and possesses mad critical thinking. She can see how Lucy, at a young age, trapped in a loveless home since her mother passed with endless lessons on how to eat, sit, walk, speak and breathe, and dress for the sake of securing a marriage of status against her wants MIGHT be frightened by the concept of forever. Lucy made a risky, dangerous decision in running away at 17 to join a guild that was not well-liked by the magic council, at the time the largest power in Fiore. And then once she's feeling settled and safe in her new home with her found family, one person seeks her out and resorts to hiring a violent guild to kidnap her so she can be brought home, controlled, and forced into an arranged marriage, expected to have a son as soon as possible. (Sometimes I forget this happens because they brush past it, and I'm like, holy shit Lucy you good girl?) Natsu, of course, can't really make the connection between his love for Lucy and all the fucked up rich people shit she went through before, but Erza is patient (not really, but for this let's say she is) and helps him draw the connections. He feels really guilty, wants to run and find her and apologize until he passes out, but worries that might be too clingy now, and gets himself in a frenzy of conflicting feelings.
When they meet again, they stand at an awkward distance, because Lucy is aware that she hurt him, and Natsu doesn't want to push her. Lucy braves it, asks if she can hold him, and he crashes into her, but doesn't bring his arms up until she squeezes him tighter.
They talk. Natsu doesn't like thinking about the people he's lost, no more than Lucy likes remembering the stuff she'd been forced into or almost, but they get through the night with a little bit more understanding, and better instincts to sense when things are a bit too much, or not enough.
Lots of growing pains, but they're getting through it.
a rough ororon redesign and my submission for the melanin blast challenge for ice of @creatingblackcharacters birthday! (happy birthday :) )
(ifà redesign)
now there's a lot to cover with this one because ororon is probably genshin's worst designed character literally ever. in terms of cultural sensitivity, readability and general seriousness as a design, it literally goes oh-for-three. so i focused on making him look more like a farmer and less like a vampire oc (since he isn't even a vampire), and also more connected to his implied nigerian-ness since he's named after the supreme deity in yoruba spirituality.
speaking of names, i know for a fact that they did not a lick of research for his name, because 'ororon' is a weird transliteration of 'olorun', and he has nothing to do with literally anything ororon is and does. so let me propose a new name for this character: xango.
xango is the brazillian spelling shango, of the god of thunder, and can sometimes be associated with the harvest. plus, it looks and sounds sick as hell.
anyway, as with my ifa redesign, design notes under the cut!
normal style:
so to start small, i once again loc'd his hair! as said in the ifà redesign, it's a really simple and easy way to keep the shape language of the original hair without compromising the character's visual blackness. additionally, as someone who is clearly inspired by the punk subculture and is also a farmer, he'd likely want something fun, but practical, and so locs would definitely be the way he goes. (i hc citlali as the local loctician since she raised ororon and learned how to take care of his hair from when he was little.)
i also darkened his skin. it works better with the concept i had in mind for this design and also fixes the issue with aggressive contrast in his design, imho (that is, giving him darker skin makes his dark clothes stand out less so the stuff that actually needs to stand out (i.e. the details) actually get to shine). plus he's based off of a yoruba deity so like. duh.
(apologies for the horrific quality folks)
in addition to the locs, i also swapped out the under eye tattoo for yoruba face paint, and added some to his lips and chin as well, for continuity's sake.
i also changed the size and placement of his ears. in his og design, his ears are supposed to be that of an iktomasaur, which is pretty clearly has massive ass ears. additionally, the ears perched on top of his head makes no biological sense, so i moved them down to where ears actually start from. i think the deal with the ears in the original was probably to give the vibe of being a wolf boy, which is weird to me when every part of his design seems to say bat. i didn't really reference the shape of the ears of the iktomasaur (in another pass at a redesign, that's probably gonna be imperative) but i just enlarged the ears he already has. (i imagine that the other ear is flopped over under his hood lmaoo)
speaking of hoods, i kept his hood mostly the same, but i got rid of his ugly-ass leather cloak thing, and made it into part of his scarf instead. i think the leather cloak/cape makes literally no sense since they live in a tropical/desert climate, especially when all his clothes are dark. in fact, i got rid of all the leather, minus boots, gloves and belt.
torso time!!
so i exchanged his top for what is essentially a short agbada (a-gba-da), which is a part of traditional nigerian formal menswear. now, i don't usually like to repurpose things, and it doesn't make sense for him to be wearing formalwear... but it doesn't make sense for him to be wearing multiple layers of leather either, so who cares. i couldn't pass up the bat-wing silhouette potential of a cinched-in agbada, so that's exactly what i gave him ^^. also the patterns on it are a riff of of that eye motif he has.
i extended the back of his scarf too to keep that bat-wing look, since i liked it, but that was kinda all i kept from his original design on his torso.
i gave him a leather utility belt also, because that's fun and cool, and fits with the fact that he's a literal farmer. i obviously had to put beads somewhere on his design, and i decided to go for his waist to really soup up what's a pretty plain utility belt.
the one question that was playing through my mind with this redesign was: “how can i preserve the punk and the leather, without compromising the practicality necessary for his design to be readable?” and so the main way i did this was by making some of the most obviously farmer-y aspects leather and more punk inspired.
in keeping the darkness of his color scheme too, i think his more emo/punk/alternative style comes through, even though you can tell that its tempered by the requirements of his manual labor job. hence the big, strappy, leather farm gloves that match the design motifs on his boots. i also added a reference to his archery in there, since his last two fingers are gloveless, like on an archery glove. plus i thought it would look cool.
along with the gloves, i thought turning his tattoos into body paint not only preserves the alt feeling of the character having tattoos in the first place, but also feels more culturally relevant. it also serves to emphasize the fact that he actually works on his appearance, because the existence of body paint implies that the wearer puts it on.
with the bottom half of his clothes, i wanted to stick with simplicity for the pants so that it wouldn't take away from the complexity of the boots, which for me was really important, because i didn't want to overdesign him, like genshin has a propensity to do. the rips in the pants i kept because it works well to add visual intrigue without making it unnecessarily complex, and definitely contributes to the 'roughness' one might expect from a farmer.
in matching his boots to his gloves, it not only adds balance, but adds to the narrative that this is a character who cares about his appearance to some extent, considering both the practical and aesthetic aspects of his presentation. i made the boots a little more practical-looking also, by taking away that weird zipper thing he had going on, so they look like something a person could actually do work in.
i think that the keeping of the leather serves as a nice contrast to the material of the agbada and the scarf, alluding to the fact that he's considered a weirdo in his community. black leather is uncommon among farmers and the already alternative, flashy style, with the purple palms of his gloves and the shape silver clasps on both them and the boots, i think it serves to show how much he stands out, not just in his community but in his design as well.
nightsoul state:
his nightsoul state was way easier to do than ororon’s since there didn't seem to be any specific design motifs i needed to watch out for the nightsoul blessing of the masters of the nightwind, since citlali's seem... citlali specific. i just lit up the patterns on his hood and added a few extra patterns, along with lighting up his body paint also.
closing statements:
the main take-away from this redesign i feel is that a character’s design has to relate to their in-universe experience. a person should be able to tell, at a glance, some major aspect of how they live from their design, not necessarily just their personal aesthetic, especially in a fantasy world like genshin, where showing is far more important than telling. it needs to be incredibly difficult to decontexualize your character, if its readable. you shouldn't be able to completely remove the character from their lived experience completely unaltered, otherwise that character isn't tethered at all to their story and world, which is a mark of a bad character design. obviously, this only applies if a character isn't a standalone figure, which ororon, as a genshin four-star, definitely isn't. people should be able to rely on their eyes to tell them who a character is and does, rather than on a story quest or lengthy explanation.
basically: a good design should show you almost everything you need to know about a character from the jump. ororon doesn't do this at all. he looks like a regular degular emo boy from someone's sketchbook age thirteen, rather than a hermit farmer guy who's a little different and sees his vegetables as his friends and might be the hero of his adoptive tribe. and i hate that for him.
i think he's fun as a character, he's silly with ifà and sweet in general. but his design and blatant lack of respect for the culture his name is taken from, makes him really hard to get past. either way, its imperative to not only respect your sources, but also your character and their existence in their world, and for me, thats probably the most important part.
characters, i think, should feel like people, rather than just aesthetics.
germansingergirl
yousharknotpass
kianamaiart
pixelskylines
theartofmadeline
