Violet - rambling about prosthetics, the french name of some plant, and girls dancing.
There are a few details that I wanted to explain about my MariAli comic Violet, so I decided to do it in this post (so there will be spoilers below the cut). I hope that you'll like it!
1) The second marisa-doll has a prosthetic leg in the epilogue, and I had a real life prosthetic reference for it!
When I was drawing the epilogue I was looking for references and I remembered that my friend Lottara ( @lottara-stuff ) knows a lot of stuff about prosthetics and she has exactly ONE prosthesis which is the EXACT model that I needed (the reason why she has it in the first place is a long story, lol). So I went at her place and took the pictures I needed. This one is from the beginning of the 20th century, apparently. Some parts are broken / missing but my friend was able to tell me how it was supposed to work! When she heard that I was going to mention it in a post, she wrote a little text for me to share here:
This artificial leg for right leg that was given to me is from around the end of the XIX or beginning of the XX century. It's made of leather (for the corset), wood (for the foot), maybe aluminum or nickel for the metal parts. There are a few more leather elements, mainly the straps (one is missing) and the upper joint of the foot. The laces are made from fabrics, and I don’t know if they are replacement or not. One of the absent leather straps is the one making a strap on the shoulder, to help the leg staying in place (which is not required now considering they stay in place in more recent models thanks to the help of a vacuum in the stump socket). The one I have is also equipped with a crank on the popliteal fossa of the leg, so it can fold. The foot also has the possibility to bend where the toes should be so the user has more agility, and the bottom of the foot is padded with leather; it's home to a shrew so you can detach it.
Even though, I don’t know the maker of this artificial leg (prosthesis is not a term which is used at the beginning of the XX century). Although visually it resembles a lot of prosthetics from the same period, whether artifacts or engraving of the time.
Fig.1: Galante, Henry. Catalogue illustré des instruments [...] H.Galante et Fils. 1885. p.186
Fig.2: Fabrique d'instruments de chirurgie, orthopédie, prothèse, physiologie, anthropologie, coutellerie fine. Maison Mathieu.1907. p.444
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2) The plants at the entrance of the Scarlet Devil's mansion are named alkekengi
I chose them because I thought that their dramatic look would go well with the aesthetic of a Vampire's mansion. But there's more to these flowers: the story could have been named like that instead of "Violet" because in France, people call it "amour en cage", meaning "caged lover" or "caged love". And since Violet compares herself to the bird in the cage of Alice's workshop, I thought that the alkekengi was also a fitting comparison. But I don't think it's called "caged love" in english.
The second reason why Alkekengi was put at the entrance of the Scarlet Devil mansion is because Sakuya, who is supposed to be a human like Marisa, didn't die (as you can see her in the epilogue). I imagined that Remilia turned her into a vampire to keep her around (whether it's for romantic reasons or because she's such a good maid, haha). So the comparison with the plant also works for her, I think.
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[/!\ spoilers of my previous MariAli manga]
3) the scenes of Marisa and Alice dancing together in Violet was supposed to be a reminder of the dancing scenes in my first MariAli comic,"Dance, dance, doll of mine!".
It's not much, but I just decided to include a scene of them dancing in this comic too so I could imply that the two stories happened in the same timeline; Alice wanting Marisa-doll to dance with her the way the real Marisa did in the other comic (if the two stories are linked, it means that Alice is also a doll in the Violet story, meaning that basically everyone is a doll here, haha). But I didn't reproduce the same characteristic frames Alice had all over her home in "Dance dance doll of mine" because I don't want this particular interpretation to be too clear-cut or anything.
I hope that it was interesting. Thank you for reading!! 🖤
