#alien skitter

[justassorted]

🎨Skitter

Character inspo asks

🎨 (or “drawing”) + a character name to find out what drawings/paintings inspire receiver’s writing of that character!

Definitely the Yogzarthu from the Harbourmaster webcomic! Which… has much less to do with their appearance and WAY more to do with the kinds of ethical and societal questions the webcomic explores with them. But it’s a drawn story, so it counts, damn it 😝

Probably the Entomorphs from that comic, too, for actual visual inspo? I started reading the comic in my very early tweens, which is also around when I came up with Skitter’s design for the first time, and they are bug aliens. So it’s hard to imagine there wasn’t some inspiration drawn.

Koh from ATLA. Looming centipede dude with a face, hah.

All of those stereotypical Clone Lab depictions with people/creatures floating in Giant Aesthetic Glass Tubes of Liquid with Wires slskdjfhf.

Him Face. Another one where I don’t exactly remember clearly but the common thread is obvious and I know I was reading the comic at around the right age. 😂

All the excellent creature/alien designers on deviantart! I wound up in some fun scifi groups and got to see a lot of work that inspired me. Pieces like this and this come to mind.

For actual current inspo: Teefs, as drawn by guttertongue. I mean look at them. 👀

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EDIT:

Holy shit, how could I forget the most important — just. All of the old mass market paperback scifi and fantasy cover illustrations from my parent’s library! I spent so long looking at the covers of those books as a kid, even the ones I never got around to reading slskdjfhf.

Special mention to this one, because it’s one of the ones I did read. I still have it and pull it out to look at and think about even now:

Yes, some of those covers back when that style was common were abysmal, and many were wildly disconnected from the content of the book. But I love them anyway. xP I still adore looking through old scifi covers pretty much whenever I get the chance.

[justassorted]

Skitter

A nonmalicious, amoral predator. Has to fight both his natural instincts and his general irritation with customs that make no logical sense to him, but does his best to stay occupied, nonthreatening, and useful. It’s the only way to survive.

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Name: Skitter Age: Adult Gender: Genderless / agender Pronouns: He/it

Species/nature: Verse-dependent. An experimental supersoldier in the humanoid verse; a semiaquatic alien creature otherwise.

Personality: Skitter is logical, curious, and short-tempered. The short temper is at least partly due to chronic stress; he is easily overstimulated, and he is all-too-aware that his life depends on following rules and social structures that he only barely comprehends.

(General tws: Dehumanization. Skitter is perfectly willing to consider killing or eating sapients. Humanoid Skitter experiences semi-frequent urges to self-injure when stressed; it is rarer but still a possibility in alien verses.)

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Humanoid verses:

Skitter is a product of an experimental supersoldier program, be it based in magic or technology. Either the program shut down for reasons unknown and Skitter is found in stasis, Skitter escapes on his own, or the program is discovered and raided—depends on what flavor of story I’m wanting to play with!

It’s difficult to acclimate to freedom, but if he manages it, he generally becomes a mercenary. Failing that, manual labor or something methodical like data entry come most easily to him.

He is capable of verbal speech, but finds it unpleasant and overstimulating. His speech is often stilted, particularly for the first few years after gaining freedom or whenever he's stressed.

[Art by @bitchfitch.]

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Sea creature verses:

[Art by @bitchfitch.]

Skitter is a semiaquatic alien that was abducted by other unknown aliens and planted on a third planet for purposes unknown. He was found in (or independently woke from) stasis in either a crashed shuttle or a hidden underground lab. He has clear memories of his homeworld, but only foggy memories of his abduction. 

Once Skitter figures out this whole ‘language’ concept and adapts as well as he can, he begins to study biology & medicine, those being the specialties of most of the people who interact with him at first. He’s as interested in understanding himself as he is in understanding the strange creatures that now control his fate.

Skitter uses sign, text to speech, pictographic AAC, and other adaptive methods to communicate. His linguistic skills are based more on pattern recognition than on true linguistic processing, and when he’s stressed he may struggle to process linguistic information at all, regardless of how it’s being delivered. But his speech is generally more eloquent than in humanoid verses; he’s had more formalized practice.

[justassorted]

Details: Skitter

Skitter is a wall of iron self-control plastered over predatory instincts and a massive startle reflex.

And said self control is less “I don’t want to hurt people,” and more “It is safer for me if I am not seen as a threat to social species, and specific individuals can be interesting to interact with.”