CW! Hobie Brown x OC content, non-sharing yumes please scroll away!
Thanks to @stargirldaydreams for the help with the Polish translation! Chanel is saying “You son of a bitch, what did you just say? Say it again!” because somebody said something mean to Hobie while at a family event. I redesigned her hair quite a bit and based it largely on a 1969 edition of Vogue with a picture of a woman with dyed hair taken by Richard Avedon.
It’s been a while since I drew these two! Honestly I’m really glad I decided to try because they were super fun. Chanel leaning way harder into 1960s hippie aesthetics was very fun to explore fashion-wise and smacking a bunch of band references on Hobie’s jacket was super fun. And here’s a tag for @shypervydolly as she requested it!
19. Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)
Aged/immortal/ageless/eldritch/etc aristocrat schemes/fails at scheming while struggling between duty/objectives and Their Feelings/Ignoring Said Feelings while slinking about their domain/palace/etc in sad/horny/yet always stylish dishevelment. From this conflict a story (or ‘story’) arises. Never gets old. Much like said protagonist. (=which, I will remind, doesn’t mean ‘goodie’!)
20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)
—insert obscure image from Ancient Greek plays! —insert obscure reference to Shakespeare! —insert obscure reference to obscure historical event! —have I yelled about German Expressionism lately? —insert obscure reference to modernist poetry! —Insert obscure reference to 16th century Holy Roman Empire realpolitik that I read in a primary source once and thought, damn that was shady, wonder if that was in reference to—my entire fic Renaissance is this. Literally the whole thing. I’d thought about updating it with another chapter just deconstructing all the early 17th century shit-talking, because I really didn’t give the reader much. (it being an ‘outsider glimpse’ sort of situation) It might be good to do, early 17th shit-talking was marvellous, it was a ridiculous time politically. Not that I was ever there! Haha. Imagine!
Anyway, I’m not super in touch with what I have/haven’t written/actually published as fic, but a couple of mainstays do come to mind: every time I make some wry insinuation at how Alexander got all that shit funded, I am absolutely insinuating that Frederick the Great was Alexander’s sugardaddy. That absolutely would have happened were Alexander a real person, oh my god. But Chanel! I hear you declaim! He’s a real ancestor of real people who are really alive today! Oh babes, look up who they’ve supported historically and what parties current members of that family have hitched their horses to. (The 'friendliest' 20th century name I can comfortably put here is Franco. Yeah.) I don’t give a good goddamn if insinuating an 18th century member of that dynasty (who incidentally, was probably the most progressive of that lot since, and he lived 250 years ago) shagged a fictional disaster eldritch monstrosity in a way that was maybe a bit transactional is ‘disrespectful’. You know what’s really disrespectful? Supporting the fash and far-right n*tionalist movements xoxo
I would say I have a fic for this but it’s been stuck at 80% done for about 18 months and my fic to-do list is the real eldritch horror
Also, I can’t even think about the alchemist ménage à trois (Alexander/Agrippa/Weyer) without my brain screaming ‘John the Baptist! Salomé! Strauss! Siri play Dance of the Seven Veils! Alexander snog a decapitated head!'
25. What part of writing is the most fun?
The attention hahaha fml
That moment when the coin drops and the tiny thing that makes a story make internal sense clicks into place. This can take longer than one might expect. After that, everything becomes a gleeful race to the finish where I constantly go ahaha! but you know what would be REALLY fucked up!! ohohoho, but you know what would be even FUNNIER!
I don't know, I just like that whatever I write that doesn't have to have commercial considerations can come from a place of unhinged joy, even (especially?) when the subject matter is dark.
It’s finally happening I’m making a Spidersona lore post. Strap in tight y’all there’s lots of story to go over and she’s one of my favorite characters I have ever made in literally my whole career as both an artist and a writer. I’m making an AO3 fic about her, the second one, actually, because the first was about a previous iteration whose story and themes are completely inapplicable to her now. So a new one must come to pass. I’m really excited for this!
CW: General evil corporate fuckery, terminal illness and death by terminal illness, corporate malpractice, discussions of personality disorders, discussions of hallucinations and schizophrenia. Not as bad as the stories for my other OCs but still not all that great. Also, Hobie dies. Not ATSV Hobie but still the guy with the name.
On with the show!
Chanel Love Hildegard Gajowa, named for the fashion brand, for Courtney Love of Hole, and for the founder of German scientific natural history Hildegard of Bingen OSB (also an abbess later canonized by the Catholic Church), is a Spider-Person from Earth-46296. Her story takes place in modern-day Chicago, Illinois in 2027 and, like all dimensions in the Spiderverse, has unique central aesthetic themes— namely eco-punk and whimsigoth. The story in itself is based around various different radical environmental philosophies as well as collectivist anarchism.
Chanel was born February 29, 2008 to Piotr Gajowy, a half-Polish half-Pokagon biophysicist at the Fantastic Four corporation, and Maryam Jeyn Wahdan, a Palestinian actress and fashion model. Because they were both very inexperienced and Mariam Jeyn has an “ironic” sense of humor, she thought it would be kind of funny to name her child after a brand she’s modeled for. That was thankfully not repeated with their other children.
When Chanel was 7, her younger brother Jack was born, and her parents wanted her to have a part in naming him so they gave her a small list of options. She ended up choosing Jean-Louis (or Jack), an option chosen to make reference to her father’s favorite author, Jean-Louis “Jack” Kerouac. When she was 16, she had enough of a brain for her parents to trust her to name the second baby, so he was christened Arne after Arne Næss, who founded deep ecology.
That same year, while combing through Busse Woods near one of OSCORP’s (all caps so that there are some linguistic differences between her universe and others) badly-maintained nuclear facilities, Chanel discovered and was promptly bitten by a short-wing kite spider that the corporation had been testing their highly experimental symbiote species on. The spider was released into the wild so the symbiote’s behaviors in nature could be documented but it almost immediately disappeared.
Chanel found it.
When the spider bit her, the amount of toxic and even radioactive chemicals that had been used on it to stabilize the symbiote’s presence in the body sent her into organ failure, at which point the RIOT (for “Review, Interview, Observation, Test”, a framework used in data collection) symbiote realized a human body could serve it extremely well and it entered her body to stabilize her organs. And it did! And she lived! Not without neurological consequences, but she lived! And though she did develop schizophrenia, at the very least her spider sense can help her differentiate between real threats and hallucinated ones.
Rapidly succeeding her conversion into a symbiote host, Chanel discovered she had superpowers and immediately decided they had to be used for good. So she became Whiteface, named for the goth-style face that the RIOT symbiote gave her in her suit. After she failed the first few times she tried to save people, including a savage beating from Scorpion, a militaristic pharmaceutical CEO, she entered her first manic episode as a result of her newly-acquired BPD and she quit. For the total span of a month before her moods swung back into something resembling stability and she realized that she couldn’t just give up on people!
A year in she met the Prowler, Hobie Brown, an antihero on the opposing side of her at-the-time highly legalistic approach to heroism. According to Hobie, the only way to fight the power was to do it without abiding by its laws, and Chanel— being both autistic and a participant in the highly regimented, rule-defined discipline of fencing— argued that laws exist for a reason. Hobie, though he respected her as a person, fundamentally disagreed. His latest mission was to go to work under OSCORP at one of their nuclear facilities and eventually feed critical information about their noncompliance with employee and environmental safety to local newspapers.
It didn’t go as planned.
Hobie began to fall ill, then eventually developed leukemia as a result of extreme radiation exposure. Chanel was, of course, devastated and her entire life became being a superhero, working up to graduate into college, and being at his side. The cancer worked fast and he died within the year. Then when Chanel tried to demand justice, OSCORP informed her that his family had “received compensation” (been bribed into silence) and didn’t want their trauma to be plastered all over local newspapers.
That was when she realized that Hobie was right.
The law is not constructed to benefit the people. It is constructed to benefit buyers, and the richer you are, the more you can get away with. When she graduated high school and began attending the University of Chicago to pursue her degree in wildlife ecology, she determined that she would take up the Prowler’s position in the overall criminal ecosystem of Chicago and fight back by any and all means necessary because under the law, the house always wins. And if the house continues to win they will destroy her city and eventually the world.
So now she’s an anticapitalist and hard-line activist both in the mask and out of it! She’s my baby and I love writing about her so I hope that this was at least kind of decent.
Written mainly for @shypervydolly but also for anyone who wants to learn more about Chanel!
Just realized that I’ve never posted Chanel’s suit on tumblr. Which is insane because it’s one of my favorite designs I’ve ever made of anything literally ever. Look at her. It’s like she’s cosplaying the noir detective alternate universe version of her dad. Her design is pretty old and was inspired by Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice (and Beetlejuice himself) but when I rediscovered it I changed it up with heavy inspiration from Alucard Hellsing. Thank you Alucard from Hellsing.
And thank you @lexfaithsmh for inspiring and encouraging me to post this!
CW just in case anyone reading is a non-sharing Hobie yumeshipper because I make a lot of OC × canon art, and this is that! This is a safe space for everyone and I love you all so much ❤︎ I also love sharing my art, however, so I figure the best thing to do is give fair warning.
Anyways! Hobie × Chanel! His outfit was taken directly from art by @padeliciouss featuring Hobie in Vivienne Westwood (highly recommend his account, his style is gorgeous). Hers is a hodgepodge of whimsigoth stuff off of Pinterest that I’m honestly exhausted just thinking of trying to track down.
Portraying Hobie as a tender kind of person is honestly super important to me because it is so rare to see really sweet and gentle natures given to black men in media, which is such a shame. Tenderness is beautiful, as is love in general, and every person deserves to see that embodied in somebody that looks like them. Plus he’s such a sweetheart in the movies, bad boy Hobie believers to the back you’re all wrong.
They’re one of my favorite OC × canon ships that I’ve ever made because I honestly genuinely love giving genderqueer people loving relationships and I especially love alt styles getting put together. I don’t know if whimsigoth is really that “alt”, but still. I thought this was really cute! I hope you guys do too.
And before I go, I asked specific permission for this: @shypervydolly , here he is! My favorite cute little guy!
