I just spent an hour going over the (potential) design for a shrimp themed Lolita dress?? I continue to get myself into these and then wonder how I got there...
So, I made a friend in the new sewing server, @hauntedamusementpark, who keeps fish and shrimp, and things just kept coming out of my mouth. And here we are, with plans fleshed out for the entire skirt.
It started with me snarkily recommending making two shrimp mirror each other across a clamshell so they looked like a bow, and it went downhill from there. On a sidenote, my google searches for “shrimp lolita” and “shrimp bow cartoon” turned up increasingly bizarre things as the algorithm attempted to sell me (archery) bows, (ribbon) bows, bowtie (pasta), or shrimp scampi. (There was also a very happy cartoon intestine for reasons I don’t know and don’t want to find out).
So after the initial throwing back and forth of themes (we were toying with doing ghost pirate shrimp and a full crustacean crew), Haunted asked me if it would be funnier to have an old school Lolita shrimp dress, with classy shrimp cameos or an over the top sugary hearts and lace *and* bows shrimp dress with cute lil pastel shrimp. I picked the second one because I’m in this purely for chaos. By the end, I had my wish. . .
So the main theme of the dress at this point are cute, mildly cartoony shrimp maidens with enormous shoujo anime sparkly eyes. Also, they’re blushing because it’s Lolita and Shoujo together. And after working out Shrimp-chan, we needed to give her a senpai... Since we’re working with freshwater shrimp (hi, sorry. forgot to mention), they live with their cousins, crawfish (or crawdads or crayfish) and that’s all we needed to bring in Crawfish-kun.
One of the other Lolita elements (and shoujo) is tea parties. They’ll just pick a noun and put ‘tea party’ after it, and boom. It’s lolita. It’s at this point that the ghost pirate shrimp idea gets tossed cruelly out and shoujo tropes, so. *Obviously*, it has to be a cherry blossom tea party picnic in the underwater school yard, Shrimp-chan blushing coyly over at Crawfish-kun.
We talked and decided to arrange it as a tableau around the skirt, so the scene changes as the skirt is turned (or looked at from different angles), with a background of stock high school areas like the (contractually obligated) cherry blossom lined avenue leading up to the school gate. Additionally, a classroom’s large windows on the left of the gate, transitioning into the park which will be on the right of the blossom avenue. And that’s the full circle.
With this, we can have Shrimp-chan and Crawfish-kun doing cute anime things like walking together to school or chasing each other playfully, and of course the picnic tea party. I’m particularly attached to the park scene because I image Shrimp-chan blushing extra hard as her tiny filter feet (the ones on the inside curl of the tail) carefully offer a fork with cake on it to the also blushing Crawfish-kun.
If you wish to retain your sanity, you should stop here. This is a cute and quirky dress themed around shrimp. The following takes it fully into Weird Horror story.
Right, so after that I was looking around and noticed this post (a seaturtle with some detailed art nouveau styled buildings growing forth from his shell) which got me to think. Sure. Let’s put the entire shoujo school on top of a whale or something. Haunted took my whale, my themed whale, and raised me to alligator. Being as this was pure chaos, I agreed. On the condition that the alligator was gyaru. Gyaru gator.
And so far that’s the plan for the shrimp dress. I have no idea what I’m doing but I’m really invested in seeing this through because I mean, come on! It’s a shrimp dress! When am I going to get the chance to do that again?
