@furawaume‘s Hime
As a former ballerina, she understandably indulges herself on sweets and pastry a bit more than she should XD forbidden fruit and all
Gotta admit from the very beginning: this whole long post is written pretty clumsily. I feel very shy sharing my thoughts and ideas, and on top of that i’m not a native English speaker, so big blocks of texts are hard for me to deal with. Apologies in advance, proceed with caution
As you may have noticed, Attitudes has been heavily featured in my content lately: all these OCs you don’t know, all this shipping art and short silly comics XD So!
Attitudes is a story that me and my dear friend @furawaume are workshopping. We’ve been having fun with it for almost a year now (it was conceived in October 2019 and our lives have never been the same since). The name of the whole thing is actually a pun of sorts: it’s a french classical dancing term, which is fitting, since the story itself heavily features dancing.
Here are the basics:
Location
Modern Canada, an imaginary city about a 3-hours-drive away from Toronto. We also get to see Alberta, Montreal (in flashbacks) and a little bit of Italy once, somewhere in the Neapolitan suburbs.
Characters
The nucleus of the story revolves around 4 characters: Sophie Brannt, Asya Vishnevsky (usually referred to as Hime), Nana Moraux and Ume Furawa. They are the soul of the story, and their relationship is the most important part of it.
We also have 3 supportive characters, secondary compared to the girls above, but still very important to what’s going on: Tony Leventini (i like to use him as a third person pov character), Kanta Blaze, and Michael Young.
What is this all about
Attitudes is a story about 7 very different people, each of them with their own hang-ups, quirks and issues to deal with, and a pivotal year in their lives. These people met through sheer luck, and the friendship they managed to forge during that special year changed them forever.
It is, in its core, a found family story. It mainly focuses on 4 female characters, not all 7, though the rest are important too. But the soul of the narrative is the bond between Sophie, Hime, Nana and Ume, who came together through circumstances and accidentally found themselves in a familial relationship with one another. Attitudes follows the girls through their separate journeys and tracks how they ended up affecting each other’s situations, beliefs and, yes, attitudes to drastically change everything for the better.
How did the girls come together? Through dancing.
It all starts with Sophie (20 years old at this point), who just moved to a new city. She is a part time voice actress, but she aspires to be a musical actress in the local theatre. She has a lot of experience on stage as a child actor, and she is a very talented singer and performer, but, unfortunately for her, she failed the audition through her lack of dancing skills. The head of the troupe liked Sophie though, and gave her about 11 months to learn how to dance before she re-auditions for the next project (“The Chorus Line”, a property where the actor should absolutely 100% be able to dance).
Hime (19) is a former professional ballerina. A prima, a rising star. Tragically, she had an accident on stage, and because of her injury on the ankle she’s never going to be able to dance classical ballet professionally. Dancing is still her life though, because she never knew anything else practically since she was a baby, so as soon as her ankle recovered, she decided to pick up dancing again - the simpler kind that her state will allow.
Nana (25) works for the police. She was an idealist and a dreamer when she started working there, but quickly became disillusioned. Dancing is what Nana did for leisure since her teenage years, and now, when her job is incredibly stressful and unfulfilling, dancing provides her with much needed escape.
Ume (about 28 but nobody knows for sure) is a coach in a small dancing studio. She is a god-given dancer, a great choreographer, and she had aspirations, but a failure in the beginning of her career discouraged her to the point where she stopped pursuing her dreams and settled for being a small-time dancing coach. She ends up taking Sophie, Hime and Nana as her advanced class.
Their bond ends up being a familial one, and me and @furawaume like to see it in “relatives” terms:
Hime is the younger sister. An airhead of sorts, she’s sweet and naive, and she lives in a dream-like state that is so uncommon to see in modern reality that basically all of the characters make it their goal to protect this little sunny world of hers. She’s spoiled and protected by everyone, and in exchange she possesses the ability to brighten everyone’s mood and deflect conflicts. She loves and is loved unconditionally.
Sophie is the older sister, still one foot in childhood, loving silliness, fun and games, getting into shenanigans, but also already burdened by responsibility (possibly too much responsibility to take without consequences). She desperately wants to be seen as a capable adult, and she definitely IS one, but also is trying to be one way too hard, trying to prove her position and abilities not only to others but to herself as well. She’s secretly very insecure about anything that is not her professional area of expertise. Sophie’s the biggest achiever of the group: she has her goals, and she friggen goes for them with a force stoppable only with overexhaustion caused by relentless self-doubt.
Nana is the mother, calm, collected and caring, nurturing by nature, soothing in her manners, voice and approach. She’s very quiet, confident and strong (both mentally and physically). She’s definitely the most level-headed of the cast, but part of that is her being pretty cynical and not really believing in deeper connections that much (despite forming the connection with girls over time: it is eventually a huge surprise for her how much she ends up caring for them). She was burned a lot in her life, and she has trust issues.
Ume is the cool grandma type: she drinks wine, tells stories of her youthly mishaps and successes, jokes around about seduction effortlessly and nudges other characters to do silly things for funzies. She’s awesome, but she gave up on herself, thinking that her glory days are over, and is more detached than other characters.
The relationship between the 4 are varied: they all love each other, but love each of each other differently. Despite being a literal teacher, Ume ends up learning from Sophie: seeing her stubbornness, her confidence in her art, her passion for the craft and her deep desire to get better and better and better, she sheds her indifferent attitude and ends up wanting things from life again, regaining her passion for dancing, bringing back the aspirations she once had. Sophie in turn learns that taking up something new is not scary at all, and failure is not only inevitable at some point, but normal and a necessary part of the learning process. Nana, seeing Hime’s genuine approach, wonder and sincerity, learns to open up and finally believes that there is still good in the world, that there are still things to believe in, and she ends up ready to trust again. Hime sheds part of her naivete, the one that made her vulnerable to be hurt by unwell-meaning people, and becomes less of an airhead, grows up from her ignorant state, and becomes more empathetic to others. Hime and Sophie, being closest in age and attitude, end up being best of friends, basically sisters, and though they don’t really learn wordy life lessons from one another, their bond is deep, their friendship is genuine, and their desire to stir up harmless trouble is mutual XD Nana and Ume admire each other: they fully understand that they will never be alike, but this unlikeness only makes their fondness of one another deeper.
Honestly, Attitudes is pretty hard for me to summarize because it’s not constructed as a book or a movie with a single focus, but more akin to a TV-series, think F.R.I.E.N.D.S or How I Met Your Mother. It is relatively episodic and has an ensemble cast as opposed to a single main character. Some characters get more time and development dedicated to them (Ted Mosby gets more screen time than, say, Marshall or Lily, and Sophie gets more time than Nana or Kanta), but overall most of the characters share the focus pretty equally, and each of them gets to be the narrator at some point because i adore changing perspectives (but generally i’d say Tony is the focal character most often, with Sophie being a close second).
Attitudes is a slice of life, and most of the important stuff that happens can be summarized as simply as “they go skating”, or “regular dance class turns awry”, or “they’re talking about exes”, or “girls’ night out”. Most of the character growth and character revelations take place during common activities: characters just do things together, and develop through conversations and interactions.
I’m honestly lost as to what is the best way to summarize something so episodic in nature, so i’ll stop here for now, and in later posts i’ll dump way more info about individual characters, their relevant backstories, arcs and generally what’s their deal.
Princess Tutu's characters in cosplay attitude's characters -?
Okay, as you guys probably figured by now, “Attitudes” is a little something me and @furawaume are working on together (it’s been more than half a year already, CRAZY). It started when she came up with that cute idea of a bunch of our ocs from different shows we enjoyed going to a dance class together. Since then a lot of stuff changed tremendously, we reworked our ocs into something completely original, we came up with a plot and arcs for everyone, and it’s a ton of fun for us, and hopefully, you enjoy art i do of the thing XD (though admittedly most of it is on my twitter)
and since me and her befriended one another because of our love for Princess Tutu, having two of our favorite things together was a natural choice XD
Some art for the soul. Me and my friendo @furawaume came up with a nice slice-of-life story for a bunch of our characters and it engaged me so much that i can barely think of anything else recently
characters on the right belong to @furawaume
