Had paused doing them for a while so I'm kinda afraid I forgot how to do them. I started off by mimicking V3/UDG style but now I acquired my own DR style w/ my preferences too, since the official has anime limitations I don't like. They're pretty fun to make :>
The Lady of the Borderlands Poll - Round 1 - Gaige the Mechromancer vs. Phuong
Gaige the Mechromancer - BL2, BL3
Gaige was a high school student and an ECHOcast streamer from the planet Eden-5 when she created her friend Deathrap as part of a science fair project to combat bullying. She travelled to Pandora to become a vault hunter after her invention was stolen and used by the corrupt police force on Eden-5.
Phuong - New Tales from the Borderlands
Research Assistant at Atlas, Phuong's primary responsibility is to keep Anu grounded and focused. Other responsibilities include talking to test subjects, cataloguing rare ores, and keeping tabs on the hot company gossip.
because someone asked: here's a big dump of stuff about the story Townsend is from, i.e. the narrator of Choker!
Major TW for suicide/hanging, and obviously OCD.
Also, heads up that it's a really silly, REALLY emo story about ghost hunting lol.
Townsend is the deuteragonist of a (really extremely unfinished) story I had, that was provisionally called Orange Peels on Fire (opof). I started working on it when I was watching a lot of Demon Slayer, and it was basically my attempt to create a cast of shounen anime characters who were all girls but look exactly like the typical shounen anime protagonists. (I mention Demon Slayer because I took a LOT of inspiration from that - at times I described it to people as a shitty lesbian Vietnamese Demon Slayer knockoff... wow it's like it was made for me!!!)
A lot of lore is super wishy-washy because I did like the OG concept art in 2021, then I just kinda fucked around until 2022 when I revamped it for a screenwriting class. I don't really consider either version more canon, but I did a lot more work on the screenwriting version so I'll just describe that :P
Setting
It's set in post-apocalyptic US (either Virginia or like California but I couldn't commit because I've never seen California). A lot of the human population is gone - old civilization is being reclaimed by nature and the surplus oxygen means that there are also giant bugs now who take a lot of the niches previously held by mammals (like mice, dogs, deer etc). The oxygen is also how I campily explain away people being able to do epic anime jumps and stuff lmao. This, plus global warming, also means that the middle of North America now has a sort of tropical climate.
The part that actually matters is everyone in the US lives in tiny villages created out of suburban neighborhoods, and they're constantly having Ghost and Monster Problems of some nature because society has forgotten how to properly bury the dead --- and also because that apocalyptic event 100-or-so years ago caused so many ghosts to be created.
Phượng Lê
The protagonist is Phượng Lê, an 18 year old girl who can see ghosts. She's a triplet, with a living brother (Thanh) and a stillborn sister (the titular Cam / "Orange") who she's always seen as just a normal sister because she's a ghost that lives with them.
(All three of these characters are from a depressing realistic fiction short story I wrote, which I personally consider to be their "true" versions, but I imported them into this because I thought it'd be stupid and funny to turn a story like that into a shounen anime lol)
This is what Phượng looks like! (modern on left, old on right)
She's struggled with depression her whole life, partially because everyone thinks she's a sad and delusional pyromaniac for acting like she has a living sister (whose bones she keeps in a box) and for burning stuff to send it to her. Because of that she puts a LOT of stock in Cam's happiness because keeping Cam's ghost kind of cost her everything (including her parents abandoning them etc).
Cam's remains get stolen one day and long story short, Phượng and Thanh end up traveling around the country trying to solve ghost problems, scooby-doo style, in pursuit of the person who stole them. There's like a different category of ghost every time, based on Vietnamese folklore. (And if you're wondering, Cam's bones are valuable because stillborn baby remains can be used for evil magic, which is of course what the evil people in this story want to do).
That finally brings us to...
Townsend! (aka May Hoàng)
Townsend has pretty different lore between 2021 and 2022, but again I'm going with the latter because I've spent more time on that.
In the story:
She's a self-proclaimed "evil ghost" who haunts a tree at the edge of town. Phuong comes to her to ask if she's seen Cam; Townsend is surprised to meet a human who's friendly to ghosts.
She lightly antagonizes P & Th (in what is later revealed to be an attempted suicide-by-cop type thing) and runs away from them a few times before finally deciding to join their team. (In some versions she has to pretend to be human to deceive Irene, the secretly evil lady helping P & Th out).
Originally I had her birth name as Townsend - in the most recent iteration, this is a nickname Phượng gives her through this miscommunication:
She's the only member of the team who can actually, you know, touch ghosts? (Except when Phuong goes all danny phantom on their asses but I don't need to get into that).
Despite this, and despite the fact that she constantly threatens to kill people*, she basically bursts into tears at the thought of enacting violence on people/ghosts, so she ends up just serving as their strategist **(as the only one who isn't kind of dumb lol).
* Her catch phrase is basically "Don't touch me, i'll kill you." This is really emo lol, but what you find out eventually is this is actually a warning and not a threat.
**Specifically, because Thanh is the only one with absolutely no ghost powers, he has to use weapons made by Phuong, and because Phuong is like the main character, Townsend and Thanh have to work together to strategize & fight in the background. That's a whole arc because Townsend is a coward who doesn't want to be in fights, and Thanh doesn't trust Townsend because she constantly threatens to kill him and Phuong. Fair, I guess.
Townsend's backstory:
She's supposed to be this fundamentally irrational character, who eventually becomes a love interest of Phượng (they're both lesbians) but still never brings herself to stop antagonizing her whenever they get too close. After months and months of working together, Phượng finally gets Townsend's backstory:
She was originally a 17-year-old girl named May Hoàng, who lived in a town next to Phượng's. She suffered from something that we would in modern times describe as OCD, but had since been forgotten by society because of the apocalypse (rip). Her family was Catholic, and they didn't think much of her earlier obsessions (except that she was being annoying), but when she confided in them about her newest obsession about dropping and strangling her baby brother, Meri, they confided in the church - and eventually all the townsfolk came to believe she was being influenced by the devil.
May's parents kept trying to work with her, but eventually she ran away to hang herself.* In some versions, instead of going through with that, she conveniently gets attacked by a hangman ghost (which is how I really loosely translated ma thần vòng) right before that, who strangles her and she still dies. Fun!
*This is what's described in the beginning of Choker. In the original version, she runs away on the back of a giant-giant american millipede, as depicted on the cover, and that becomes kind of a faithful steed that they can all ride around on later.
Either way, what she didn't realize (I guess because she's Catholic) is that if you hang yourself and nobody finds your body, you turn into a hangman ghost, and can only pass on if you strangle a living person to take your place.
So..... obviously that's not going to happen.
Phượng & Townsend
May died about a year before the story starts. She was kind of hoping Phượng could just exorcize her, but because it takes about 3 seconds to realize May isn't actually a threat, Phượng refuses to do that.
Instead they kind of fall in love (shipname Phuongsend if you're wondering lol), and they eventually figure out she's just mentally ill and reinvent ERT or something.
Meanwhile, because of both Cam and May, the whole team is looking for a way to turn ghosts back into living people. I never decided if they actually succeed, but honestly I don't think they ever will. May committed suicide and that's just not something you can undo.
As foils
They both care a lot about each other, but that's despite (or maybe because of?) some very conflicting values. There's a little undercurrent of each trying to change the other's morals.
Phượng's mother abandoned her and Thanh because of her obsession with her sister, Cam, who was stillborn and never even got a chance at life. She's only leaving home now to find that sister and maybe even bring her back to life.
From Phượng's perspective, May HAD a shot at life, and somehow thinks she has the right to get it back even after squandering it. May also loves her baby sibling to death, but her idea of protecting him was to run away forever --- and to Phuong, that's just about the worst thing you can do to someone you love.
They were both treated as heretics, but Phượng reacted by getting a superiority complex and starting to hate everyone, while May still thinks everyone is fundamentally good, except herself. Phượng is (technically) a younger sister and constantly pushes back against Thanh's overprotectiveness, something May sees as disrespectful and scary, as an older sister who spent years obsessing over Meri's safety. Finally, Phượng's violent tendencies/occasional anger issues are something May sees as a big moral problem.
And.... that was a LOT. I'm not sure if I'll keep this post up honestly because there's still like a TINY chance I'll adapt this into something. But for now enjoy the lore dump :P
