Hey Zirkkun, I am on Floof Queendom and I saw Noko's new art that she did of different characters in hugging poses. One of them was Horror and she told me the little skelly hanging from his arm was Dye. She said that they are your OC. So I was wondering if there's an info post or character sheet about Dye. Or if you can tell me more about them.
Sure, I can tell you about them, absolutely!! (Also, for those wanting context, the image being asked about by @little-noko is over here!)
Do note! Dye's story is not a necessarily happy or fun one. I originally designed his character -- and his half-brother -- around my frustration with people labeling certain darker topics as "edgy." As a reference, before I had a name for him, he was affectionately named "knife baby" because. well. he was a small child being... Very irresponsible with knives. (There is murder involved.)
For more fun arts done in the past, I did these two with both Dye and his brother Quill, one for Halloween and one as a Pokemon crossover. Noko also did this piece of Dye as a mermaid, and Kao ( @tatatale ) did this piece of Dye and Quill's human designs!
He has a page on ArtFight here, and this was my original post about him (but this info might have changed slightly? I haven't re-read it in a while.)
I can explain more here, though! Do know, though, a lot of his stuff is from a mostly-unfinished project of mine, so it might be a little messy since I have not worked on it in ages beyond RP with friends.
I'll put it under a read more since it might get a little long but also so it can be under these warnings! :D
Dye is a shipkid for Killer and Ink in an AU of mine I previously dubbed the Polyship AU or PSAU for short, which was a kind of catch-all title for a collection of stories I had set in the same multiverse. (I later wanted to rename it to Fractured Prism...)
I actually made this animatic a few years back that kind of covers the story of Dye's parents specifically. I'd never made a shipkid before so Dye was genuinely my first attempt, but he has a special place in my heart for it.
Basically, Ink got roped into working for Nightmare after hanging out with Killer too much. Ink chose to make this decision as opposed to avoiding interaction with the AU because he had been friends with a creator who convinced him to make his own choices and become his own character. That whole thing in itself is a long story that has been subject to like 4 revisions so I'm gonna leave it at that for now.
Dye happened on complete accident, but Nightmare "allowed" him to exist, if you will, because he had plans to craft Dye into a tool for his own misdeeds going forward. However, Nightmare goal was to keep people ALIVE so he could farm them for negative emotions, meanwhile Dye's "talents" resided in spiking fear before ultimately killing them (even though he didn't intend to.) Nightmare considered this to be a "failed experiment" of sorts, so he threw Dye out into the multiverse on his own at age 4.
During this time, Dye didn't really know how to fend for himself or... do anything by himself, really. Not beyond the awful "training" he'd gotten through Nightmare. This led him to basically greeting people through stabbing, to which he found a fascination with the different "colors within people's bodies" (the different colors of magic or blood that would ooze out when he stabbed someone.) He found out that ingesting this "made his eyes do funny things," (they gained eyelights and, instead of dripping with black ooze, the "tears" turned iridescent.) You can see the difference in his ref here:
Anyway, this cycle happens repeatedly as he keeps stumbling through portal after portal, until he somehow stumbles into Sunny's ( @tatatale / @asksunflower ) flowerfield AU. Here, he is willingly adopted by Sunny (as in, Sunny accepts Dye as his son) and unwillingly adopted by Breaker!Killer ( @murmur-utdr-au ) (as in, Dye clings to Breaker and Breaker wants no part of it but plays along with anyway. Dye calls Breaker his "knife buddy.")
By the way, when I tag those two, they're my friends and I RP with them! That's how Dye is connected to them :D
You also may have noticed the floating white circle in front of Dye. He functions similarly to Flowey-- in that, he has no SOUL (illustrated by the translucent white circle) but is living purely with Determination (illustrated by the red outline). Because of this, he has extremely muted emotions, although they are not entirely nonexistent. Notably, when he is young, he is terrified by seeing black ooze or paint or the like because he wrongly assumes it will be Nightmare appearing to hurt him. Which... he doesn't actually remember, because on top of having a horrible memory thanks to Ink, Dye has repressed pretty much all of his time living in Nightmare's castle. All he remembers is the fear it brought him, and that fear can be triggered by the slightest reminder.
As Dye gets older, though -- which, this part is more just planned out as opposed to actually executed in any form of writing -- he is able to work through those things to not have such panicked reactions to the things that trigger him. This is also beneficial, considering the fact that Dye's magic default takes the color black, because that is the color you get when you mix all of them into one.
His memory continues to fail him, however, and he doesn't retain most events from his childhood as a whole. There is even a point where his parents manage to escape the castle -- "thanks" to an unfortunate combination of help from @tatatale's Error (Neon) and that same creator from earlier.
Despite the fact that he gets support and plenty of help from Sunny and Breaker, though, he doesn't really change all that drastically from his morality as a kid into when he becomes an adult. This is made worse when he meets his younger-older brother (uh. due to different timeflow in the flowerfield vs Nightmare's castle, Quill out-ages Dye by 10 years.) and re-meets his parents. His parents dote on Dye completely-- and Quill is convinced that Dye is the sole reason for the good in his life being ripped from underneath him.
This is also what Dye looks like at age 18, btw:
Dye is also meant to be a foil to his brother, Quill. I've been trying to keep this as focused on Dye as possible, but they are inherently very linked by design.
Dye values doing things as he pleases and freely, while Quill is more rigid and prefers stricter plans and schedules. Dye is pretty laid-back and apathetic, meanwhile Quill is very stubborn and passionate. Dye is able to charm all different kinds of people for whatever reason, but Quill is basically a repellent to all both in magic and just general personality. And, most importantly-- Dye doesn't really find much value in life at all, his own or others; meanwhile Quill has immense value in life, the good and the bad alike.
In this way, the two are sort of supposed to flip-flop their roles. Dye is set up to be a victim-turned-antihero type story, but he ends up having a corruption arc that he is never really punished for, in part due to everyone feeling bad for him. Quill, on the other hand, has a similar setup, but is more "oh this guy is definitely going to be the villain" -- only for HIM to end up as the conflicted antihero with a redemption arc. He is still very much a victim, but he's basically thrown under a bus by many around him.
Anyway, explaining more of this will dig into Quill territory, which I can definitely delve into (probably tomorrow morning... it's 12:30 AM for me right now lol) if you're interested! But, for now, that's my blurb on Dye :D
Sketchdump of stuff with a KillInk shipkid I designed a little while ago! I actually initially wanted to use this concept (soulless but with Determination) for a ErrInk shipkid but... somehow it changed??
Anyway, these are some sketches based off of some RP’s done with friends and also some of just Dye’s general backstory I had in my head. For also some clarification, there are two different Inks and two different Killers depicted above. Breaker (with the blue Soul) and the Ink in the first comic with him aren’t Dye’s parents.
And yes... the Bad Sans!Ink is Dye’s parent. I thought the concept would be fun, eheh. I don’t have much for him, but basically, in exchange for being able to stay close with Killer, Ink works for Nightmare. He is only allowed the most minimal amount of paint to keep him alive, and usually it’s just the ones that have Ink feel negative emotions. So his default eyelight colors are a pastel blue and a pastel red.
-💚-✨-💚-
Ink by @/myebi / @/comyet
Killer by @/rahafwabas
Breaker!Killer by @murmur-utdr-au / @murmurkins
Magusverse by @magusverse / @xfr3eax
Dye is soooo cute! I wanna take him out for ice ccream and pat his head. He does seem like a trouble maker around halloween time.
You're partially right! He's a troublemaker all the time and thinks he can do no wrong at all because his family is ... a little too supportive sometimes. Aside from his brother who hates his non existent guts.
He'd love to go out for ice cream and get head pats though! Just watch out, he likes to frequently playfully flirt and intentionally break people's hearts. 💔
