No update this week as I'm really struggling with some poses on this page -- but I have finally have some (late & long-overdue) ask responses written up, so those're below the cut! Longer responses this time. And then the update next week will wrap up the chapter.
Firstly: thank you!!
As for lore headcanons, I'm feeling something of the equivalent of being asked what I want for Christmas and immediately losing all earthly desires. That, and the lore I focus on the most is that which is directly relevant to the comic.
If you want to do some lore reading though, I'll point you over to this older discussion I participated in about the Dungeon, Hell, and Jungle lore, something I've been intermittently trying to untangle.
While at a certain point everything turns into headcanon/comic-specific story+lore, I do try to at least base things off of in-game content where I can. Terraria doesn't really have much in the way of lore deep-divers (which- fair enough. The game's lore is sparse.), so a lot of my interpretations come directly from digging through bestiary entries/etc. and extrapolating from there. It's fun, if a bit slow-going at times.
& Yep! The comment from Malik was a reference to exactly that.
[The page in question where Andrew is shown stimming as a child.]
This is a complicated question because while a lot of a character's behaviors and personality wrap back into their themes and the story I'm trying to tell with them, to a certain extent I cannot divorce myself entirely from the characters I write. Which is to say sometimes neurodivergent traits are intentional, and sometimes they're just external influences creeping in.
That being said: compared to other characters, it is the most intentional/explicit with Andrew.
Let me summarize it this way:
Andrew has difficulty connecting with people/forming close bonds, and struggled as a child with the knowledge that many people saw something "off-putting" or strange about him that he fundamentally could not also see/conceptualize.
Andrew has always preferred the company of nature -- spacious, silent, calm -- over the chaos of other people.
Andrew is 463 years old, and thus (even in the face of changing societal expectations) has had a lot of time to learn both how to mask and create/rely on coping mechanisms. So the way he expresses himself as an (immortal) adult is very different from how he acted as a child.
It makes me very, very happy seeings folks' reactions to this scene. The comic has been dancing around Andrew's actual feelings towards things for a while, and this moment marks the beginning of the end for him -- Andrew is powerless, and despite how he slips into that helpful Guide persona for Chris, there's a part of him in there that's being dragged to his death kicking and screaming.
This chapter, and the next two to follow, are what l started the comic for and I am so, so excited to finally be here.
Thank you as well for the kind words on my art -- progress isn't always linear, but I do try to push myself and improve in the comic. I often struggle with motivating myself to put effort into one-off pieces, so working on the comic has really been instrumental in actually keeping myself drawing.
For sure! 👍
It did not! Alalia used her magic to help it bloom on this page.
A few fun facts about this scene:
First: This was one of the very first scenes I ever conceptualized for the comic. The actual contents of the scene have changed a fair bit, and the meat of it ended up split over 3-ish scenes (at the party in chapter 9, now in chapter 10, and one final confrontation in chapter 12), but specifically the idea of Alalia growing an orchid during an argument about purpose/autonomy with Andrew has been around since the start of the comic, and I'm glad it finally made it in there. Andrew's reaction to the orchid has changed in the script a few times too -- originally, it was shock/resignation, then anger (him cutting the blooms off) on-screen. The final iteration makes it a bit more subtle, as the scene cuts away before showing his direct reaction to it, and he removes the orchid from the table between chapters without directly addressing it.
Second: Since the orchid was based on an actual, IRL orchid I used to have, it was originally going to be a normal-looking orchid. This was changed last-minute to instead be a Moonglow flower, for a few reasons:
I felt that it blended too much into the background, and using a glowing plant was an easy way to make it stand out.
It felt silly using a regular, IRL flower when there are flowers in the game I could have been using instead. (Yes, there are non-herb decorative/crafting flowers as well, but I liked the idea of using a more recognizable herb from the setting.)
Moonglow grows on jungle grass, the Dryad's preferred biome. Moonglow being a jungle plant [that blooms at night] also explains succinctly why it never bloomed for Andrew -- he took it away from its preferred environment, and while he keeps it out of the sunlight, he never puts it out in the moonlight. Andrew should know this -- he's a Guide, after all -- and yet he still attempts to make it bloom where it is, thinking if he just gives it the right amount of water and better soil it will bloom eventually. Which could mean nothing.
Touch of symbolism once again nodding to Andrew's previous connection with the Lunatic Cultist.
So, I redrew it to be a Moonglow flower last minute (literally -- it was one of the very last changes I made to that page before posting it).
