tumblr fucking logged me out when i tried to answer this because its scared of my heart
time 2 talk about my heart #myheart
first of all i was unrelatedly asked to draw heart by a friend and put him in this exact pose. hes about 2 shake da hell out of that fish [also, more images of Heart at the bottom of this post! warning for nonsexual nudity]
my design process with Heart is shaped by starting with him i will say. i went in acronym order, hms, for their designs, so he's where the visual through-lines i wanted to use were established
with my designs i started off with two goals:
make them very uniquely mine in a way i enjoy drawing [massive success!]
deconstruct the visual tropes seen in a lot of hms designs and implement the thought process behind them in a new way.
heart is associated with the physical heart, emotions, and the moon, but a major fanon association of his is birds and angels [which is actually semi-canon now but im not talking about nmtkr because im not seriously incorporating volume 2 into anything until its done]
the bird and angel association comes from a major jasher giving him wings because he presents himself as without guilt, thus ties to angels. i dont recall which jasher it was, but @gracebeth3604 knows as a veteran fan. so i asked myself what that meant and how else you could manifest associations with biblical purity: doves. he's got a facial pattern meant to resemble a heart and a beak, and the under-eye marking comes from the pink circles around pigeons' eyes, since pigeons are a type of dove that people dont tend to like.
heart is also where false transparency started to come up. a major aspect of my hearts design is the hole in his chest, and the anatomical heart patch next to it. but fun fact, that hole only exists when he has his hoodie on! and the heart is too far off-center, if you were to shoot him there you'd hit his lungs. the actual heart is mostly centered, nestled between the lungs, it just has more mass on one side so it ends up leaning to your left.
if heart removes his hoodie, he's a horribly starving, realistic animal. because i also used art styles to communicate the theme of false transparency and further the idea of purity. heart is chibi where he can't cover himself up, but the reality is far more sickly and rotten.
Heart also does have feathers, but just 4. they grow in at the corners of his eyes and mimic teardrops, but also since they're pairs they mimic hearts. and his eyes are meant to mimic moons!
and Heart wears a hoodie and a long skirt to hide his silhouette, also.
ok that's all im telling the public about Heart rn teehees time for the heart montage ive drawn him sm already even tho the designs like 5 sniffs old feel free 2 ask abt the other designs i love them and they suck
I enjoy the really normal reaction you had to the Look Outside animation I reblogged lmao, I saw the amount of notifs and genuinely thought tumblr was glitching because I left tumblr for maybe an hour and don’t post enough to warrant that many notifs, I know literally nothing of Look Outside but Phillippe, I quite enjoy Phillippe he’s my exact variety of character, anything you wanna yap about for it?
OH IS THERE :)
ok so im putting this under a readmore in case my friends currently playing Look Outside get nosy. IM GOING TO BE SPOILING A LOT OF THE GAME!!!
ok im not even done yet and the post is so long. ive been typing near-constantly since you sent this ask and my wrist hurts. good luck. [final time was one hour and eight minutes of typing this post.]
look outside is one of my favorite games of all time and its kind of comical how much more i love it than basically anything else. yknow how the utdr fandom gets? acting like those are The rpgs? yeah thats me with look outside.
as a game, look outside is about compassion. the premise, as you might be aware, is that due to something called The Visitor, people who look outside are being transformed into body horror monsters influenced by their thoughts and feelings at the time of transformation. it is also, crucially, always treated as a neutral thing. some curses are extraordinarily painful while others are outright pleasant, and there's no visual shorthand for this. the thing is, though, curses are often distressing, which can lead someone to lose lucidity and lash out! this is why MOST but NOT ALL cursed individuals are hostile: they couldn't cope with the changes to their body and brain.
something very interesting for a horror game [and especially something with such an emphasis on body horror] is the absence of direct metaphor. the curses within Look Outside are NOT a metaphor for puberty or alterhumanity or queerness or physical disability or mental illness or anything of the sort, and so that lack of specificity allows the comparisons to be more freely drawn from character to character and for those topics to exist within the story both overlapping with and separate from curses.
to go over these a bit, i'll start small. there's two rather explicitly neurodivergent characters: Dan, who has autism, and Ernest, who experiences delusions and possibly paranoia [no explicit reason, but canonically predating the plot of Look Outside].
Dan is canonically grating, ignorant of social cues, seemingly unaware of boundaries, and emotionally tone deaf. he is capable of betraying the player's trust by wasting 200 dollars [intended for rent] without any guilt about the matter [which you can kick him out for], basically constantly streaming and sharing private information with the public, and can get all of his viewers cursed simply by not thinking about the consequences of streaming while outside. however, it becomes clear during the unique quest you do with him that he has struggled consistently with being liked, and has resorted to masking with a goofy streamer persona for positive attention. you just see his actual emotional depth only once, because he's always streaming.
Ernest, on the other hand, is best friends with a rat named Colonel Squeakums and often assumes meaning behind Squeakums' squeaks. if you have an item that allows you to understand rats, you can quite firmly determine that Ernest cannot speak to rats and is usually wrong about what Squeakums' is saying, but the rat doesn't resent him for this, and wishes to look out for the old man. Ernest's delusions and paranoia lead him to suspect many characters are hostile without grounds, and he says a lot of odd things such as asserting that before Look Outside there were "little men made-a blue cheese doin' mind experiments on the elderly", but he's overall a very kind old man who appreciates the help you can provide to him.
i started with these two because they're very major characters and neurodivergence is an easy read for the curses! however, i am in no way done. warning for discussion of body horror in the next paragraph.
next up is Joel. he's eight years old, and while he didn't look outside, his baby sister Rosie was napping under a window and got cursed. she was presumably at the age where her teeth were growing in, as the curse led her to keep growing teeth, and those she bit also started growing more teeth. Joel was bitten on the nose, and his face ends up being gradually replaced by a giant mouth full of rows of teeth all the way down to his throat. the player meets him right before he loses his second eye, which causes him to panic. at this point, the only way to calm him down enough to regain lucidity is to find his favorite stuffed bear and give it to him, which allows you to take him into your home! if he is left alive but not helped, the teeth spread across his entire body as they do for his baby sister, little brother, mother, and father.
Joel is, crucially, experiencing drastic and distressing bodily changes at eight. these changes reframe how he interacts with the world, what he can and can't do, and even how he talks [he often has to pause to take a breath mid-sentence]. this is something he had no say in, and it has left him disconnected from his family [who are all either dead or worse]. while puberty isn't the most intense reading of look outside, it is one that is significant for Joel's story. i'm not discussing his post-recruitment story for a few reasons, but he does have trouble grasping the scale of the changes to the world, and at one point worries about homework for school the coming week despite the fact school is absolutely not continuing.
so far these are all firmly major characters. specifically, they're all party members. however, i now want to take a minor character detour to cover some of my favorite, smaller cases.
one character you might meet during the game is David. he is a teacher, and specifically he's special ed. all of his students are disabled, and he asks you to find and help them, since they got scattered around the sewers. and CRUCIALLY, the bus he was in started to crash down into the sewers when he got cursed and his primary thought process was just to try and help his students, so he became a giant spider and made a web that caught the bus before it could go too far down. this is one of my favorite curses in the entire game because it is motivated entirely by one teacher caring about their students and dammit thats a trope that kills me. the students themselves are all really sweet, and David even tells you about each of them so you can identify them easier! one of them is blind and has a guide dog you also have to track down, and one kid was so engrossed in his video game that he managed to remain human. he literally avoided looking outside by just being fixated on his game. iconic.
and now the most minor character im going to bring up here. not even close how minor they are.
joyitcatt is one of Dan's viewers. you remember how Dan is a streamer? his stream chat has some named viewers with unique dialogue they might send. during combat, joyitcatt will sometimes say things such as "gender envy...", "transition goals tbh", or "I wish that was me" about cursed opponents. and during the finale of the game, you and your party go onto the roof of the apartment building, which means everyone watching the stream gets cursed if Dan is in the party! and joyitcatt's roof dialogue is "very happy rn", "sometimes good things happen", and "maybe the visitor is a good thing :)" which are some of my FAVORITE lines about curses and they come from a character that is known only by 10 dialogue lines and a username. joyitcatt is so transgender and alterhuman and i love them so much. if we ever get more information on joyitcatt i will leap for joy they're so cool to me.
ok now for two more characters. these ones read as plural to me!
Leigh is another possible party member, and she is capable of transforming into a giant monster called the Grinning Beast. her quest involves finding her phone [which she discarded just before the events of Look Outside] and seeing the texts she receives over the next few days from each of her parents, one of her siblings, and her boyfriend. all of the contacts have very hostile names [like "LIAR"] and it is clear things ended on a very sour note. she asserts during her quest that she is a just The Grinning Beast now, and no longer Leigh, and you can either choose to let her throw away a ring her boyfriend left for her [symbolically throwing away all of her old life] or tell her that she's allowed to be both of these things. and like. wow. okay. it's kind of hard to analyze this through a plural lens because it's Right There. however i also headcanon her with bpd which led her to split on her family and boyfriend, because i think it'd be cool if she had bpd and was also yucky.
now. clears my throat. Frederic. the Freds are great. basically, Frederic is a painter, and was painting the sky shortly before the plot of Look Outside, unaware of the Visitor's presence. he got cursed that anything he painted would come to life, and unknowingly painted the changes his curse made him experience as well as depicting the emotions he was going through. these self portraits came to life as the other Frederics, and one of them who was originally faceless promptly stole og Fred's face for himself, leading the originally-faced fred to be externally dubbed Faceless Fred and the face thief masquerading as the original fred to be dubbed Face Taker. all of the Freds, however, are vastly different. they hold different beliefs on which of them is the original and whether the others should be killed. some, like Toxic Fred [his painting is labeled Treachery], are aware they're not the original but still want to be the last one standing. on the other hand, Bright Fred [his painting is Blinding Light] is confident he is the original but doesn't even consider killing the others. the one big through line for them is that the Freds all hear the thoughts of each other and it gives them all really bad headaches that make it hard to think or do things. the Freds are so important to me but i had to do sparknotes because theres 10 of them and it'd be a lot to go over. i hope some of the Massively Plural fredness has come across
okay. so. i've gone over several instances of marginalization as it overlaps with Look Outside. but now. here's the kicker: they're all also people of color. and we know this isn't art style or lighting, because there is exactly one white person in the entire game and he is blatantly paler than anyone else. and this game takes place in Montreal, Canada. and it's awesome.
anyways, i need to stop because my wrists hurt so much from all this typing, but my final note: Look Outside's willingness to let marginalized people be flawed is a massive source of comfort. i emphasized how much Dan sucks because it is a major reason i consider him some of the best autism representation i've ever seen. i didn't even cover how almost every character uses it/its and several are straightup nonbinary. i didn't bring up the canonically gay and bisexual characters. i didn't touch on almost any of this game. it's so big and it's so important to me and it is the best game i've ever played. survival horror rpg with cosmic hope good endings. good endings plural. there's more than one good ending in the apocalypse game. i didn't even bring up the time loops or the character from another universe who knows everything is almost guaranteed to be doomed. i didnt cover the main character at all. oh video game about compassion we're really in it now.
not Spoken For, but it IS a music reference! specifically Larva Irae Incarnatum from the album Majoris Melodia by Chonny Jash :] its an album based on Majora's Mask, and Larva Irae is specifically Majora's song.
i actually hadnt connected the dots between "maybe i am nothing, maybe i am all" with "i am more than. i am all" thats really funny. maybe teto Is majora /silly
