I'm pretty fond of this as it is, I think its more graphic and a better look at what I was trying to achieve, but I really also did want to give this one color!
a history of cosmic harmony development: the elpis crew
its been about ten years since i first created my main group of cosmic harmony ocs! i thought itd be fun to talk about how they've changed since i first created them :3 a lot of infodumping under the cut, complete with VERY OLD ART
the first draft of cosmic harmony was VERY DIFFERENT from today's. it was a story that took place hundreds of years in the future, and it was very torn between two axes: "in the future, bigotry will be fixed!" (i was a middle schooler) and "i want to write a story about queer teens struggling against bigotry". it was really informed by the middle grade fantasy novels i loved reading.
Aria was the same in some ways: she was the cocky confident spaceship captain who ran away from a homophobic family. the thing is, that's ALL she was. that confident facade wasn't a facade at all - she was just the vessel for escapism, the doorway into another world. i knew pretty fast her power was hope, but i didn't know how that would manifest. my friends in middle school nickname her Froyo for some reason - natalie and mars if you're reading this i still look upon those memories with so much fondness.
Violet was originally Violette Dotais, pronounced Vi-oh-let, which I very quickly dropped. She was the damsel in distress, a character who joins the crew after Aria rescues her from... some weird magic situation that I didn't rlly have a reason for. she was always nice and elegant and quiet and polite, but her fierceness was developed pretty quickly, though it wasn't much of a flaw. she also has life/growth powers and a violin already!
I have no art of London from this era, because London... was originally a talking fox, and I didn't know how to draw animals so I just didn't! Instead, here's some art of London as a human, which I switched to pretty quickly bc I was scared of being called a furry (girl who is now a therian foxgirl). As a fox, he was sardonic and sarcastic - when changed into a human, he wound up being more quiet and shy and anxious. Despite this, he's always been Aria's best friend, rescued from some tragic backstory by her. He originally has psychic mind powers bc I'd just read Homestuck and lets be real he used to be Terezi (now he's Aradia).
Den is. well Den (surname originally Alokaya) was originally a boy. You see, the original idea with CH is that I was gonna write the book I wanted to read, and I wanted a character like me - a boy who wore skirts! (I am now a trans girl.) She was absolutely a self insert - happy and bubbly and optimistic all the time, always able to cheer everyone up. In the far future timeline she lived on a space station and was neglected by her parents, which is why she chose to go with Aria and London upon meeting them.
oh god. i'm glad we transitioned. these den drawings arefrom october 2017, which is abouts when I folded the Earth Squad into the story, which coincides with the decision to put it in modern day to make the plotlines about homophobia make more sense, but i'll save earth squad timelines for later. den's relationship with honeycomb starts to emerge here, which winds up becoming a big part of her backstory. here, the story becomes very influenced by steven universe - for a while, the elpis isn't even a spaceship but a teleportation hub, before i decide fuck that its a spaceship again. here are some 2018 drawings, where their designs start to emerge:
the characters really start solidifying around this time. i wrote some cute den and honeycomb fic (oh god its so outdated), and participated in artfight for the first time, which got these kids really on my mind. this is around when i was the same age as them, so they were really hitting. i also start drawing violet in pinafores in 2019, which paves the way for the big 2020 redesign, which marks THE single biggest change in how i draw these characters (and in how i drew at all)!
check the "gnc boy" instead of "cis boy" for den - by this point i was using they/them but not with many people and i wasn't very confident in myself. this marks a really big change for these characters - the design sensibilities have changed to fun clothes and bright colors, including a lot of elements of clothes that are still around today. here's where they all get their cosmic theming! by this point i had multiple other stories and wanted to start differentiating cosmic harmony, though it didn't have its name yet.
big changes - aria's confidence is starting to become a facade, and i develop the shorthand of having her only smile with her mouth closed in rare moments of vulnerability. london gains his passionate hyperpop side, which he normally hides from everyone but the rest of the crew, along with getting his glitch powers.
shortly after, the original host of this body goes dormant and i (juniper) take over. its more complicated than that, and it doesn't directly influence cosmic harmony, but it feels,,, important to note.
especially because once i'm here, cosmic harmony gets its name - originally, it had been called space's aria, but i dropped that back in early high school. cosmic harmony is basically the same name, but it sounds cooler and works with some key themes of the story! and aria gets her wings, which become the most important part of her design. and i listen to rainbow road by patricia taxxon, which becomes the story's guiding light.
violet's trust issues become very apparent at this juncture - it becomes evident to me that a central theme of cosmic harmony is trust, and a key tension is violet's isolationism and refusal to trust anyone.
around this time, i create the boumans for a hypothetical ttrpg character's backstory, and i love them so much that i tie them into ch. this is important bc ever since transporting the characters to modern times, i've lost some of the story, and now i get a way to tie it back in - london becomes claudia's former adopted kid and aria becomes her former star student. there are new ref sheets in 2021, but they don't change much so i'll skip them.
i think about the cosmic harmony characters intermittently, but being in college and working on short stories takes my attention away from them and they don't really change much, so i'm skipping a lot here - until 2023, when i make den a trans girl. listen, she already WAS a trans girl, she was a self insert for me, a "boy" who desperately wanted to be a girl, and bridget guiltygear had just come out and it was undeniable den needed to transition. so she did! i decide not to change her name or design - as a kid, i read books with trans women, but i saw them as some disparate category of person i couldn't be. so i wanted den to be a character who would speak to child-june - a "boy" who gets to run away and realize she wants to be a girl an gets friends who encourage this.
in thinking about cosmic harmony, i spend a while really attached to the narrative of london and izzy - they were kinda the only thing i thought about for a while, and the narrative reshaped around the weird history of the bouman family. this marks a big shift - for a while, aria and violet's romance was the central relationship, but it becomes clear that the actual highlight of the story is aria and london's relationship as chosen siblings.
this gets us all the way to today!
a lot of little changes that add up to a lot. i pay a lot more attention to making sure aria's race and den's weight are actually lovingly incorporated into their designs as they deserve to be. i'm using a color palette for cosmic harmony to guide my decisions - there are specific shades of pink, orange, yellow, green, and cyanthat i try to use wherever i need those colors.
i know this post probably isn't of interest to anyone but myself, but i think it's cool to look back on these characters. especially since graduating college it's been really nice to think about these characters, they've honestly helped me recover from so much burnout, and just... i've had them since i was 12. they're really formative to me and they're still extremely comforting to think about. looking back at them is cool - you can see my art develop and you can see me figuring out who they are. to wrap this up, here are some pieces of art i still think are cool!
To me, Spacekru was the best thing the 100 ever did. A group of people who all have various reasons to not trust each other or get along ful
This video has been in my drafts for ages and I finally finished it. Spacekru remains one of my favorite things the 100 ever did, and I wish I had been able to stay invested in the last two seasons purely because of them. If only we had had more time with some of the best dynamics the show ever set up.
