👶 - OC in their youth; or, if they didn’t have one, at the beginning of their journey; this may be shown as background.
Right right right right riGHHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS, OP. I've been struggling to draw this guy young for months now and I finally got an excuse to get it done. Anyone who doesn't wanna see a post about Some Guy (tm) close your eyes now. 🍌
So. Banny. Banny at the now of the story is a minor antagonist to a background character (before he gets better), but he is also daddy's favourite little angel and gets all the screentime privileges in my mind. Now, I've never considered myself the type to enjoy subjecting my favourite OCs to Endless Torments, but hey! Sometimes the quickest path to where you need to be is straight through a window.
^^ Pictured here, Banny at varying stages of possession (feat. FerJoe).
More backstory rambling under cut 😌🤭
Banny specialises in summoner magic (TL;DR everyone in TEYP has built-in individual magic abilities generally divided into about... 4? classes? - TEYP has its inspired origins in turn-based fantasy RPG games - each of which having an additional 'internal' and 'external' variant which basically means whether they can pull the magic directly from themselves or need an outside object to channel the magic through, i.e. Yolk's wand or Ketchup's rifle.) and he's really good at it too. So good in fact that he became officially recognised as one of the country's greatest experts on it from a very young age. His ability was to summon ghosts, specifically - but ghosts, mind you, not necessarily of 'the dead' - TEYP is big on the magical affect of emotions on the state of the world, and ghosts in particular are for the most part just memories gained form - and he could give those memories form. And people loved that. And for a while it worked out perfectly fine for him. He was rich, he was popular, and he was on top of the world.
At his peak, he made a career as an entertainer / medium, and was living the life, but he grew a little overconfident in his control of his own abilities and slipped up. That's how he ended up meeting FerJoe, who initially appeared as a harmless little sprite, but was actually just a really good actor / grade A manipulator with malicious intent, and gaining the trust of someone as powerful as Banny was just the dream for someone like him. And he was not gonna let an opportunity like that pass him by. And uh. That's how Banana Cakes ended up losing control of his body for a good two decades.
Banny's default expression was always the signature :D but it was a hell of a lot more comforting back when he still had his boyish charms to back it up. And, you know, wasn't actively being puppeteered around by a malevolent spirit, that also doesn't help his image. He's barely even recognisable as himself in the state he's in now, which in many ways he is grateful for, in some messed up meaning of the word. Cause on one hand if people knew it was him, they might be able to help him. On the other, he's a washed-up celebrity who spent the past 20 years living outside and getting attacked by birds - he's deteriorated quite a bit from his glory days, he's not exactly proud to be there. But! He does eventually get better! It just takes a while to get there at all.
Also felt compelled by character study and drew him even youth-er. 💖
