#umbracosm

[humunanunga]

...Maybe this'll be the final version. Almost every year, I'd gone back and recolored this piece that marked when I'd settled on how to draw the simpler, more cartoonish of my two main artstyles.

This'd be the more human of my sonas, but the colors are unnatural for the same reason Kris is sometimes blue.

[humunanunga]

In February, I became a fandom server mod. Which has actually been wonderful and honestly kind of a healing experience. There was a lot for us to plan, organize or mediate in the following months, but thankfully it's been paying off. I really like it here.

Besides that, March, April and May had been spent finding housing for a friend I picked up at the airport from out-of-state. And besides that, I'd been out picking up things from the farmhouse my family had to sell, and I ended up collecting almost two complete cow skeletons.

Then in June, of course, the new Deltarune chapters came out, but then I also drove through nearly tornadic weather to pick up a different friend escaping dv, and then I found a sick month-old kitten a few days later, and then my car broke down in the middle of the road with a dead alternator and an oil leak, and then I'd spent basically the whole day at the vet clinic with the queerplatonic wife. Oh yeah, and I was told all about the villain speeches my birthgiver's still posting about me on Facebook almost three years after I blocked her.

That's still not everything, but anyway, utmvarchive is finally unpaused, and I'll be hauling ass to build up the queue again whenever I have more time to myself.

Fucking. Wish me luck or something.

[humunanunga]

Another recolor, this time with a few more subtle differences in my own colors between the surface and the abyss while also workshopping how I want to do shine-and-shade in my simple style.

[humunanunga]

In an effort to crawl back out of burnout, I got back to work on some sona references I'd started on before it struck. A collection of my real-life outfits to follow.

You know how Kris Deltarune is recolored when they're in the Dark World? Similar concept here for the abyss in Umbracosm, to tie references into the worldbuilding.

[humunanunga]

Some outfits from my real-life wardrobe, plus an Abyss variant to acknowledge the other time I drew myself in that.

[humunanunga]

I've decided I'm done with a self-made color palette challenge I made back in 2020, so I went back and recolored the pieces of myself I'd drawn for it.

[humunanunga]

Umbracosm sounds interesting, but I’m not quite sure I understand what it really is? Is there a discord server with more info about it or a longer explanation?

There is a Discord server! At this time, any activity in it has almost exclusively been a lovely's and my own note-keeping. The post's link to a wiki should still be valid, but as of yet, it's a setting I want to invite other artists to be able to use for their own stories. I may post an invite link, but for now I'm gonna offer to share it over dm while I get myself more comfortable moving forward with this.

As far as how to better describe what gears could be turning in the setting at any given time, that's something I'm taking suggestions for too. For all the potential I've laid out for there to be plot, that's the part I've been stuck on with the stories I myself have intended to use this setting for.

Let's take media's concept of The Void/Abyss, alternatively calling it the umbracosm, and call the "real world" the surface. Now let's say that the umbracosm is the existential plane wherein "limbos" like dreamlands and liminal spaces manifest, with an emphasis on how belief and imagination can influence the shape those dreamscapes will take, and how observation is more inclined to override that influence the longer it's been since that dreamscape's conception.

(I've been making a lot of comparisons between the UC and the deep sea) The catch is that on the other hand, I want to limit the umbracosm's influence on the corporeal plane, the surface, similarly to how Narnia had minimal impact on Earth despite the impact Earthlings have had on Narnia. I may post more about the framework from @/umbracosm to make what I have in mind more accessible; again, I'm pressing forward before I've settled on how I want to do this in case Tumblr doesn't end up giving me enough time to decide.

If there are parallels with other media, that's at least partly deliberate. This began as a thought exercise of drawing parallels between different meta that use similar lore tropes and figuring out how they could theoretically coexist in the same canon.

[humunanunga]

So I've been sitting on this for a long time. It still doesn't look complete enough to share, but probably the problem is that as much as I love to spend all my time worldbuilding, there's only so much I can offer without any content to present it with, and the point of doing this is to let other people make their own content with it so this setting doesn't go unused if I never finish drafting any of my own stories for my own blorbos.

The idea is like with, say, D&D, where it offers its own setting that campaigners are welcome to use as an asset for telling their own stories together.

It doesn't currently have any posts for the above reasons, only sidepages that must be viewed from desktop or mobile browsers, but I have a sideblog by the name umbracosm. I also have a dedicated Doc and Discord server.

In case I lose the wiki I made to make Umbracosm's worldbuilding publicly available before there's any sharable content for it.

Umbracosm is intended to be a creative commons attribution setting made after cross-examining relevant genres for a common worldbuilding concept. Details may be polished or revised on occasion, but it is available for anyone to apply to their own stories as long as credit to humunanunga/verdantViridity is included.

It still feels too early, but if anyone is interested in this concept, if anyone happens to be looking for a dollhouse to play with their own dolls in, please help yourself; and if anyone has questions, if anyone has feedback or more ideas to canonize, my inbox is open.

Just one disclaimer, though, on the off-chance that this works to get Umbracosm off the ground. A queer leftist made this and does not endorse ableism, antisemitism, intersexism, racism/xenophobia or queerphobia, including aphobia or transphobia.