Interview w/ Artist Yayster of the Fire Emblem Compendium & the Final Smash Comic
For our first guest, we knew we wanted something special and the Fire Emblem Compendium Project caught our eye. The aim of the project is to draw every single major Fire Emblem character. And it became wildly successful within the fanbase, with a growing community sharing and helping each other with their work. The project is also intended to be very inclusive; artists of any skill level were invited to take part, and show their appreciation for their favorite characters. It really is incredible.
Very recently the Compendium began selling Emblem Arcana, a collection of 78 tarot cards (and one booklet) featuring beautiful artwork of multiple Fire Emblem characters with ALL the proceeds going to charity! They are going to be donating any and all profits to CURE Childhood Cancer.
Yayster is the one who started it all! But she didn't do it alone, she’s backed by a wonderful team of mods, artists, helpers, and friends. So now that you know what’s going on here are the highlights!
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Claire: What do you want to see in Fire Emblem? 16. And what are some of your favorite elements of fire emblem that you hope that they keep and just in general what you’d like to see in fire emblem in the future?
Yayster: I think for me, my favorite Fire Emblem Game is Shadows of Valentia. I absolutely adore it. It’s probably in my top five greatest of all time. I think what I’d like to see something with the kind of the storytelling and the presentation and the voice acting of that game, which was absolutely stunning. Mixed with the gameplay of something like Conquest. I liked some of what echoes did, but it was a bit on the easy side and there were some odd map decisions because they were keeping it so faithful to Gaiden. But I think, you know, combine that kind, the gameplay of some of the harder Fates stuff. I mean chapter 10 is so good, that defense map, the satisfaction you get when you beat itis amazing. So something like that with the kind of systems in echoes with the storytelling and presentation. I think that would be my perfect fire emblem game.
Claire: When it comes to the art style of fire emblem games, what do you think they’re going to go with? Which artist are they going to go with Kozaki, Hidari? Who do you think or who do you like to see for the artist on Fire Emblem 16?
Yayster: I absolutely love Hidari’s style. I think it’s really earthy. I love the use of color. It’s not too extravagant and I just think it’s got that extra kind of element of realism; as much as you can be realistic in fire emblem. I’m interested to see kind of what someone else can do with it. I know there’s a lot of Cipher artists which people that are massive fans of and I would be interested in seeing, but to be honest, I mean I’ll probably be happy with anything they do. I’m just excited to get stuck in again, really.
Claire: I love the feeling of exhilaration that you get when you watch a trailer for the first time. Especially when at It’s at E3. That’s what captures the magic of fire emblem. I think I’ve talked about it.
Chris: I think it captures the magic of video games in general. With announcements and stuff like that. All the hype of these events and things like that and you see things about it and you’re learning about it and you’re so excited to get it and play it and all that. Even though I feel like games rarely ever live up to the expectations you give them, it’s still very fun. I still enjoy being in that cycle.
Claire: Oh yeah, so you like Hector, you like Ike. who is your favorite husband in fire emblem of all time?
Yayster: If anyone’s listening to this from the discord or for big compendium that going to be laughing at this, but it’s time for me to gush about foresight.
Yayster: I don’t really have a kind of a, the whole husband thing. But yeah, he is my favorite character. I think it’s so difficult to describe why you like a character, but I just find him incredibly endearing. He’s happy, he’s positive. He’s funny and I think he’s totally underrated. In the Choose your Legends pole python got 107th. I think Lucas, he’s already in the game, got 102nd and it’s like, no! Why do people not see how good he is?! I think probably because he gets virtually no screen time. He gets like a memory prism and his recruitment conversation and that’s it. Unless you get the DLC where he really, really shines and I recommend the Rise of the Deliverance DLC to anyone if you want to explore the RGB trio in more detail. Um, but other than Forsyth yes I like Hector, I love Python as well and I really liked Berkut. They’re all guys but I do like some female characters too. Don’t worry!
Claire: That’s okay. Um, yeah, I guess we should have made the question husband and wife and everybody else we love. We love ladies. Please. We kinda had a feeling you would talk about Forsyth.
Yayster: yeah, it doesn’t take much.
Claire: He’s a lovable dork character.
Yayster: Oh, absolutely. If he was in modern day he’d wear socks with sandals, no question.
Claire Well that’s fashionable when you’re talking about?! He’s kind of like Chrom. Chrom is such a successful character. I feel like Forsyth could have very easily been like a main character in the game and people would have really liked him.
Yayster: Yeah. Actually, I think that’s a really good comparison. I think he is quite a lot like Chrom. Chrome is very trusting, very kind and a little bit naive but really courageous and brave and like fights for his friends and everything like that. I think with Forsyth, there’s actually quite a similar characters.
Fire Emblem Compendium future projects?
Claire: Going into that, you obviously do a lot in the community. Some things I didn’t even realize. So you’ve got final smash. You’ve got the compendium, you have the Zine about the three good boys. Do you have any other projects going on right now that, that maybe we didn’t know about?
Yayster: Not presently. I think, we’re going to be doing more with the compendium, but at the moment I think everyone who’s been involved in the project is pretty much exhausted or we’re taking probably a month or two just to kind of recuperate and come up with exactly what we want to do for our next idea. We’ve got a few concepts in mind, but we’re not quite sure which one we’re going to go for next. At the moment, for me it’s about finishing off the Tarot and about finishing off the Zine. And then who knows what’s going to be next. We’re going to be reopening the compendium for fire up 16 and Book 2, so that’s coming, but only when Nintendo decides they want to actually reveal anything. So that’s gonna be a while, probably.
The Fire Emblem Compendium / What it is / How to get involved
Claire: How would you describe the fire emblem compendium, what you’ve been doing and how even people can get involved.
Yayster: So to start with I kind of made a jokey tweet. It said like three things that would be impossible. So I started with, first of all not too difficult would be to just draw every smash character because there’s quite a few. Next would be to draw every Pokémon because although are loads of them, some of the designs are very simple. They’re not going to take that long to draw. And then I said the impossible thing will be to draw every single Fire Emblem character because of the amount of detail that there is on them and there’s over 700 of them. And that would be insane for one person to do. And then I kind of thought actually, you probably could do it as a community effort for a couple of reasons. I just thought it’d be really cool to actually see something like that and see what the community came up with. Also, it’s not the most cohesive of fandoms.
Like it’s kind of fractured in some ways and I think it was really cool to bring all these games together into one project. So you’ve got old fans, new fans and I think that’s something I really wanted to achieve from it. And then it was never really meant to be anything else, but after that it just kind of expanded. So we started thinking, oh well we’ve got this group of people now and they all seem to be very keen, um, that we kind of kept things going. So what can we do next? And it’s just kind of evolved from there. It’s very organic thing and we’re always trying to change and improve based on what people tell us. So we try, we’d like to get a lot of feedback in terms of people who want to get involved. We’ve got our twitter, so following that it’s very easy we post an art challenge every week. An art challenge can be a different thing. We’d do a random generator or draw a class or draw a particular character or do an alphabet challenge and we’ve got our discord. There’s lots of ways to get involved and anyone is welcome. You don’t even have to be an artist.
Being an online artist / content creator today
Claire: Also while being a prominent person in the community and online. What has your experience been from, from the start, up until now with being a content creator, and it doesn’t mean just within fire emblem fandom, but within Smash, Nintendo, Doctor Who all the different fandoms you’re in. Be it on twitter, tumbler, all of those social media platforms. What has your experience been? In general, you know, I feel like online creators are pushed to no matter if they’re an artist or a Youtuber to have you create, create, create nonstop in order to stay relevant and sometimes slumps come. So how do you from that get past it as well as keep sane?
Yayster: I think, um, I’m not really the best example because I’ve almost let that take a back seat because the admin of things really does take up a lot of my time. I’m like, I’ve spent hours just going through excel spreadsheets and you know, things that are too boring to talk about right now. I struggled to get one piece done per month, but there are some people whose output is just incredible and I just love watching them. I do feel there’s a lot of pressure on content creators and sometimes, especially when people want to move into different fandoms, it can be a bit demoralizing because I might not get the feedback that they want. But in general I enjoy it, I enjoy drawing when things go well, when things don’t, it’s maybe not so fun, but the most of the time I enjoy it.
I’m quite a perfectionist, which means I do have a lot of WIPs that just kind of sit there and I work full time so that kind of leads me bit exhausted in the evenings so when I get home I just nap. I’ve rediscovered the art of the nap. So that’s something I’ll often kind of do. But when you really kind of get going on a piece and you’re feeling it and you’re in that mood, that’s such a great feeling. I have been reading up on some of the ways to avoid creative slumps. And one of the things I read about was just doodle anything. So just, you know, get a page and scribble until you’ve kind of got into that, that vein where you can, you can just start working on a bigger piece. So I think I’m going to try and try and do that, try and force myself to turn my tablet on and just rather than sit in front of a screen and not think about what I want it to look like actually go and draw it.
But I think I still have a lot to learn and I think anyone who is an artist knows the artistic journey and we’re all in it together and I think as long as we’re kind of bouncing ideas off of each other and improve alongside each other, that’s the most important thing for me. I get a lot of satisfaction from seeing people excited about these things. So, you know, even though I might not be producing that much art, I’m still doing something and that’s important.
Yayster: I want to use this opportunity to say a massive thank you to anyone who’s contributed in any way to our projects. I don’t get the chance to talk to everyone because I’m a little bit of an introvert myself. I might not be the most outgoing, so thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. I really appreciate what you have kind of done for us as a group and what you have bought to the fandom.
In order to keep up with us. Probably the easiest way is just follow our twitter. Any new projects that we, that we do will be announced there and on our discord. So yeah, we’ve got more coming. Make sure you’re staying tuned for Fire Emblem 16. And we have a couple of projects in the pipeline that I hope people will be excited about when we do compendium things. I like them to be slightly different from the norm. Slightly odd projects or something that you might not be expecting. So just look out for it. That’s all I’ll say - CountChrisdo & GlossedGarden
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