Hello everyone, it's been a little while. 

My last update was back in early July. After pondering it a bit, I guess I was a little busy. The visual novel has been on my mind a lot lately. I was very frustrated at myself this summer because of the lack of progress. Not long ago, a friend of mine who I used to make videos with in high school reached out and now we're in touch again. I think I've been missing a creative person in my life, you know, someone to bounce ideas off of and that also likes to create things. Like, I follow artists online but they don't seem approachable and they're way beyond my level.

Anyway, my friend wrote a script to a short film he wants to work on together with some of his other friends. I had a week or so to read over the script and it reminded me of advice I've been given time and time again: always start small and work your way up. 

Part of the reason why I felt so frustrated with the VN was because I want it to be my magnum opus right off the bat. Maybe not my magnum opus, but I really want to pour everything about me into it. Everything I've experienced in this life, all the happiness, all the pain, everything I enjoy, which is why I couldn't really find a central theme that satisfied me. 

My friend is hoping the short film opens up opportunities to expand on the world he created. Because of that, I think I decided to take a similar approach to my VN.

Wandering Chrysanthemum

I'm working on a smaller VN named Wandering Chrysanthemum, a prequel to the main story that I want to make. I've described it as a "one-shot" because it's more of an opportunity for me to gather feedback for my writing. On top of that, I have a feeling that not everything in Wandering Chrysanthemum will carry over into the main story.

I think my current worry is this feeling like I'm ripping off from media that I like. For example, in Wandering Chrysanthemum there's a Imperial power that has conquered a lot of modern-day countries, like Mexico and Japan. This world follows a similar timeline to our own, but set 100 years or so in the future. I've also swapped out Japan for Yamato as the country's name. I did this with Mexico as well, in my story it's known as Aztlan. 

I took heavy inspiration from Full Metal Daemon: Muramasa. The story is also set in an alternate history with the name of certain countries having been swapped out for reasons I've speculated on. In Full Metal Daemon: Muramasa, Japan is also known as Yamato. I believe this was chosen because Yamato is also the name of the ethnic group that is native to Japan. They're the descendants of the original people who moved to the archipelago. 

I've borrowed this idea for Wandering Chrysanthemum expanded it to include Aztlan, or Mexico. This is a bit more difficult to do with Mexico since Central America was home to many different groups of people. Aztlan was the ancestral home of the Aztecs, however many historians debate where it was actually located or whether it physically ever existed at all. 

My rule for doing this is to at least do some research before committing to changing a country's name. For example, I'd like to change China into Han, again following the trend of renaming a country to reflect their native people. I really would like to do this with respect, though. I'm actually scared about writing something I know nothing about. The good thing is that I'm okay with reading a lot and immersing myself in research to make sure the details for the scenes I want to write are somewhat accurate. 

But yeah, I think that's been my main worry. 

I finished writing Wandering Chrysanthemum's first chapter last night. When I completed it, I felt really good and proud of myself because I finally had done "something" for this story brewing in my head. 

I mentioned this story is a prequel of sorts. A few months ago I posted about a mentor character that I was inspired to create. Her name is Azuma and I gave her a pretty detailed background. She's supposed to be the mentor of the main character of the story I'm writing and I never really explained how they met. Wandering Chrysanthemum is about my main character maturing into the person I want her to be at the start of the main story. Even though it's not her first time outside her home country, she's still very naive about the world. 

I think one of the main themes will be disillusion, which is something I experienced heavily as I came of age. It's not necessarily disappointment, I think it's a stronger feeling than that. It's basically like having your world, everything you've come to expect be turned on its head. 

As a brief background to the story, Aztlan has a well-regarded military academy as a university. It's actually based on a real military college in Mexico with an incredible, futuristic looking building. I love it because it's this blend of modern with indigenous pyramid structures found all over the country. Like an homage to our ancestors, somehow. 

My character, Amagi, has to complete a year-long mentorship program in order to graduate. She has grown up within the "Empire's" reach her whole life, meaning she has been subjected to its propaganda and views of the outside world. Her critical thinking exists, but she's still relatively young and hasn't have a lot of worldly experience. 

Her mentor will make her question what made her decide to fight for her country. Is Amagi doing it for an ulterior motive? Does Amagi understand what she's being prepared for? When her country finally asks her to kill someone she doesn't want to, will she do it? What will she tell herself if she decides to follow through with it? 

These are the types of questions I'm looking to ask. I want to learn more about my character and put her through a very difficult experience where she learns a lot about herself and meets someone she can depend on emotionally. 

In contrast, I'm having a lot of fun writing Azuma. There's a lot of mystery to her character because of things I have in mind. I've dropped her last name because of those secrets. She's just known as "Azuma" and nothing else. 

If I were to describe her, she appears to be a very elegant person with a very playful attitude when things are normal. However, she can get very stern and I would describe her fighting style as being very disciplined yet, has a handful of dirty tricks. With this I'm trying to hint that she came from a place where she had to keep appearances but also exercise authority. 

Character Concepts & Drawing

I don't think my drawing has drastically improved, but I am content with the marginal gains I've achieved this year. 

I have a general concept for Amagi that I spent about 2-3 weeks designing over my breaks at work and here at home. 

This is concept art for my character, Amana Amagi. This would be waaaaay after Wandering Chrysanthemum, we're talking several years later. At this point she would be in her mid-twenties at least. Something I struggled with and still am debating are the animal ears.

Let it be known that I will not bend to any criticism asking me to remove them, I love those ears and I'm trying to make them work and find an explanation for them but I don't think I ever will and that's okay. Let the girl have her ears. I don't even know what animal they're from, I just really fucking love those ears. 

Amagi went through many iterations, some that look drastically different to the final result. Here are a few:

This was the start of the the outfit design, short after I decided on the face. I'm a huge fan of tactical fashion and honestly, have a thing for white collared shirts on women. I really wanted a cape of some sorts, so I borrowed the idea of having her jacket be the cape from a character in Girls' Frontline. Honestly, I still REALLY dig this outfit but I don't think it aligned with what I was going for. 

This was a few months ago. These features are definitely more feline-like. Again, I'm using the white collared shirt and jacket combo. There's actually a full-body version of this drawing, but I honestly just like the face.

My favorite thing about this version is probably the necklace. There are these 3 alchemic symbols introduced by Paracelus that represents the three "primes". Salt, Sulfur, and Mercury, or, Body, Soul, and Spirit, respectfully. 

You can draw parallels to any trinity that represents unity like the holy trinity in Christianity, or aspects of matter, etc. The necklace is a fusion of the three aforementioned elements in order to represent that Amagi is this "complete" trinity. It has to do a lot more with my ideas for my story than anything else, so don't worry if you don't get it. 

Oh yeah, another reference to alchemy are her moon-shaped shades. Amagi has a "male" counterpart, an "animus", who is represented as the sun. Amagi here is represented as the moon. Sun = Masculine, Moon = Feminine in alchemy typically. Not necessarily this binary of man and woman, but aspects of it, is how I interpret it. 

I used to play this series called Senran Kagura. The series was about these teenage girls who are going through ninja high school and learning about this secret ninja world they're about to be thrown into. It's very silly because there's these GOOD and EVIL ninjas and it's very black and white at first but then they realize they're all just teenagers and try to get along despite being rivals and stuff. The series always had fan service, but eventually it got a little crazy. It's also dead now, but I think it's gacha is still running in Japan. 

Anyway, why did I mention all of that? It's because this outfit was based on a costume for one of the Senran Kagura characters, Asuka. I think this outfit was exclusive to the gacha because I had never seen it anywhere else. I thought it was really cool and had a nice mix of tactical, but it had way too much ninja for me. I don't see Amagi as a ninja. 

I think this was earlier in the year, around the end of winter. The vibe of the story, the world, and everything else was very light-hearted. You can actually read one of my first blog post about some of those ideas. I think I wanted Amagi to be an android or cyborg from the very beginning. Here, she's actually terminally-ill man who donated his body to science and ended up looking like that. Also, androids/cyborgs like Amagi weren't very common and strictly use for combat and were theatened to be replaced by robots. 

I still have the first few pages that I wrote for that scenario. The PMC that Amagi works for in order to keep her/his? new body is doing a joint mission with a Russian PMC using their own androids. Basically everything goes wrong and the conspirators pulling the strings want both PMCs to fight each other so they damage public opinion of androids and sell more robots to security companies. 

It was very silly, I had a couple of ideas for characters and the PMC was supposed to be very tightly-knit. I had an "older sister" character planned and this really playful character with pink hair. Also, this older scientist was supposed to act like their mom or something. I started over because it wasn't going anywhere for me. 

As for this drawing, I was looking at a lot of pictures of Reisalin Stout, aka Ryza from the Atelier games. My favorite iteration of Ryza is probably in the last game, Ryza 3. Her hair does this wacky thing that I tried to replicate here. It worked, but unfortunately it made the character really cute, too cute, I think. 

That's all I really have to share for now. It's like 3 AM and I'm going out to breakfast in the morning with my family so I really need to go to sleep, haha. I'm very excited to work on Wandering Chrysanthemum and I hope I can at least finish writing it by the end of the year.