i love your art/redesigns! i'd love to see your take on hoodude voodoo, i think he's such a sweet and cute character but his lack of pants has always seemed…weird, especially considering he has a jacket LOL
I had SO much fun with this one!
I love Hoodude but his backstory is atrocious. So rather than being Frankie's attempt at making a boyfriend, he is instead their attempt to make a sibling after they get jealous of hearing all their friends talk about theirs. He does live with the Steins, and they are raising him alongside Frankie (as well as another certain steam powered robot, but we'll get to that.)
Mr. Stein was studying him as there had been reports of a Voodoo doll that was showing signs of life, and he wanted to get to the bottom of it, having created life himself. After trying and failing, Frankie snuck into his lab and started talking to it. Feeling much more comfortable around them, Hoodude began showing signs of life, and the two eventually struck up a friendly conversation. After alerting their parents, preparations were made for him to settle with them, and eventually start at Monster High. Before that, Frankie enlisted the help of Clawdeen to help freshen Hoodude up and make him look more like himself. So after cleaning him up, dying his fabric blue, changing his eyes to his two favorite colors, and giving him some slick blue and red yarn locs, they dressed him in the sweater Mrs. Stein knitted him and started his first day at Monster High.
It didn't take long for the superstition surrounding voodoo dolls to spread, and so like Scarah, the student body became immediately wary of him. Being outcast for similar reasons, he and Scarah became quick best friends. He tries really hard to strike up a friendship with Jackson, given how different they both are from the other students and are also both being bullied by Manny, but Jackson does his best to resist. That is up until he's clued in on the fact that Hoodude is essentially Frankie's brother and he can use being friends with him as an excuse to get close to them. That plan ultimately fails, but the two do become actual friends in the process.
He's a HUGE Veronica Von Vamp fan, and his favorite animals are love bugs ❤️🪲
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finally introducing the other character who also occupies a part of my brain:
Meet Giewont!
while the creator of it, Maria Leszczyńska, originally intended to make a war machine, she struggled a lot with finding resources then. however, with her and her family's life deeply affected by both world wars, the idea never left her mind. inspired by utopian idea of glass houses from a novel "the spring to come" ¹, she created her machine from glass. it would be cheap to make, yet durable, available as help to those in need, able to do hard work in times when it was needed - but if fragile peace was in danger again, it could fight alongside other soldiers. as if to set that role of protector in stone, she named it Giewont ². to test her creation, she gifed it to her brother Andrzej, who owned a small farm near the seaside.
Giewont worked as much as four men, not needing to be paid or fed like people would. it was a perfect solution for everybody, the new industrial revolution. that was, until about half a year into her work, glass started to shatter. it turned out not to be as durable as the utopian story made it to be, especially in contact with rough farm tools. small cracks also started to appear after they worked outside in winter, with low temperatures on the outside and hot steam circulating inside. with her fingers and edges getting sharper every day, Giewont was forbidden from taking care of animals anymore, as she would injure them. she was given the only task with no way to injure others - they recieved a showel fully made from metal and was ordered to dig. she did as she was told, even though the work put strain on her already-falling-apart fingers.
but when one day, when returning home, she noticed daughter of Andrzej, Aniela, swimming too far away from the shore and having trouble coming back, long forgotten wire snapped into its place as she jumped into the water to save her. while Giewont did bring her back home, carrying her in their arms, the girl had severe cuts on her body from coming in contact with robot's sharp hands. furious with his sister creation, Andrzej took it outside, desperate to destroy it. blinded by anger, he didn't even notice the storm gathering over the horizon
Andrzej took the metal showel and struck Giewont on the side on their head, then again, until her body fell and crumbled to pieces. He covered it with sand and raised his hands to deal the final blow.
that's when the lightning struck.
and the man fell to the ground, dead.
the sand melted from the heat around Giewont, filling the empty spaces and connecting the pieces back together. raising from their shallow grave, with body more rigid than what she was used to, she took her shovel and decided to bury the man, with what respect they had left for him. that was, after she dealt the final blow herself.
although miraculous, the lightning didn't return her to the previous state of being. their motions were stiff and some parts of theirs got lost forever among the sands of the beach. the part of her head where the first blow was dealt never worked properly again, rendering Giewont deaf in one ear (or whatever was left from it). however it did some good as well, as it widened the space around her mouth, finally making them able to talk - even if it was simillar to a whistle. determined to help people but with a body that kept hurting everyone around her, Giewont set off into the world, trying to find a home and piece herself together, leaving parts herself and a dead body behind.
footnotes below the cut:
1. "During one pause in their journey, the elder Baryka tells Cezary of an entrepreneur who, along Poland’s Baltic coast, devised an ingenious method for manufacturing durable glass from the vast reserves of pristine sands that had lain for eons beneath coastal peat fields. By a massive Rube Goldberg-type arrangement of channels and a creative method for harnessing the westerly winds (the storytelling here is a literary engineering feat in itself), an incursion of the sea provides power for converting the extracted sand into glass. From this vitreous wonder substance, prefabricated houses of glass are built inexpensively. The houses are strong as steel, hygienic, and easy to heat in winter and keep cool in summer. Whole villages are built with houses of brightly colored glass. Life becomes less of a struggle for mere existence, more civilized, and without the need to toil incessantly. People eat less meat or no meat at all, and begin to revere farm animals as sacred beings. For the reader, the digression serves to freshen the mental palate. For Cezary, however, the story is altogether beguiling, raising the utopian prospect of a more wonderful life, reunited with a homeland that might have been his to begin with and a father he has just rediscovered" - via neh.gov
wow thanks for skimming through footnotes as well! as a reward, here's the first ever design of both Janka and Giewont (which proves they were both created around the same time :] )
2. "Those knights had been in a deep sleep for hundreds of years and they only would wake up if it is time to fight on a great battle. When this day comes, the earth will move, there will be thunders that would shake the sky, many trees will fall and break, and there would be noises when the Border Mountains will break. On that moment the knights will take their horses and they will gallop to fight for Poland once again." - the legend of the sleeping knights
a lot had changed since that time :]
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