Starting with
what happens when a black swan wakes up from dreaming of a white swan?
explodes right here right now instantly.
funny story bout this one specifically actually, iwas originally mostly neutral towards her right up until queuing her up into the tourney bracket back in like. november. i had t do a run thru of her combat dialogue and it was just "oh. what. huh?? girl??? girlie hey wait girlie hey," so its fair to say i feel Very Normal about her. but um, to sort this into some sort of something;
Design-
immediate bonus points for being Creature. go girl kill. we love bird imagery in this household and she is Rocking it. the crest is fucking impossible to draw but again, it slaps. the fact that most of her body is just that inky black impossible to tell the detail between one thing and another honestly works really well for her. idunno how to explain it, but the wing claws are a Very good look. it coheres 👍 also umbrella weapon bias. she honestly just hurts to look at. compliment. sad wet bird. can i please just gently pat her with a damp towel. ithink that would help her feel a little better.
Theme-
explodes right here right now instantly. black swan honestly kinda went right by me my first loop through, but getting to it again? augh. augh. auuguugughghhh. the tie between the childhood disillusionment of optimism and the vessel of an old fable hits like a truck. the core of futile dreaming in a nightmare, tied with the daughter imagery with angela....... augh. it aims and hits the mark! plain and simple and striking. black swan is honestly just generally painful as a whole, and the way it executes that is VERY clean. again, she just kinda hurts to look at. compliment. also the black feather motif...... explodes right here right now instantly.
shes honestly one that was boosted up by just. the ping-pong effect of several of us going 'wait. fuck. wait oh fuck wait shit AUGH' at each other in a circle for a while. like yea. yeahg. its hard to describe just what it is about her thats so . [motions with hands.] because you just have t. just Look at her. listen to her. look at it its on the ceiling, yknow? i love her very much. no notes peak angela 👍
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🖊 for any milo and/or reiji details they fascinate me ^-^
YES thank u they live in my brain
Let me go on a tangent before I even get to what this ask actually is cause why wouldn’t I- Milo and Reiji are interesting characters to compare to each other, because despite their entwined storylines, I don’t draw a lot of connections between them as they were designed. Characters that never interact are fun to draw conclusions with because it’s more obscure out-of-universe things: Julian and Milo are so different but they follow very similar paths and come from very similar places. Milo and Brooke (actually they do interact but only like, once) both deal with the results of a corrupted worldview that once questioned, can’t be ignored once again. Reiji and Diana share an inherently wary, bleak outlook on how the world functions as a result of their own experiences. And characters that do interact but were designed that way are... designed that way. Julian and Liliana are the same stuff poured into different molds, impossibly similar and impossibly different, and that drives everything about their relationship- they’re foils. Diana and Julian start at the same place in the same situation, (for different reasons), and end up wildly different people in opposite directions- they are diverging paths evidenced by truth or lies.
But Milo and Reiji aren’t connected by anything inherent or anything unchangeable. Their meeting in the first place is mostly chance and a little bit of give and take of compassion. They stick together because the alternative is being alone in a world that’s so much bigger than both of them, so much older, and just a little bit more broken. Their relationship is a choice in a way that really isn’t the case for a lot of other characters.
And I mean, they do have parallels, but they seem different somehow, because they actually apply in-universe. They reflect off each other. They both leave something behind that they wish they could get back: but while Reiji’s was taken from him by circumstance and chance, Milo’s was a culmination of something grown that eventually he had to choose to abandon, though if there was any other way, he would have taken it. (He tried, before. It didn’t work.)
But now they’re both missing something, and with it, their place. Reiji doesn’t know where he belongs and the truth is that he doesn’t belong anywhere. He can’t return to the one place he did- (it wasn’t a place, but a people. They’re long gone, even as they live) -and now he searches aimlessly for someplace he can return to. He doesn’t find one. Milo loses everything he’s ever known when he walks away, and even as he makes the decision to, it feels like the admission of some crime (it looks that way to them, and he knows it). He longs for the community he lost, but even if he gets something close to it, it’s wrong, because it isn’t them, and because the reason he left still follows him.
They’re both ghosts wandering a vast expanse of unknown. There is exploration in it- Milo especially does genuinely love the places he passes through, the people he meets briefly, the idiosyncrasies of each town, city, village. Reiji less so- he’s only ever known the wandering, so it isn’t as special to him. He’s always looking for something that will change, but even so, traveling with Milo forces him to see things he wouldn’t otherwise.
The difference between them is that Milo stops being a ghost. As time goes on, less and less is searching and more and more is exploring. More is fixed than is broken. But the opposite is true for Reiji. As he finds nothing it feels more and more like he is one of very, very few. That he has found no place to exist because there is no place for him, for those like him. Reiji is looking for answers in an environment that buried most of them, in a world that hunts the rest. And it becomes this obsession- a thousand whys.
Why didn’t his flock look for him? Why did he even survive? Why is he hunted? Why did it start and why won’t it change? Why is the world sitting on the ashes of an older one? Why are people broken by something they don’t remember? Why does every place he goes scream that there used to be more? Why are his people a part of it? Why are they here? Why do they occupy a world that is so clearly not made for them? Why does he not know where they are made for?
Reiji asks a thousand whys and they can all be summarized by one what: What happened?
Milo and Reiji cross incomprehensible distances and in the time that takes, a lot changes. Milo goes from being a ghost of who he was and who he should be to being alive in a way he wasn’t before, genuine in a way he didn’t allow. Milo looks for an answer in a different way than Reiji, because he is looking for certainty. He wants someone to tell him, with no room for error, what is true and what is corrupt. He wants surety and permanence in a way that just doesn’t exist, and so instead must choose which side he’s on- he must decide what to believe, because nobody can tell him black and white. With that choice becomes an acknowledgement that the world isn’t as simple as good and evil, and the two can very much coexist, that perfect and unredeemable don’t really exist, not here, anyway. He’s allowed to just be. Reiji, though, doesn’t get the opportunity to make that choice, to take that answer. He isn’t looking for the answer to a moral question or a cosmic should. He is looking for a reason, which is an order of magnitude more impossible to find. He looks to the past for why and the nature of time is that he keeps getting further and further from it. He finds very little, which only makes him look harder, which makes it worse when he finds even less. He starts down an impossible spiral that he can’t get out of until he finds what he wants, but what he wants just doesn’t exist in the way he needs.
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