Okay guys I'm gonna do a breakdown of a few of my personal hcs for the main 3 of both s1 and s2!!! This includes little doodles of how I draw em differently !!!
Let's start off with Olive :3 there's a LOT under the cut.
Okay, so Olive's really active, right? To me, she's always been brains AND brawn. So since she's out in the sun all the time, she has a tan!
She's also lightly scarred in my version, if you look carefully. Those were gathered out on cases. I hc that she has a LOT of battered uniforms that Otto sews/embroids together. Also, if you squint, you can see my version has light eyebags. It's not that she doesn't sleep, she's just fed up with everyone.
Her hair is messier! She comes into work all prim and proper, but leaves it all disheveled. If it's a more tiring day, she'll run her hand through her hair. Also, red hair tie instead of black, just cause I find it cuter.
Miscellaneous hcs:
- Olive is half Quebecois, half Vietnamese
- Her last name is Tremblay
- Her full name is Olivia, she just shortens it
- She's terrible at English and can't write an essay to save her life, but is very good at analysis
- She eats green skittles first, and thinks the purple ones are awful
- For their halfiversary, Otto got her an olive branch shaped tie pin that she wears whenever she feels fancy
Next up: OTTO!!
The urge to change his hair was carnal in my soul. It's the Asian canon event. It happened to me, and it happened to him. Just to make things a little bit more fun for me to draw, I let his hair grow out a little bit... yknow the awkward stage after a bowl cut grows out a bit? Yeah, that.
Downturned eyes! Just so he and Olive can contrast a bit more. He's soft, she's sharp. They're silly!!!
I also make sure his mole is always at least partially visible. It's such a cool part of him, and I can't believe they cover it up most of the time in canon...
Miscellaneous hcs:
- He always has his blazer undone
- He's an excellent cook, but becomes immediately incompetent once someone is watching
- He's strangely good at identifying plants, and has a habit of picking edible ones and eating them straight from the ground
- He's good at English! Not the best, but better than Olive
- His last name is Garcia
- For their halfiversary, Olive got him a cast iron pan. He doesn't use it to cook, and instead swings it at anyone who makes fun of him or Olive
Next up: OSCAR!!!
I honestly don't have much for Oscar. I love him, but don't think about him that much.
He has messier hair and is just a LOT more disheveled in general!!! Close your eyes in the bullpen at any given moment and I bet you could hear something in the lab blowing up.
He's perpetually sweaty. Damp palm guy. Maybe that's why he keeps dropping gadgets...
Miscellaneous hcs:
- He's very bad at telling the time. On vacation, he'll never know what day of the week it is
- He knows how to play the otamatone surprisingly well. He can make them talk, and has conversations with one the way one would with a sock puppet
- He never knows what significant figures to use, so he ends up just ballparking everything and just not measuring in general. Maybe that's why everything in the lab is always blowing up
- He has a full denim outfit saved up for formal occasions. I'm talking denim hat, shirt, jacket, pants, shoes, all denim
- His last name is Collins
OLYMPIA NEXT!!!!
Okay so there's a lot of hearing me out you guys will need to do.
Anna Cathcart is half Chinese and half irish!!! Thus, I gave Olympia monolids to accentuate that factor. I also downturned her eyes and thinned her "lashes" to make it more obvious that I'm portraying her as wasian!
I gave her freckles and rounder glasses for the vibe. She's just a soft character to me, and I really want to make her look the part.
She's got messy hair!! It's based on the little half fringes she had in very early s2, which I thought were adorable. Her ponytail's also higher just so she looks different from Olive!!
Miscellaneous hcs:
- Olympia knows floriography, and will get very hurt if you give her the wrong flowers
- Conversely, she thinks she's being really rude if she puts a tansy on someone's desk to show that she's upset and will feel bad about it all day
- She always carries a little salamander named Josh in her pocket
- She can speak Yiddish
- She has a massive storage of those flippable sequin shirts and has one for every occasion
- She put her hair into a ponytail bc of Olive (this one is courtesy of @/starboundsingularities!!!!!), but the more she found herself, the higher up she tied it
- Her last name is Carter-Ng
Next up: Otis!!!
I draw him a little sickly for no particular reason. He's just silly like that.
He's not that different from canon tbh! I have his hair in an undercut because I think it looks cool on him (plus it's easier to draw), and he has eyebags because of ... the vibe.
He has a notch taken out of his ear due to an injury! From what, he won't say .
Miscellaneous hcs:
- He listens to royalty free music unironically
- He's going through his Alan Walker phase
- He has barely legible handwriting, but can draw surprisingly well
- He types like an old man, with the "............" and everything
- His last name is Otis. His full name is Otis Otis. This one is also courtesy of @/starboundsingularities I love it so much
Last but not least: OONA!!!!!
She's really going through it.
Fun fact: Olivia Presti has curly hair!!! That means that Oona should have curly (or at least wavy) hair... but she doesn't. Which is honestly so sad.
But I can always mitigate that, so I draw her hair wavy. I guess it's more extremely frazzled than wavy, but it's the same effect in the end.
EYEBAGS. She doesn't sleep after The Incident. She also has downturned eyes, just because she gives off that vibe.
Miscellaneous hcs:
- Oona is a regular customer of a local rage room
- She knows how to use a crossbow to a mildly terrifying extent
- If a flight of stairs has a railing, she'll slide down it. She almost always ends up falling
- Her last name is Silva
- She says she knows how to speak Polish, but she only knows a select few words and doesn't know what they mean. They're all curse words.
- Subsequently, Oona is banned from several Polish restaurants across the city
That's all!! They're all so silly :3
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What are your headcanons about Marcille's mom if you have any? It's interesting that what drew Donato to her was cause she lived the history he studied, or that was said somewhere at least. She must've had an interesting life.
so this was going to be just a normal answer but then I realized I have a Lot of Things To Say. so here goes, a compilation of what we know for a fact from the canon, what I've extrapolated from the visual cues and details, and my theories based on all of that.
Things we know for a fact about Marcille's mother because they were explicitly stated in the manga and supplemental materials:
She was a court mage for a Tall-man kingdom at the southern part of the Northern Continent
Donato, a court historian, fell in love with her because she had lived through the history he was studying, and he courted her for 17 years (age 15 to 32) before getting married
She was a cheerful person who rarely showed extreme emotion and took things as they came
She always cooked a huge meal for Marcille on her birthdays
She remarried a gnome after Donato's death and a short distance away from Marcille's childhood home
Pipi, Marcille's pet bird, was actually older than Marcille and originally belonged to her mother (bird died at 62)
She was extremely heartbroken when Donato died and ultimately ended up instilling a deep fear of mortality in Marcille with her words
the only time she showed extreme emotion in front of her family was when Donato could no longer eat his favourite dish near the end of his life.
She scolded Marcille for being cruel to ants (implying she can have a stern side when needed)
Things that are explicitly shown but mostly through visual cues
She has a very distinctive style of dress always involving a ribbon choker (mirroring Marcille's habit of always wearing a matching choker with any of her outfits that don't cover her neck)
She was almost stereotypically good at housekeeping and traditionally "wifely" things (very frequently depicted wearing an apron or doing some domestic chore when not at work, seems to have been an avid cook).
She knits? (also, note the affectionate smile as she's looking at Donato and Marcille reading a book together in the full panel)
She was as excited for Marcille's milestones as Donato was.
She didn't tell Marcille much about elven food
(there are a couple things that this panel in particular implies:
She lived a good deal of her life (if not being born and raised) in a mainly elven country in the West, implied by her knowing enough of an elven region's cuisine to prefer Tall-man food over it
seems to have a pretty carefree and casual demeanour overall, if this is how she replied to Marcille asking her about it (sounds like she never gave her culinary preferences that much thought to begin with)
slightly related to number 2, it seems like she and Marcille had a fairly casual parent-child dynamic (especially in comparison to the Toudens' memory of their father)
(local elf tastes Italian food once and never goes back))
However, she seems a lot more... serious in most of the other times we see her? Almost like the very stereotypical archetype of a graceful elf.
Subsequent conclusions about her personality:
Usually pretty carefree and cheerful at home, has been a loving and attentive parent throughout Marcille's childhood (while not being so doting that she didn't discipline Marcille).
Slightly more conjectural theories on her personality:
Had a much more graceful and professional personality at work, which would explain the more serious portraits we see of her.
Given that both she and Donato had positions at the royal court, it seems a little odd that she'd go out of her way to do all the housework herself, so maybe she just enjoyed doing it?
Now taping all the evidence together and toeing the line between analysis and fanfiction:
It's clear that she loved Donato very much and was utterly devastated by losing him. But there's one thing that really stuck out to me in what little we see of her:
Doesn't she seem... angry? The way she's gritting her teeth, clutching the tablecloth, and how this is the first and only time we see her eyes opened that wide. In the following panel, you see her being quiet and dejected after her initial outburst. She's still crying very intensely, but her brows are furrowed, and she's not really responding to Donato's affection in her body language.
We're not told the details of how she felt about losing Donato other than that it upset her. But this, to me, implies that she was angry and resented that he was aging, that the end of his life was approaching. An "it's not fair" type of preemptive grief. And if this was the first and last time she cried like this in front of her family, she was either very good at coping in private... or very bad at letting herself feel unpleasant emotions until they become unavoidable and end up overwhelming her.
It's not too remarkable a detail on the surface. It's even reminiscent of what the audience has seen of Marcille. But... when it comes to the big picture, you'd think an elf who voluntarily chose to marry a tall-man and have a half-elf child would have been better prepared for this.
It kind of recontextualizes her cheerfulness to me.
"I'm sure everything's gonna be okay!" (or some variation thereof, depending on what translation you have).
And this is stated to contrast her extreme grief when finally confronting Donato's failing body and eventual death. But I'm wondering if... maybe this optimism was why she was so upset. What if she went into all of it thinking "everything's gonna be okay"? What if she was a little young by elven standards, and just followed her heart thinking that her own resilience would get her through anything?
Of course, only to get completely overwhelmed when she actually loses Donato. She turns into a completely different person. And that's heartbreaking on its own-- but what the audience sees is the effect it had on Marcille. Can you imagine being her, watching your invincible and upbeat mother suddenly lose all the light in her eyes in one go?
I've already made a huge post about how I think Marcille models her "work persona" off her mother, but another thing that stuck with me as I was looking for more details in the manga was this:
copy pasting from the other post i made about it lmao it's like... the second she resigns herself to lifelong pain and terror, there's another portrait of her mother facing her like this. with their heads bowed, in mirrored body language of resignation and despair and sorrow. Except it's posed like Marcille is still looking at her mother but her mother is looking away.
It took me a second to realize, but I think that it's a visual metaphor for the fact that Marcille's mother was the only long-lived role model she had-- and she failed to model healthy grief for her daughter. I don't say this as an accusation or to disparage her as a character, but just as a matter of fact. In her, Marcille was seeing herself older and losing a short-lived spouse or loved one of her own, and all she saw was hopelessness.
But her mother didn't mean to instill hopelessness and terror in her. She wasn't really thinking of how it would truly affect Marcille at all (at least, that's how I'm interpreting her looking down and away from Marcille in the metaphor), she was just sad. And she, in her own way, was trying to protect her daughter and help her prepare for future losses.
What she meant was "loss is inevitable, and you have to learn how to be in pain but live on anyway." What Marcille heard was "loss is inevitable, and you will be scared and hurt for the rest of your life."
Again. Marcille's mother doesn't feature explicitly in the story the way her father does -- but in so many ways, her shadow, her silhouette, her reflection is always hanging over Marcille.
All that to say... headcanon-wise (everything from here on is 100% without evidence lmao), I'd like to think that she matured and realized that she failed Marcille. I imagine her being regretful about it, wanting a chance to fix it but never finding a way to insert herself back into Marcille's life when Marcille is so so so busy becoming the most accomplished mage possible. I imagine her being herself again, now, so many years after her loss and after remarrying -- but with her cheerfulness tempered with a lot more wisdom and the pain of having gone through loss like that. I think the second Marcille actually tells her what happened in the dungeon, she'd want to go running to her daughter again -- if Marcille tells her the full truth instead of just being embarrassed she let things get that far. (oh, the tragedy of her wanting to be more like her mother and an accomplished adult who doesn't need to be babied... being embarrassed to actually tell her mother how much she fucked up...)
There's also the tension of her having remarried -- I know that there's at least a little bit of resentment that Marcille harbours about that, because she's childish like that at heart even if she makes an effort not to externalize it. I think that her mother would be aware of that, potentially adding to her sense of guilt and apprehension at trying to reappear/intrude on Marcille's life. I honestly don't think Marcille has met her stepfather -- or even considers him a stepfather rather than "mama's new husband" and kind of a total stranger. I think she and her mother actively don't talk about it in their correspondence, like an elephant in the room.
but, ultimately, I think her mother is on her side no matter what. Ancient magic? Dark necromancy? Sure, she'll feel guilty and like she was partially responsible for setting Marcille down such a painful path, but she wouldn't care. that's her daughter!! she would've moved back west and been petitioning for her at the court, buying a house right next to the Canaries barracks and visiting her every day that she wasn't on a mission. And if her husband had opinions on Marcille becoming a "dark arts user," he either gets over it or it's divorce with him. Yes, she might have had her optimism completely humbled by losing Donato like that -- but she's still headstrong and self-assured and she doesn't care what people think of her. It's her way or the highway and she's always going to be in Marcille's corner.
(She also needs a name lol. I went with Juno, just to be cute about "Marcille"s closest real life equivalent being Marcella, which is the female version of Marcellus, which in turn is a diminutive of Marcus, which was derived from Mars. Absolutely in love with Marcille potentially being named after Ares/Mars the fucking god of war btw)
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ARIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I HAVE A VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION FOR YOU. HOW DID ARISUGU MEET?🎤🎤🎤🎤🎤🎤 i am now steadily dragging everybody into this selfship playground hehehehhee ilysm<33 - @teddybeartoji
MICKEY!!!!!!!!……. welcome :3 take a seat :33 have some tea :333 🍵🍪 i’ve been Thinking abt this ask. intently. i got Way too into it btw
i think!! arisugu met in high school!! that makes most sense to me :> i transferred into his class and got attached to him …. pretty quickly probably. LMAO. i can see suguru being the one who gets assigned to show me around bc satoru Cannot be trusted w new students and shoko is a delinquent in the making…. so sugu is probably the one i meet first :3 and then i subtly imprint on him. like a duckling. a little ari following him around bc he has a soft silky voice. and he gets a bit of a soft spot eventually (me and the bad bitch i pulled by being socially incompetent <33)
WITH THAT BEING SAID…….. i see arisugu as The slowburn ever. neither of us are the love at first sight type, so i think it’d take a year or two for us to actually Fall in Love…. a year of getting to know each other on a deeper and more vulnerable level (ON THAT NOTE. late-night talks under starry skies are extremely arisugu coded)… so the feelings are very deep but. even though they’re mutual i don’t think we’d get together until a couple years have passed 😭😭 sugu would get tired of the ”chase” eventually and confess in our last year of hs maybe…. but i am Not Ready to accept his feelings. or my own. and i tell him that.
and so … he waits :’3 (WILLINGLY MIGHT I ADD i just think he’s the type of guy to say ”i’ll wait for you.” and Mean it yk….) until i eventually make the final push in like. our early twenties maybe…. which would mean about five total years of pining?? ish??? i just see it as a very tender, very very slow romance!! kinda like wading into deep water when you’re afraid of it. but by the time we get together we already know and trust each other so deeply that the change isn’t really too abrupt….. though he insists on taking everything at our own pace anyway. sniffle. i adore him (ALSO needless to say i’m not following canon here 🤨🤨 i firmly believe sugu wouldn’t have defected if he had a baby duckling following him around ok)
anyway. that’s how i picture it!! :3 i have Thoughts abt the overall dynamic but i think suguru is just… so patient. and so devoted. and i’m very loyal and also Very Shy. yepyep.
now . 😇 you didn’t ask for this but just as a comparison (<- this is a lie i just spent 2 much time thinking abt this)…. arigojo. i fear it’s a coworkers to lovers kinda deal. i’m Very Much picturing blindfolded gojo specifically and bc of his…. ways (crippling fear of intimacy + opening up) this is also another slowburn. and it ends with something a little less straightforward than arisugu bc i do Not think gojo asks me out…. it’s more of a gradual change yk?? bc labels are scary. but one day i don’t let him eat my portion of kikufuku and he goes ”how could you treat your boyfriend like this ;((” and i’m like . oh ok. so that’s what you are. we’re both losers sadly
ANYWAYYY THAT’S ALL i hope you didn’t run out of tea….. have some more just in case 🍵 as you can tell i had too much fun thinking of the Lore + all three of us are emotionally constipated (suguru too he’s just the most functional) but i hope reading it was enjoyable for youuu <33333 i love them. unfortunately.
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