#xellafail

[xellandria]

Okay, "aging userbase" or whatever, but I've had a favourite since I first started using it and that was at like eleven or twelve, so.

#xellafail #tumblr polls #polls #personally I gravitate toward front right #I'll use front left to boil water for pasta and to reheat soup #but front right is king if I'm doing any proper cooking #(including cooking ground beef for meatsauce or whatever) #it's been forever since I've been in a 3-burner meal situation but I THINK my third choice is usually back left #my previous house had a 6-burner stove but the two burners in the middle were linked to each other #and we had a long pancake griddle that fit over them both #so I included both options #I'm interested to see if there are other stove variants I haven't thought of #obviously that'll require this to breach containment but who knows #tumblr likes polls right now so it might! we'll see lol

[xellandria]

y'know, Aiglamene's skin-covered eye socket and bowing replacement bone leg are both mentioned in the text, but the specifics of which side each is on never is. I've been thinking about it for a while, and I just can't decide what I like best which is putting a bit of a crimp on a thing I'm working on. So I come to you, Tumblr!

(also hey, if you want to comment in the tags (or whatever) on what side you think Crux's eyepatch is worn on I'd love to hear that too cause I can't decide on that either, lol)

#the locked tomb #aiglamene #xellafail #this has been presenting issues for like a full month now lmao #gideon the ninth

[xellandria]

A couple weeks ago I was listening to the Nona the Ninth audiobook (as you do, for nearly a year straight) and noticed something towards the very end of it where (spoilers for NtN) the events at the end of the book don't end being frantic until Alecto's name is said exactly three times in Nona's hearing. I didn't grow up with many spooky stories or folk tales or whatever, but I DO remember a tumblr post where they were joking about looking into the rear view mirror of a car and chanting "Bloody Mary" three times to summon her behind them as they're going 50 mph or whatever. Something like that, anyway, but my brain made the connection.

Today, @spaceswordblaster reblogged one of those "have you seen this movie" polls about a Bloody Mary movie. That reminded me that I had wanted to go to the wikipedia page and read up on the common way(s) the legend is invoked, because if it actually worked the way that I was vaguely remembering, that would be a neat parallel that I could ramble about sometime!

The wikipedia page itself gave me a lot of related ideas but it also linked to a similar myth from Japan about "Hanako-san." Having only cursory exposure to horror movies and the like, I was like "is that the Ring girl?" and clicked on that link; it was not (I think the Ring girl starts with an S but anyway).

At the top of THAT wikipedia page was a disambiguation section, which included "if you're looking for the manga, see "Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun" and I was like w h a t (until I read the Hanako-san page, at which point is still sounded hilarious but made sense).

So then I went to the Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun page, as you do, and saw it had been adapted into an anime in 2020 and there was a reboot coming out in 2024 (I think?). So I looked THAT up and it's free on Crunchyroll and I was like "okay I'll watch one episode just to see what it's like, then I can go do the things I need to do for the day" and now I'm on episode 7/13 or something like that.

So that's how my day is going, rofl

#xellafail #he does not appear to be very toilet-bound by the way #I imagine he's school-bound more than anything but we haven't gotten to that point yet #anyway Hanako-kun would be one of those anime characters that hits one of my favourite 'oh fuck yeah this is my DUDE' tropes #except the characters are actually drawn in a stylized way that is way more reminiscent of first-year high schoolers #than the adults most high school-based shows do #and I'm old enough now to feel Weird about that #so he does not get added to the 'bishie list' #but I definitely am getting Ideas for the future #which I guess will ALSO have to do on that giant to do list I have pinned rofl

[xellandria]

Hello, Locked Tomb fandom. I want to take a minute to remind you about something that I think is very important, and that some folks don’t know!  It’s so important to me that I’m breaking my policy of never using the new post editor just so I can give it fancy formatting!

The audiobook and hardcover versions of Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth do not contain the extra bonus content that the paperback and ebooks do!

The paperback releases of the books are the first editions to contain any bonus content and while the ebook edition is typically updated even if you purchased it prior to the paperback release, physical books can't be updated like that and the audiobook is recorded well before the hardcover's release and is therefore also not updated (though it'd be fabulous if Moira Quirk were to record them some day, I don't think it's likely unless there's a short story omnibus at some point that gets its own audiobook release).

As a result, hardcover readers and audiobook listeners have some additional content that they might not have realized existed that can sate them somewhat while we wait for Alecto (and Nona's paperback release, which may also come with bonus content). The drawback is that anyone who has ingested the series through those formats (as I have) may not even be aware that there's more story and information that they're missing out on!

So hey! If you didn't know, now you do.

#xellafail #the locked tomb #tlt #locked tomb #and if you already knew that and were being a jerk to people anyway #well. #yes I'm sort of vagueblogging but like #I do also genuinely think it's important info to learn or remember #especially if you're participating in the fandom #or posting in the tags

[xellandria]

Do you ever think about your OC's accents? I know folks often do voice claims for their characters, but if your stuff was being adapted into a format with audio, how would they all sound in relation to each other and in your native language? Would everybody just have the "normal" regional accent for your area (whether that be locally or country-wide), would certain characters be exceptions? How deep down the rabbit hole do you go, and is this a dark, dangerous door for me to have opened? :P

#xellafail #I've been thinking about it a lot for some reason #and while I can't say I have any specific accents chosen for any of my characters #I do know Karra and Sevvie and James would all sound different than the rest of the cast #because they're not from the area it takes place in #(or in James' case the time period it takes place in lol) #Xella-or-whatever-Xella's-replacement-ends-up-being would probably have a 'fake' accent that blends in and a 'real' accent that doesn't #I'm tempted to say that Alex would be given whatever accent seems to be the most 'swoon-worthy' in the states at any given time #so like australian or soft texan or something like that #(what are people swooning over these days idrk) #Sevvie's the only one that has a sort of 'grounded' accent #but even that's kind of up in the air #because I vacillate daily between her being some flavour of British #(because when R made the character she was leaning heavily on BTVS' Spike for it) #and californian #(because her language patterns are heavily californian and also that's where we were at the time) #which is a weird ping ponging in my head but there you go lol #almost all the Hellfyres would have the local accent #Kanos might be SLIGHTLY different due to James' influence but not significantly so #don't even talk to me about my D&D characters tho bc I have absolutely no idea lmao #I think I've been thinking about it because of the new-ish Castlevania series #where everyone's british except for the aztec vampire #even the french folks #also I guess the russian lady #and possibly more characters I haven't run into bc I'm having a real hard time getting through it #but like everyone's from the same place even though they're not! #and it's driving me crazy for some reason #(I think I listened to the og castlevania series in french maybe that'd help here)

[xellandria]

Instead of drawing something for it this year, I was preparing to make a montage of all my attempts' boxes set to Yakety Sax, the way I decided to start doing that for Arfus at Hallow's End. Arfus dropped the very first time I hit Start Recording on OBS, but it was looking pretty bleak that I'd get that lucky again.

The world continues to laugh at plans. Day four, the first run of the day.

180 attempts this year. 5,043 recorded attempts since 2014, an unknown number prior to 2014, fourteen years of not only running as many times as I could during the two week period of the event but also largely structuring my account around being ready to run as many times as I could during the two week period.

It's the end of an era. I don't ever have to do this dungeon again if I don't want to. I am free.

I am free.

#xellafail #world of warcraft #love is in the air #you can see by that video just how long it took me to register what had happened lmao #I do actually still have to do it on my hunter+mage til I get 270 love tokens for the new mount+toy #but everyone else can stop if I want to #actually if I do dailies on my hunter tomorrow she'll have enough #the mage might have to do an extra day though

[xellandria]

Hrmmm… my Nona ebook purchase updated the cover image to the paperback version (with the pink stripe on the right), but the contents are still the hardcover (or at least doesn’t contain the bonus content). I guess I’ll try again next week :(

#xellafail #the locked tomb #sorry main tag but maybe you know something I don’t here?

[xellandria]

I’ve been listening to the Gideon the Ninth audiobook (and the sequel books, obv) basically nonstop since Nona came out, and for significant periods of time before that. Yet it wasn’t until today that I heard and noticed this little gem:

Which is probably a good jumping off point for pobody’s nerfect, but is really making me think about a sixth house role swap and just how pathetic a cavalier Palamedes would be, rofl

#xellafail #the locked tomb #but palamades would end up like cgi body swapped Chris evans in the captain America movie #I am firmly convinced that he is incapable of athleticism regardless of au #Camilla would be a dope necromancer tho #probably not the greatest in her generation #but pretty high up there #someone has probably done a harrow nova expanded au at Canaan already #if I was a fanfic gal I’d go looking lmao

[xellandria]

Nine days after that Portland nightmare trip and I woke up with five symptoms of Covid~

Granted, three of them are just my every day life, but (:

#xellafail #health is hard #I feel like the ffxiv comic #except I’m not going anywhere

[xellandria]

Yes, tumblr.

This indeed is like the blogs I follow.

Because it IS one of the blogs I follow. Great job team, let’s hit the showers.

#xellafail #tumblr is hard

[xellandria]

Cows mourn for other cows :V

(also I never noticed that the tauren skeleton has five fingers, rofl)

#xellafail #I'm pretty sure there is absolutely no overlap #between wow followers and locked tomb followers #BUT OH WELL

[xellandria]

Tomorrow (or today, if you live in any timezone east of the west coast of the US) is my birthday! Since I’ve recently rediscovered and have been reminded of the incredible healing powers of tag-gushing, I’m gonna spend a lot of my free time tomorrow(/today) doing some tag trawling and reblogging other folks’ art (and maybe writing, but probably less of that because I’ve never had a taste for fic and also I get way pickier about it than I do about art for some reason).

I have no idea how big or small a project this will end up being (it might be no posts at all! it might be to the limit!) but I’ll be tagging everything with #birthday tagapalooza so if for some wild reason you don’t want to see a lot of bitchin’ art on your dash in the next 24h you can go ahead and mute that ol’ tag there in advance.  Some of it will be fandom stuff. Some of it won’t be. No idea where the tags’ll take me or how much free time I’ll end up with (got more doctors and raid and birthday obligations tomorrow, all three). Let’s find out.

I’ll also reblog this post again at the end of it just so you can get a chronological warning (in case I start up before you get to this point on your dash), heh.

🎉

#xellafail #birthday tagapalooza #holy shit that emoji ended up huge #I mean I know I browse tumblr at 133% but still

[xellandria]

Liar! Liar!! Kiriona Gaia, you apologize right now for this bald-faced lie!

#xellafail #the locked tomb #nona the ninth spoilers #what happened to her knee and her humerus? #they’re mentioned in both other books and yet! #and yet! #apologize to sister Canace this instant young lady

[xellandria]

This one was so close.

#xellafail #tumblr is hard #The Bots

[xellandria]

I... have a lot of feelings.

For a long time now, I’ve been considering “dropping everything” and completely reinventing myself.  It’s kind of a cruel thing to do to friends and family so it’s never really gotten very far, but it’s one of those persistent, nagging desires that just hasn’t gone away.  Four or five years ago, I thought about a “partial reinvention” wherein I’d create a pen name and associated identity--real, normal people have those, right?--and use that to get back into writing, which is something I haven’t wanted to do publicly as Xella, because I’ve been Xella on the internet for 24 years now and I don’t necessarily want to have writing that I know won’t be up to a standard I’d like to set associated with myself like that. Plus, having a pen name is a Real Actual Thing that Real Actual People do or have done, so it’s not like it’s weird.

Not that Xella doesn’t fill that same niche in a way (since it’s not my legal name), but you can kinda see where I was going with this.  I spent a lot of time workshopping it and came up with something that I liked, that abbreviated nicely, placed itself well in the theoretical bookshelves of the mind (just so I wouldn’t have to start over again if I ever got good enough for that), that didn’t step on the toes of existing people but still sounded like a real, genuine name that a person could have, and I created an email, twitter, and Ao3 accounts for it, did the set-up to make them all not look like the current wave of tumblr bots, and... nothing.  Just kind of stalled out, realizing that I had no real starting point on writing, and that my lack of ideas was not just limited to visual art.

But it’s been sitting in the back of my brain for the past five years, safely tucked away and keeping me company in the bad times.  If it all goes wrong, this pen name, this other identity, is sitting there waiting to be used, waiting to let me start over and leave all my past mistakes behind. I could begin again, start new, start fresh, not worry about dumb shit that happened in 2003 that hasn’t actually come up since 2007ish and isn’t likely to come up again, not worry about the brand and just be able to do what I want to do.

I’m not really sure why “the brand” keeps coming up for me, but it does.  I’m not a popular artist, despite having gone so hard on trying to become one that I burned myself out on everything.  I’ve never been big and at this point it’s kind of a given that I never will be.  My style is recognizable, but doesn’t have mass appeal, and I wish I was fine with that.  There’s been a lot of uproar in artist circles about AI lately and I absolutely understand where friends and colleagues are coming from when they get upset about it, but AI will never take a job away from me because I don’t have a job to take.  Legality and morality aside, a lot of the “AI vs real artists” examples I see on twitter? I can’t tell which is supposed to be better or which was created vs. generated. I can’t tell which I’m supposed to be siding with. AI can do what I do better than I can do it, and I have spent my entire life getting to the point I’m at. I haven’t even bothered looking at the big “has my art been used to train the AI” lists because I can almost guarantee you that my stuff won’t be there.

There was such a gigantic push in the mid-to-late 2000s and early 2010s that if you were an artist on the internet, you had to sell yourself. You had to take commissions, have a storefront, make money from your hobby, make it more than a hobby. I spent so much effort, worked so hard trying to create things that people would want and it was absolutely the wrong thing for me to do.  It destroyed the thing I enjoyed and turned it from a thing I was successful at to a thing I had failed at.  Nowadays, that push is still there in the background, but the big thing is views, engagement, social media metrics; even if you don’t turn those metrics around into customers, your art has failed if you don’t get The Numbers.

Which is ridiculous!  It’s absolutely ridiculous, but my brain just won’t internalize that message.  That picture of Alex I reblogged at the start of the year had one note when I RBed it, and that one note was my own RB from here to @xellart.  It’s up to 12 now (4 RBs including my own), thanks to Tev RBing it and some of his folks getting eyes on it, but it sat around dusty for a full year.  It was a little more successful when I originally posted it on twitter, with 18 “engagements” (6 RTs including my own), but most of what I post on twitter just goes there to die; outside of Bash stuff (which is usually RTed by myself, the bash twitter, and anybody whose characters happen to be in the pic, and thus typically blows my non-bash stuff out of the water exponentially) I’m usually lucky to see one other person RT a piece I’ve spent hours on.

I tried for years to convince myself that it was because I was posting WIPs, so people got bored of pics before they were even finished, and that if I didn’t share the joy of creating and progress pics with folks, that they’d like the finished product more.  I don’t really know if I ever managed to convince myself that that’s how it would work, but in reality I think it’s a combination of my style, my content, and my presentation.  As I said earlier, I think my style is recognizable (for the most part), but it definitely doesn’t have mass appeal; the colours aren’t vibrant or poppy, the lines aren’t smooth and elegant or chunky and interesting, and my compositions don’t typically wow the brain.  As much as most of my recent work is technically fanart, it’s not the kind of fanart that has mass appeal; World of Warcraft or Dungeons & Dragons player characters typically fall into the same vein as original characters in that there are a few that garner some attention in various corners of the internet, but by and large the subject matter won’t carry engagement and it falls on the technical aspects of a piece to drive its social media standing.  Then there’s presentation, which in this context is just “how shit looks on the social media sites it gets posted to” and which I have repeatedly failed to take into account (or chosen to overlook) when spending hours/days/weeks/months/years on a piece; my Wall of 60s looks god-awful on both Twitter and Tumblr, because neither website handles images with a ratio of  2:1 or more very well.

For a long time now, I haven’t been enjoying art because I’ve been feeling the crush of those three failure points.  Sometimes (albeit VERY rarely lately) I’ll have an idea for a piece, get excited about it, actually create it, be happy with it, and then... post it to social media to crickets.  And those crickets come rushing in and make me feel that not only was posting it a bad idea but that somehow, the joy of creating retroactively didn’t happen and that if social media doesn’t like it (because if they liked it they would RT/RB it or comment on it or something), then I must also be wrong to have originally liked it myself.  Which, again, is ridiculous!  And I know it’s ridiculous even as I’m thinking and feeling it; you can’t take loved away and you can’t change the way you felt in the past just because you’re looking at it from a different perspective in the future.  But it’s a persistent feeling, and it’s been this way for years at this point, and is why all I had to show for 2022 were two commissions (both friends who specifically sought me out for art, which should also tell my brain/heart something! but we’re not gonna get into that rn lol), the beach bash, my Wall of 60s, and a couple refined sketches from the first couple weeks of January when I was trying to work on a new years resolution to draw more, even if things weren’t fully-realized masterpieces, and was using the art jam discord’s characters as practice (before I hit a huge depression spike and stopped completely, whoops).

It’s factually incorrect to say that there’s nothing I can do about my style; obviously a person’s art style is fluid and can change, and you can mimic others to varying degrees of success, and you can definitely improve (or devolve) in areas like composition, but of the three areas my art has been failing in, this is the area I think will be most difficult to do anything about in the short-term. Content and presentation, though? Those are easier.  Go into art projects knowing where you’ll be putting the final results and make sure you have a plan for display. Posting to Tumblr? most people’s dashes don’t display images wider than 500-700 pixels and taller images can (theoretically) thrive. On Twitter, a single image should be wider than it is tall but not significantly so, and it should be saved as a jpg because pngs will convert to jpgs anyway and you can’t control the quality and transparency is a nightmare and so on.  Content is also easier; if you care about metrics (and unfortunately, apparently I do), make fanart. Real fanart, with canon characters, for series that people are currently into.  Now is probably not the time for Slayers or Homestuck (unless you’re really feeling it), but its descendants are out there, ripe for the picking, and there are always the evergreen fandoms like Sailor Moon or Star Trek or the like.

Circling back around: when I was creating all those accounts for my (never-got-off-the-ground) writing project, I didn’t create a tumblr account for it, because that was right when the Tumblr Porn Ban stuff was happening, and everybody was jumping ship.  When the new year rolled over, I spent a lot of time thinking about it again, and decided it was finally time to Do Something With It, even if the Something was not the thing I’d originally intended.  I can talk all day about the Three Areas Where My Art Has Failed but the big fourth area is that I post to @xellart, on Tumblr and Twitter both, with the expectation that People Will See It, and that it will Get The Numbers.  This is obviously patently false, and has never been true (except that one time during the Lik the Bred meme era where Ancillary Justice was super popular and I combined the two), but I constantly set myself up for disappointment on this front, because it’s been 24 years that I’ve been at this, and I spent so much of that time working myself ragged so surely I have enough of a following by now to touch a handful of hearts?  That’s not how it works, but I swear I do it every time.  But, see... this pen name person, this person who is me but is not Xella... they don’t have a following.  They’ve sort of existed on the internet for five years, but also not really.  They’re starting fresh, which is what I’ve always wanted.  There’s no expectation there; any posts they make are literally shouting into the void, which is how I’ve always wanted to treat my personal twitter account anyway (even if it doesn’t actually work out like that most of the time).

So at the start of the year, I finally dusted them off, made them a tumblr, populated it a little bit with some stuff from my dash and my likes so it didn’t look like a bot, and started posting art again.  I haven’t wanted to talk about it because talking about it (here, there, or even in private to select friends) defeats the whole purpose, but I’ve never been great at keeping my mouth shut with my own secrets.  I’m still sitting here hesitating, now that I’m on paragraph eleven of this ridiculous ramble, because if people know, won’t it lose the magic? But given the recognizability of my style and how little I’ve done to try to alter or obscure it, there was always going to be the chance that the dots would connect anyway (even if that chance seems minuscule because there are billions of eyes on the internet but only a handful of them are likely to fall in my orbit, let alone fall there twice) so maybe it’s a moot point, I don’t know.  The point is, they can chuck art into the void and if it’s not “successful,” it doesn’t actually matter because there’s no expectation of success there. There’s not 24 years of building a following or a brand or friendships or anything there; it’s just another anonymous person on tumblr posting things that they like and if other people like it too, so be it.

Anyway it turns out that the whole thing has kind of backfired, because despite having 0 followers and no expectation of anything, the most recent post--which is not even especially good--is Getting The Numbers.  But more than that--SO much more than that--it is Getting The Tags.

I’ve talked a little bit in the past (albeit mostly on twitter, I think) how much tag-commentary means to most artists I know, especially here where we’ve got our own language and system and how much more genuine people tend to be in the tags (because only the OP, whoever they reblogged it from, and that person’s followers are likely to see them).  It’s something I definitely want to do more often myself, but often find myself paralyzed by (which is a rant for another day).  The Tags mean so much more than The Numbers, and I am getting so many warm fuzzies from The Tags on this post, and I am terrified of what that means for the future.  Which, yet again, is an obviously ridiculous emotion to be having about this, because there’s no expectation of anything here, and that ought to include expectations from me, as well.  But can I avoid raising my hopes so high after unexpected success? Will not the next offering automatically fail in relation? How can I avoid seeing things this way? And how in the name of all the gods and everything that’s holy can I ever explain any of this to a therapist in any way that makes sense to them so they can give me actionable advice for once in my misbegotten, miserable life?

(I think I'm also a little taken aback from the sheer volume of response because it confirms my theories about Content; not only was this a piece of art for a popular fandom, it was arguably a piece for a popular ship in a popular fandom.  Well, not even arguably--I absolutely tagged the ship name, because it contained both characters, even though it’s not remotely a romantic piece (to me. evidently this is not a universal experience, though? lmao))

Anyway the more I talk about it the more I get it off my chest but also the more anxious I get about talking about it so I’d better stop there, even though I have Many Other (somewhat-unrelated) Thoughts. They’ll have to wait, I guess.

#xellafail #mental health is hard #art is hard

[xellandria]

Oc Ask Meme!!

7,26 and B for Alexander

(https://www.tumblr.com/xellandria/725141210645315584/uncommon-questions-for-ocs-and-their-creators for ease of access)

oh no this post is going to contain art from twenty years ago, run for the hills! Also this got long lmao whoops

7. What triggers nostalgia for them, most often? Do they enjoy that feeling? For a long time, Alex had a heart-shaped pendant necklace that belonged to his first love. They were in that "this person can do no wrong" puppy-love stage of infatuation that a lot of early relationships (especially between young people) get when she was murdered and he was forced to flee because he was accused of killing both Mephala (framed) and the town's sheriff/top law enforcement guy (valid, sort of). It was the only possession of hers he had to remind him of her, and the memories associated with it were intensely mixed (a: her, but also b: murder), and after Mephala's fridging he carried it with him for a long time (somewhere between 20-200 years, depending on how my timeline for other events that aren't set in stone yet end up shaking out).

Do you know that thing that you do sometimes when you're really depressed and feeling self-flagellating where you already feel bad, so you intentionally start thinking about a Bad Thing that happened so your life can suck extra hard? And how obviously thinking about it makes you feel worse, but there's a weird undercurrent of pleasure and satisfaction at the ability to hurt yourself like that? It's weird to think of him like this because in the "present day" he's a very happy-go-lucky kinda guy like 97% of the time, but there was definitely a period in his past where he was that kind of angsty, moody teen.

And then, fourteen pages into the comic, the doofus accidentally left it behind on a bar countertop while escaping from some bounty hunters :V

28. What is their preferred mode of transportation? Alex is a big fan of the persistence predator's famous "walk 'em to death" strategy! So are a lot of my characters, I'm realizing (because other methods of transport like wagons and cars and bicycles and scooters and such suck to draw I guess, lmao). I think Alex would be an indifferent equestrian; competent enough to stay on the horse (once he learned, which I'm not sure when he would have done), but very much a sack in the saddle. While he can fly, he prefers not to because he haaaaaaaaaates his wings; there ARE humanoid creatures with wings on Meir, but a lot of them don't interface well with most of society and have a bit of a Reputation, so there's a bit of a stigma there, and people tend to stare. Alex doesn't mind being the center of attention, but he definitely prefers it to be for the things he's doing, not the thing he is.

At some point recently I said (probably on twitter) that I'd only drawn him with his wings three times: once for a "sexy" wallpaper, once for a NaNoMangO pregame meme, and once just recently for the ref sheet I posted a couple weeks ago. While I was going through First Target again for this ask just now I realized it's actually been four: his wings came out when he was fighting Viktor (which, now that I've remembered, made me go "oh yeah, that was important cos people witnessed that he wasn't human which made them go after him extra hard," it's funny the kind of details you forget after twenty years, rofl)

Edit: FIVE times, actually: I forgot I did one of those "what's your god tier" memes in the height of my Homestuckdom and he got Thief of Life.

B) What inspired you to create them? In seventh and eighth grade, in the late 90s, my friends and I were all role playing on various portions of Yahoo!'s social outlets, both in their chatrooms (Aenye, aka Ayenee aka A&E aka the Arts & Entertainment section) and on their groups (okay in fairness that was mostly just me, I don't think my RL friends indulged in that bit). I "GMed" a lot of stuff for my friends in the chats, and we had a fairly expansive storyline going, but a lot of it was pulled from things we were invested in at the time and a lot of characters were straight up just whichever media characters we were crushing on at the time, sometimes with the barcodes sanded off and sometimes not. One of the characters I "mained" at the time, both in RP with my RL friends and in various RP groups (which were mostly mixed-anime isekai-style things or directly based in the world of the anime/manga Slayers), was Xellandria Butadientium.

Xellandria Butadientium, Xella for short, was heavily, heavily, heavily based on Xelloss Metallium from Slayers, a smiling "trickster priest" with a deliciously malicious side and very obscure motivations. She was in competition with every other Mary Sue OC in those groups for Xelloss' attentions, though even at the time I (and she) was less interested in romance and sex than in just Being There and I dipped out of several groups once whoever was playing Xelloss there indicated their interest in eRPing (I was like, fourteenish and assumed I would care less/more when I got older. That, uh, never happened :Y)

When we moved on from Yahoo onto our own private forums I started redesigning some characters to be less obviously derivative and wholesale replacing others, and Xella was one of the ones hit with a redesign. She kept some of the things that had become "iconic" to her by then, but I tried to move away from the rest.

The problem here was that there were five main characters in The Bloodraven Chronicles, and only three of us bay area girls RPing; I was responsible for three of the five. One was Xella, one was James (another character who started his life being based off Xelloss, at least visually), and the other was straight up just Xelloss. That wouldn't do if we were making this an original story, which we all* had it in our heads at the time to do (because that was Just What You Did, we were formulating Aslua Studios who were going to Make It Big doing Things related to this story!). So, as Xella was originally a genderbent version of Xelloss who eventually evolved into her own thing, I figured I would just do it again, but in reverse!

Thus, alleX, who evolved over the next couple months into Alex, and whose design was finalized in September of 2001, just in time for me to be noodling around with the idea of starting a webcomic, which I would start posting to KeenSpace in November of that year.

Alex's personality takes a lot of inspiration from those old Xelloss roleplayers, though it leans into the more "human" versions, where he was less inscrutable and more just kind of silly. Nowadays he's pretty happy-go-lucky, which you would not know from anything in this long-ass post, l m a o

Anyway to cap it off, have a bonus visual chart of all this, from one of those "1 like = 1 answer" things on twitter about his D&D AU version:

(* I am reasonably sure, in retrospect, that my friends were just going along with my own desire to Make It Big (With Art) and that they had no real stake in it. In fairness, this was the correct decision/response on their part, but you know.)

#xellafail #long post is long #alex #original characters #bowspirit's aim #boy these images aren't actually posting side-by-side in my draft preview #I hope they post correctly or this is going to be an even longer scroll than it is while I'm typing it rofl #TY BOGGIE RAMBLING ABOUT OCS IS THE BESSSST #edit sigh yup it doesn't wanna post the comic pages next to each other sorry for making you scroll extra far :(