New Normal Character Design: R and R

Sunday, February 23, 2020 - 1:13 PM

Character designs, go! We've got Ravage and Rae in their jackets and not! I kinda had kept pushing off drawing this current design page until riiiiiight before I needed it for page 16. Both Rae and Ravage have shuffled down through a ton of my projects, so I'm really glad to finally have a home from them. Um, mild spoilers? There's gonna be a later scene where Rae wears a hoodie. Oooh.

I guess Rae and Ravage's planned trajectory have both changed so damn much from their initial inceptions that there're no spoilers in sharing them here, which is cool, cuz it's kinda been a ride!

We'll start with Ravage, my tall, skinny punk. Ooh boy, her inception might be more embarrassing than Rae's, but I'm not sure. I'll leave that up to you guys, I guess. So Ravage is a character initially born in the combination of an origin of a dream where I was a passenger in her head, and watching a promo for the Suite Life of Zack and Cody which got me thinking about what it would be like to be the older sib of insanely visible and famous precocious brats. In this dream, Ravage was a goth lesbian who, of course, fell in love with a vampire girl, and ended up being transformed into a vampire via her kiss, which in this dream did the ridiculous trope I have now seen elsewhere, that a kiss-initiated transformation was hella painful, but generated more powerful vampires, because of course it did. I feel like I should say this now, but THERE WILL BE NO VAMPIRES IN NEW NORMAL. Nope. No vampires. If something like a vampire shows up, it won't actually be a vampire, it would be some sort of blood-feeding fae, or mind control monstery do-hicky, or something else. Basically, I'm not averse to playing with some vampire-y tropes, but I do not want to play with vampire lore. There's a lot more fun things to play with anyway. I do plan to have dragons.

Rae's origin was kinda hilarious, and I don't even feel bad. My gaming group had found a particularly fun Mary Sue generator...AND OH, HOLY HELL, I STILL HAVE IT SAVED. Okay, so this particular Mary Sue generator was located here: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/fatguy.html, and Rae's description in particular is below:

"She appears to be a normal student except she dresses like a commando soldier foxgirl, her eyes can see the goodness in any creature's heart and her hair is navy blue and sparkles in bright light, but secretly she is actually a half-pixie.
She is unknowingly the queen of her kind working for the church and she will fight her enemies with the power to turn her foes inside-out with her mind or to turn anyone she bites into a unicorn.
Her friends and enemies call her Ravenwoman Loveriver!
Her constant companion is a amorous mysterious robot who is also her father.
Her favored weapon is a conscious freezing poleaxe which feeds on blood."

So yeah, pretty much none of that is a part of the character anymore, but I've used a lot of different elements in different iterations of Rae's character. Really, she kinda ended up melding with another of my old characters, Tsuki, which is where her hair color an a lot of the ways she carries herself came from.

So my initial idea for Rae's story was a challenge to myself, to take an entire cast of characters randomly generated from this Mary Sue generator and try to make an actually good story out of it! Yeah, I gave up on that, but Rae stuck around, and now she's here!

Basically, I have way too much baggage with these two, and wanted to let you know how ridiculous I am!