Siendes & Mona - Raw Sketch

Remember when I’ve told you that I work in iterations?

This particular picture is a great example of how the very first iteration looks. Mona’s eyes and mouth are skewed, her arm isn’t right, the her neckline’s off – among others problems. Things like this are common in my sketches, it’s not as if I’d get it right on the first time.

But what I DID get down – and that’s the actually important part – is their facial expressions (I especially love Siendes) and body language. The idea has been finalized and the rest is window dressing. The foundation is laid.

It’s unlikely I continue to work on this picture, but if I would the next step would be to construct the anatomy of the torsos and heads right and look for references if necessary. That’s when I start redrawing things over and over until they’re either to my liking or piss me off so much I refuse to work any further on them. ;)

The inks of Chally. Yay! :D

The sketch!

This will be a companion piece to the Bust of Siendes I did a few weeks ago. I plan to use both of them on Traces of Chaos‘ castpage.

This particular sketch is actually the fifth iteration¹ of this portrait, and I propably need one more in order to fix her cheekbones.

I enjoy putting so much work into a simple lineart once in a while – it’s the later iterations that make a sketch come alive, because then I have fussed out the basics and can push the details. And it’s always those tiny, hard to see details which pull an image together. It costs alot of times though, which means I can’t do that many iterations on a comic page itself.

A quick lineart of young Siendes.  I plan to run some simple colouring tests on it. I know what kind of colouring style I want, I now just need to find a faster way to achieve those effects.

The huntress - art by me

To be honest, my first negative reaction to Metroid Other M hasn’t been fair.  I do worry that they’ll fuck up “humanizing” Samus, but of course that’s no the whole story. First reactions are neither rational nor complete, which makes them so dangerous – it’s always worth digging deeper to see what exactly caused them.

See, Super’s been my first Metroid game. The second I powered up my family’s SNES with that cartridge and saw the loading screen, the game and its heroine had captured my imagination. And the endboss? That nailed it and turned me into a fan of life. I began thinking about what kind of person Samus was and what kind of life she lead, how she felt – normal fandom stuff, really.

Samus Aran wasn’t the first character who interested me enough to write or draw her. She wasn’t the last either, although by now I’ve learned not to get too attached to other people’s characters. But currently she’s the only one I’m a fan of.

See you next mission - art by me

It’s partly because I’ve always been fascinated by the strong, silent warrior ladies, partly because I grew out of my other fandoms either due shock¹ or simply because my interests or world view changed.

But the main reason I stayed a Metroid fan was Samus-the-Cypher – I got enough glimpses of her character to get a basic grasp of her, but still so little that I was free to imagine her how I liked. I soon knew what kind of person Samus must’ve been and how she acted, just like I know exactly who Siendes and Chally are. There’s a whole inticriate world build around my fan-version of Samus Aran – and to be honest, if I’d switch around some of the names, you propably wouldn’t recognize it as Metroid, just that this is a world were the government employs bounty hunters – one of whom happens to wear an alien-made powersuit. It’s my vision of Samus and it’s unique.

And now Other M is going to take this away by replacing it with the official-approved-emotional-life of Samus Aran.

That‘s the sticking point.

The Samus in the Other M game, she will be different than how I imaginated my Samus to be. She’ll behave differently and will have different motivation. She’s totally different character after all, written by other people. She’ll be fitted to the taste of time and the audience she’s intended for – the game has to sell afterall². And humanizing Samus has the potential to be a great marketing move. It might be the key to expand the fan-base, to rejuvinate the series and to pave the way for more Metroid Goodness – which is a very good thing.

Bureaucracy - art by me

But… For me Official Samus will not be able to life up to my private version of her. She cannot. For more than ten years I’ve thought and written about my Personal Samus (even if I’ve rarely shown it) and she got tailored exactly to my preferences.  In contrast the official version will have exactly one game for character developement and she will be designed for the broad public. She has no chance. The best I can hope for is that she’s close enough to my personal version that I can incooperate the new information without any major clashes.

Well, this is my problem and in no form or shape Nintendo’s fault. Conflicts between fanon and canon are common the second anybody grows too attached to characters they do not own. It’s what fuels fix-fics, fan-rages and lots of fantastic and/or craptastic fan art and fanfictions. It’s both good and bad – if something catches somebody’s imagination, they’ll want to play with it. Sometimes it goes to far and people forget those toys and characters aren’t theirs. Human nature.

But that’s what makes concentrating on my original work so worthwile – it’s my universe, my dollhouse, and I’m the only one who shapes it.

Hm. How does “Traces of Chaos, 200 years later” sound? My private Samus would fit great into that setting. She might even keep her first name, although I definitivly would have to design the powersuit…