For Kris there was a scene I’d always had in my head that I now realise should be a bit different
Kris quotes a bunch of facts about Fuchsia the Superpower and Kate is like how do you know all that, so Kris (after pulling it out of her flow-merge watch) holds up the first volume of a “historical fiction” comic about her, of which there are like 8 kinda thick volumes
I kept listening to that Nostalgia Critic parody song about grimdark Superman because I love it
And a few words just kinda stuck in my mind
Through the inspiring words of my father,
I’ll become a symbol, an icon
A saviour to restore hope to those who have none
Because I think about everything way too much, I just kind of thought about those words
And finally realised that basically, those words are a quick summary of why I like the song and think it’s so funny and on-point.
I was thinking about whether it made sense for Sanctuary City to be in Salvare or not, and actually I think it might make a lot of sense
Because think about it
We have this whole debate (or “debate” considering its civility) going on right now about refugees who are coincidentally from the one actual place where terrorists might be disguising themselves as refugees and America wouldn’t be massively overreacting to the risk of terrorism
If the Faith attribute is about accepting basically anybody, but also has “superpower” as one facet of it, it seems all too likely that this weird “superpower theatre”
I may finally have an explanation for “The War”. maybe.
So Graznar is a Soulless, which is the opposite of a Soulful (recently I realised that’s not quite true and I explain that further down this post, but that’s not important right now). He has his HQ in Corazón, formerly the Heartland—home of the Soulful.
Now, I realised, Corazón is a weird name for that place to have.
Thing is, it’s kinda weird it would be named in Spanish, cause I don’t know of anywhere in Aluma that speaks Spanish. Grævonia speaks basically-English.
Sketchcanon: all the people with mineral names (there are like four I think – Fuchsia [has pink topaz as talisman], Sardius, Carbonado, Sphene…) possessed one of the legendary “jewel cases” which are cd-rom cases that contain mineral discs. Each one contains a program that has the power to rework the world a different way, but all of these ways get rid of humans.
The discs were Carbonado’s invention, probably. I know that there was a “tech noble dev command in the South” which the technotranscendents that would later found Techanopia got their skills at, so I’m thinking that was like an early mission of the Fort, to leverage techno cirquers to create a method of cirque programming so Carbonado could create his program discs.
At some point the Techs and other people must have just left him because he clearly didn’t get to carry out his intentions. Either that, or he made the discs and then was just like fuck it, I don’t wanna use these, it’s more fun to sit here and exploit people by running diamond mines. (This came from a cleverbad quote – “He said, ornaments and other form of exploitation”)
I realised that there’s kind of a plot hole regarding Fuchsia…
Fuchsia was part of “The War”, and later went to found Salvare, where she currently leads it as the world’s only materiotranscendent gem-person. It was supposed to be that she died of natural causes and then resurrected as that, but I realised that if she indeed died of natural causes why do I imagine her resurrecting as looking about 30 when she should be like 70 or something. Fuchsia is the kind of person not to be ashamed of who she is, to the point it would kinda more sense for her to just come back as a tough old woman who’s still doing crazy superpower antics to the extent she can manage it.
I dunno, maybe doing her reality-bending Faith stunts back in the days of the War and stuff was rough on her body and like a few years after she founded Salvare she died a really anticlimactic death of like cancer or organ failure or something. That would be really ridiculous, to have this really awesome superhero who does all this unbelievable stuff and founds an entire new nation and then she just dies of cancer.
The interval between these only gets longer, but at least this time it’s mostly because I’ve actually been posting things as proper posts instead of in here. Still, there are a few things.
First, the Observers’ colour is apparently called “atoll” as I found out on this neat website. Neat bit of trivia. I remember back when all MBs were going to be variations of that colour, a time this post still hasn’t gotten out of.
My mind couldn’t think of the word “papaya”,
OC thing: Fuchsia has the power to become a “materiotranscendent” after death through the sheer larger-than-life idea of her shaping her topaz clasp rôle object into a new statue-like body made of fluid topaz (cuz eff matter conservation). This form doesn’t age/sicken but has the downside it’s more brittle than her original body and if it passed a certain point of breakage that’d be it for her (worrying when she can’t repair fractures very fast), so she can’t really fight the way she used to.
Here are the Arbiter in progress, Cragwing, and a quick Fuchsia I literally just drew, from one of many pages that’s been sitting in my folder way too long.
The former two I’m gonna describe a bit later in a Sangkara post but I may as well say a bit about Fuchsia you may not have gotten. She’s one of a number of side characters that played important roles in Aluma’s history; to be a bit more specific she was a superhero of sorts known as The Superpower, and the first of the Superpower archetype. In present times there’s at least one comic about “The Superpower” very loosely based on her, but almost everybody forgets it was based on an actual person. Kris, one of the main characters, was greatly influenced by this comic.
I’d had the basic idea for her design with the big poofy wing-shaped hair and the “feathered” cape for some time but then recently I found out about SU and realised it would make way more sense if Kris with her vague mineral theme admired somebody who also had a connection to minerals… so I shamelessly gave her a dark pink topaz stone clasp as a rôle object. :p
(Fun fact: Fuchsia is supposed to represent Faith, so her original name was Fiducia [trust/confidence in Latin], but that sounded like Fuchsia so I decided she’d probably go by that more often, and then fuchsia became the colour of Faith, so her gem is meant to match both her attribute and her name)
The stone is supposed to turn into a pair of big fragmented floating wings but I wasn’t in the mood to draw that at the moment.
Sardius and Sardonyx are both really good names, Sardonyx makes me imagine some kind of dinosaur or specific species of leijonœrn in shades of black with large visible red claws because that’s what it means (red claw)
(I was looking up minerals again for reasons, this time more RFS than SU; specifically I wanted to find a mineral for Fuchsia because the Gems made me realise a mineral hero would be the absolute coolest thing to Kris so why doesn’t this “Superpower” she admires have at least some connection to minerals to echo her own as “Silica Heroine” and with all these mineral-descriptor archetypes)
