lunarrhapsody - Tumblr blog

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[lunarrhapsody]

All About Scarlet

Basic Info

Age: Unknown Height: 5'6" Weight: 323 lbs Birthday: ??? Sex: F, apparently

Personality

Scarlet is normally extremely quiet and reserved, but observant. However, get her talking and she'll reveal herself to be a never-ending font of zealous moral/political rants. Scarlet also makes and holds grudges easily, and is deeply bothered by any display of "indulgence" or "disloyalty". She views the government and most major social institutions on the island of Mirra to be illegitimate, preferring the long-forgotten Pharosian colonial government, and won't hesitate to let that be known.

Relationships

Scarlet lives as a foreign exchange student with Theo Goldsmith, who is also her only "friend". She knows Alice by association with Theo, and finds her annoying.

Hobbies

Rather than typical hobbies, Scarlet spends her time spying on the people of Mirra and looking for anything she would consider a threat. When she finds one, she acts as a vigilante and attempts to interviene. She is known to hide in unusual areas when found in public, such as trash cans, the ceiling/walls, etc. She is also a skilled sword fighter.

Abilities

Scarlet's body is infused with a compound known as vivium, a mercury-based self-replicating alloy that certain individuals (such as Scarlet) can manipulate on contact. Users can change vivium's state of matter, shape, and other physical properties such as hardness or magnetism. They can also assimilate other metals and convert them into Vivium, however because vivium is an alloy of multiple metals there is a limited amount of additional metal of a particular type that can be assimilated before needing to assimilate more of some other kind of metal.

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I have discovered that DeviantArt is a terrifying place

That one picture of Alice I posted keeps getting saved by people at a rate of like 4 people per day and I haven't touched the account since Thursday

I made a deviantart go look at it

because Tumblr puts my art through the blender and Instagram won't let me crop stuff good

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All About Alice (and the power system)

Over the course of these next few weeks I'm going to be writing about my characters, starting with our protagonist, Alice Weaver, and proceeding with a random selection from then on. These shouldn't be necessary reading for the comic, and will not contain spoilers. The only thing you'd lose from reading these is the "joy" of extracting the details from the comic yourself as it is produced.

Basic Info

Age: 22 Height: 5'4" Weight: 160 lbs Birthday: 23 August, 1988 Sex: F (for "failure")

Personality

Alice is known by those who know her for her irreverent attitude and incessant need to annoy people around her. She maintains this attitude in all but the most life-threatening situations, and evaluates whether to be friendly with someone based on their willingness to tolerate her banter rather than the amount they like her. Perhaps in an effort to validate her own flaws, she tends to ignore faults in others. Her motivations in the beginning are primarily selfish, and her greatest motivator is the desire to feel powerful. However she is self aware and believes she is intrinsically a bad person. This belief is part of what motivates her to steal, since committing crimes doesn't infringe on her self image, instead reinforcing it. Despite frequently being pushed into violent situations and having few ethical boundaries, Alice absolutely will not kill anyone. She has a complex relationship with her principles, seeing the few she has as a hindrance but also feeling bad about not having more. Alice also has a complex relationship with her sexuality, being pan and semi-gender-nonconforming. She is very outwardly promiscuous, in part as a way of making others uncomfortable, but also as a way of reasserting control over her identity, which she is more generally not comfortable with. However, she is also a virgin, which is a source of embarassment for her.

Relationships

She has very few close friends. In particular, she is friends with Jack, whom she met by chance in middle school and is fairly close with, and Theo, whom she met later in high school and tends to pick on.

Hobbies

Alice is an amateur bodybuilder and recreational thief specializing in cutting edge technology. She once took martial arts, but has neglected the pursuit for many years. She is also a self-taught singer and guitarist, preferring the electric guitair. She's also dabbled in amplifier and filter technology, but doesn't really understand how they work. She primarily uses these powers to cover songs people find annoying.

Abilities (and power system explanation)

Abilities in Lunar Rhapsody are a combination of biological attributes such as resistance to extreme heat, wings, super strength, or anasthetic spit, and "soul abilities" that work by posessing and manipulating objects or concepts with the user's soul. A person's soul always posesses parts of their body, and is most concentrated in parts that are associated with that person's life, such as their blood, brain and heart. This gives all humans a strong resistance to any ability used directly onto their body, or things they percieve as part of them including clothes or tools they are comfortable with. Alice can be most closely described as a "vampire", but lacks a lot of the strengths and weaknesses that vampires in most media have; she doesn't combust in sunlight and can eat garlic, but also can't turn into a bat and isn't immortal. She does have fangs and can incapacitate others with her bite, and if she consumes parts of a soul she can heal and temporarily mimic that soul's ability. She is also telekinetic.

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Complete Page 1 of a scrapped plotline with a different artstyle. Now, technically I like this artstyle better than the one I'm going to use. So why am I not using it? For one, it takes FOREVER to get right. For two, it requires use of a brush from Krita that I have yet to replicate accurately in CSP (which is better in general). I may return to this style in the future, however, as I do plan on the style of Lunar Rhapsody to be different at different points to reflect the mood.

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Sketches of various characters.

Clockwise from top right: Liz, Crystal, Lawrence's head, Dr. Scratch, Top Hat's head, Charlotte, Alice, Jack's hand

Four characters who will absolutely not show up in the comic.

Me going insane over the course of a discord stream. Depicted, from top to bottom, are: - Luna - Pixie - Specs - A friend of mine in the style of Big Nate - Top Hat - Pixie, possessing Alice's hand - Lawrence (TV head) - Someone's eyes IDK - Alice, with hand possessed by Pixie - Mettaton fused with that robot guy from Fallout: New Vegas - The entire Greek Alphabet - Facial experiments

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ART. ALL BY ME.

Using Clip Studio Paint, if you wanted to know.

Page 1 in the process of being constructed. I would have colored the panels in order, but due to layer shenanigans it seemed easier to color all of the ones that did not bleed over the edge of a frame (which coincidentally were the ones containing Alice). If you ever wanted to know my process, this picture shows all three steps after the sketch; one such sketch is pictured below.

Finalizing the design of Alice as well as concepts for Emily. These two are the protagonist and deuteragonist for Episode 1.

Scarlet, a major antagonist, also in an intermediate design that I want to touch up.

The banner image, depicting a badminton game between Alice and her little brother Vlad. This was initially created as an art trade combining a lightning strike and a badminton game. Event may or may not become canon.

[lunarrhapsody]

I made a deviantart go look at it

because Tumblr puts my art through the blender and Instagram won't let me crop stuff good

[lunarrhapsody]

What the Heck Is This Thing??? A Manifesto of Unnecessary Length

Introduction to the Snow

FELLAS. If you already stumbled across this blog somehow despite being a blog dedicated to a comic that does not yet exist that is also currently fresh from the womb by a person who has basically never used Tumblr before and also barely uses the internet in general, congratulations, I guess? This post is meant as a newcomer guide which will mostly be useful for when this blog actually has stuff in it, so I guess you're in the right place.

The Good Stuff

This is a blog for the (currently) upcoming webcomic I call Lunar Rhapsody, which sounds pretty chill, maybe you should go like read it or something when it comes out.

As for the comic itself, it's a modern-day-ish fantasy/sci-fi story about this 22-year-old who just graduated high school, Alice Weaver, who's also a magnet for fun descriptors like "high profile thief", "quote-unquote vampire", and "annoying". She gets involved in an incident with a piece of experimental technology trying to steal from a mysterious company called Knight Biochemical that's run by her former therapist. She is then forced to work for him both in the lab and in the summer camp he runs as a front. Wacky hijinks ensue as she gets caught between corporate ambition, domestic terrorism, vigilantes of questionable moral standing, extradimensional horrors and the unhinged antics demanded by the voices inside her head.

This blog will serve as a sort of companion to the comic, detailing its production process, additional information about its characters and world, Q and A, and bonus art, as well as any other stray thoughts that go unrepressed in my brain. I will have a bunch of other social medias carrying this same content (as of right now I have a Twitter with nothing of substance and an Instagram with some miscellaneous art. A YouTube channel about writing in general I'm making with a friend will be existing soon as well.) Now I said I'm new to Tumblr, but out of all the popular social media platforms available this one seems best as a "home base" due to its personalized, text-based nature, so that's what it is now. Whoops.

Content Warnings

This is, believe it or not, a thing not for kids, as it will contain mild gore, drug use, strong language, sexual themes, and revealing clothing but never full nudity. As the main characters are fresh out of high school, I want them to talk and act like people their age in the real world and address the kinds of issues they would be expected to confront (in addition to the more fantastical problems). However, I also intend to leverage these elements to generate appeal, but never more than what I (keyword: I) would consider the line where it becomes shock value or genuine porn. But unless you work at a really cool place, it will (to use a turn of phrase) probably not be safe for your workplace. Use your own discretion with regards to that.

The Immediate Future

This blog's gonna get slowly populated with content over the next few months as production is in full swing. So stay tuned if you're interested.

The comic's first update is expected to be released by August of this year (hopefully earlier), and I'll post details about where it can be read. I'll also post the first few pages to my various platoforms. It will be in the format of a somewhat but not completely self-contained chapter, which will be roughly a third of the first self-contained story or "episode". Each update will be another chapter, constructing each episode piece by piece. I'm deliberately not going to give the traditional page-by-page updates because that makes my schedule less flexible and, in my opinion, ruins the experience. As the comic is gonna be written and drawn more or less exclusively by me, a college student working on a Physics Bachelor's who's self-taught in writing and art, we'll have to see how things go in terms of production speed and quality.

Feel free to ask questions in the question asky box over on my page if you feel inclined for... some reason. I'll answer them probably within a day of receiving them, not because of any sense of urgency or importance, but because I (evidently) like making words happen a lot and frequently.

Legal Stuff

Oh. Also. Not that it's important now, but the whole thing's gonna be under some form of Creative Commons license, so if something I make tickles your fancy for some unholy reason I will never take legal action against anything you do with my creations. And that includes stuff that makes you money without me getting any of it. Hope the power doesn't go to your heads.

Peace,

Willy Tombstone (pseudonym) aka The Author Guy

[lunarrhapsody]

discord headers are so scary