#and her tail is usually between neutral/fondness because she’s got no thoughts beyond ‘I love my friends’

[sincerely-sofie]

ALSO IVE BEEN MEANING TO ASK THIS!! BUT!!

I’ve noticed Twig’s tail flame changes color- Is it emotion based? Or purely for aesthetic reasons? Either way, it’s a fun detail and I love her design as a whole.,,,,

Short answer: Yes! It is emotion based, and thanks so much for liking my little litzard’s design!

Long answer: Oh man do I ever have a tangent to go off on.

Originally, I couldn’t decide what color I wanted Twig’s tail flame to be. The Pokédex states that charmeleons will spew blue-white fire when excitedly going after opponents, which I thought about making her tail flame, but I just couldn’t commit to one color. It was a struggle and I was starting to decide to just give up and give her a standard yellow-ish orange flame… but then I remembered @modmad, the creator of a webcomic that has greatly influenced my creativity throughout the years, and a major character in said webcomic, RGB.

RGB is a man with a television set for a head and a color bar for a mouth, and the colors are constantly bleeding off of his screen. Already a neat design, but here’s the kicker: all those colors mean something. Yellow is fear, cyan is sadness, green is happiness, magenta is curiosity, and red is anger.

This character can only emote so much using his “face”, but Modmad hacked the system and basically made an emotion percentage bar which people can use to judge what exactly RGB is feeling at any given time. It’s pretty simple to grasp what his main emotion is based on which color is bleeding the most, but it gets super fun to dig into the implications of any other colors that are bleeding as well.

It’s similar for Twig, though I’ve only recently outlined the complete meanings of her tail flames and haven’t drawn them in action very much! You may have noticed that her tail flame’s color tend to lean towards a magenta / fuchsia when she’s having unpleasant flashbacks. That’s because that shade of fire indicates fear!

I really didn’t have too much of a personal guide to the flame colors before now— my guiding principles were “fuchsia = scared beyond all belief, neon colors = stressed / excited, softer colors = chill / tired”, but with this handy dandy lil chart I recently made, I’ll be able to be a lot more consistent going forward :>

Thanks for being interested in this little detail! I didn’t think anyone would notice, so it’s super fun to get to talk about it in-depth! Enjoy a happy lil etymology geek Twig admiring a dictionary Celebi gifted her as my thanks :>