#oc: rowena blevins

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I always say someday I’ll draw portraits for all of my Pokemon OCs but I do so at such a glacial pace that I just keep trying to improve my portraits of the same five characters once their old art hurts to look at.

Anyway this is Rowena, my Diamond player character, who started with Turtwig. She has two sisters, one older and one younger, and they all have matching Gracidea tattoos. She and her older sister tangled with Team Galactic when they were young trainers, came face-to-face with more legendary Pokemon than you can count on one hand, and managed to keep the world from being destroyed. After a loss to the Elite Four as a teenager, Rowena quit being a full-time Pokemon Trainer and as of the present she’s a graduate student studying the myths and legends of Sinnoh. 

This is Storm, her younger sister, and Glynis, her older sister.

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Say, just curious. What exactly is Rowena's eye colour? Brown? Orangy brown? Red but you're a coward? :v

Bucket how dare you accuse 10-year-old me of being a coward in OC design. Her eye color is amber*, thank you very much!

*Strictly speaking, that doesn’t answer the brown/orangy-brown question, because looking at just a sample size of three pieces of amber jewelry I have, the colors range from brown to brown-orange to orange-brown. (Not to mention white amber and green amber, which are also included in my jewelry collection**, but those have the color modifiers so we’re not mentioning them.) Rowena’s eye color would fall on the orange-brown end of the spectrum, but not quite bright orange enough to be described as simply “orange”. 

** “Roddy why do you have so much amber jewelry?” Because I went on study abroad a month in Poland and went absolutely ham jewelry shopping because I’ve been obsessed with amber as a color and concept and quasi-gemstone since I was 10 years old and could make an OC whose eye color could be described as “amber”, duh, next question.

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Coloring with sharpie is fun

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Rowena: “I don’t need anyone to validate me! I know my own worth!”

Professor Rowan, who has known her since she was a baby, who has known her father and her family forever, who has seen her in all the stages of her life from bratty child to sullen teen to a very smart and stubborn young woman: “I understand that and I’m glad for that but. That’s. That’s how you get a PhD. The committee has to evaluate you. And decide. You can’t just decide for yourself. You have to. to present. to the committee.”

Rowena: “Sounds super lame.”

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I promised I’d do this, and I have: an old meme, featuring most of my Pokemon OCs, and some rivals/NPCs who have featured prominently in the fics I wrote back when I was.....13.

The only two OCs not here are Toshiro (because even after 8 years I still haven’t figured out what he looks like) who would be “laughs nervously”, and Marie (who’s kind of detached from everyone else here and who I’ve only ever drawn once anyway) who would be yet another “YEET”.

I originally wasn’t going to include N here because Gen 5 is kinda when the games started giving us more than bare-bones characterization that I could run with in any direction (which is what I’ve done with rivals Blue and Silver, and Champion Lance) but since I was leaving out Toshiro (who’s from Unova) I figured I might as well include the other Unova boy, since I can draw N in five minutes flat from memory anyway, it’s not like it required any effort on my part to include him.

Now that I have portraits for all most of these idiots, I could do a proper intro post for them. Or I could just continue to only meme. Both sound good.

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Some Pokémon OC doodles since I keep getting battered by the waves of nostalgia for these kids. Rowena, Zoe, Zeke, and some random Bulbasaur, none of these three even have Bulbasaur, why.

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you ever in the mood to draw something fake-symbolic with your OCs 

I couldn’t decide which was better, I like the second composition of her having wings more but I spent too long drawing the Honchkrow in my initial idea to not post it.

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every middle school has that one delinquent kid whose posture is so bad that they’re basically rubber

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randomly in a mood to do stuff with some of my Pokemon OCs so here’s aesthetic boards for two of the three Blevins sisters, Storm and Rowena.

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This is.....criminally stupid, but I think it might be at least a little funny for anyone who doesn’t know the characters so here it is.

Storm and Brook announce they’re dating to their older sisters, and god damn do these two families have to make a production out of absolutely fucking everything god can’t we just have brunch in fucking peace.

Storm, Rowena, and Glynis (the black haired girls) are mine, and Brook, Stacey, and Jenny are @scattereddreamer‘s.

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Been in a Pokemon mood lately and had these sketches sitting around to line and color. Here’s the Sinnoh Garbage Sisters: Glynis, Rowena, and Storm. Glyn and Storm take more after their mom, while Ro more resembles her dad.

It really weirds me out when I think about how Glyn and Ro have existed in some form for a full actual entire decade now.

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I’ve had some of these characters for a decade. It was probably inevitable that things started spiraling desperately out of control like this.

So! Anyway. I don’t talk about my Pokemon OCs much, but I love them, and thus have created this massive overwhelming chart to throw into the void without any more context on any of these characters, most likely thus leaving you, the viewer, with many questions, unless you just scrolled right past it because it hurt your eyes, which I wouldn’t be able to blame you for honestly. I tried to at least categories the different types of OCs I have - there’s the ones based on the characters I played the games with, there’s ones based on the unused other protagonist design that I didn’t pick (e.g. Red, Ethan, Toshiro), there’s ones who are rivals who I’ve expanded on (e.g. Zeke, Silver), there’s ones who are NPCs/Gym Leaders/Elite Four/Whatever who I’ve expanded on (e.g. Daisy, Clair, Lance, N…) – let’s be real, Pokemon is pretty thin on characterization, it’s definitely getting better but it’s thin and so once I get my hands on an NPC, the amount I put into developing them is enough that I count them as a sort-of-OC. I haven’t actually done anything with the Alola trio, but I had to include them since I was including Marisol.

I was also going to include colors for “BFFs” (e.g. Piper and Zeke, Red and Lance, Marisol and Hau and Lillie) and “BFFs Whether You Want To Be Or Not” (e.g. Ethan and Silver, Marisol and Gladion, Everyone and Clair) but I think this is horrifying and complicated enough, honestly. 

The asterisk on Sinnoh is because there are many other OCs in that group, but they’re not mine, and don’t have any ties to anyone outside of Sinnoh, but I’m gonna make a separate chart for Sinnoh.

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Since I’ve been thinking bout my Pokemon OCs, I was also thinking about how something that tends to be beyond my drawing expertise is “making characters who are family resemble each other in a way that is more than ‘same hair same skin tone’”, and how I’ve wanted to practice avoiding that with Silver and Rowena, who are brother and sister but have very different coloration, so I can’t just lazily shorthand it. 

I’ll admit, I cheated a little lot by doodling one basic sketch and then altering details, like the jaw and chin and cheekbones, but like, gotta start somewhere aND WHEN DID IT GET TO BE 11 PM. See if I hadn’t cheated it woulda just taken me longer and I wasn’t gonna go to bed until I finished it, so really, this is good for us all. But seriously, gotta start somewhere.

I…think? if you took the hair away on the lineart, it’d be clear that they’re different people, but related? I shoulda made a comparison without the hair. Damn, I’ll do that tomorrow.

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some random OC doodles: Silver x2, Rowena, Zofia

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1, Angel Rose. ;3c

I hate how, despite you having never read a piece of the canon she exists in, I’ve told you enough about her that you can just drop me a prompt that dead-on nails the essence of her being.

1. “It wouldn’t be the first time you broke a promise.”

Angel is one of my Pokemon OCs infamous for being a fuckup, and this writing piece below is just purely self indulgent because there is literally no other person, living or dead, in the world who can fully understand everything I’m picturing here. Like most of it’s referring to old stories I’ve written and will never share beyond the one (1) person who read it back when I wrote it, but then the setting is a concept I’d been floating for myself if I ever wrote in my Pokemon universe again.

Anyway this is 2.5k words of a bunch of idiot teenagers and 20-somethings with grudges yelling at each other and being dramatic soap opera idiots while the end of the world looms so maybe (I hope) it’s funny even without full context.

“You can't shut me out of this!" Rose - Angel - whatever the fuck her name is - snaps, rounding on Glynis, and Rowena leaps to her feet and swiftly places herself between them. Sure, she's pretty sure that if a fight starts, it will have been Glynis who started it, and Glynis who emerges the victor, but it will still be the absolute last thing any of them need now. Plus, if her sister starts throwing down with the lying two-named stranger in their midst, something will probably get broken, and Professor Rowan is very protective of his laboratory equipment and knows that if a brawl starts, Rowena tends to be the instigator, so even if for once she isn't, any damage will first get attributed to her. And that is something else she would like to avoid.

"And why the fuck not?" Stacey demands. She is standing back behind Glynis, a wheeled office chair overturned behind her when she flung herself up out of it when Rose - Angel - made her confession.

"I know more about the Distortion World than anyone," Angel says. She shakes her blonde hair back - is that or the blue her natural color? Is Angel or Rose her real name? "And all of this" - she jabs a finger at the scanner printouts that they have all crudely scrawled upon the past several days, at the monitors and further details updating themselves faster than Rowena's eye can take in - "is about the Distortion World! If you're messing around with any of that you need me!"

"Being stranded there for five years doesn't an expert make," Glynis says dryly. "Maybe you got real good at figuring out a pattern to the screwed up gravity but what the hell do you actually really know about about its fundamental makeup, the way it's connected to our world, and how portals to it keep spontaneously opening!"

Rowena knows it wasn’t five years but that’s so far from relevant, and will just spark a hundred problems, so she lets it go.

"And what do you know about that, then?" Angel asks. She folds her arms and shifts her weight back and forth from one foot to another. "You know even less than I do." She doesn’t correct Glynis on her timeline either.

"Glynis - Stacey - all of you, listen," Toshiro says. He stands like he's trying to command everyone's attention, sounds like he's trying to be authoritative, but something of the picture is broken by the way his Joltik is firmly clinging to his forehead. "Rose is right. She -"

"Do you know what she did?" Glynis asks. "The whole, actual, goddamn story?"

"Yes," Toshiro says. "She told me. I know."

"She tried to piss Arceus off enough to destroy the entire universe," Rowena says. "Just - just to reiterate the main point. Like I dunno how she tells it but that's fundamentally the point: she nearly erased all of us from existence. Like do you get that?"

"Yes, I do get that," Toshiro says. At the edges of his words, Rowena can hear his patience starting to fray. "And she helped us - me - in Unova. I trust her. She helped us stop -"

"Hey, not to, like, start shit," Brook calls from where she and Storm are sitting on one of the lab tables, "but -"

"Please don't start more shit," Jenny says. "Please do not start more shit."

"But - I'm gonna start shit, sorry - I think I remember you two mentioning that didn't Toshiro join up with Team Plasma once?"

Angel's mouth his half open and then without a word she closes it. 

"For two months - it was a mistake," Toshiro says. "I know it was a mistake -"

"Yeah and it wasn't so much of some warning flag, like yeah we've all been dumb and helped people we shouldn't have" - Rowena knows that Glynis will be staring directly at the floor right now, and probably half of the others have turned to look at her as Brook says this - "but when you put you with her, and her really really really really really big mistake of trying to blow up the whole world..."

"You'd think Professor Juniper could've found better lab assistants to send us than Team Galactic and Team Plasma's rejects," Stacey says loudly, to no one in particular.

"Yeah sorry but the Heroes of Truth and Ideals are otherwise engaged," Toshiro snaps. He has given up his veneer of pleasantry.

"Isn't one of those two Heroes the leader of Team Plasma?" Dawn asks. "I wouldn't trust them either."

"Hey, no, he wasn't the leader of Team Plasma so much as -"

"Rose, now's not the time -"

"- he thought he was and thought they were working toward a different goal than -"

"So a guy with a super powerful legendary dragon is a gullible idiot instead of evil?" Stacey asks. "Super great."

"He is not -"

"Rose, now’s not the time" Toshiro repeats. "Rose. Seriously. I guarantee you N does not give half a fuck about whether you defend his honor or not. I promise you he doesn't care and we're already so far from the argument we're trying to make that -"

"Oh, good, you're on a first-name basis with the leader of Team Plasma too," Glynis says. "My confidence in your credentials increases by the minute."

"Glynis," Angel says, looking past Rowena, "please. Please, trust me. I swear I can help, I promise that I -"

"It wouldn't be the first time you broke a promise," Glynis says coldly.

Angel recoils, just momentarily, and for a moment Rowena is willing to entertain the idea that she is sincere. And then she looks at Rowena and Rowena can recognize the girl from half a decade ago. She almost looks nothing like her - time has twisted the face in Rowena's memories, undoubtedly, but she remembers someone paler, almost sickly, skeletal, blue hair half in tangles all around her face. But her eyes, her gray gray eyes, are the same, that same look, and something in Rowena's stomach hardens into ice. 

Rowena almost wonders if Angel will go pleading to each of them in turn, but of course - if she can't win over Glynis again, she'll go to the other one out of them all that she knew best. "Rowena, you trust Darkrai, right?" She doesn't leave time for Rowena to answer the rhetorical and continues, "He trusted me - he let me go, he told you that he let me go -"

"What?" Glynis asks.

And the roulette wheel of confessions, gone from Angel to Toshiro, now rolls to Rowena. "You knew?" Glynis asks. Rowena finally looks away from Angel, still not sure that the woman won't morph into some sort of monster as soon as her eyes leave her, to her sister. Glynis looks... not angry, like Rowena expected, but hurt. "The - Darkrai told you? When?"

"About a week after everything went down," Rowena admits. So much for avoiding this conversation.

"Time doesn't work the same in the Distortion World," Angel says. "It felt like years."

"A week?" Glynis repeats. "And for five years you didn't - tell me?"

Something inside Rowena's chest snaps and she is twelve years old again, a stupid angry child who hates her older sister. "Well first I didn't tell you because you were already moping so much about your sad stupid crush on her -"

"You had a crush on me?" Angel repeats blankly. 

Throwing Glynis under the bus was one way to shift the roulette ball out of Rowena's own slot, and she's certainly mixed her metaphors well. "- and then as time went on and the world didn't end I figured that you know, maybe Darkrai was right that she was sincere!"

"Ignoring that the world did almost end in Unova, two years after that," Stacey says.Rowena rounds on her. "And what, I figured, and you would have too, were the bloody fucking chances of her having ended up in Unova?"

"So you trust Darkrai," Angel says, a little desperately, "so you'd trust -"

"I trusted Darkrai then," Rowena says. "Now's like..." She wiggles her hand back and forth. "Eh."

Angel's face falls. "Sometimes I think I trust him,” Rowena continues, “and more often I'm pretty sure he just thrives on the chaos and only stopped you because if the universe got destroyed he'd be gone too and wouldn't have any entertainment."

"You know," Angel says, and she still looks sad, but her lips almost twitch toward a smile, "I hate admitting it but you're probably right about that one. He's an asshole." She closes her eyes and presses a hand to her forehead. "So you won't trust me either."

"I'll tentatively trust you," Rowena says, and Angel's eyes snap open, something like hope transforming into suspicion. "Conditionally, as in - the world is already fucking ending and we're gonna have to take a chance somewhere or other to save it, probably."

"That sounds like a terrible idea," Stacey says.

"You know what else sounds terrible?" Rowena asks. "Sinnoh gets sucked into an alternate dimension because Giratina or some fucker keeps opening portals and no one stopped it. That sounds bad."

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Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but draw your OCs contextlessly sitting on an invisible chair or whatever