#shimon shelley

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The last art to commemorate the whole posting of the On The Tip Of Everyone's Tongue 4-Chapter run of Shuffle Odyssey, based on the album cover of Danny Elfman's So-Lo -

A fun style experiment, even if all the hard line detailing killed my shoulders a couple days in a row, and a good way to put a pin on things before me and my co-writer, @poisonbat take a break from the fic - a small hiatus for us to work on other things for a bit (specifically, working on a Pokemon project for poisonbat) and avoid One Piece burnout.

Chapter Links

On The Tip Of Everyone's Tongue Part 1 (AO3, FFnet)

On The Tip Of Everyone's Tongue Part 2 (AO3, FFnet)

On The Tip Of Everyone's Tongue Part 3 (AO3, FFnet)

On The Tip Of Everyone's Tongue Part 4 (AO3, FFnet)

[timetunnelcollective]

In 1764, Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, the book considered to be the first Gothic Novel. With this he initiated the genre which ushered in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and also....a peculiar form of fashion. 

Illustrated by Shimon Engel 

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And introducing - Doctor Shimon Shelley!

Chapter 5 of Shuffle Odyssey updated (AO3, FFnet).

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Shimon Shelley was an interesting OC in that he was the first one that actually got a backstory that laced into canon. Specifically, they was Doctor Hogback’s longstanding lab assistant, who was disfigured and partially blinded while assisting the not-so-good doctor with the robbery of Victoria Cindry’s body. From there, his path butterflied a bit - in one path, he stuck with Doctor Hogback and ended up later striking up an odd friendship/flirtation with Ryuma and in the other... somehow they managed to encounter Brook and Yorki.

Yeah, I’m still not sure how that happened either and I’m the one that wrote it.

Shimon Shelley was named after Mary Shelley - can’t go wrong with a good old Frankenstein reference, can you? - and styled as a sort of Doctor Frankenstein sort of character, albeit, one that wasn’t so nearly bothered by his work coming to ‘life’.

There were a few odd flashes of inspiration in the earliest versions of the character, such as the fact that I kept switching between his gender presentations and the static charged defibrillator plates in his gloves serving both a combat and practical use for their given profession. There was also a bit of a running gag with his glass eye not being properly fitted and thus falling out at inopportune times - such as when having tea.

Then there was stuff like me not realizing that Ryuma wasn’t all that big - canonically 5′10″ -and making Shelley almost a full head shorter than the zombie samurai, which ended up putting the good doctor at an incredible 5′4″ at best.

As you might be able to tell from the older drawings, Shelley took a lot of visual cues from Faust VIII from Shaman King with a distinct bit of influence from Frankenweenie. Traditional mad scientist look combined with a sort of lifeless coloring and appearance made for nothing truly groundbreaking, but he wasn’t terrible. Still, 8 years on, he really needed a redesign.

My initial redesign included lengthening out his hair and making it silkier-looking and @fezgician​ suggested changing his hair from blond to blue. I then decided to lean into the sort of techno-goth/contrast color emo aesthetic I’d admired at the time - 2012 was a bit on the end of that trend, if I remember correctly, but I’d always been a bit slow on trends and the like (the 90′s goth blue lipstick he’s wearing should be a bit of a hint on that one). Adding color to the outfit helped brighten him up a bit - I used the old green while Fezzy suggested the blue - and the patterns I put over his shirt helped give him even more color.

Also the platform boots are still massively entertaining to me.

He might still have the proper lab scientist look in his closet for actual professional reasons, but he’s a lot less uptight in his appearance now.

Skillwise, I tightened up a bit of a loose assumption I made back in the beginning that Shelley’s specialty was in surgery. I added in an aspect of pathology to round out his skillset, but that played well into the ‘handles corpses better than people’ aspect of his personality.

Personality wise... well, there wasn’t a whole lot put to page back in the day but there was enough to give me the skeleton of a personality. He could be affectionate and was certainly loyal - sometimes past the point of self-destruction -, but it was difficult for that trust to be earned - simply reacting poorly to his appearance or making presumptions about his pastimes and professional standards could be enough to close him off - and losing it?

Well.

I’m sure it’ll come up in the story.

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Back when I started in fandom, I had... a lot of personal issues that weren’t being addressed by anyone that could do anything about them. One of the ways these manifested was that I’d share something and then when I later discovered the flaws in it - usually the product of my own inexperience -, I’d make every effort to destroy it and any evidence it existed. As I got older, I’d try to replace the destroyed version with a better one - a rewrite that would usually peter out within a few chapters of starting the darn thing.

Well, this time I decided to forgo being motivated by cringe and instead approach this as a challenge - pick up all the major OCs I’d ever designed for one specific fandom (and more than a few potential fic ideas I’d entertained and then done nothing with) and try to do something new and better with them.

So this is my One Piece OC collection (revamped with a lot of help from @fezgician, who will get more specific credit on the nine she gave the most input on), ft. literally every single Original Character of note I made for the fandom since approximately 2010, except for two that got smushed into one, one that got split into two, a few that picked up traits from other OCs that didn’t have much going for them beyond a similar design or concept, and the dozens of background ones that would have pushed this project into next November if I’d decided to go that far.

That’s 21 characters, over the course of 3 weeks. That’s roughly one character redesign a day, though the time split wasn’t quite that clean. Over 600 layers went into this project and a whole lot of digging to find the few scraps of information a couple of these OCs had. Some of the redesigns were pretty major - hair color and body type tweaks to go with complete fashion revamps were just the general order of the day. Others were just a matter of updating the OC to my current art-style. All of them involved character overhauls and more than a few got updated or completely changed names.

The character list (does not correspond to standing order in image).

Raine

Jeanne

Meryl Dacey

Shimon Shelley

Nuada

Mako

Liten

Mercy D. Witt

Rufino D. Silva

Fintan Terzi

Wydah

Reijin

Malorhaye Anzu

Malorhaye Shani

Avery Springbuck

Bentley

Yelena

Orsin

Vache

Caramuru/Cid

Saberhagen

This list will be updated with links as I post each character - each post will have a bit of history and art, ranging from current works to past drawings. Feel free to ask any questions concerning the characters - not only am I happy to answer, but you might just run into something I hadn’t considered before.

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OC Biography

Name: Shelley Epithet: The Lightning Struck Surgeon

Bounty: 1,150,000 Profession: Doctor / Surgeon Hair color: Pale blond, straight, limp Eye color: Watery Blue / (glass eye is purple) Height: 5 foot 8 inches / 172.72 centimeters Appearance: Thin, thin lips, high cheekbones, delicate facial structure, thin limbed, pale skinned, dark rings around eyes, faintly surprised appearance Likes: Brook, Ryuu-san, being around his friends, animals, cats, warm places to sleep, people liking him, chocolate, moths, butterflies, being clean, listening to music, piano music Dislikes: Dogs, getting wet, spiders, bugs, being alone, wearing dirty clothes, being perved out on

Favorite Food: chamomile tea and ginger snaps Good Attributes: Loyal, kind, generous, devoted Bad Attributes: Loyal to a fault, naïve, childish, cloistered background Hobbies: Sewing, clothes making, semi-acoustic guitar Distinguishing Marks: Missing eye, severe scaring over half of his body, bluish lips, feminine face Martial Abilities: Middling athletic ability (about level to Usopp), able to take advantages of the body’s natural weaknesses, hand to hand combat, friction powered shock plates in the palms of his gloves, good pain resistance. Back Story: Shelley spent most of his childhood in an orphanage where he was secluded. He eventually ran away. At the age of ten, Shelley was employed by Dr. Hogback to exhume the body of Victoria Cindry and was severely mauled by a graveyard guard dog after completing the task, even going so far as to lose one of his eyes. He survived the encounter, though not without horrible scarring and a life-long fear of canines, and became Dr. Hogback’s apprentice and then his assistant. By the time Shelley was fifteen, he was a capable surgeon and doctor, though most of his skill was with surgery. Ryuuma was brought to life using Brook’s shadow and struck up a rapport with the young doctor. Their friendship (which may or may not have been something more) lasted until the zombie was incinerated in his duel with Roronoa Zoro.