It was with great protest I decided that if I tried to keep going with the armour at this speed, and do Sheik, and do fibres, I would probably die. And I'm still recovering from yesterday/Wednesday night's madness, so there is that.
The Seventy percent 3500 word essay is in. And I still have a sleep debt to pay.
Also, I'm writing from the incredible student gallery of Watt Space, and my headphones have chosen here and now to pack it in. Ah well. I tend to use headphones all the time, and have never really been kind to them. So I only buy cheapies. This pair has lasted me a bit over a year. Well, either a year or two. Can't remember. But for ten bucks and me thrashing them, that's okay.
Alright, where to begin?
For reasons such as 'I did not want to do the essay', I left it to the last minute and put the production of the armour on hold for this week. Which will make this weekend rather busy, but hey. The essay's in, and that's important.
I finally networked with the people attached to the airbrush and made friends with it yesterday. I think I've kind of got the hang of it - fine detail is something I'd still have to get my eye in on, but I'm fairly confident that that will come while working on the big bits. I like how an airbrush can apply acrylic paint without using a propellant or solvent. That was the big hassle/trial problem for using paint on the foam armour, and I think that at the cost of a nice sheen, it will work in any case.
So there's really, sadly, not much progress to report on that side of things. I guess I could work through the concept of it though. Like, why it is I picked Tex. There's a few reasons, and some of them have spoilers for the later seasons of Red vs Blue, so if you would rather skip them, scroll down to when there's big text or something. There's no spoilers as far as I can remember for the first five seasons though. So all good on that account.
Also, spoilers for the Hueco Mundo arc of Bleach, and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time. And Final Fantasy VII, I guess.
I'll write up what was so fascinating about each one I picked, actually. Even the outfits I ditched. Spoilers ahead and stuff.
Anyway. Begin.
I picked the Hollow for a few different reasons.
There's a certain kind of allure that comes with insanity. Perhaps it's a zero-accountability thing, perhaps it's the fact that insanity rides on impulse and stuff. Plus, the hollow was a type of butt-kicking that sagas are sung about.
I like that.
There was the degree of unpredictability, and raw power, and despair that drew me in with the idea. Plus, I wouldn't have to tuck my hair under a wig or anything.
I think that the fact the hollow was the flipside of the character was a drawcard as well. That in spite of the fury and terror that the character embodied, it was still Ichigo. The drawback for the creature was actually the loss of reason though - a double-edged sword. Unable to tell friend from foe, the hollow was capable of lashing out at anybody.
The hollow is a reminder that I have the potential to be a monster.
Now.
Tex.
Tex started off as a ring-in character in the Red vs Blue series. She gets sent in as a freelancer for Blue team, and all they know about her is that she's prone to violence (Which is due to an aggressive AI that was implanted in her head) and that she had some kind of long-standing attachment thing to Church, one of the other main characters in RvB.
And then as the series progresses, you kind of see that she's actually a decent soldier, as opposed to the rest of the characters. That she's keen on ending the war between humans and aliens (covenant) and that she'll go to any length to do so.
And then something real weird happens. You find out that she's some kind of memory - that originally, she was someone dear to the creator of the AI, and she'd died, and he'd somehow made a copy of her. This ends up making more sense later as you find out she's actually an AI herself. Or, to be more precise, she's a fragment, a byproduct of creating another AI. That she existed, self-aware, but was always doomed to fail at the big things she tried to do, because all of the memories that she was built out of were centered around her being dead; that there had been a failure in the system and she'd died as a result of it.
She wasn't aware of this herself for quite some time, and when she did learn, it changed quite a bit. She tried to save what was left of the AI she'd fragmented from, but, because it was part of her composition to fail, she couldn't.
Probably the saddest thing about her was that the Director, the man who accidentally created her, kept trying to bring her back. Because she was all that was left of the woman that had been dear to her and had died. And it never worked properly.
So what then do I find interesting about Tex?
She's really good at being a soldier. At fighting and doing things and she's always motivated to save people. But no matter how hard she tries, she can't. She'll always fail - it may not seem to be her fault, but she'd end up blaming herself anyway.
And she doesn't exist properly; she's a memory, a shadow.
Also, I'll just put in here what I mentioned casually earlier. She's the Beta AI. Hence, The Beta Experiment.
I so sneaky.
...
Next character I wanted to do/revisit was Sheik.
Sheik arrives in the Ocarina of Time storyline shortly after the main character (Link) travels forward in time seven years (effectively).
Flipping mysterious, Sheik usually seems to know where Link has to go next to defeat Ganon's power in that area of Hyrule. I think the first clue the player even gets to the character is when Ruto (one of the sages) calls the Sheikah a young man.
So Sheik kind of exists as an assist character. The first time you see something serious go down with the character is just before the Shadow Temple, when Sheik tries to seal off the evil at the bottom of the well. It doesn't work, and you have to progress through the freakiest dungeon known to man.
Anyway. Track through that one and the Spirit Temple, and you head back to the Temple of Time, because you get told that there's someone waiting there for you.
It's Sheik. Who is actually Princess Zelda; gone into hiding for seven years while you, Link, had been missing from the world. Funnily enough, it's the moment that Zelda takes off the disguise that the big bad finds her and takes her away, since she holds part of the supreme power, the Triforce.
So, Shiek exists as a princess in exile; one who'd adopted a full disguise to stay hidden and yet still remain fully useful to the mission of freeing Hyrule from the evil king's grasp.
Something similar goes down in one of the later Legend of Zelda titles - Windwaker.
It was cause enough for me to giggle when I realised. Because in 2011 my sister and I went to a convention as Sheik and Tetra. Pirate and Ninja, but both effectively Zelda.
Sheik is kind of like an important character but not. I've heard many speculations over whether the character itself is male or female. My counter argument is that I have never ever seen a male Sheik cosplayer. And she's Zelda, so there is that.
So far we have three characters which
A) Forsook social expectations for combat
B) Don't exist properly
C) Are second-fiddle characters to the story.
The fourth originally planned was Aerith Gainsborough, from Final Fantasy VII.
Now, Final Fantasy VII was a game I didn't actually get into contact with until high school, when my siblings and I were wandering around Target and Jack spotted Advent Children in the DVD section and tried explaining the plot to me, as someone who had no idea who the characters were and what the plot was.
So, like, a motorbike that also functions as a knifeblock for your swords, and there's giant swords and stuff that explodes, and a bunch of kids are sick with something, and there's explosions and stuff.
I bought the DVD, and we watched it. Confused as buckleys, I turned to the internet for some explanation into the characters.
Just a word of advice - be very careful when turning to the internet for information. It can be a scary thing.
Um.
Okay, so after watching Advent Children, I kind of gathered that Aerith was important to the story, but she died, and in Advent Children she kind of pops up a few times. Like she's trying to help the main character (Cloud) get over the guilt that he has because he couldn't stop her from being killed. From wherever she is on the other side of death.
And in VII Aerith was supposed to have a major role in stopping the big bad from wreaking the world, and then she dies, so everyone's like 'aw crap, now we can't stop the world from ending', and then they find something she left behind that would still be able to stop the big bad.
There's a giant meteor that crashes into the planet, and the counter-attacking magic that she was part of save everything, and that's that.
I realise that it's not my gift to explain part of a narrative without explaining all of it. Apologies.
So, Aerith (At least in the spinoff movie Advent Children) appears as a character who, like the three before, only half-exists.
Considering a bunch of other characters I'm kind of keen on doing sometime in the future, I think this might be a trend. Hmm.
Anyway.
SPOILERS END HERE. SO DOES THE MAJORITY OF THE BLOG POST.
It's now Wednesday again. I'll start a new post to let everyone know how the painting went.
I finished the foam patterns for the chest on Sunday and the helm on Monday. Sunday arvo I tried everything I'd built on over the wetsuit, which was fun. It's still difficult to move in, but I'm hoping that's because the armour isn't stuck to me and thus keeps falling down (Shoulders, thighs). Velcro soon.
Have a progress photo.
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