Why I play video games

    A lot of people seem to not understand why I spend so much time and money into video games. I don't care about leaderboards, high scores, achievements of any kind, and I generally ignore many mechanical functions of a game that gamers are apparently supposed to instinctively care about. These things aren't what motivates me and causes me to need games in my life.

    Even explaining to people what I do play games for seems to fall on deaf ears. It's bewildering, and even a little hurtful, that no one else can fathom, or even wants to try to fathom, what it is about video games that makes them so appealing to someone like me.

    I've always felt that people understanding why I play games would be synonymous to understanding why I so adamantly oppose certain genres or types of games. Especially why I would never play them myself.

    I've known, to my disappointment and frustration, for a few years that barely any of the general populace, if any at all, understands or cares about the things that make games important to me, but only recently understood the marginal divide between my view and everyone else.

    For starters, the utter detachment with which people view games with. This is probably what allows them to play a game like Call of Duty and not feel totally appalled that it's basically simulating war and bloodshed. Or maybe they're just heartless monsters that don't value human life, at least that's what the cynical side of me believes. The optimistic portion, no matter how small it might be, likes to think that it can't be a common demonic lust for killing that drives people to play such games. I certainly don't understand the appeal, I find such games depressing, representing the textbook example of what I wish our society could move away from and leave behind. I find the fact that people take joy in games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto to be a violation of moral ethics to the highest degree. And the only way I can make sense of why any stable and functional human being would enjoy such an opposite of the idyllic is because they are so detached from the games they play that they never even think about it.

Which in and of itself is very depressing to me. Why would anyone not want to be attached to a video game in an emotional and mental link for a few hours?

This is why I play games, why I always have. If I could be so blunt, I hate my life. I hate all life. It's miserable and dull, thinking of the scale of human life in general, what we do, what we achieve, what little impact I will have, the reality of how futile existence on one small planet on a universe deemed mortal itself by science is a depressing and crushing weight on my mind, and it has been for several years. Real life makes me feel an honest and sickening amount of dread, knowing I struggle for a better place only for it to have no meaning some 40-50 years from now, to know that my only true purpose as a gender-designated living organism is to reproduce and ensure the next generation which I assure you has always been the last concern on my list even before I started having such broad thoughts, and to know that my chosen career in art is worthless in every sense of the word. I'm an impractical, unnecessary, useless part of society that takes up resources and space and gives nothing of value back beyond the arbitrary value that my species (and only my species, for I do not think one species in a vast universe is enough to justify my resource-draining practice) places on such things as scribbles on expensive paper with equally expensive materials that other humans toil in mines to dig up and transport for no purpose. And I only continue because it's all I know how to do, it's become both my excuse for getting up in the morning as much as it is my only method of maintaining a contented life, for that's all I can think that anyone can work for and feel like it is theirs and not something wasted on unrealistic ideals like religion that seem so much more appealing than the reality or future advancement in technology for "the next generation" when we are all doomed to extinction no matter which planet we inhabit.

    I haven't always thought this way, only once I went through a time in my life where I let go of religion as much as a phase of my growth as a result of considering the chilling concept that there was no god or magic or anything more than what we see. I spent much of my teenage years in contemplation and introspection to find a comforting atheistic alternative to the ultimatum of my life's efforts meaning something on a higher level. I have found none.

    And as a child, I needed to believe in something. As I type this I feel a pang of guilt both at the admittance of weakness and the fact that it sounds like an excuse, or a cry for attention, or even discredits anything I think or say. I was born in respiratory distress and needed immediate surgery to be able to intake enough oxygen to sustain life. In the time I spent half-dead, my brain received permanent damage that would stay with me for the rest of my life. Side effects of such a development varied widely from mild emotional instability (not the least of which being anger issues) to vivid and highly inaccurate interpretations of my environment that lasted until I was 11 and finally placed in proper care.

    The ideal of magic of some kind helped me to explain, and even in some regards, embrace the culminations of my overactive imagination mixed with my slight deficiency in determining if it was indeed said imagination. I will never say that it was a bad experience. There were times when I would become extremely frightened for no reason and freeze or have a hard time breathing, or become angry, but these weren't frequent enough actions for me to say that I did not, as a child, enjoy the incursion of my imagination into the real world.

In fact, in spite of the fact that my disturbing development in train of thought only came about when I was 16, I've never enjoyed plain, bland reality. Possibly because I've always had something to spice it up. I was a reclusive child that viewed all humankind as dangerous, or untrustworthy, which was a trait inherited by my mother, and I invented a plethora of imaginary friends to surround me and make my world colorful and interesting. As well as the average childlike tenancy to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, I could make myself believe some of it, and even made it my goal to explain every detail that made no sense to make it more real, as much to add stability to what I believed as to solidify it in reality. Such as why no one else could see my "friends", or why I was so reclusive and outcasted, which I was, because of my huge glasses and bad temper alike, and thought there just had to be some justice, some explanation for my existence if I did nothing but make my mother miserable, make my teachers frustrated, and be bullied by everyone else.

I suppose my environment at that age wasn't helping my already abnormal mental development...

Then came video games.

    I was an active and energetic kid, I liked going outside and pretending to be on a grand adventure with all of my friends and enemies (most of which were anthro, hinthint) either calling for my draconic sidekick, visiting a hyperintelligent sea monster that did experiments, or taking my chances solving thrilling mysteries of why the shipment of sugarberries didn't come in that morning. This was how I spent my days. I even managed to elaborate a reason for my father's absance in my lif, believing he must have been some great hero or powerful being that had very important business and left me as a safeguard or something. But we lived in a terrible neighborhood and my mother didn't want me outside. I suppose she thought buying me a PlayStation on Christmas (Though of course Santa delivered it with his ability to teleport into apartments with no chimneys because so few houses had them these days and he needed a new sort of magic from extraterrestrial life-forms, strange I still remember telling that to my cousin when we were kids) was the best way to keep a perfectly aged pedophile target in the house and out of trouble with the neighbors. (I will say that I'd probably have been a pedophile's wet dream considering how sexually experimental I was, even going so far as to wonder how famous cartoon characters masturbated or how bizarre or forceful it was or why it felt so amazing to drive the body to a certain limit. Guess what that limit was.)

My first game was Spyro, it's still one of my favorites, and my attraction to it was due to my love of dragons more than anything. To me, controlling a dragon on a TV was just as whimsically idyllic as being one in real life. I loved dragons and obsessed about them constantly, always looking for dragon eggs outside and praying for one at night. Spyro opened a door for me that made dreams come true. The expansive worlds, mixed with my inexhaustible imagination, fueled a fantasy I'd always wished for.

I wasn't completely insane... I should elaborate on the specifics in another blog entry. It's complex and requires reflection to unblur and articulate on expansively. And most of it is beside the point, only used to demonstrate my indifference and cresentment of the life I was given, and the life I had no choice in.

It didn't help, and still is no small damper on my wish to achieve something, that I was born with visual impairment, a trait of both parents and unavoidable. And because of this, I can never be allowed to apply for a pilot's license under federal law. I am thus forbidden to legally fly, which has been my dream since as far back as I could remember. I have always known that I would never be able to have a driver's license, that no one would even let me have significant mobile freedom without relying on someone, never truly being free or of my own volition. Perhaps it is these arbitrary and unjust restrictions put on me that have aided my dislike of modern society and technology as much as a preference for fantasy. I feel so restricted and opposed in modern society, as a kid, I believed that if I lived in a fantasy world full of wonder and adventure, I would be free to do as I pleased.

I found this world in video games. This also fueled my preference; I do not play games in the modern setting, feeling humans are "too limited" to be vehicles for my imagination and voracious desire to explore and roam freely, a need which I believe is analogous to oxygen for me. Thus I have always chosen a preference in animal or anthro characters to play as with a few exceptions (Zelda being the largest with Elder Scrolls in close second), because they had such amazing powers and throughout my life, I have always preferred animals to humans. The whimsicality and mystery surrounding animals for a child, as well as their utter indifference to things I despised, such as "laws" on where they could and couldn't go, and they were indifferent to me, predictable, trusting, honest. They seemed to represent divinity to someone who led a life of having less right to things everyone else was fully capable of, not just in arbitrary laws but in innate abilities. I was always less capable in gym and thus decided to just hate sports and make my spiteful attitude known, and was quickly drawn to instruments which, though I couldn't read music (I couldn't read very well at all at the age we were learning it until my mother requisitioned some large-print books for me), I picked up on quickly because it was something I could do with sound and touch and not my lesser, inferior sight. It is still a preference of mine, from whistling to playing a harmonica or a flute, because it relaxes me and is one of the few things I feel truly confident in and capable of.

    Video games are not something I feel confident in or capable of. My cousin is often pointing to things I do not see. It is clearly just another one of those many things that I will always be inferior in compared to someone else. Therefore, I choose not to seek the challenge. In general, I choose to reject the opportunity for challenge at all, whenever possible, because for me, the chance of failure is much higher due to my limitations and I see it as a waste of my effort and a method to frustrate me as opposed to a constructive use of my time. Time I can spend doing something I enjoy, such as escaping from my dreadful circumstances for a while.

When I was 11 and my mother and I struck the final nerve in each other's bones, we were forced into therapy before the results could be more violent and I was given the proper medication I needed to function.

My clarity improved gradually, as well as my mood, and various other points of my life, such as the relationship between my mother and I. It's difficult to imagine the time before that I spent sober of the effects of modern pharmaceuticals but I do remember how strained our relationship was, and it didn't console me at all to know that it was nobody's fault. It was never my fault, I could never control anything, apparently, I had genuine problems and was put on the standard pacifier for "wayward, petulant brats" as everyone else whose kid had outbursts in class or hit people for fun. I'm not saying that some people don't have an honest problem. I'm very aware of the types of legitimate medical diagnoses that warrant the treatment that I and several other people I've met online and off badly needed but the fact that every parent that couldn't administer a justified spanking and just wanted an easy solution has saturated the worth of such treatment and created such skeptics to the type of solutions that people like me actually need is appalling, because I'm also very aware of the type of kid that had no problems other than an idiotic, irresponsible mother that didn't know how to do her job, because I'm related to such a kid, my youngest cousin and his clueless mother. And by the way, he's 14 and she hasn't learned a damned thing. I think her negligence as a parent combined with him being forcefed powerful antipsychotics since he was 2 has actually done severe damage to him to the point where he actually needs the care now. But that's a bit off-topic...

There was a downside to the treatment, one that should be insignificant but which altered my life significantly. My imagination settled, it was no longer vivid, and thus my world was no longer filled, despite the vain grasps at the much-wanted whimsy of it all that absorbed me for a couple of years to come. Video games changed from a medium to a coping mechanism for me, helping me to adapt to what was apparently a "normal way of thinking and understanding" and giving me the attachment to fantasy that kept my spirits up. As I grew in the next few years, I found reality to be depressing and dark. It seams strange and backwards for me to mourn the inhibitions and distortions of the mind when a lot of people with such problems are probably grateful to be able to function in society and live a normal and contented life but I don't think there has ever been anything of the norm about myself.

    When I was 13 I decided to "do art", though what I thought that meant, I don't know, I just know that I started drawing more seriously than before. I'd always drawn to express my imagination, to show people the characters I invented and my world I valued, but now I was becoming more serious and devout to improvement and refinement. That carried through to highschool, where I drew like a 10 year old, didn't use shading, made haphazard lines with colored pencil everywhere, and was in the absolute barbaric stage of my evolution. At this point, I was resigned to my life, having left aspects of my childhood behind, and very much depressed by many old haunts as much as by the new ones that crept into every aspect of my day. Video games like Sonic had a lot of influence on my art at this point in time and it looked like it. The anatomy was horrible, I could barely draw hands (If you think they're bad now, at least you can tell what they are). the proportions were atrocious, and the drawings were comparable to the usual tripe found on dA. Maybe this has some influence on my rather low opinion of Sonic art in general. My own experience has led me to associate it with immaturity and unexperience, as well as bad taste in character design and unoriginality.

    By my sophmore year, I think I was really discovering my craft of choice. I began an almost recolutionary experimentation with many concepts at once that I'd never grasped before. Partly because I had such an amazing art teacher, my highschool advanced art teacher remains a prominent figure in my esteem, her ghost will forever influence me on proper form and my continued growth as an artist. I should really thank her, she did so much for me despite my limits. She treated me like everyone else, she accepted faults in my art that resulted from my lack of vision capabilities and explained how I could change it, helping me pass barriers instead of accepting them, and pushing me to my absolute end, which was exactly what I needed. I began to understand, and become fascinated with, color, lightsource, how colors effect the mind and the emotions, how the placement of such invokes deep feelings, as well as my constant experiment with hues and what could and couldn't be a shade of another color, such as using purple to shade green on the basis that everything away from the sun has a blue tint here on Earth and everything directly toward it can be white or yellow, and using this basic concept to create worlds filled with vibrant colors. I made my world colorful in a completely new way and I was learning every minute.

I slowed down my 11th and 12th year of school. This was a time when "my entire world expanded all at once", as I like to say. This was the time when I was a frequent internet user and an active person in social areas, and in two short years I learned more about human cruelty than I could have stomached in an entire lifetime. Yet in that time, I also learned many concepts which my small world had never bridged, some of them were actually good. But through it all, it did tell me how few people valued the type of whimsy and wistfulness for a "more colorful" life that I so desired. I'd hoped that the internet, a place full of virtual, simulated space where anything could happen (like a video game) would be filled with people wishing for a common goal which eluded and disinterested "real people" but that was quickly shattered in a very blunt and brutal way with the people I came in contact with.

So by the time I was 17, I feel that much of the magic I retained had drained out of me, perhaps the experience of so many humans and none that could understand or wanted to support my wishes exhausted the last of my zealous ambition to pursue a wonderful world I enjoyed in the form of artificial simulation, or perhaps I was just too cynical at that age to appreciate such things as I used to. This was around the time I felt much discomfort at a half-unwilling but entirely necessary detachment from religion or "unrealistic" concepts, as my mother called them, where I wanted so badly to believe in those things again, to be comforted by their promises of a better place than our reality for me, of a reward for my struggle and misery, but could not bring myself to be convinced, and it hurt, it was probably the most dreadful hurt I've ever experienced, along with the constant apprehension of my death, that I would wither to nothing, be nothing, feel and think nothing, and imagine nothing, such thoughts disturbed me to a point of unimaginable depression. I dealt with it in a few years, striving to control or overcome it. I'm not sure I really did, I do know the certainty that I never have, and never will be the same again, and now, almost 2 years after dealing with the change, I'm not sure I'd want to be any other way.

My need to create declined dramatically after highschool. I spent much of my time sleeping, much of my first year after graduation either trying to get into the workforce with the aide of government-maintained services or taking refresher classes for people seeking college (because I thought there was just nowhere else to go since I had no faith in my art to be sufficient at the time) and much more of my time online, doing nothing but getting into scrapes with others and generally depressing and frustrating myself further over my inability to penetrate through to anyone and have them understand. I'm not entirely sure of that motive, it's just what I remember with the most clarity. A scant two years ago feels like an eternity now, I feel 20 years older than I should at times and seeing the dates at which I posted some of the things I did on different sites and in logs bewilders me now, it's like looking at someone else. I'm barely aware of the logic behind some of my previous actions though I have tried to remember what the motives might have been and failed.

My video gaming habits also declined as I settled into a slower pace of life. At this point a hard reality had hit me; my only goal through highschool was to graduate. I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do with my life, which was art, but graduation, and the summer after, felt like the end of the road with nowhere else to go and I wasn't sure how to deal with it at the time. This is partly why I did nothing but sleep. Sleeping, until the past year, has been one of my many coping mechanisms for overwhelming circumstances. And these were very overwhelming. It took me until the beginning of the year to decide on a long-term direction for my life and I'm just now really easing into that direction. My dependance on video games has depleted, probably as a result of, though it saddens me to admit, not needing it anymore, at least not to the extent that I used to.

The  current market isn't helping. I still have interest in video games but the lack of a market interested in colorful fantasy worlds and, though it is strange for me to admit, a need to feel more adult, limits my choices to a few and turns me off to mainstream gaming completely. There just aren't enough games that capture the elements of what I truly need anymore; it's a depressing reality, and one I constantly refute for the sake of not losing one of my only coping mechanisms for life, but I feel that coping mechanism dying every day. It confines me just as my world always has.

    People do not understand the reasons I care for such supposedly "irrelevant" things as art direction, character strengths and weaknesses as well as appearance, freedom of movement, and various other aspects of games which are paramount to me but apparently irrelevant to everyone else.

And when I try to explain this to some of them, their first reaction is always "See, that's what YOU like about games but not what everyone else likes." As if this is supposed to make me think like them. I'm not sure if they intend the kind of hurt a comment like this causes me, and I'm fairly certain most of them don't care. I'm not even sure what their motive could be beyond pouring salt in the old wound of a perpetual outcast but maybe they just feel that my presence threatens their preference in gaming as much as I feel theirs does to mine, though I will argue that my fears are far more legitimate by virtue of the fact that it's happening to me and not them.

I wish writing this out made some of them understand and sympathize instead of being so dismissive of me and what is important to me. I do not need further reminder of my insignificance in the universe, I'm perfectly aware of it, in fact, it's the cause for my resentment. I wonder how many of them truly believe that I believe I'm the majority, or that I believe that everything I say is right. It should be obvious that I don't, that I feel currently as if I am in an impossible situation and neither diplomacy or force has softened anyone to my case. I feel lost in the flow of a river moving against me, never given purchase on a handhold and never allowed an inch, just driven along against my will.

I never get to choose, do I? I can't even choose the types of games I prefer because they are no longer being made. Just as I had little choice with every event in my life. Can I not at least be granted the sentiment of a compassionate audience that doesn't discard or ignore me for a change?

Born to Fly

So here's the new blog. I deleted the old one because it was attached to my old Google account and I'd rather funnel all my socializing to this new one which is specifically set up for it. (Not that there was anything important on the old one anyway. :V)

But anyway, I guess I should post a little info here.

    Been a furry for a few years now but my character was actually created before that. Originally she was much older (About 12-13) and was meant for a webcomic I wanted to do about the adventures of an arctic fox that also happened to be a wind elemental. The original plan for the comic was an action-anime type thing but I didn't have the skill to draw it at the time, so I just used a little MS Paint pixel drawing of the character as my avatar on forums I went to and on my old Quibblo account, which I no longer use (Though they still send me spam. How nice.) Eventually, it ended up being my representation on the internet, a young-looking white fox with a scarf.

I don't have the original file anymore, sadly, but I made two avatar images of her after, and both were significant leaps from the last.

This was the image I used for the longest time on an MMO forum and as my MSN avatar. It's a pretty good likeness of the nameless white fox. (At the time everyone just called me Gale or Kaze so I guess that was her name.) The wing in the corner was something I came up with as my signature because I've always been obsessed with flying and rainbow-colors.

This is an unfinished version of the character, it was a pixel image I blocked out (Lightsource is still in-tact) and intended to shade with fancy Paint Shop Pro 8 methods but at the time I lost interest in art and fell into a slump. This was drawn after I decided to give her wings. I've always thought one of her unique traits was how her whiskers swept up to look something like wings, that was something I gave her early on so that it would add to her wind-elemental appearance. I'd also gotten a solid idea for how to do her hair besides a terrible imitation of Tails' 
bangs made to look like a whirlwind.

At one point, I drew a pencil drawing of her (Colored and shaded with traditional pencils, though that's not saying much since I was never a pro at it anyway) where I first gave her two new traits; the rainbow-colored wings that have become her main focus and a pair of glasses that look similar to mine. She was also completely naked in this picture (Nothing was showing, get your minds out of the gutter) and I originally drew her with five fingers (As I always have for all my characters, it makes sense to me) and four toes on each paw, and in this picture she looked more anatomically correct than I've ever cared to draw a character. (Again not saying much considering my anatomy skills are awful.)

After not drawing the character again for a long time, but participating in various RPs, I decided I'd name her Aria, since it means "Air" in Italian and was more original than Kaze (Which means "Wind" in Japanese) and because of its relation to music, which seemed fitting since one of her talents was to play the flute (Better than I ever could.) And I changed her from being a pure Wind elemental to being a creature similar to a nature spirit bot closer to a tangible, living being. She could speak to nature and make small plants grow, but she was young by her species' standards and didn't have a lot of talent with her abilities. My idea was that every member of her species evolved differently to become different elementals in their maturity. So whole she had talent with nature, the flow of water, and even light as an infant (By her species' standards, she looked about 12 and was nearly 500) she would grow to master wind and assist the balance of the world in another thousand years or so. But at that moment, she couldn't even fly and often hid her wings because (like all her species at that stage) she didn't know what she was and saw that everyone else around her wasn't that strange and found it easier to beg on the streets by playing her flute and survive in forests than to make a scene.

Then I went some time without RPing at all. In that time, a lot in my life changed, a lot of excitement and grief and a lot of change in preference in general... And a lot of accepting things about me that I didn't think related to me.

After I emerged from a relatively dark time (Not THE darkest time but relatively dark) in my life, and long after I decided to be a furry, I finally decided to better define my character, and I started with a complete redesign. The main reason being that the original design was too heavily based around Sonic style (I used to be a huge fan) and I felt that dampened her design greatly. I didn't want to be another noob with a Sonic fan character for a fursona so I did an overhaul.

After a few pencil scribbles, I solidified the key elements of her design in my mind and did this little MS Paint doodle when I was bored and had no access to a working PC for a short time. (This was done on a laptop.)

The design was made more cute and simple,  I was going for "Fun" at the time, and I wanted to make her look like she was falling after getting into some sort of mischief but I still wanted to keep a lot of the anime aspects. She no longer carries the wing-whiskers but that's more because I couldn't figure out how they'd work on her and still look good than any lack of interest. I thought they were an interesting trait. I gave her scarf scraggly-looking stripes (Miss-matched in this image) and now draw her with five fingers and three toes on a paw. I did this by accident and didn't realize it until  I thought about it. Then I just kept it because I've never felt the difference in three or four toes was as significant as the difference in four or five fingers (You actually need five fingers to do things like type or play a guitar so cartoon characters always having four is a bit of a peeve with me, it's too illogical for my tastes.) The character has always had a baggy shirt with wizard-like sleeves but the baggy pants were a new touch. Originally her shirt was dark-blue with some white lines around the cuffs and her pants were a light gray, I changed them to turquoise because I felt it was more colorful and interesting, and she originally wore gray shoes, but at the time I couldn't think of how to make them look interesting, so I just went with the traditional anthro look of not giving her any. More a lazy solution than a preference, mainly because feet of any kind creep me out and I still have a hard time drawing paws, especially the bottoms of paws, for any length of time without feeling dirty.

I also just decided to name her Kaze, because that's what everyone calls me. Although her nickname is Kaz, which is mostly because of a story reason being that one character gave her the nickname Kazeakuma (Wind demon) for her habit of causing trouble by accidentally unleashing some wind magic, and the only part of that word she could pronounce was Kaz. :V

I also modified her story to be more fitting to a less serious atmosphere but still being substantial to base a plot around. I also bumped down her age to 6 and made her more of a support character, or someone who would be in need of one, because I've always liked playing the sidekick with an interesting backstory for some reason. Probably because in video games, I prefer the protagonist to be silent and for the other characters to share their history with them, and for their friends' plots to be as much a driving force behind the story as the main plot, so I based the character around that preference. (Because I also like the idea of inserting a little interpretation into a main character, especially in an RPG or Adventure game like Zelda.)

The new story is somewhat the same with her having some talent with making small plants bloom and being able to manipulate the elements, but her development is less planned-out in years as it was before. I haven't yet determined the time it will take for her to mature but I don't intend on making her grow up soon. Instead of being shy and hiding, she's more open and hyper, and has a tenancy to find trouble, as most kids do. But she maintains an air of innocence that makes her so adorable. The more serious and deep side of her personality comes from her uncertainty of her origin, of her abilities, why she has wings and why she can't yet fly, and who her parents were. While not a character to brood, she does have that natural curiousity about these things, especially since it's evident to her in many subjects of life (Like seeing a mother and father ith a young child and wondering what that's like.) It's this aspect of her design that I feel has the potential to drive her plot, such as ways of her raising these questions to the adults in the story, thinking with that expected naive innocence that they would have all the answers, and this offers an opening for said adults to ponder the same questions, and for her to decide she wants to (Or has to) find them on her own. From here, I could go in many directions with the story for a comic, if I ever gain the initiative to write said comic.

My envisioning of an adult form for her is basically a larger, more mature and developed version of her, with a very calm and content expression, and wings that radiate light. She would never need to land (And would prefer not to. She grew to be a powerful air elemental but being in contact with the ground makes her weaker and uneasy) and she could conjure, or prevent, windstorms at will. Her place in the order of things would essentially be to maintain a balance of energies by either creating or preventing various storms or other disasters of her element. She circles the world, drifting carelessly and often playing music that would make the wind howl to the tune, and communicating with the various creatures in the sky, but rarely coming in contact with another elemental unless their tasks overlapped or there was a dire need. (I had a pretty good plot for her to meet up with a chronomancer after another character jumped through time that she knew in her past so they could resolve the imbalance together) I'm not entirely sure if that form will ever be shown in the plot, it hasn't in the pieces of the plot I have planned out.

Add some more tweaks and I came up with this. While there are a lot of things I'm not happy with, like proportion of head to body, flatness of hair, and how the eyes were done (as well as anatomy being weird) I rounded out the ears, put some ear fur on the insides, changed her scarf color, experimented with the wings a bit (In a lazy fashion, I'm still a learning artist and wings are something that eludes me) and gave her whiskers. Those actually came from playing LittleBigPlanet where I tried to create a Sackboy likeness to her and ended up giving her whiskers. It stick, and I think it gives her another unique quality.

I'm definitely not happy with the tail. I've always seen her tail as being massive, at least the width of her body and 3 quarters as long, but I can never manage to draw it properly.

I'm still tweaking her design a bit. Experimenting, mostly. This was an experimental sketch I did, though now I'm considering scrapping it.

As well as try to give her shoes, I tried making the wings look more detailed and resemble bird wings, as well as shape her ears a bit more and align her face a bit better. I tried to give her back her wing-like whiskers as well as the catlike whiskers she has, but I'm not so sure I did it in a favorable way. I definitely am not a fan of the shoes now that I give it some thought, they somehow make her look older, I'm not sure what it is. And aside from anatomy problems (One arm is longer than the other) everything else is the same. And yes, I know sleeves don't work that way. :V I started to ink this, and I might just finish inking it, and I did fix a lot of the weird things, but in terms of design ideas, pretty much all the changes are concept.

I did manage to make her tail look right to me though, nice and fluffy without looking like it had no volume. Ironic, but it's definitely a start. Practice is always good, I guess.

So that's the long tale of a fox who's born to fly and how they came about. I certainly love hearing myself talk.

I haven't given up on that comic, I just feel like I need more practice. This was originally a concept I did for a potential cover. The blue fox isn't my character, he's a friend of mine and he's supposed to have five tails, but my idea for him was that he bunches them together to make movement easier for him and because it leaves more room on a panel for me.

Maybe someday. Maybe someday soon, even. Who knows, really.