I’ve mentioned there are some characters that I thought were a mistake, or at least maybe potentially so. One is Jack. The other is David.
Maybe it is no coincidence that they are two of the male characters.
David is Lily’s little brother. He starts out at around 8, and is around 11 or 12 when the story ends. And the truth is that I never actually knew what to do with him.
I don’t know how to relate to young boys.
Yes, I was one, in the past, but I kinda didn’t know how to relate to them even then. I was the kinda kid who would sit on the front porch reading a book about microprocessors (the 68000 was kind of amazing) while other kids were climbing trees and peeing into jars with rose petals in them… to see if they could. (Yes, that happened). I mean, I did “play” with the neighborhood kids sometimes, but… that was something of a disaster best left for another time.
Point is, I didn’t know what to do with him.
Lily and her sisters, well… I had a pretty good idea what to do with them. I’m pretty comfortable with that world for some godforsaken unexplained reason that I still don’t entirely understand. But David… he was a complete mystery to me.
So, I basically relegated him to comic relief. He’s the young troublemaker who liked to play video games and get into trouble (and MAN did he get himself into some trouble). At one point in the story he went to summer camp, killed a couple of pigs, and got two girls to fall for him. Then he walked in on Ai in the shower and got a little ramped up… basically, he was just comic relief.
And I’m not too happy with that, to be honest.
But the problem is, that I can’t think of a better way to use him. It’s not that I really regret not doing more with him, because I don’t actually know what more I could do with him.
But a family without a younger brother just didn’t seem right either.
But, let’s be fair. This story is told from Lily’s eyes. Lily was a fourteen year old girl when she was found, and was fifteen or so when this story started. She didn’t really know what to do with David any more than I did. I mean, I’m sure there are families where the older sister and younger brother get along well and love each other – but I never really saw one. Lily didn’t really know what to do with David any more than I did, and the feeling seems to have been kinda mutual. He has the emotional range of a teaspoon, so he’d just rather sit in his room and play video games than interact with Lily in any meaningful way.
Towards the end, he did see Lily as a sister. It was even mentioned that he would defend her when he was playing his games and one of his little team mates got a bit mouthy. But… he saw Beth as a sister too, and they barely got along any better.
So, was David a mistake? Mixed feelings on that. He added a little to the story. And I guess he was necessary for some reasons. But all in all… he was always destined for the sidelines – in the same way that little brothers tend to be destined for the sidelines with real older sisters and their friend groups.
So… I guess I accidentally went for reality.
Maybe he’ll grow up. He probably will. Hopefully before he gets his “girlfriend” pregnant.
(giving a kid that young a “girlfriend”… or even two… wasn’t necessarily the greatest idea. But it sure did lead to some comedy.)
You might remember that Crystal had a band. Two, actually.
I actually have quite a bit to say about Crystal. There’s a reason why, other than Lily, she may have been my favorite character in the story. But I want to specifically talk about her musical pursuits.
At some point in the story, about halfway through, Crystal got in her mind that she wanted to learn how to play electric guitar, and she turned out to be really good at it, and also a pretty decent lyricist too. She wrote most of the music for her band, and even when it reformed with new members she met from her school, she still was a very strong creative driver in her new band. I don’t think she ever became great at the guitar, at least not in the story, but she became good. Good enough that she could play lead.
As with several plots in this story, this came from an anime (the Idols, as I mentioned, were another). Bocchi the Rock, to be specific.
Bocchi the Rock was one of the first anime I ever watched. I don’t remember if it was first or second (It was either just before or after Akebi’s Sailor Uniform), but it was definitely one of the first two or so. And I loved it. I still think it’s one of the best anime, even though looking back at it with a more critical eye there were certainly things that could be improved.
But, even then, I couldn’t exactly just take the plot of Bocchi the Rock and turn it into a plot point for this story. It had to have its own twist.
The twist was that in Bocchi, all of the band members wanted a band. In this story, only Crystal did, and Lily and her sisters only started a band so they could help Crystal succeed. In fact, after a while, the band broke up and Crystal had to find bandmates on her own. Crystal was so driven to succeed because she remembered being homeless and wanted to have something to fall back on if the worst happened.
This was actually a little similar to Bocchi’s motivation for being in Kessoku Band, but it also kind of mirrors some of my feelings on things too. I try to keep my skills up in multiple ways because I don’t ever want to be near-homeless again – like I was, once.
But there were things I rather liked about the whole thing. I liked coming up with band names. “The Rockingest Rockers that ever Rocked in Round Rock” was pretty creative, I thought, but I agree with Lily that “Crystal Refractions” was actually really good. The song she wrote for Lily was sweet and full of feeling, but I deliberately didn’t write it as well as I could have. Girl was sixteen, after all. It’s not like she’s going to write a Mozart symphony. And, I think I mentioned this in one of the author notes, I really want to hear “I love you, you pink frilly bitch” someday. That sounds like a really fun one.
The song she wrote for Lily, by the way… there were some clues to how she feels about Lily. When she said she would marry Lily? She really wasn’t kidding. I mean, yes, she discovered she likes guys better in that way, but every other way? If she could spend the rest of her life with Lily, she would in a heartbeat. She said “The Moon is Beautiful” – Lily wondered if she knew what she was saying. Spoiler: She absolutely did. It was, at least of sorts, a confession of love. which Crystal admitted herself. I actually don’t think there was any character, maybe excluding Dave and Sabby, that loved Lily more deeply than Crystal did.
I was inspired in a lot of ways by Bocchi the Rock, but the most inspiring part was in Episode 8, when she said “I refuse to let it stay this way” and Bocchi’d all over the stage. In fact, I think Lily recounted that herself, in the same way. I kind of took that into myself as phrase I say sometimes when things are at their worst. And Lily kind of did that too.
Anime can be awful – but it can also be a great inspiration. Some of it was for me, like Bocchi the Rock, Sound! Euphonium, reLife, and a few others. And others… don’t get me started. Lily and I both agree that Nagatoro is nasty.
Crystal will go far. She’s off doing music school now, or at least preparing to start, and maybe in ten years we’ll have the next Lady Gaga. Dang, I hope not. But if anyone can do it, it’ll be Crystal. What’ll probably happen is, she’ll graduate from music school, find some boring corporate job where she doesn’t use her degree at all, and play in odd dives on weekends and weeknights. And… I bet she’d be really happy that way.
Or she’ll end up using Lily’s connections, going to Japan, and making some weird j-pop and a-pop fusion, become a star touring around Japan, and having the time of her life.
I guess time will tell. Because she could just end up getting married and being a housewife, too. You’d think Crystal would be a bit wild for that… but all she’s ever been looking for is stability, and you can’t really get a more stable life than that… with the right person.
Anyway, enough rambling. I changed February 25, 2024 tonight. There were two errors. One of the errors was Lily said “Beth” where she should have said Crystal. The other is that Lily stated Beth slapped Crystal. She didn’t. She almost did, but didn’t. I actually think the story would have been better if she did, but I try to reserve slapping for when people really deserve it. And, well… maybe Crystal actually did, but Beth was more interested in just venting, I guess.
In Lily’s story, there is almost no LGBT. Even though Lily does mention the possibility in passing, and there are strong hints (confirmed at the end) that Crystal is for a time at the least bi, there was very little LGBT in this story. There is a large cast of… at least twenty girls, and only one of them is even bi. The rest are interested in boys – at least as far as we know (there are some I didn’t flesh out very much, but since we don’t know, it doesn’t matter. Do I know? Not really. I didn’t really care what, say, Britni did in her private life where Lily wasn’t concerned.)
And even Crystal was bi because of trauma. She’s the one who, well, let’s be frank, got raped by one man, and was in an inappropriate relationship with another, so her experience with men was very bad. It made sense in the story that Crystal would be, at the very least, a little confused. Trauma does tend to go hand in hand with that kind of thing, it seems. (Not one hundred percent of the time, but often).
So there were multiple reasons for that.
The first reason is, this is a story told from Lily’s perspective. Every day Lily wrote a post in her diary, and apart from the occasional “guest post”, the story was only ever told through Lily’s eyes. And that kind of thing… just didn’t occur to her. Britni or Yu or Rebecca may have been interested in girls, but I don’t think Lily would have ever picked up on that. So, maybe there was some stuff going on out of story. Lily never picked up on it, so it never got talked about.
The second reason is, it’s really not a common thing. As much as the media wants to make us believe it is, in truth, it’s a very small percentage of the population that is of that persuasion. Many yuri anime likes to pretend that it’s really common and when you get a pile of girls together they’ll start being interested in each other. For the most part, that’s just not true. So I deliberately wanted to go against the yuri trope, and have a story where there were no yuri shenanigans. So it was partly a rebellion against the other stories that did have an agenda, for whatever reason. (I maintain that a lot of the yuri anime out there are not yuri because of representation, but more because male otaku like to think about two girls rubbing things together that many girls commonly wouldn’t rub together. Japan really tends to treat that kind of cultural thing much more matter-of-fact.)
The third reason is, that it would have ruined the story. Frankly Jack came close enough to ruining the story, and it was a straight relationship. If I’d let the complicated feelings of romance pollute the pure love of Lily and her sisters, it would have become a problem very quickly. The whole point of the story was to explore the relationship of a bunch of girls who loved each other in a very pure way. Adding an “impure” motive on top of that would have just ruined everything.
And the last reason is, I just didn’t want to. It’s my story and no one is entitled to “representation” in it. When I write stories or other similar products, my attitude is very simple: It’s my story, my plot, my characters, my everything (unless it’s fanfiction, though some parts of that are still mine). You can tell me how bad my story is structurally, point out errors (and there are errors), all that sort of thing. But the plot is mine. You don’t get to criticize that. I just didn’t see any point in adding that to my story, so I didn’t. If you do want to read a story with that kind of thing, then… write your own, or read something else. There’s lots out there to choose from.
I was pretty cagey, in one of the bonus entries, as to why Crystal left her girlfriend. Crystal didn’t want to tell her, and Lily didn’t pry. So Lily doesn’t know, at least right now. But I’ll tell you. Crystal left her girlfriend because as much as she loved her, she didn’t like having sex with girls. She thought she did, she did feel an attraction and a love for her girlfriend, but when push came to shove, it just wasn’t her cup of tea. She had a long talk with her girlfriend, and explained that, and her girlfriend basically said “You don’t have to be lesbian, you know. I know it’s not me. Go find yourself a guy and have a happy life, we’ll still be close friends.” And they hugged.
And they broke up. They’re still really close, like Lily said, and Crystal hangs out with Dakota and her girlfriend sometimes. Even Dakota’s new girlfriend likes her, and they’re getting pretty close. But Crystal just wants something… different.
Dakota’s not really a part of the sister group, but they all know each other, and Lily did meet her.
I just thought of the fact that cat-girl seemed to love being with women. She was… ummm… an interesting case. I didn’t really write her as lesbian or even bi. I wrote her as… well… she’d do anything with anyone. So it’s not so much that they were girls or boys, it’s just that they were there. She’s quite the character, but at the end of the day… her goal was always to find a man and settle down. It’s just that it seemed so out of reach that she gave up and fully embraced hedonism.
The long and short is, these things are complicated, with complicated psychological reasoning, and squishing the whole thing down to a label is its own kind of dehumanization.
So, that’s what I was thinking. No LGBT in Lily, and now you know why.
Over the past few days I’ve been rewatching “Onimai: I am Now your Sister”. It’s one of my favorite anime, even though it kind of got a bad rap because people tend to comment on things without understanding them.
It’s kind of a “Cute Girls doing Cute Things” anime, of course, with a twist. The twist is that the main character is a man who got turned into a (rather cute) middle school girl. I know that many would hear that and get all panty-twisty, but in reality, it’s a really cute and rather sweet anime (that does get ecchi-adjacent in places, admittedly). I really mean that – other than a bit of double entendre, there’s nothing at all inappropriate about it. It’s exactly what it says and no more.
The thing about “cute girls doing cute things” anime is that that label actually very clearly describes what the anime is. It’s a bunch of really cute girls doing really cute things, and there’s usually not a whole lot more to it. Some anime play a little fast and loose with it (like Onimai) and have a little more plot than just cute girls doing cute things, but that’s essentially what it is. Cute girls, doing cute things. (Other anime hew to the trope so closely it gets boring…)
I mentioned before that, when i first started writing Lily, I had only seen, I think, one anime in my life, and I have absolutely no idea what a CGDCT (as it’s often abbreviated) anime actually was. I just knew that I wanted to write a story that had cute girls, doing cute things – in a deep way.
My story is about cute girls doing cute things, I guess, but I never actually shied away from rather important topics. In fact, I kind of leaned into them. In this story, I address: abortion, adoption, sexual assault, just plain assault, karens (yes, they get their own category), older men with younger girls, abuse, neglect, suicide, mental illness, onlyfans-like streaming, teen sex and pregnancy, and a few other things as well. I didn’t shy away from that. I didn’t want to shy away from that. If I’d written a story that just had shallow, cute girls doing absolutely nothing useful, I don’t think I could have lived with myself.
But, on the other hand, it has some really beautiful things, too. A loving nuclear family, sisters and friends that truly love each other, a fairly healthy teen relationship (as these things to), spirituality, redemption, pregnancy and marriage seen in a positive light, healing, lots of crying but lots of comfort. Oh, and a few pillow fights too. It’s a story that didn’t just lean into cute girls doing cute things, it leaned into cute girls doing human things in a cute way.
There’s clearly an appeal to cute girls doing cute things. Clearly. If there wasn’t, I wouldn’t have wanted to write one without even knowing about the genre. It speaks to something very deep in the male, but also in the human heart. It speaks to innocence, to friendship, to love, to sisterly bonds, to fun… it speaks to everything good about femininity and humanity. After all, for most men, cute girls are something we want to protect (and the fact that many women don’t and don’t want to understand this is currently one of their greatest flaws). We want nothing more than to make a world where cute girls can do cute things, and feel absolutely safe doing so. But if you write about cute girls without making them human girls, it just gets… boring, kind of. And “Onimai” actually did fall into that trap, just a little bit. The girls ended up so cute they kind of stopped being human and started becoming an idealized version of human. So cute that you almost forget that girls that cute just don’t exist. Much escapist media has this problem – you end up with an idealized story that satisfies something very deep inside, but also stirs up a longing as well, a longing that this kind of world could actually exist. And doesn’t.
And maybe that’s one reason why I wanted to dive into deeper things with Lily. I wanted girls that could exist. And I feel, just a little, that I succeeded at that.
At the end of the story (or nearly so), Lily got letters from a few of her friends, and they all told her, in different ways and with different depth of feeling, how much they loved her. That’s not cute girls doing cute things. That’s something a little different than cute girls doing cute things. That’s… cute sisters loving each other.
And at the end of the day, that’s what I hope Lily’s legacy will be. Throughout the story, that’s the thing that held everything together. Lily’s love, and her family’s (adopted or otherwise) love for her in return. And if they showed that love in a cute way, well, more’s the better, right?
And just as an aside – I don’t understand yuri. I mean, I understand why it exists, but I don’t understand it. This is not a yuri story and I actively avoided anything yuri. Crystal even wanted to get yuri sometimes and I shut it down hard. This is because if I’d had any of those girls get into that kind of relationship with each other, it would have stopped being cute girls doing cute things and started being, well, something else. These girls loved each other, deeply. But yuri would have, in my view, corrupted that love and added complications that would have ruined the story. Even at the end, when Crystal ended up with a girl for a little while, Lily was kind of caught by surprise. It never even occurred to her. And… in my view, anyway, that’s kind of how it should be. She accepted Crystal, but… it’s still not that kind of story. I might say more about that later.
People can do what they want, but I owe no one representation, especially in my story, with characters that I created..
(I’ll be a little fair, though, one of Lily’s flaws is that she is amazingly gullible. Remember that birthday party where Liz all but told her about the surprise party and she still didn’t figure it out? Crystal was sending a whole bunch of signals, like on.. I think, August 16, the night before the big idol concert in Houston. Lily did not pick up on them. Likely at least one of her other sisters did. I have no idea who, but if I’d have to guess, it was… Diana. Who is, frankly, more interested in tacos than girls, so…)
In the first entry, I decided to change some of the “tell” to “show”. I’m still not completely happy with it, but now Yuki actually talks to Lily about her graduation instead of Lily just recounting the conversation after the fact..
And in the second… I at least partly corrected a huge mistake. I made Yuki’s English very broken and bad, even though she’s not really that way in the rest of the story. Even if I allow for Lily cleaning up the grammar a little in the retelling, I still think I did Yuki a huge disservice. So I changed the grammar to have fewer (but not no) mistakes. The mistakes she made before would be appropriate for an Asian language, but you have to be really bad at English to screw up quite that bad, and Yuki has shown (even from the beginning) to be reasonably competent.
I may yet go back and fix it just a bit more (as well as maybe running Miki’s Japanese past someone who speaks it better than I do) but I’ve been feeling these changes are necessary for a while now.
Today I took my first step towards fixing some of the errors in this story. While I feel that the story is pretty solid as it is and I don’t want to completely rewrite it, it is a story. And there’s no reason I can’t go back to fix stuff I don’t like or feel like could be improved.
The fix I did today was in the January 14, 2024 entry. This is the entry where Anathema’s life changes.
When I wrote last night’s entry about the body models, I started thinking about Anathema, and about her back story. How does such a pure girl turn into such a whore? It’s not just something that happens – there’s usually a reason for it, and it’s usually trauma.
But this highlights something else about this story: this is the second time (or maybe the first of two, but I think second) that I wrote about a teen girl having a relationship with an older man. Note please that in both cases I didn’t treat this as something that was desirable. It’s not. Sometimes the relationships are, if not legally, at least in intention, consensual. Sometimes there’s actual love there. And sometimes (well, often but not 100 percent of the time) that love is pretty one-sided. And the innocence of a girl is taken away. Or given away, maybe.
Anathema found a man that she thought she was going to be with for the rest of her life, that she thought would make her dreams come true, that made her feel wonderful things she’d never experienced in her life before. And she thought much, much more of that relationship than he did, and when she found out that it wasn’t to be… it broke her. She turned into the cat-girl we know and… tolerate? She became, let’s be frank, a pleasure-seeking whore who sought out as much physical pleasure as she could find to hide the empty hole that that man ripped out of her heart.
And it took Jesus to fix her.
This story has never shied away from difficult topics. And this is a difficult topic. But I think I handled it well, and I think now, I handled it even better. Unlike in Crystal’s case, Anathema’s “boyfriend” never had any consequences. She never told. Deep down, she still loves him.
And that’s probably the greatest tragedy of all. Sometimes bonds aren’t broken, even in the midst of the worst betrayals possible.
When I first created this story, I had in mind to voice Lily also as a vtuber character, and made some steps towards making that happen. It didn’t, for two reasons. Reason 1: I couldn’t find a voice changer that worked well enough to disguise the fact that the voice was, well, mine (that actually changed towards the end of the run). Reason 2: It was just plain awkward.
But as a part of that I created 3d .vrm models for all (or most at least) of the main characters. The first model I created was this:
This model was okay for a first step, but to be honest, I didn’t really know how to use the vr generation program, which was vroid (and to be fair, the version of vroid I used was far less featureful than the versions that came out later). I used 3tene to animate her, and found the dress on booth.pm. The reason I brought up that the version of vroid was less featureful was that the program was designed to create, well, cute anime girls. I couldn’t do too much with her, and it kind of defaulted to a lot, well, sexier than I would have liked.
You might notice her boobs are a bit large. This was a mistake. I’ll explain more about that in a bit.
Her second iteration looked like this:
This iteration was better in some ways and worse in others. The feedback I got on this model was that she looked too grown up and sexy. I didn’t do that on purpose, but I agree in hindsight. Her breasts were too large again (and I will again talk about that in a bit), her stockings were actually a bit out of character, etc. I did like her dress, but all told, this was a mistake.
After I got some feedback that “a man must have written this”, well, I took that a bit personally, and I modified her body model a little.
Many of the changes were “underneath”, so to speak. I believe I changed her body skin (which no one but me will ever see), I reduced her breast size, I think I adjusted her hips, and made her face look a little more youthful. I don’t think I did a perfect job, but it reflected her character a little better.
Truth be told, I don’t like how I made the breasts too large in the beginning. It was a mistake, and one that I will forever regret. It’s not because I don’t like big breasts, or because I like small breasts, it’s because Lily is supposed to be a teenage girl, and I let some ideas about how a woman’s body looks override who Lily actually is. That was a huge, huge mistake, and I wish I could take it back. But all I could do was fix the body model and move on.
The last iteration of her body model is this:
This is my favorite body model by far. What I like about it is, it’s cute. I deliberately toned down some of the more blatant female aspects (her breasts are normal sized, her hips are normal sized, I adjusted her face to be more in line with how I imagined it, and even her pose is a lot more innocent than the previous models. This is much more the Lily that I’d imagined than the previous models. It helped that I had a lot more knobs to turn with the newest version of vroid, and another tool was also available to pose her far better than 3tene (or vroid) allowed. That tool also allowed me to pose all of the other girls at the same time, too. Previously I had to use blender, and that’s just a royal pain.
There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes for a project like that.
While I’m at it, let me also discuss some of the other body models.
This is Liz. Her body model was particularly difficult, because she was deliberately described as a smaller girl who was not as, well, developed as Lily. Her hips are smaller, and so are her breasts. The later models of vroid made that a lot easier. She’s also described as pretty studious and dressing very nicely. I don’t really think the shoes fit her, but otherwise, I like how this model turned out. This was her first model:
Me and Liz at the purikura
Which actually wasn’t too bad, but wasn’t great either. This was one of the renders I did in blender. The only one, actually.
Now for Beth:
Beth was difficult because Lily played her up a little too much, and it was hard to pick an outfit/skin tone/etc for her that would do her justice. This turned out alright but I’m also a little unhappy with how she turned out. Maybe I’ll redo her model at some point.
One of the limiting factors of all of this is what’s available on booth.pm. Because of the nature of vtubing, etc., the outfits that are available are about 90% sexy/fetish/whatever, and I had to pick really, really carefully. Particularly because I didn’t want to pick any that had a license that required attribution. It limited what I could do, but I guess it worked out… Mostly.
The ahoge is cute though. (See below for a more recent model)
Okay, here’s Diana.
In some ways Diana was the easiest. Her attitude is more in her pose than anything, so I just picked something that looked a little appropriate and it worked out. I actually wanted to make her a little pudgier, but this is where I came across the limitations of vroid. It wasn’t an option.
And… Crystal.
I envisioned Crystal as dressing in kind of a gothic lolita kind of style, and it mostly worked. This was another instance where I ran up against the limitations of booth.pm. Without designing my own clothing (and who has time for that?) I pretty much had to make do. This was alright. It could have been better.
I did a body model of cat-girl (Anathema):
This one I actually didn’t like. At all. I mean, her body is fine, but it was difficult getting her face and hair, etc., right. I may redo it, but I may… not.
Here are a couple of other pictures of Lily I experimented with. They have their plusses and minuses.
That last one… It was supposed to be fanservice. It ended up just being awkward. But, well, I guess you can see.
This was also supposed to be fanservice. I was playing around with the body model.. and dressed her in a bikini and put her on Patreon, back when I was using it. I don’t really see the point of that. It’s a cute picture, and I love the expression on her face. But if I were to do it again, I’d pick the background more carefully (It was supposed to be in Orlando, and, well.. .there’s no place in Orlando that looks like that). I’d also choose a slightly different body skin. This one worked, but not well with the bikini.
I do like the pose, but mostly just because it’s pretty perfectly done. It really does look like she’s jumping. Now if I could just add a shadow…
Where vroid completely fell over was…. Sabby.
Sabby being Sabby
The reason it fell over wasn’t so much because of the skin color or the face or anything like that – it’s because vroid is designed for cute, sexily dressed anime girls. It’s not designed for middle-aged, short, slightly pudgy motherly figures with big breasts. I could not make her pudgy – it wasn’t an option. All I could do was dress her as frumpily as I could and pose her in such a way as to make up for vroid’s shortcomings. This is where what I was trying to do with vroid fell flat, and about where I started giving up on the whole body model thing. And don’t even get me started on Dave!
And vroid also kinda fell over here, bad.
Allison!
This is Allison. She is based on a girl who I am familiar with (I have never met her in person but know her mother) from real life. She was eight or so when this picture was made. The problem is that vroid is, AGAIN, designed for cute/sexy anime girls. Trying to make an eight year old was mostly impossible. This was another situation where I just had to turn some dials all the way down (you know, chest size, etc) and then add baggy clothing to hide the rest. Because of that I was VERY DISPLEASED with how this turned out, but I literally couldn’t have done much more without actually editing the photo manually.
It was close enough, and her mother was fine with how it turned out, but I never tried to do that again. Maybe vroid has improved in that regard. I’ll have to poke at it when I get some spare time.
This led to a rather unfortunate situation where Liz and Allison had nearly the same size for some particular measurements, and that is not a situation I was pleased with.
She’s twelve now. It might be slightly more doable if I tried again. I won’t.
Let’s see, what else do I have.
This is a picture I created of Lily wearing kimono in Japan. It turned out okay, but I don’t like it. Maybe I should try again with her new body model.
And this is Beth’s latest body model. I actually like this one better, for the same reason I like Lily’s better. I ran into similar booth.pm issues, her dress is a little sexier than I would like, but it turned out alright. I don’t like how her lip color interacts with her skin tone, but oh well. It’s a little thing. I’m not a huge fan of how slender vroid makes the legs and doesn’t really give much of a slider to fix that, but I guess it’s cute enough.
Hmm. I have a couple of others. I have one of cat-girl that, well… you’re not going to see. I made that one for “fanservice”, but I was never happy with the fact that I even made it, so it will stay hidden for now.
I’m soo happy!
This one was cute. I actually like it. I did a good job with the posing, I like her dress, all that. But it just never actually fit with the story and I will probably remove it when I figure out which post I attached it to.
I think I have one of Lily in a maid outfit somewhere. I never uploaded it to this page, it was used just for a youtube. Maybe I will.
Anyway, that’s some behind-the-scenes stuff about the characters’ body models, etc. It’s more difficult than it appears, isn’t it? I mean, it’d be really easy to make some or all of the characters (except Allison for at least TWO reasons, and only one is age, the other is the inadequacy of the body model) in all sorts of different outfits and stuff, but at the end of the day, it just doesn’t serve the story, and keeping the models appealing while also staying true to their character is not easy. I missed the mark more than once. But I hope the current models are pretty close.
It’s Father’s Day, so it seems like a good time to write about Dave, Lily’s adoptive father.
Dave was always a difficult character to write, and there were multiple reasons for that.
Reason number 1: I didn’t know what a “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” story was when I started writing Lily. I mean, I kinda understood the concept, but I didn’t know it had a name. But as I continued writing, I started watching anime (which I’ve mostly grown past now) and realized that it’s a thing. It’s a genre characterized by, well… cute girls doing cute things. But also by the fact that there are few male characters, and often no male characters.
Clearly I didn’t go whole hog into the no male characters trope, but I did have very few. There’s Dave, David, “owner” (who we never find out his real name. It’s some Indian name I never got around to choosing), Jack, Liz’s boyfriend, and pretty much every other male character in the story is a jerk, a creep, or ends up in jail/prison. (I’m thinking of a few exceptions after I wrote this, but it’s true in essence.)
In hindsight, this says a lot about me.
Reason number 2: I don’t really know how to write men. This might be surprising, because I am one, but the truth is that pretty much everyone who knows me would know that I suck as a man. I’ve always tended to identify more with women. (This is not the same thing at all as identify as a woman). I don’t get boys or men, and I find them difficult to understand and interact with. It’s not that I hate them at all, but I just don’t understand them. I kind of understand women. You’d think this would make my life easier in some ways, but noooooo.
And reason number 3: My father sucked. I mean, seriously sucked. I have no role models with which to write a good male father character. My father died a couple of years ago. I don’t remember the exact date and I don’t care. It’s a particular effort not to wish him to be in hell at the moment (I don’t, but sometimes I catch myself slipping).
But when I wrote Dave, I didn’t want to let any of these things get in the way. So I ended up writing a male character that had a difficult time with emotion, mostly kept to himself, and was a very logical, analytic and thoughtful person. But on the other hand, he also was very protective, was not afraid to step in to keep Sabby in check when she needed it (that happened at least once), and was actually a pretty good father, if flawed.
That’s why Dave was difficult to write, in the end. I didn’t know how to write him.
There’s nothing wrong with a Cute Girls Doing Cute Things story. Let’s be honest, a story full of women can be kind of mercurial and go off the rails a bit, and sometimes male characters are needed to bring stability. That’s kind of the role Dave and Jack filled for Lily, in a way. Even in the CGDCT stories where there are no males, there’s often a female that takes the male role of keeping things in check.
I’m not upset with how I wrote the men in this story. I’m really not. That’s because there really is nothing wrong with a Cute Girls Doing Cute Things story, and it was really important to me to explore the relationships between Lily and her sisters. Women to tend to form very strong friend groups, and I wanted to explore the dynamics of that. And I think I did a pretty good job. In that kind of story, there’s not really a place for a male as a main character. I accept this. But on the other hand, I don’t think the story would have been what it is without Dave. Diana had a single mother and her father was a deadbeat. But if Sabby were a single mother… I don’t think it would have turned out well. Dave was necessary to the story and Lily loved him deeply. And he loved Lily just as much. Even if he had a hard time showing it sometimes.
Put another way, I think I would have rather had Dave than my own father.
And that means I did an okay job writing him.
So… some things about Dave I never put in the story. He didn’t like to talk too much about his past. He wasn’t in the military. But he did have some close friends that were, and they died in the gulf war or some such. He also knew some people who were in the WTC when the towers fell in 2001. So he had a lot of experience with losing people close to him to war or other things. That’s why he always got a little depressed when memorial day, etc., came around. It’s not that he was some kind of super-patriotic guy, or anything, but he remembered, and it made him sad.
But he has a hard time with emotions, so he just sat in his chair and let the world go by sometimes.
His prank wars with Lily were legendary, but that’s kind of his way of showing love, in a way. He met his match with her, but gave as good as he got. Lily didn’t mention it too much, but he also had a rather weird sense of humor, and was the type to tell dad jokes sometimes and make everyone groan. He also really loved Sabby and took his duties as a husband and a father seriously. Sabby was a difficult woman to wrangle, but she always remembered what made her fall in love with him in the first place, so she was willing to be a little submissive when she needed to. He didn’t take charge often, but when he did, she knew he was probably right, so she let him. Even if she hated that and had to blow off some steam.
I mean, putting cayenne pepper in chocolate pudding? That’s genius. Especially when you’re dealing with Lily…
Anyway… I think Dave turned out to be a decent character, even if I didn’t do the best job writing him sometimes.
When I first added cat-girl to the character roster, I wasn’t actually sure about that decision. She started out as a one-dimensional “slut” character. Actually, I’m kinda not joking about that. We initially met cat-girl because she wanted to help to advertise the bakery (I don’t even remember how she found her way into the story, honestly). She immediately went out wearing nothing but fifth-element bandages (you know, those white bandages that Milla Jovovich wore) and caused a couple of car accidents.
Throughout the rest of the story, she was barely even comic relief. She was pretty much an exhibitionist slut who just wanted to show and use her body in any way possible, and Lily and Sabby basically had a full time job just trying to keep her from getting them in a whole heap of legal trouble. I think comic relief is the best way to describe her, but maybe more accurately, she was a sweet and well-meaning thorn in everyone’s side that they just kept around because she made the bakery a lot of money.
I mean, Lily wouldn’t even describe some of the stuff she “wore”. Not just because that would have made this the kind of story I didn’t want, but because she was embarrassed. I mean, one time she wore nothing but a ribbon. Another time, well… Lily was too embarrassed to say, but when Lily and Sabby made the mistake of relaxing the boundaries a little, she came in in full leather fetish gear. And, let’s say, it was the type that didn’t cover much but if someone had taken even the smallest liberties… would have put her into a very vulnerable, immobile, and difficult to escape from position she’d have enjoyed very much. If you get my meaning.
Quite frankly, I don’t understand why Lily and Sabby didn’t just kick her to the curb. I would have…
I wasn’t sure about that decision right up until her redemption arc. And then, suddenly, she turned out to be more of a tragic character than anything. I mean, poor girl wanted to be a housewife. How did she get here from there?
We never really found out, and frankly, I should probably explore that. It might make a good short story.
Anyway, the moment she was “redeemed”, I guess, was the moment we found out her real name. “Anathema”. Set apart. But sometimes anathema is a word used in a negative way. When I saw that word (when I was trying to figure out what to name her, I actually looked up names that mean “set apart” or something like that) I knew it was perfect for her.
It’s an unusual name, too.
And then she turned out to be one of the most… beautiful characters of the whole story, if a little undeveloped, I suppose.
I love how her character arc turned out once “the boss” set her in the right direction. She then turns right around and tells Lily right to her face that she’s being selfish. Who else could get away with that? But… this is Anathema. She never shies away from saying what she thinks. Or doing what she wants. It’s just that what she wants… changed.
So at the end, I still kind of regret what I did with her character, but she turned out to have a fairly important role in the story, and she’s perhaps the character that has the most… notable change of character in the entire story. And truth be told, not having to rein her in anymore was a relief. That girl always wanted to push the envelope and I was always fighting with her to keep her body to herself. If I’d let her, she woulda at least nailed Lily (though as she explained, she did know it was a bad idea), probably Crystal (bad girl!), and probably would have tried to get everyone together at the same time. But I didn’t let her do any of that. She kept it out of work… mostly. There was that one time…
But at the end of the day, I’m not going to retcon her out. She did serve her purpose. Even if I probably should have reined her in a little better.
I don’t think I ever mentioned her last name, did I? Well… I won’t here, either.
Sabby, Lily’s adopted mother, was not necessarily my favorite character, but she was at the top of my favorite characters to write.
When I first wrote Sabby, I had in my mind the character of a sassy black woman, but one with a lot of heart. Lily always says that Sabby “goes all Claire Huxtable on people”, and that’s kind of who I had in mind when I wrote Sabby. I mean, maybe she was physically different. In my mind, she was always a little darker, just a little plumper, a little more well-endowed… maybe a little shorter. I always thought of Sabby as beautiful, but not necessarily in a statuesque kind of way. Maybe more like in a motherly kind of way.
But she was modeled after Claire Huxtable (of the Cosby Show) in a few ways. The most obvious was that she was a genuinely caring woman with a temper and a protective instinct like a lion, and when she went off, you’d better listen or else. And it’s not even that she’d scream or yell, she’d just get quiet and clipped with her voice, and then if you didn’t listen, you were gonna get smacked.
But as the story progressed, Sabby’s character deepened. She wasn’t just a one-dimensional sassy block woman character. She lost her parents at an early age, made a lot of bad decisions, had foster parents that she had decidedly mixed feelings about. She also had a fairly well hidden stream of insecurity about her, like she sometimes didn’t really feel like she deserved the good life she had. And towards the end, when Katie asked her and Lily to be little Sabrina’s god-daughter, she was rather introspective about it.
I want you to make one more promise to us,” Sabby said. “If you’re serious about this.”
Katie nodded. “Anything.”
“Well, we’ll see. I want you to promise that, when you find another man, that you will take our opinions of him seriously. You… already made one bad choice, and… I will not have my goddaughter having a, well… you know… as a stepfather.”
Katie’s face contorted a little, but then she relaxed and nodded. “I hate that. It makes me a little angry. But… you’re right. It’s best for her.”
Sabby blew out a breath. “That was not fun to say,” she said. “I know I have this reputation as a lion, and Lily likes to say I ‘go all Claire Huxtable on people’” – I giggled and she shot me a look – “but it’s not an easy thing to do,” she said, rather softly for her. She looked at me. “I hate doing it,” she said, “and if you tell anyone else, I’ll deny it. But I hate having to say these things, I hate having to be a lion.” She actually deflated a little. “But I’ll do what I need to do for my family. For family I have, and… and for family I chose.” She reached down, and in an uncharacteristic gesture for Sabby, she stroked Katie’s face a little. “This makes you family too,” she said, softly. “And I’ll be a lion for you too.”
Sabby takes her role as a mother very seriously, and she wasn’t a lion because that was her nature, but because that’s what she felt she had to be for people she cared about.
Sabby is also a very… moral… character. It’s not because she’s perfect – far from it – but because the feels strongly about those things. Lily’s pretty grounded, but Sabby’s always Lily’s moral rock. She’s one of only a few people who can call her out on her crap and have Lily actually listen (Cat-girl/Anathema is another). Multiple times in the story, she called Lily out on one of her major flaws – the desire to please people because of the fear she’ll lose them.
I liked writing Sabby, and that’s partly because I didn’t always know which facets of Sabby’s character would show. Or be revealed. She may not be my absolute favorite character, but she might have been the most interesting character to write. Lily loved her for a reason, and maybe the reader would grow to understand that as the story progresses.
Lily alluded to this at the very end, but Sabby’s actually conservative. She’s not quite a Trump supporter or MAGA, but she’s got a good head on her shoulders, and knows how much damage misplaced compassion can cause. Dave… was more liberal. I didn’t say too much about that because this wasn’t a political story and Lily was not a political girl, but Dave did start to come around around the time of the fateful Joe Biden debate. Sabby and Dave still have… ummm… words sometimes.
I’ll write more about Dave soon, but I’ll say this: while I wrote Dave as more liberal, he’s more of an old school liberal, you know, like Bill Maher or some of the old-school Democrats. He was still a good father to Lily, and she did love him deeply. And he would have protected her if he’d needed to.
In my story, race was not something to be ignored, and it was not something to be celebrated, either. It was just something that… was. Sabby was black. Dave was white. Lily was half-Japanese. Emiko was full Japanese. Beth and David were half-black (what we would have called “mulatto” back when that was more of a descriptive word than anything else – and it’s funny because this is the first time I actually realized David is half-black). Liz and Jack were Chinese. Diana was Mexican. Crystal was… white, I think. I don’t think I ever explicitly said but that’s just how I imagined her. Lily had friends and family of all races, colors, etc… and it was never a big deal. Only Yu, Rebecca’s friend, had SJW tendencies, and her friends mostly just patted her on the head and went on with their lives. That was a deliberate choice. It wasn’t a big deal to Lily… neither in a positive or negative way. No one in the story had any hate in them – but they also didn’t put anyone on a pedestal because of what they were. It’s just something that was, and people just accepted whatever and moved on. Black or white, Lily didn’t care what Sabby was, as long as she made her ample chest available to cry on when Lily needed it. Or maybe more accurately because she made her ample chest available to cry on when Lily needed it.
That’s the kind of world I want to live in.
Because, frankly, any issues with race today are issues of culture, and that’s a whole other can of worms I’m not opening here.
English
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