Erin's Xenosaga junk

[whyfish]

I made a website for the highly specific brand of bullsh*t I've been on since circa 2006. Some content may be NSFW and/or contain mature themes, so please proceed with caution. General TW for Ziggy's canon backstory and associated implications.

Also have a meandering but mostly Xeno-centric fanart thread on twitter!

 

[katimus]

I love your fics, Erin!!! Thank you for sharing!! ^_^

 

[jessiray]

I love your art Erin! I have always admired how much shape you give to faces and bodies. That cybernetic enhancement Ziggy at the top of the fanart page is just wow...!

 

[whyfish]

D'aww, thank! <3 I finally managed to drum up the attention span to post all of my old fics on AO3. Nothing new here (yet), I just figured it'd be good to have them backed up in a place where there's at least the possibility of subjection to the mortifying ordeal of being known. :B

 

[whyfish]

I guess I should update this with stuff I've done since last year, or at least since the last time I posted in this thread.

So, uh, fanfiction:

Spoiler

grief is the plan (endgame XSIII conversation between Jr. and Ziggy)

unaddressed (MOMO and her family, 15 years post-canon)

Both of these are rated M and contain spoilers through the end of Xenosaga Episode III, as well as references to major character death (including by suicide). Additionally, "unaddressed" discusses terminal illness and the loss of a pet, and an implied past assault.

Apparently I don't always write short fics but when I do, they're hideously depressing! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (I may be working on a longer one that's not All Depression All The Time, I just don't know if it'll ever see the light of day since I've been writing it on and off since mid-2019, oops.)

ANYWAY FANFART uhhhhh so I found an old sketchbook with the first drawing I did of Ziggy back in 2003 or 2004 and posted it alongside a sketch I did this year for the 20th anniversary of XSI:

Spoiler

actual 20th anniversary thing I spent too much time on (cw for blood, sort of):

Spoiler

I was thinking of Something Dire by Alex Reed when I drew this, although the entire album is also a mood.

 

[Elendraug]

Apparently I don't always write short fics but when I do, they're hideously depressing! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

Can confirm I sobbed grossly over both of these fics, they're so good and so heartbreaking. Bring tissues, big time. I am not exaggerating when I say that no fic or book or film has gotten me to cry the way I did over your work. A+

 

[Karen Hart]

20th Anniversary Ziggy is amazing. It's a small thing, but I love that he has blond eyelashes (I don't see that much), and when I looked at that I noticed the red glow in his pupils. ❤ And the floral references to the women in his life! I rather like the blood-branch supporting the peach blossoms. Absolutely gorgeous!

 

[whyfish]

20th Anniversary Ziggy is amazing. It's a small thing, but I love that he has blond eyelashes (I don't see that much),

Thank you so much! (Heh, I saw some fanart on pixiv where his eyelashes were drawn like that and it kind of became a headcanon for me. ^///^ There's an actor I like who had very noticeable blond eyelashes too, so it's kind of just me dumping all my hyperfixations in the same bucket for maximum serotonin.)

and when I looked at that I noticed the red glow in his pupils. ❤

Oh good, I was hoping I'd be able to pull that off! We watched the original Blade Runner a few months ago (I'd seen it a few times, but my spouse was only familiar with the sequel that came out more recently), and Jerami pointed out that in a lot of scenes, the replicant characters were filmed at a camera angle that created sort of an uncanny red-eye effect, like in pre-digital photos. I've also seen other artists use it as a stylistic thing.

And the floral references to the women in his life!

I love Xenosaga's floral etymology. ;A; There's a tweet by Soraya Saga (unfortunately deleted now, but archived here) about the origins of Sharon's and Juli's names that has lived in my head rent-free since I saw it. (A friend of mine also pointed out a few years ago that the name "Melisse" is derived from a word meaning honeybee, so Lactis and Melisse could potentially refer to [the land of] milk and honey, i.e. the promised land. Anyway, that's why there's a bee in the picture, FOR GREAT JUSTICE. orz)

In other news, I've been digging through my ancient (c. 2006-2010) unpublished and/or unfinished fanfiction recently, and a lot of it is more or less as clunky and embarrassing as I'd thought, but it's also pretty interesting to see how I struggled to depict the characters when I first started writing for them, and how my interpretation of them has changed over time. I decided to post this one backdated from 2010 (it's pre-canon Ziggy doing a routine mission; TW for references to death and suicide). I think I'd written it for the same group fic on Godsibb that I wrote mother's day for, or at least around the same time, but for whatever reason I sat on it and never actually posted the thing.

 

[Karen Hart]

(A friend of mine also pointed out a few years ago that the name "Melisse" is derived from a word meaning honeybee, so Lactis and Melisse could potentially refer to [the land of] milk and honey, i.e. the promised land. Anyway, that's why there's a bee in the picture, FOR GREAT JUSTICE. orz)

I wondered about the bee! Everything else was so thoughtful that I just knew it must have had special meaning. ❤

 

[whyfish]

Sometimes I get the urge to do pixel art, so I've been practicing with Dotpict on my phone. Xenosaga was probably inevitable since it's my default thing to draw when I have no idea what else to draw. ;P

These were all done at a resolution of 32x32 px and scaled up to 512x512, so they kind of look like nothing unless you stand about a mile away and squint.

 

[tomxie]

Sometimes I get the urge to do pixel art, so I've been practicing with Dotpict on my phone. Xenosaga was probably inevitable since it's my default thing to draw when I have no idea what else to draw. ;P

These were all done at a resolution of 32x32 px and scaled up to 512x512, so they kind of look like nothing unless you stand about a mile away and squint.

View attachment 7661 View attachment 7659 View attachment 7660 View attachment 7658 View attachment 7657

Awesome, I like pixel style painting very much！

 

[Valkyrie]

Adorable little faces !

 

[Elendraug]

I love the Foundation OT4 so much, but you already know that, lmao. I'll echo what I was saying to you yesterday - pixel art always seems deceptively simple but it really takes a ton of skill (and skill that I've never managed to get the knack for) because you have such a limited amount of space to convey your ideas. It's like poetry, in a way. The haiku or 100-word drabble of fanart. The Pied Piper Jan is my favorite. I'm honestly astounded how much emotion is present in such a tiny piece.

tl;dr your art rules and I love it

 

[whyfish]

pixel art always seems deceptively simple but it really takes a ton of skill (and skill that I've never managed to get the knack for) because you have such a limited amount of space to convey your ideas. It's like poetry, in a way. The haiku or 100-word drabble of fanart.

Ahhh, thank you so much! I've always really loved pixel art and wanted to get good at it. (As a kid I was obsessed with copying the sprites from old Game Boy games and Tamagotchi in MS Paint, like this, and eventually trying to make my own.) It doesn't come as easily to me as I wish it did, but I see it as kind of a challenge or a puzzle to make something look a certain way with a limited palette in a limited amount of space (Dotpict's canvas sizes and default palettes are really good for that imo), so it's kind of a brain exercise too. It feels like it has to be precise and impressionistic at the same time, if that makes sense.

Here are a few more I did recently. (The second one is my deliberate misinterpretation of #ShipInABottle, which was the daily prompt on Dotpict a few days ago. ;P)

 

[jessiray]

Ahhh, thank you so much! I've always really loved pixel art and wanted to get good at it. (As a kid I was obsessed with copying the sprites from old Game Boy games and Tamagotchi in MS Paint, like this, and eventually trying to make my own.) It doesn't come as easily to me as I wish it did, but I see it as kind of a challenge or a puzzle to make something look a certain way with a limited palette in a limited amount of space (Dotpict's canvas sizes and default palettes are really good for that imo), so it's kind of a brain exercise too. It feels like it has to be precise and impressionistic at the same time, if that makes sense.

Here are a few more I did recently. (The second one is my deliberate misinterpretation of #ShipInABottle, which was the daily prompt on Dotpict a few days ago. ;P)
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These are so cute!! The little bottle is especially adorable. you do a great job with pixel work.

 

[whyfish]

These are so cute!! The little bottle is especially adorable. you do a great job with pixel work.

Ahhh thank you! <3

I keep forgetting to update this thread, but here are a few things I did from this year's Xenotober prompt list on twitter. Spoiler tagging for ... well, possible spoilers, but also for Big McLargehuge image files (some of them were supposed have external links to the full-sized images, but I don't know if that works with the thumbnails).

Spoiler: tl;dr

day 3 (promises)

I always felt bad that they never got to make a house for Nex. ;m;

day 8 (protection)


day 10 (rebirth)

If I were you, I'd script a better future.

day 14 (mechanical)
I absolutely loved Elendraug's fanfiction for this prompt, so I tried illustrating it in a short comic format.


day 15 (hope)

This was also partly based on some of Elendraug's writing about what Jr. and Gaignun went through after they were rescued from Miltia. If the scenery looks familiar, it's because I referenced it from Shion's mom's hospital room in XSIII. (Beds in Xenosaga's vision of the future are weird and kind of uncomfortable-looking? The only "normal" beds I can remember seeing offhand are the ones in the Foundation that are supposed to look like 20th-century Earth furniture.)

day 19 (reunion)

You're never/always in the dark.
[full size version 1 and 2]

This one might have actually taken the longest (except for day 25/26 which somehow took even longer?) despite looking really sketchy because I did a million different versions of it (here's one with more noisy crap and XSIII spoilers) and wasn't really happy with any of them, which I guess is at least meta-thematically appropriate for how Ziggy is feeling in this scene. Sometimes you have no choice but to say "I failed yet again" and move on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

day 20 (favorite character)
I ran out of time to draw something new for this one, so I just linked all my old junk.

Bonus Sellers, who is unironically one of my favorite antagonists.

Extra bonus: this started as a multi-panel comic based on an entirely different meme but I felt like the setup was too convoluted for a throwaway joke.

day 25/26 (friendship/loss)

This is the one I made the Clip Studio brush for. (Helmer and Juli is my other brotp besides Jr. and Ziggy. I like the idea that they've been supporting each other since they met at the Institute, not just as political allies but as friends and family members, too.)

I did a few other things but they're not strictly fanart and I can only upload 10 files at a time, oops. (I might actually make a separate post/thread at some point to address my recent obsession with trying to recreate Xenosaga locations in Starbound. We'll see what my attention span has to say about that.)

 

[Valkyrie]

Awww love those works so much, especially the ones about Pied Piper !
Congrats whyfish !

 

[whyfish]

Thank you! I still have so many feelings about Pied Piper. ;-;

Annnnd I really didn't draw much at all in November compared to Xenotober, but here's a lazy sketch dump anyway.

 

[whyfish]

Did a sketch based on a thing I wrote last week, about Melisse at the end of Pied Piper. (Personal update: I still can't draw dogs. )



Major content warning for graphic discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation, as well as medical/institutional abuse and implied animal neglect. The actual fic is here (and also mirrored here). It's rated M on AO3 and I would not recommend reading it at all if you are in any sort of bad place emotionally (I wrote it to process some feelings I was having while I was trying to quit antidepressants, so it kind of reflects that in a very abstract and dramatized way, but I'm OK and doing better now). Also spoilers for the end of Pied Piper, obviously. ;P

 

[Elendraug]

The fic is excellent and I highly recommend it, I cried

I love the way the ink is smudged as if with tears