Weekly Update - 52

A full year of weekly updates?  Crazy.  Trying to structure these updates more so the important stuff is at the top, and the endless TLDR rambling is down below.  Let me know what you think.

Post this week:  Yes!

Art Progress:

Page 95 - Finishing up flats and shading today and tomorrow.

Kiera Poster - Flats and Shading

Max Poster - Ready for linework

Riley Poster - Somehow jumped ahead of the rest last week and just needs another shading pass or two.

Playing:  WoW, and Loop Hero is also surprisingly good.

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I wrote six paragraphs but I've cut it way down, just for... I dunno... sanity's sake.

I've been scared people might accuse me of being uncreative with the names I give things.  The Citadel, the Deadlands, the Downtown, these are all very generic, boring labels.  I've started seeing a lot of the names I've chosen appearing in different contexts.  Watching a video the other day on worldbuilding, the guy seemed to pull an example region out of his ass that he rather flippantly dubs the Deadlands.  Watching a streamer play Half-Life Alyx, I was reminded that the massive structure in the middle of Half-Life 2's City 17 is called the Citadel.  And now more recently I've learned that in 2020 a massive, ridiculously huge webcomic manga called God Slayer with over a million followers has come out of nowhere and completely eclipsed any bit of discoverability my tiny webcomic once had in search engines.

It feels pretty shitty to see the name I've chosen for something used in a different context, but I've been trying to figure out why that bothers me.  The names I ultimately pick are generic and simple but that doesn't mean I didn't put any thought into them.  Originally, I imagined that people in Kuserra just call things what they are.  Everyone is focused on survival, and there's not a whole lot of room for creativity.  The feeling I want to capture in that regard is one of simplicity.  Life is hard, but it is simple.  It's called the Casino because it's, yeah, probably the only one in the city worth talking about.  It's called the Downtown because there's no confusion about what place in Kuserra you are referring to.  The names themselves are less important to me, I think, than the consistency in how they are applied.

I choose these sorts of names also specifically BECAUSE they have an existing meaning.  If every name was a made-up, random string of letters, sure it might help my world feel unique, but it tells my readers nothing at all.  A word like “regblargathan” has absolutely zero meaning until I explain to you what it means, and only then, once we both agree on whatever the hell that is, can we begin to have a conversation about it.  If I called it instead, a “god” suddenly you have your own thoughts and ideas about what that -thing- is.  I don’t need to sit down with you and explain to you what it is, or what the people in my comic think it is, because all of that is already implied through its name.  Over time, as you see my “gods” behaving in ways inconsistent with your expectations, it may become clear that your definition of “god” and mine are different, and suddenly we have quite a lot to talk about.  When I call something a “Citadel” you might expect a massive fortress or structure, until I show you that it's something else entirely.