Update July 5th: Maybe no new page this week, because I am VERY FRUSTRATED by other stupid things. V`(oo)´V
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Samona’s looks are based a bit on my sister Ainur, but with an even bigger nose and wavy black hair. (Of course, my drawings are so stylized that she could look like anyone … oh well.)
According to a Kazakh friend, Ainur looks like “a true Tatar girl” in this photo. :o)
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When using trunnels with wedges, you must place the pressure along the grain – i.e. the wedge across the grain – or else it could split the wood. Yes, I learned that from the Internet (though it’s kind of obvious).
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… Is it a sign that you have created a good Mary-Sue/Gary Stu (an overly idealized character that is way too obviously a fantasy-fulfilling insertion of yourself, common in amateurish fiction, or screenplays by Andrei Tarkovsky) when it makes your mum cry reading about the character? My mum claims she cries when she reads Driftwood, because Willie reminds her so much of me. O_o
Yay, Samona! I never found her stereotypical in an offensive way, maybe because it’s so nice to have a character based on my looks… And maybe because you have so many “mysterious ethnic characters” already, actually all of your characters are mysterious and ethnic according to mainstream criteria, so Samona just blends in with the crowd… At least she is making labskaus, not hedgehogs baked in clay.
A good Mary-Sue character is by definition not a Mary-Sue anymore… Because a way too obvious self-insertion is annoying, not emotionally moving. This applies to both you and Tarkovsky 🙂
The only reason she hasn’t been cooking hedgehogs baked in clay is that both hedgiepiggles and clay is kind of hard to come by on the sea. :3 SHE WOULD IF SHE HAD THE GOODS.
Maybe Willie is just overly sensitive towards that type of racist tendencies, being from the UK and all.
Well, Tarkovsky’s Gary Stus are not as annoying when they are Russians (though I still dislike the adult main character in Zerkalo). Russianness adds so much automatic sympathy towards a character that it can neutralize Mary-Sue tendencies!
Mina två söta flickor!!!
And here I’d always thought Samona was a stereotypical gypsy from some world inhabited by stereotypical gypsies. She just fitted in the pirate, the anthropomorphic pig, and the citizens of an alternate reality soviet union that never collapsed…
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Don’t mistake an ‘author avatar’ for a Mary-sue! I often suspect characters in web fiction of being Mary-sues (or the male equivalent), but then I also probably suffer from mild paranoia. In the case of driftwood, yeah, I figured Willie was something of an author avatar, but not so strongly idealised that I’d slam her with the ‘Mary Sue’ lable. That said, I do really like the character.
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-Aidan.
A whole world inhabited only by stereotypical Gypsies sounds kind of cute. :o)
Well, I got this idea about Samona’s (even more mysterious) background fairly early on, because Ainur really looks like a very typical Tatar (she got all the Tatar look genes!), and not much at all like a Roma, even though we have a little heritage from there, too. So I tried to make sense of that contradiction.
I guess I ended up not discarding this idea because it also makes a point about how identities are in some ways very much something you can choose, and in other ways they are totally something you are blessed or cursed with for all your life. If that makes any sense at all. Maybe I should make a spin-off comic about Samona’s backstory …
Anyway, it’s not that far-fetched, because Tatars and Roma have been living in the same areas all over Eastern Europe and Russia. And in fact, the mixing up of Tatars and Roma was institutionalized in the early slave trade in Moldavia and Vallachia (today’s Romania), when Roma and Crimean Tatars were taken as slaves, and all slaves, without distinction, were called “Tsygani”, Gypsies.
There is an Italian comic from the 70’s and early 80’s, set in Renaissance times, where the main character is actually a Crimean Tatar who acts like a Gypsy. (But I didn’t get this idea from there, I swear! It was just a strange and very nice coincidence.) It’s called “La Strega”, “The Witch”, made by Anna Brandoli and Renato Queirolo. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Brandoli)
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Okay, regarding the Mary-Sue thing, I was probably just being paranoid. (^^ 😉 Besides, mum likes to project herself and her family on ALL fictional characters, so I shouldn’t take that too seriously. :o)
When I first created Willie, she *was* more of a Mary-Sue (hey, I was 14-15), but since then her character has obviously evolved into a personality of her own, with her own good and bad sides.