Inspiration finally strikes! ToT Thank you God!<br /><br />I came up with the idea for this piece shortly after I noticed that my pageview counter exceeded 100,000. o_O Considering my viewership has been actually slowing down lately, I didn&#039;t think I would get that high until Christmas, but... whoa. It seems people <i>do</i> still like my work. ^^<br /><br />This piece shows the stark contrast between the two worlds where these characters were born. On the left is the skyline of Zyagen City, still pristine and sprawling like most of Tradugu&#039;s settlements. On the right, the Mutantverse, desolate and empty from the Genome Ancients&#039; attack. You can also see the contrast between the two girls&#039; faces; Azzy&#039;s is round and of average length, while Dodge&#039;s is heart-shaped and shorter than average.<br /><br />If I had to pick a definite theme for this piece, I&#039;d probably go with "entropy." As an author, I realize I&#039;ve been pretty mean to Dodge, having just blown up her home universe, whereas Azzy willingly ran away from that world out of sheer paranoia and somehow got rewarded for it. In a way, while I was writing Dodge&#039;s final tirade at the end of Wanderer, I switched avatars and spoke through <i>her</i> instead. It wasn&#039;t fair that she and everyone else in the Mutantverse had to suffer for doing nothing. It&#039;s almost as if Azzy&#039;s actions sucked away all of their blessings. That&#039;s not to say Azalea is without her own problems; Her old friends and adoptive family died in the Mutantverse Purging, an ancient and powerful enemy that she once thought extinct is still at large, she has a literal Evil Twin running around and possibly getting a leg up from one of Rappy&#039;s archenemies, and to top it all off, Roon the Enchanter is about to go over the line between wisecracking genius and homicidal maniac. She has plenty of reason to be full of angst. But Dodge has just as much reason, if not more. All of <i>her</i> friends and family died in the Mutantverse Purging, too, and because she has no home to return to, she has become an interplanar nomad. She trusts no one but herself, not even other planeswalkers.<br /><br />I feel terrible having used the plot of Wanderer to erase all the people and places from these girls&#039; youth (if for nothing else, then because the "parents died" status is horribly clich&#233;d), but at the same time, the destruction of the Mutantverse had to be done. -.- It represents a shift in my goals as an artist. I used to draw mutants for the sake of drawing mutants, but then, somewhere down the line, I decided that was the wrong way to go. I had to start treating my characters as <i>characters</i>, not as objects of a shallow affection based on how they look. Sure, I&#039;ll still draw a person of unorthodox beauty once in a while, but that alone shouldn&#039;t be the focus of my gallery. My new aim is to provoke a more multifaceted emotional response based on what is going on in the drawing, not just who is in the drawing. With the destruction of the Mutantverse, I feel my transformation is complete. Nowadays, I can look at Azalea and Dodge and honestly say that they are well-rounded, deep, and interesting. The fact they both have four arms has become an afterthought.<br /><br />That all said, I know I&#039;m a giant hypocrite because I still +fav just about anything involving more than two arms. <img src="https://e.deviantart.net/emoticons/a/animesweat.gif" width="19" height="19" alt="^^;" title="Sweating a little..." /> I&#039;m not by any means shunning people who come to my gallery just to see mutants; I&#039;m only explaining that my inspiration comes from a deeper source now. It&#039;s like ~<a class="u" href="https://lonestranger.deviantart.com/">lonestranger</a> constantly reminds me: "The body attracts, the mind keeps."<br /><br />Art and characters (C) <a href="https://dfreak235.deviantart.com/"><img class="avatar" src="https://a.deviantart.net/avatars/d/f/dfreak235.gif" alt=":icondfreak235:" title="dfreak235"/></a><br /><br />EDIT: My face is round, but not <i>that</i> round. &gt;.&gt;