Last night I redesigned two characters for use in this story.

They had last been seen in a story in 2023 and at the time, all I had to available to make them with were Genesis 8 resources, which (in that particular area) were crappy. Well, actually, they were mostly nonexistent. I have an enormous pile of G8 resources, and if there had been tools for this, I'd have bought them.

The resources in this particular area continued to be mostly nonexistent until a couple of months ago, when, for no reason I can fathom, suddenly there were three Genesis 9 kits that all did the same thing, within the space of a few months. I bought all three.

The particular area in question is bird women. Anthro bird women. There were a couple of G8 kits where you could get bird feet, and all kinds of wing kits, but not really any good ones to reshape the head to have a beak (or add a beak as an appliance; there are still basically none of those), and if you wanted body feathers, forget it. Not even plausibly as a clothing item. This was made even more frustrating by the fact that it was basically the only hole in the anthro spectrum. Obviously the "hot" ones have a lot of coverage. You can have your choice of tiger-women and wolf-women and so on. But G8 also had things like bug women and rhino women ... the variety available made the omission of avians even more baffling.

Anyway, so, now that I had the resources, I remodeled my two bird women in G9 -- I hated their original designs fiercely. And they look great. They look absolutely nothing like they did in their previous appearance, but I don't care. If anyone notices and compares, I'll just say they changed their look. People change their look in far more radical ways in these stories all the time. It's a virtual reality. You can look any way you want.

But no one will notice. Trust me.

One of the things I did in these figures -- and I also did it in the G8 versions -- is sharply reduce their breast size, to the point where (depending on the angle) you could just read them as having pronounced pectorals instead of breasts. This is because it rubs my internal fact-checker the wrong way to have avian anthros -- egg-layers -- with breasts. In truth, they should have no breasts at all, but my justification is that they weren't actually born bird-women; they're human women who have chosen to take on this appearance.

I've had that argument ready for more than two years, since their first appearance. I haven't needed it. No one has said a word.

Just like nobody has noticed that my lizard and alligator women have no breasts. Actually, for T'Lau, the gator woman who's had a speaking part, I added breasts (very slightly); the only base I have for her is a male base and I cross-gendered it a little, just enough to have her sorta-kinda read as a female visually.

Sometimes I care about these things because they would otherwise annoy that internal fact-checker. I don't put visible sound effects in space scenes in Quitclaim, or anywhere in "The Void Eaters" which takes place in a station with no atmosphere ... which is why Randa's weapon, which normally makes a visible noise, doesn't there. Again, it's not clear anyone has noticed. But it's important to me.

Sasha Miller, whose Mother Miller's How To Give Good Book is the only writing manual that has ever been even the slightest bit useful to me, refers to a phenomenon called a "card trick in the dark" where the writer has designed what they think is a particularly brilliant bit of plot stunt ... but doesn't really telegraph what they're doing enough, or lead into it well, so that when the unveiling happens, the audience is either "huh" or doesn't even notice.

These things are, like the title says, not quite that. But I do sometimes wonder why I care about them as much as I do -- especially when the evidence suggests that three-quarters of the people who read these stories on DeviantArt just thumb through them for the bits that satisfy their kink, without wanting or bothering to absorb any of the plot. As noted in the previous rant.

Anyway, I'm very happy with the way the bird women came out.