Sinfonia started out as a joke: a friend of mine jokingly suggested an idea of an RPG but "with 70s shoujo manga graphics" and the idea was so silly and bizarre to me that I actually wanted to run with it for real. But I'm not very good with RPGmaker just yet and visual novels are probably more of my forte anyway (it probably comes with being a literaure major, heh) so I decided to do a visual novel for the april fools day. My original intention was to make a parody of 70s BL series I have read recently and the common tropes of general BL content too right down to the "practical brunette and tragic blond" dynamics they really often seem to have. You know, the good stuff.
But as we all know, I'm incredibly bad at making parodies and very soon I noticed I actually wanted to do things more my way. The setting, general aesthetics and the protagonists are still very heavily borrowed from some of the superficial conventions of 70s BL and shoujo, but after that I just kind of started doing my own thing.
Claude was the first character I came up with somewhere in October 2016 when I initially was inspired by the idea. I drew a terrible "don't raise the pen from the tablet unless absolutely necessary" kind of doodle to demonstrate how I imagined him:
My next Claude concept drawing would be this one, I think. It also features my second drawing of Jonathan. He is missing some details there I added later.
Fun Claude design fact: I intended his eyes to look intense in a way his pupils always show the white part of his eyes from... under the eye? I don't know how to explain it, but please look at his eyes and you'll understand, haha. It's kinda like he is always looking a little up, I guess?
I usually don't intentionally put too much of myself into my characters, but I felt like giving some of my own weird problems to him would make him the kind of character I wanted him to be - he is just in all ways much, much worse and more extra than I am, haha. And it's not like we're the same people anyway: I couldn't do half of the things this asshole does without feeling guilty and bad and being unable to deal with them. We have similar feelings and motives, but entirely different ways of dealing with them and that actually makes him so fun as a character to work on: I get to see entirely different approaches on things I also deal with and see the potential end results.
Claude is fun. But also difficult and he needed much more work than Jonathan because of his nature in the game itself. I even write an actual essay about his character to figure him out better! He also has some things that in turn are completely something I don't have, and working on them has proved to be a nice challenge to me. Claude was originally much wilder than he now is, btw. I hope people will wonder what his prototype was like when they eventually see him in action...
Jonathan in turn has been much easier for me, mainly because I'm way more experienced in writing those kind of "good boy" characters like him. In general I'm more geared towards to writing at least vaguely good characters who aim for good and don't prioritise themselves over others, so yeah, Jonathan is much more natural to me.
Compared to Claude, Jonathan has a wider and stronger built. I imagined that he would be a Swede if he lived in the real world, so I wanted to keep some sort of nordic aesthetic in mind with him and his nature. Jonathan was much harder to design though because he is my first time consciously trying to aim for that "soft brunette boy" look, heh. Although I actually borrowed his eyelashes from Akira, I constantly compare him to Serge in my mind because I'm biased and have hard time remembering Serge was one of the first characters to set that kind of trope so it's natural to compare but sdfg whatever. I'm sure what he lacks in looks he makes up with his meme-tastic personality (not).
Jonathan is actually much more fun to draw than Claude, although most of my doodles of him are traditional so I don't have that much to show right now. His freckles, thick eyebrows and his eyelashes are totally his characteristics design wise.
Jonathan is a much more expressive character than Claude is, and definitely more social and kind too. He is that typical nice guy who tries to be fair to everyone, but he does have a bit too short temper for his own good: he tends to answer to violence with violence, and his pacifistic actions do a 180 degree turn the moment someone punches him, honestly. He is also a bit impatient at times and tends to have trouble trying out new things: he is vary of getting out of his very specific comfort zone, which is partially why he doesn't really want to help Claude at his detective work first. Jonathan also tends to fall for peer pressure and ends up doing reckless and stupid things if pressured into it. He can be a bt of a troublemaker, but very much like my other character Karl, Jonathan usually tries to take full responsibility of his actions. He is the oldest of his family and has been heavily dependent on, so he has learned that kind of thing from an early age.
Either way, I'm trusting in my own abilities to make this joke of a game into something (hopefully positively) memorable and the characters unique enough to be likeable (or hated) and remembered! ; v ;. This game has a rather weird and unconventional birth story and I felt wrong about taking out the things I had already done for it, but hopefully I can still make something "own" out of it. And if not, that's fine too. This is supposed to be a practice and a challenge after all.
I'll definitely continue talking more about Sinfonia and its characters and development though, so stay tuned! I'm slowly working on the side characters too so hopefully next entry will be ALL about my group of rowdy silly boys with important roles. Also, Thomas makes an appearance in this game!
Claude is Lovelace from his his father's side, but his mother originates from the Volkov family. Ilja is Volkov and this makes him and Claude relatives, although kind of distant. The Lovelace family in turn is connected to my ghost boy Alois' family, making Claude and Alois also relatives (and I imagine them being closer relatives than Ilja and Claude).
Claude and Alois never met and probably never will in any way, but Claude and Ilja meet in the full version of the game! Ilja is three years older than Claude and as such they were never in the same school building (Ilja was already in the nearby high school building when Claude started junior high) but during their investigation their roads cross. I like to think they don't really get along, both being really dominant leader types and strong personalities. Ilja is just considerably more stable mentally than Claude is.
Jonathan is Linden, which is the same surname shared by Vivian and Armas from the Linden assassin family. They are not very close relatives either, but definitely related. I like to imagine Jonathan's father probably knew of something about the assassin branch of the family and the myths of the lindworm tattoo that can summon the real deal, but he was never personally involved.