disaster crew

All aboard the S.S. Trainwreck!

the losers

Who are these people?

For context we must rewind.

2012. I don’t have human characters, largely because I don’t like drawing human beings. But I like the Pokémon franchise, and I admire the heck out of people who take the blank slate player characters and make something all their own.

In April, the player characters of the Black 2 & White 2 games leak, and I immediately start going ham on “headcanons.” Thus spawn the earliest iterations of Nico and Ivy (the first two shown above). When I actually played through the game, I messed with the plot based on the characters I’d come up with, and later even had some some vague ideas for where the duo would end up as adults—

And then I got sucked into XY headcanon hell and that took over my writing for a while. (It eventually turned into The Firebird Effect. Needless to say, I learned how to draw humans.)

2017–18. My interest in TFE is waning, and something that I keep seeing (in my own and others’ work) is that trying to align one’s story with the original game’s plot can be a hindrance. Returning to the “disaster duo,” I divorced their story from Pokémon entirely—which warranted some character replacements (Tara, Vexus, and kinda Ava) and, by extension, new people (Levi and Dodder). But despite development tying most of them together in some way, I didn’t stick with any particular “main story” idea long enough for anything to coalesce an Established Project Canon.

So here we are, in 2022(/23), and the crew kinda just Exists, as they have for years, and I’m not doing anything else with them. While I’ve intermittently revisited certain concepts in other projects since, I don’t have a specific uniting plot for this group (and if I ever do commit to one, there could be significant changes), so I figured they’d be good candidates for this little website-experiment-thing.

side note on years

The character timelines have two distinct phases, 5 years apart: 2012 and 2017. It’s based more on the dates I was developing things IRL than any in-story reason—but characterizations very much reflect the times, and would be different if shifted to a modern era.

Which, yes, increasingly makes the whole thing a time capsule. I don’t know how to feel about that.

Anyway, all instances of years in profiles are 100% in-universe unless otherwise noted.

relevant links

all (publicly-shared) art

deviantArt tag: disaster crew
tumblr tag (archived*): #coniferous vines
- *The photo post formatting is weird and the tags are out of order. Such is auto-archival….