Meet Melissa, if you haven't already

When I wrote last week's post, I immediately thought it was depressing, and that I should do something more fun and lighthearted next time. Well, it is next time, and I wanted to formally write about my OC, Melissa. If you follow me on fedi you've seen her already, it's the image I have been using as an icon for over a year. She never had a specific set of characteristics, she is just a character I enjoy playing with, so take that into consideration, she is a very malleable character on purpose.

Melissa is, essentially, a kid. She is 9 years old, has a short blonde hair that is sometimes a little orange, styled in a sidetail, and she wears colorful clothing. Sweaters, shorts, and lots of hair clips. Her personality is very dependent on what context she is in. She can be from shy and quiet to a brave adventurer saving a distant land, and often a smart and mature president of the world, that's a fun one. I enjoy writing her as happy and carefree though; she is a kid after all, and all of this is meant to be lighthearted.

She came to be when I was bored, using my saved credits on NovelAI to generate images. I typed in some stuff, "abstract" is a word I used, and I got image that was a mess of shapes, things bled into one another. Fingers weren't well defined, you know, AI images, but strangely, something on this spoke to me. Like I could see an idea behind all that noise. I will, on purpose, not post the AI one here, to not equate it with the real artists that made pieces on her. It took some time, but Melissa finally got a proper image by an artist, Agatha. The image does say "Agatha", and as I was writing this, it occurred to me that I cannot tell for sure if it was meant to be the artist's signature, or my name, since I did commission an icon to use on fedi. A mystery, I suppose.

P.S. Both images are low quality, it is just for this blog post, using the original resolution would've been too much.

I spent a year with that image, until a while ago when I got another artist, Nelson to make a second one.

I have plans for more commissions, and I love the idea of artists drawing or illustrating Melissa in whatever way they see fit. It's nice, I think the OC question is always "How much of them is me?" and it is no secret I, like many trans people, have a bit of a "missing childhood" complex, and while Melissa is absolutely a fruit of that, she is also a character on her own right, and I enjoy that. I hope she can go on many more adventures in the future.