alright. we know i love val, right? of course we know i love val. i don’t shut up about him. and if you get me started about dash, you know i’ll never stop. the only thing that will stop me is my tears. never forget that dash was here first, dash was the original babygirl, put respect on her name.

but i gotta talk about lupine for a little bit. because i spent a lot of time with him.

lupine is a character i had a rocky start with. he, too, is based off of one of my ball jointed dolls. my relationship with him has never been straightforward. i remember what made me order that doll. it was right before my birthday. I think it was my 15th birthday. i was not mentally well, and i had imprinted onto a doll i saw on the internet. there was something about him that made me so crazy that i was straight up afraid the listing for him, which is still up today, would go away. it drove me to a panic attack. i didn’t have a panic attack over a doll, though. it wasn’t his fault. it happened during a trip i was on with my mom to see my grandparents in florida. i never had a good relationship to my grandmother on my mom’s side, and she never had a good relationship with her either. being autistic in a household with an evangelical christian grandmother and a grandfather with severe OCD who were constantly fighting while my own parents were getting a divorce meant my fight-or-flight response was constantly firing off. all i could think of to get my mind off of all of this was the doll i wanted to get. it was the only thing i could use to give myself hope in a time of my life where i was desperately grasping for understanding.

when i got lupine’s doll, he was lovely. so lovely that i immediately paired him with my beautiful dashiell. i thought of lupine as my most beautiful doll, second only to dash. by the time i got to college, though, i didn’t know what to do with him. i felt like he needed a change, and didn’t really have a solid personality like my other characters. it was hard to get attached to him. he still sits dismantled in my closet. one of his arms is missing, because i was in the process of tattooing it before i graduated college and all of my stuff got dispersed among my parents’ storage units at the beginning of the pandemic. there was something about him that had completely lost identity once i started trying to change his look.

i put him in parfum nostalgique because he was still dash’s boyfriend. it would make me feel really weird if i paired her with anyone else. i kept remembering how i would talk to them while i would dress them both up in my room, and not care if my mom heard me in the other room and thought i was weird for having a couple of gay dolls.

lupine’s look is based off of the first look he ever had, the lupine i fell in love with. his wig was one that i bought because it was on sale, just like val’s. it is not because it looks like neopolitan ice cream, though that is totally what it looks like, and totally what fits him. he wasn’t supposed to be italian. i named him after the lupine flower because i read a story about that flower, and liked it a lot. i couldn’t afford good clothes for him, so he always wore a white tank top. i associate white tank tops with italian “tough guys” like my cousin charles. that’s why i decided to add a cornicello necklace to him.

his personality started off as a “sleepy gardener,” when i first made him. i wanted him to be like… a harvest moon protagonist, falling asleep in his garden. but he was always chronically ill, a hoarder of tea, and a lot calmer than dash. dash was anxiety, he was depression. dash would yell at him all the time for not taking care of himself, and the two were always too afraid to confess their love for each other.

when i was working on parfum nostalgique, I was like, alright. how about some trans tape? how about this guy is a trans man? not even knowing yet that I was a trans man. lots of people ask me if lupine is a self-insert, because he’s transmasc, italian, sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo hot and sexy, and he has a lot of my hobbies. but he is not! the similarities i gave to lupine to myself were either his first, or things i gave to him to feel closer to him. lupine was a trans guy gardener with 8000 boxes of tea in his pantry long before i was, but even when i started being like that, he felt distant from me. what really brought me closer to him was making him someone who reminded me of my family.

i think a lot about my cousin charles. those who know me will say, “which one?” because i have many. my cousin charles is a fucking cartoon character. i actually have a character much more heavily inspired by him in my next work. classic wet-look italian-guy hair, white tank or a Nice Shirt, and occasionally, some blue Absolut Vodka branded sunglasses when we were in high school. he knew i was bullied in school, and made it his business to do crazy shit like, oh, i don’t know. get a bunch of Dudes together to threaten and scare them into leaving me alone. and then he would tell me about it, drunk, in a dark shed at midnight on christmas. i wanted lupine to have a little bit of that. i wanted him to be a little bit unhinged.

i think lu and val are a lot alike, but also very opposite, especially in aesthetics. there’s so much about parfum nostalgique that is so… campy and loud. there’s whale tail thongs everywhere. there’s whatever the fuck oberon is doing. there’s whatever the fuck kenny is getting off on in act 2. but lupine is just kind of there. and he’s dying. the drama of it all with val and donna is a little easier to digest, despite it ending the way it did, but lupine is just dying the entire time. being brought back to his perspective, i feel, instantly turns the mood down. he was not a fun character to write most of the time, but i loved every second of writing him. at least i think i did.

when i ask my friends, “who’s your favorite,” it’s easy to say someone like dash, val, or let’s be real, kenny steals the show whenever he’s on screen, but lupine is a response i get really happy when i hear. i feel like my work is really appreciated in a unique way by those who appreciate lupine the most. it’s okay if you like someone else more, of course! it doesn’t make you wrong, and it doesn’t mean i don’t feel appreciated if your favorite is a more easily endearing character, but when someone reads this visual novel full of tone changes and fun and camp, and they say their favorite is the one who is so plagued with struggle, it makes me happy. i think someone with as much existential dread as lupine would feel that he’s not worthy of that kind of love, and if he read parfum nostalgique, he wouldn’t be his own favorite character, but he deserves the love that my wonderful readers give him.

anyway, i made this meme.

also, can i just say he is so fucking cute, oh my god? when i drew his face on his sprite for the first time, i had a lot of trouble replicating his cuteness in future stills of him, so they look very off-model, but toward the end, you’ll see that he’s looking a bit more like himself. this is because instead of looking at his sprite and attempting to draw him from reference, i instead thought of a henohenomoheji and a horse at the same time in my mind’s eye. this is a henohenomoheji. it’s on a lot of scarecrows in japan. in my head he looks like this, and also a horse. i’m not going to include an image of what a horse looks like. you’re going to have to imagine that on your own. i’m not going to explain a horse to you. you’re on your own there.

as long as i pictured those two things in my mind at the same time, i was all good. i could draw the most beautiful lupine in the world.