Kaylee inspirations

I posted a LOOOONG twitter thread earlier today, about some behind the scenes stuff with Kaylee. Some of it I've posted here before but a lot was new.

The thread is here, but I'll post the text below for anyone without a twitter account

I rewatched Akira around the time I was working on the first chapter or two of Kaylee. The idea to give her a cape was inspired by Tetsuo, I chose an American flag because it was the biggest piece of fabric that she could plausibly find

The original idea was to have the nuke weaken Kaylee and make her no longer impervious to damage. This was going to lead to her being horribly wounded by heavy artillery, possibly losing her arm in the process  But I decided that was too gross so she just got black veins instead

At one point I was thinking about having a giant space laser instead of the nuke, again borrowing from Akira. I decided that would have felt like it really came out of nowhere, since there weren't any other sci-fi elements aside from the crystal and growth

Oh back to the flag, there are at least a few real-life American flags on bridges that are about as big as the one in the comic. None in Los Angeles, as far as I know, but it's at least relatively plausible!

The original idea was to only have Kaylee grow, and have her rule over the world. It was going to be a 7-chapter comic  I don't think I decided to have Kayla grow until I was posing that scene, after which I decided to have Krystal grow too  Anna and Yeona grew on impulse too

Having Krystal decide to save Kaylee was a relatively late decision inspired by the ending of The Last of Us game, which I played years ago. I loved the idea of the maternal protective instinct being twisted from something beautiful to something bestial and horrifying

So this might come out of left field, because communicating subtext effectively is hard, but... Kaylee's thesis statement is that while wealth and power corrupts some people in obvious ways, even seemingly good powerful people are usually selfish in the end

Kayla sides with Kaylee because she cared more about her horrible sister than millions of strangers. She was so insulated from the world that saw normal people as abstractions. Her charities were more about virtue signaling as shrines to her goodness than actually helping people

In real life, Los Angeles is a sprawling city that consists mostly of low-density 1-story buildings, due to zoning regulations  In Kaylee, it's more dense and looks more like New York  My excuse is Kaylee's dad changed zoning laws  The real reason is because of set availability

So while I very quickly found inspiration writing Kaylee's story, the core idea was something I came up with unusually cynical and data-driven reasons  LFCFan parted ways so I needed a giantess comic that would be similar enough to Bullies to keep those fans happy

That meant doing a rampage comic with a larger giantess (prior to that I'd mostly done mini-giantess comics, like Squash Match and StBH), and having a college-aged main character with a more thin, athletic body type (which I originally planned to keep throughout the series)

But why reality stars? That was also unusually data-driven, or as close to data-driven as I get. I decided to have a comic that was inspired by a few of the most-searched for celebrities on a certain website for adults

I came up with three ideas:  A Kardashian-inspired reality show family A rivalry between two female rappers Or one inspired by off-brand Ivanka and Melania Trump  God I'm glad I didn't try to do the last one, LOL

The obvious inspiration for Krystal is Kim Kardashian, but there was a bigger inspiration for her appearance and personality, at least in later chapters: Sophia Vegera's character Gloria from Modern Family  She's a feisty rich Hispanic Mom who's very protective towards her kids

I stared picturing Krystal with a Spanish accent in later chapters, and I used a Spanish-accented voice for Krystal in the Part 21 audiobook. And while her history isn't directly stated, I picture her being an immigrant who got famous after marrying her billionaire husband

POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW

And since I probably won't explore this much more, and I didn't really explain it in the comic, here's my headcanon for the crystal and how it works.  It's some kind of alien artifact or entity. It's not necessarily conscious but it promotes certain tendencies in conscious minds

It only works on women, and it doesn't have much effect on most of them. To work its own power has to be multiplied by a seperate metaphysical property that the person gets from being worshipped. That's why it only made the famous women who were exposed to it grow

They found the crystal in India thousands of years ago. There was probably at least one previous incident where it made a powerful woman grow and rampage. This served as a partial inspiration for Hinduism, or at least Kali. Then it was hidden away, and lost until recently

I'm not sure if this is something I misremembered, but I remember reading something years ago saying that Hindu deities aren't a single entity, but rather a sort of office that can transfer from one person to another as they become its avatar

So the crystal statue inhabits one or several people who are widely loved or worshipped at a given time, sharing part of its energy with them in the form of a kind of radiation. Presumably the energy left its previous hosts, and that energy was restored to the statue eventually.

That's a bit complicated and wasn't fully spelled out in the comic, but most of it's at least hinted at ,and I think it makes sense. If you prefer to interpret it another way, that's fine! But this is what I had in mind when I wrote the last few chapters.

Before the last few chapters I hadn't decided 100% on a lot of this stuff, it was pretty vague and I went back and forth on ideas.

If you're wondering why I'm tweeting so much, I had more coffee than usual today

Check out Akira if you're at all interested, it's an absolute tour de force  The Last of Us is great too, for anyone who hasn't played/watched it. I think the game is probably better and a remake just came out  I'm not a huge Modern Family fan, I just like Gloria