RAIN - Taylor's Tale

Hey, folks!  Sorry it's been a while again, but I want to try and get back on the wagon a bit.  Honestly, I've been meaning to get back to posting stuff on Patreon for possibly months now, but sadly, I just keep getting distracted/busy.  I'm finally feeling caught up enough to share something with you again, though.  Perhaps, this just something small and simple, but I hope you'll find this interesting.

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If you're keeping up with Rain lately, you might be familiar with this character, Taylor, the check-in attendant at the reception hall hosting St. Hallvard's prom.  This kid is young and hip and super chill, and very open to everything the main kids seem to be doing throughout the chapter.  I'm on the record stating that Taylor is not a major character, and probably won't have any developments or backstory to go over, and thus, readers can headcanon their own reasons for why they're so cool if they want.

I will say though, that when I began drawing the current chapter, Taylor was not named.  My scripts (having been written for years now) simply referred to the character as "Attendant".  Similarly, I had the look above more or less in my head, but I'd never actually drawn them until the first page of the chapter.  And it wasn't until then that I realized the design I had in my mind was actually rather androgynous.  It never once dawned on me for years that I'd never even considered a gender for this character.  And... I decided I didn't want to change that.  I asked some friends to suggest gender-neutral names (Taylor was what stuck), and I did my best to draw the character with no features obviously tipping their presentation one way or the other.

From there, it's been an interesting road.  I've been wanting to do more with enby characters for a long time now.  Ky is one of the few exceptions I already have, but I don't necessarily want to just do one and call it a day.  Ky is just one kid, and while many readers relate very strongly to them, many others don't.  They simply can't represent everyone; there's a lot of ways to be non-binary and many ways to be genderfluid, after all.

So I like the idea of Taylor being this agender young adult (early 20s, maybe?) just going to work, living their life, and doing their best to be a swell person.  It's simple and lowkey representation, but I think it's potentially very valuable.  And to me, the best part is that even though I never actually said any of this directly in the comic, I'm still seeing readers pick up on what I was going for.  

If there's a downside to all this, it's that it seems a shame to relegate a character that I and many readers really like to this small bit part role.  I'm not going to lie, though; I've been really nervous about writing enby characters in the past.  If I'm gonna write one, I wanna do it right.  Taylor might be a minor character, but they've played a major role in giving me the confidence to do more branching out in the future.  Maybe we won't see much more of Taylor, and maybe there's not a whole lot of time left in Rain for me to start adding more characters to the story now.  But I'm hoping this is the start of seeing more like this from me in the future.  :)

Thoughts and input are always welcome.  ^_^

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And again, sorry for the radio silence on my end.  2019's been a weird year for me so far, but I'm gonna try to do better.  I've got something else I'd like to post later this week too, so hopefully this is me getting back to regular posting again here.