Page Commentary No. 38

Psu: BUTT JOKE.

Psu: THE WHOLE REASON GUNWILD WROTE THIS CHAPTER

Gunwild: Okay, inside baseball here: at the time this came out, Hiveworks was still using tumblr for social media pretty regularly. And our tumblr preview image was panel 4 there. They wouldn't reblog it, since their blog was pretty all-ages.

Gunwild: I didn't blame 'em, but I'm still proud of the dumb joke and butt-related silliness. It's very Cassiopeia.

Psu: I somewhat remember the concepting of this scene, I can't remember if the Vanaa control panels being on the floor came before her using butt controls or after. Basically I forget which cart came first over there.

Gunwild: I'm pretty sure the idea for how Vanaa interact with tech was born about the time they were. So often on Star Trek or whatever, we see an alien ship laid out exactly like one normally used by humans, which sort of makes sense, but the interfaces being set up almost identically doesn't work as well.

Gunwild: Like, a species with claws having the same keyboard as a more finger-y bunch? Doesn't make sense.

Psu: Not to throw shade on an already shaded up game, but Mass Effect Andromeda did the WORST job of it. You're gonna tell me you go to a new galaxy and all the weapons are the same shotguns and rifles and stuff that happen to be human shoulder sized? That's sillier than our story about piloting with your butt!

Psu: Okay, maybe not silly.

Gunwild: Either way, I think we can agree it's interesting to create weird aliens and then plausible spaces for them to inhabit.

Psu: There's a lot of visual story telling that came about organically on this page, on top of the butt stuff. Deciding what Skript Kitty looks like when hanging out with Cassiopeia, figuring out how Zeke looks when he's embarrassed, a lot if that appeared on this page first. And it was just finding solutions to questions that the narrative asked. Then we got to use them later! 

Gunwild: Sometimes people ask creative types "Where do you get your ideas?" And isn't 10% of it just taking a thing you think might be cool, and then 90% of it figuring out how to logically justify that narratively?

Psu: I spend a lot of time in the shower trying to think of ways patching together our ideas. But you've got to add the percentage time we spend trying to understand each other's ideas! It's tougher than you might expect. 

Gunwild: Well, there isn't vocabulary to explain a lot of sci-fi concepts... the word I used for the way a Vanaa uses pressure pad controls was "gloobling" onto it.