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The 3 not-so-princesses - revisit

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Those who follow me on twitter may have read that I wanted to use my warmups to render the characters from The 3 not-so-princesses, a comic I did a few years ago featuring the princesses from the Super Mario universe in the crapsack world that is the city of Rothingham. Linked below for your covenience.

T3NSP - page 1 by TheArtrix 

Admittedly, one of the main reasons I abandoned the project is because of ponies, but it was also suffering from poor writing in the second act of the story; it had a very abrubt and unsatisfying one-page ending and the whole comic ended up being just "stuff happening". I also noticed that I was overrendering the latter pages, which is against my original goal of finding that fine line between rendering and delivering new pages on time. In all, consider this image to be the closing chapter of the whole T3NSP project, and to top it off, you can now download the whole script so you can at least know how the story ends, if you can call it that.

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With that said, I'll share with you my quick thoughts on each character in this image. Not all of them have shown up in the comic, and some were never going to be there at all.

Peach
Those familiar with the comic know that this Peach is in a perpetual state of disappointment of not living like, well, a princess. In this render I wanted to emphasize that she is a twig on sticks, further emphasized by the slouched posture.

Daisy
I think Daisy had among the best characterizations in the comic, supported by her character design. She is assertive and doesn't give a shit about what you think. All I had to do was improve the anatomy a bit.

Rosalina
When I re-read the comic, I noticed that for a character that (at the time) only floats around and moans "Oooh" as she blankly stares into your soul, this Rosalina was surprisingly well rounded. She is full of optimism and energy, which makes her naive and has to cope with an environment that is set out to destroy her spirit. Rosalina was set out to be more conventionally attractive, and it only meant tweaking the anatomy a bit. Her eyes are also a bit more true to her original design.

Mario
I elected not to have Mario and Luigi in the comic because I wanted to tell the tale of the not-princesses and having them in there would be too distracting. However, Mario showed up in one valentines picture I did, in which he can be seen comforting Peach. This Mario is scarred by experience, has a very serious can-do attitude and cares a lot about those close to him. One idea I had is that him and Luigi live in the same apartment block as the princesses and that he is genuinely worried about Peach being so hard on herself.

Luigi
Can you imagine Luigi living in a place like this? He's still a coward, obviously, further emphasized by his slouched body and the overall more pristene state of his uniform. Also, Luigi has a thing for Daisy but he is too much of a wimp to talk to her.

Wario
I really liked Wario in the comic, but the proportions of his character design was all over the place. I made him slightly taller than Rosalina and made him more bulky without sacrificing the fat.

Waluigi

Waluigi was pretty much the punching bag of the story, even though it may not be warranted. Did he cheat on Rosalina or is she overreacting over some dumb shit? The world may never know. Tweaked his design to be more slender.

Ludwig
Ludwig is my favorite koopaling, but I wasn't sure if humanizing koopalings was such a good idea for the comic. In the final arc of the story, I intended to have a Randal-lookalike (from Clerks), but with this chararcter design, Ludwig fits the bill just fine. A very intelligent young man who basically has given up on life and instead decided to just work at a electronics store to cause as much misery as possible.

Wendy
The script calls for a generic woman, but in hindsight, a humanized Wendy, the only female Koopaling, would do very nicely. She'd be on the streets trying to get people to sign up for a charity organization by guilt tripping them using extreme measures. Obviously, she couldn't care less about the actual charity and she is only doing it to get as much of a commission as possible so she can spend it on useless crap. She would be defeated by Peach after she tries to coax Rosalina into signing up, as Peach has mastered the art of "resisting fake guilt relief".
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Comments24
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JaxInvasion's avatar

I'm a fan of AUs where characters are generally more miserable in an enviroment that, while less dangerous or climatic than canon, is all-around hopeless and soul-crushing. The best of these give the original characters a lot more depth than they had before, and I'm happy to say that T3NSP is one of my favorites! The art & the direction you took with the characters are truly great.


Side note, how would Toad fit into this universe? Yoshi & Bowser, I'm less curious about, but it'd be cool to hear your thoughts on all 3 regardless!