Ricgomori and WEIRD ART: My Hypothetical thing
A thing that I’ve always wanted to do but I’m not nearly as courageous / have the time and effort for is my unnamed Ricgomori project that is kind of about my OC of the same name. I would want to do it as a multimedia webcomic thing with some out there art styles, but my own personal critic is ever the
Granted a lot of this comes from a strange place of being deeply inspired by other projects. I would say that the original inspirations for the whole thing was OFF, OneShot, and Middens (though given the creator for that game / those games is a creep it’s kind of a shame given that I really do find those games fascinating as games / art pieces but also have a hard time trying to reconcile that against a creator who is a sex pest; death of the author can only take a person so far with weird media if the source isn’t all that great).
The thing that did wind up shelving it was Undertale of all things due to the original nature of the project.
It was going to be a self-aware game that was a critique of the sort of rpgmaker renaissance of the time with regards to horror rpg’s and their endings, this being a continued tradition held over from Corpse Party. Ricgomori is also kind of a goat-ish creature that’s kind of a play on the traditional goat demon because they showed up so vividly in a very intense dream.
Undertale came out, and while it wasn’t doing the sort of thing I wanted to do in the slightest, it still dashed my dreams due to the fact that Now this super influential game that did (albeit not quite intentionally) say something about multiple endings and how valid any of them are comes out (in contrast to the standard I wanted to critique from horror RPGmaker games where the best ending is something you only get from clues from playing it a lot / guide dang it stuff where you have to specifically know what you’re doing and all other endings are not considered valid by the community or have much weight) and On top of that there are a lot of goat-ish characters characters (three, but that’s more than one). And Ricgomori’s design, though not set in stone, is distinctly goat-ish.
I was concerned my unnamed project was going to be called a lamer edgier undertale rip off. And I did not want that.
So I put it on the backburner while looking into how to self-host such a project as it quite quickly changed to being a webcomic and not a game project.
This was because there were a lot of good webcomics going around out there about the time I came up with the idea and started working on it (2014-2015). Lots of comics to be inspired by, like Skin deep and The Property of Hate.
I still never got my art chops to the level I wanted to be able to pull off the style I envisioned for the project, but kept developing Ricgomori as a character.
Another much more recent thing that’s held me back from making WEIRD ART (as I’ve dubbed the kind of thing I’m going for, stylistically multimedia and using contrast of multimedia to communicate ideas and such, Kind of similar to the weird art that Lynch liked to speak about at length. The kind of art where it's just unafraid and unapologetically itself despite perceived flaws) while accumulating various things to be inspired by was Welcome home.
Welcome home and the newly awakened fear of Loosing control of my character. Granted, it’s arguable about whether or not that happened with Clown, but the other thing I kind of dread is if my project were to go unintentionally viral because it turns out Ricgomori is a deeply personal OC to me. And maybe it’s selfish but I don’t think I want to share them with the world at this point, though it seems like many more people are okay with that. Clown certainly needed a break to help with their project suddenly going so viral.
I do not want to pull an Anne Rice, I’ve seen and heard enough stories about the damage authors of those bygone eras have done to fandom and having to hide stuff (I never personally engaged with that fandom myself and have only heard stories second hand about it, a similar thing from what would actually be my time was the whole bit about supernatural though I never engaged with the show itself or the fandom).
At the same time, I don’t think I’m ready to share Ricgomori with the world. Or at least not now.
That being said the conceit of the unnamed project is that an unnamed protagonist (I never came up with a name for this blank slate character) gets lost in Ricgomori’s labyrinth world. Ricgomori is indeed a sorcerer type creature of indeterminate gender among other things, known shapeshifter, and mischievous to a fault and got a bad rap because a demon may or may not have stolen their identity and they didn’t start caring about that until it was too late. Something something stolen names and while Ricgomori did eventually get their old name back on top of keeping the name of the demon
I kind of always painted them as a weird creature, kind of fairy-like but in it’s totalities of being both chaotic good and evil. One big thing with them outside of their secret angst and dramas is freedom and not being restricted by others. Totally supervillain coded but not actually directly all that villainous (they just love the style tbh).
On paper, this is maybe a few things removed from a hodgepodge of movie! and book! Howl Pendragon from Howl’s Moving castle. In practice, this poor person is lonely and has yet to find a sophie who will be with them.
ANYWAYS the protagonist is stuck in their weird labyrinth realm and it’s kind of like Yume Nikki / how myhouse.wad / super mario B3313 handles it. It’s a fucked up maze but not in the traditional sense, and Ricgomori lives in the center and loves to toy with people but at the same time is deeply lonely and wants the companionship but doesn’t want to let people too close.
I do want to visit this idea as either a game, a multimedia webcomic, or both. And I think I will in fact actually commit to it sometime soon given that I’ve seen enough people speak up about how perfection / perfectionist ideas can sometimes halt a project dead in it’s tracks before it’s even started, and if that ain’t the problem with this still unnamed project then IDK.
This Article by The Comics Journal was something I wound up reading that I think is a good read.
Some of this is being inspired by just seeing discussion about this hypothetical "Weird Art" that matches my little definition of the concept on Tumblr, but unfortunately, it's not easy to just link tumblr posts.