~Dariak-Frostmourne

I caught a bug lately. A small epidemic that is slowly bringing everyone up to speed with a game series called Mother.

Mother 2, the only game released in America as Earthbound for the SNES, has shared its legacy with us in Super Smash Bros. through a playable character called Ness. But lately, with the introduction of Lucas in Brawl, Mother 3 has been gaining more recognition over here in America, even though we lack an English version of the game. ESRB recently rated Earthbound for a Wii VC release. And rumors are spreading of a DS bundle containing all 3 Mother games being released, possibly here in the U.S. So its possible that we may be seeing the other two games within the states, assuming the rumors are true.

Hearing about Earthbound coming to the Wii VC was already enough to catch my interest. I loved Earthbound, it is one of my favorite RPGs (next to Ultima, of course). I still have the SNES cartridge, but I lack an adapter to play my SNES on any TV. I hate using ROMs, so I thought I was up the creek without a Tessie to give me a lift.

After catching the Earthbound fever, I immediately began to look into the entire series. I searched for plotlines, gameplay, and characters. Then I came over something that intrigued me, Giegue.

From what I've read, Giegue is who we call Giygas here in the States. It appeared in Mother 1 as the final boss, and had a rather emotional background. The sprite was rather obscure, and showed what looked like this blue-ish, slim alien inside a vat of some sort. I started to look up some pictures of Giegue and made another discovery. It is popular for Giegue to be drawn as either a Mewtwo-esque being, or as a female. Although I believe Giegue is officially a guy, I think, I do find it interesting to see opposite sex versions of those characters, especially when the official artwork is an obscure to view or a seemingly androgynous picture. The most notable of the female Giegue pictures I've seen come from a deviant artist called Morphine. I've checked out her work and I'm very impressed.

Other androgynous character templates I've noticed include the Avatar from the Ultima series. The Avatar was the Player, therefore the Avatar was either male or female. It wasn't until the later Ultima games 8 and 9 did Electronic Arts and Origin make Avatar a set Male character. Still, many people speculate Avatar as one or the other gender. I speculate him as a male, but I also speculated him as a female along with other artists.

I decided to make use of my Earthbound craze and work on a new picture featuring Imp Avatar and the Morphine inspired Giegue.
[link]

Among other things, my semester ended last Monday, and I passed my Drawing 101 class with an A. The teacher thought my charcoal works were exceptional for the class's difficulty. I should find a way to scan them and feature them on my gallery.