Saturday, January 17, 2009

The Development of Annie-Mae's World

I really just need to make more new posts. But I noticed that I should talk about Annie-Mae more...

When I was in Jr. High, Pokemon Red/Blue was terrible popular and Silver/Gold had just come out and all of us were trying to outdo each other. The inspiration of creating a cartoon persona came to me when I noticed that predominate artists where giving themselves versions of themselves in the franchise they fallowed. There were Sonic fans and Animaniacs fans that I would see around, and it's always nice to see these people still drawing today. During the early years I came up with my own versions of me being a character in those franchises.

These are modern renditions of those old characters (except the sponge character who is a more recent Spongebob version of me). Alice Warner made herself appear in a few pictures as a main well developed character with no real relation to the Warner. The black hedgehog would not make much farther then 1 other picture I drew of her, but these are the failed Annie-Mae designs. The Sponge Annie-Mae would be drawn for fun but the real Annie-Mae had been created before I made her.

But for every good fan character, there were plenty of dumb ones. I had a friend who was all over Dragon Ball Z, and that was the season of Freeza and Cell being fresh on American TV. There were plenty of Sonic fan characters that fallowed this idea that my friend had, which was to make your charater 20 billions times more powerful then Freeza, Cell, and Goku combined, and give him spikes all over his body and dragon wings...at that point I vowed to hate fancharacters because most of them were incredible dumb like that...A good fancharacter should never overshadow the hero of the show.

By high school I had been known for perfecting my drawing skills using anime which had reached it's max popularity. We had soon obtained our own computer at that point and I needed to get myself on the net. At the time I had started playing in the marching band in the highschool. The whole band would go to competitions across Southern CA, and the students parents would fallow along as a cheering crowd. One day while we were waiting for the awards to be given out, I had met the parents of one of the fellow students, who had a daughter who was into art as well. I told them about anime and how I was creating my own pokemon and showed them my stuff. At that point I had created a symbol for myself that was the 1st two letters of my first and middle name put together, my middle name being Mae. I call it the AM-PM which stands for my name and Annie-Mae, as I've twisted the 1st part of the symbol to look like a P or an A. A few weeks later our flute section had to perform a recital with the clarinets, and I had run into the parents of the student I met before. They told me that they were talking about me over dinner one night, and they gave me the nick name "Annie-Mae" which is like Anime. So I kept that, and that's how Annie-Mae got her name.

These pictures were done in 2001, which means they had to be Jan 2001 because I hadn't gotten into Invader Zim yet because Zim was the major turning point of my drawing style. Because I was going to be sending my stuff on the Internet I didn't want to reveal my real identity and to this day I deny my real name for that sake of consistency. I went back to the idea of creating an Internet persona for myself and with a franchise that reflected that things I was into at the time. Animaniacs was dieing and Sonic was starting to suck (mainly on the Archie level because that was the only leading force of the Sonic franchise until Sega of Japan came in and debunked everything Archie had built up at that point), so picked something that had some artistic merit at the time. Pokemon was fresh and ripe with possible outcomes, there were plenty of pokemon to choose from. It dawned on me that a Smeargle would be perfect seeing how it was an art pokemon. The Smeargle hat was changed to that blue hat because I was finally allowed to wear hats in high school, I wore a hat because I could wear a hat (if you got it flaunt it). Annie never wore a top because I always wore jeans but never wore the same shirt. At the time these pictures looked nothing like the real me other then having some big boobs, which has stayed consistent with Annie to this day.

At some point, not long after this, I had changed Annie's design only slightly because I had gotten a hair cut and a new hat. I had also started to build the other character that would assositated with her. Mr. Man who technically has no official name, but when I 1st crated him for a comic idea I had named him 'Dildo'. Greatly inspired by Professor membrane of Invader Zim, I had created him with the intention of him being a mental figmentation of an alien who would travel around the universe, lost in a drug trip. Because the name Dildo made people laugh (and I really had no idea what one was but thought it was a funny word to name a character), I made his name tangible. To me his name is Dildo but he has NO official name.


Smot was an interesting creation as well but he was not developed until recent years. Smot was another nickname given to me by my friends as a bit of a spur of the moment joke, but it never stuck unless I brought it up and soon turned as a stupid idea that got annoying fast...which was weird because I hardly ever brought it up because it caused me physical pain. One night we had all decided to come together to a local book/cafe club to hear poetry and our fellow students make themselves look stupid on stage. At one point we walked to a poetry reading place where the guy who was hosting it had asked us to just start free versing our poems out of the air in front of people we didn't know and our friends, making the night awkward and boring. Finally when it was time to go home we were all tucked into my friends mom's car, and in some sugar driven conversation someone blurted out "Don't Poke Smot". LOLs were made and it was soon fallowed up to be asked "Who's Smot!" to which I said, "I'm Smot!" and then I was soon poked abusively with stubby fingers. The joke my have died a week later, but I had this creative name that I desided to use as a mascot even if I couldn't use Annie-Mae, seeing how she's a fancharacter of pokemon.

As time has progressed over the years I've been trying to change Annie's look to be more like me and less like a pokemon without getting rid of her initial look. There have been many slight changes as I've never really given her a set pair of shoes to wear, seeing how her shoes are always different depending on the type of shoes I'm wearing at the moment. Along with an official character model sheet, Annie's origins in the context of her universe hasn't ever been revealed truly. So here is how Annie, Smot, and Mr Man came to be (beware crazy fan-plot ahead).:

Jesse and James, of Team Rocket, had created a method of mix breeding pokemon, to create new pokemon with traits and attacks of the two pokemon they mixed together. They had mixed things like a Meowth and Vaporeon, a Vuplix and a Nidoqueen, a Golduck and a Garadose and a few others to create a huge mix of pokemon. Not all pokemon could be mixed like that, it required genetic splicing to do so. Once they revealed the method to Geovanni, they started making many mixed pokemon and soon developed human and pokemon mixes. At one point they had perfected the plan but never made it public as a huge explosion had caused the project to be shut down and never practiced again.

Before the plant exploded they started a clone of a Smeargle/Human. A young pokemon breeder was walking through the forest when Team Rocket grunts attacked her and kidnapped her. They put her in a chamber that turned her into a pokemon mix. They released her back to her family but her parents had found her ugly and started treating her mean. She would soon run away and become an outcast trying to find the best way to make herself happy once again. Unbeknown to her, she was never turned into a pokemon, and her parents still loved her. While Annie-Mae had been turned into a pokemon outcast, the real Annie-Mae was happy and free, living her life as a normal human. After they kidnapped the real Annie-Mae, they let her go to live her life as a happy human, while the Smeargle Mae was left to live a confused false existence with the same memories and lifestyle of the original. Annie wouldn't find this out until Mr. Man came and told her.

Mr. Man was a Rabbit that was used in Team Rockets lab and was turned into a horrible man/rabbit/demon hybrid during the explosion. Because he had so many horrible test performed on him, his genetic make had given him dark powers and changed his appearance. He would grow a terrible rage against humans and vowed to cause the fall of man. After finding Annie-Mae he would use her and her psychic/pokemon powers to cause mayhem and chaos, but Annie was only interested in her own selfish wants to care about his demands for world destruction. He fallows her in hopes that her good spirits will fall so that he can feed her sole to Smot and control her completely.

Smot is a head demon. Everyone has a head demon, and when you do something against your moral being, the head demon grows larger and if it grows large enough it will consume you. If your will is strong enough you can fight off the head demon when it tries to attack you, but if you don't know how to manage a head demon you can soon fall into self pity, despair, and dependence, leaving you open for other attacks on your soul. A head demon can take many forms, as food, drugs, lies, money, or violence to others. To manage your head demon you need to take yourself away from reality, and express yourself in a way that isn't closing yourself up in your thoughts. Art, movies, video games, books, sports, or communication are all good ways to distract your head demon from the pain you feel in the real world. There is a consiqence to spending too much time out of reality as you'll find your self seeing your head demon in a real form, making it easier for it to attack you (seeing how you're becoming dependant on distractions to keep you happy). People who fall victim of their head demon will usually fall back on having children to solve their love problems, kill or attack someone to better their lives, resort to drugs as a means to go back to a happier time, or intentionally try to destroy the world.

Annie-Mae's goal in life is to possess the real Annie-Mae, so that they combine as one and Annie can live amongst humans again.

Any Questions?...