March Projects Reveal (Patreon)

Hi friends!

It's time to talk about the March lineup. Admittedly, this has been been the hardest decision for us so far, as we were faced with picking a artist's choice and also a new loyalty reward. While everything was clear and easy about Ägir (Azur Lane), who dominated the poll leaving all other contestants behind, the other two choices left us cracking our heads for weeks.

Those very few patrons who have been with us since the beginning might recall that we opened this Patreon with Nocticula, Our Lady in Shadow, as our first project exactly one year ago in March 2022. Even at that time, Lena considered creating the Redeemer Queen version of the same character, but I talked her out of it because her other look was more iconic and known to Pathfinder fans. Ever since, she wanted to get back to her one day, which is why we had to consider long and hard whether to do so now. We fully understand that most of our current patrons don't care about Pathfinder and Nocticula would unlikely get us many new subscribers or sales. And yet, now is the ideal chance to look back at where we began and see if we've made any improvement over the last year. And let's face it, it's probably the last chance for us to justify the creation of this model, so we might as well give Lena this opportunity to sculpt something she's excited about.

The loyalty reward has been my personal headache ever since Edelgard's release. To put it bluntly, she was gorgeous. Mofu did a wonderful job with that sculpt, and from day one I knew I would have a hard time coming up with something equally as good when the time comes. And thus, four months later I wasn't any closer to picking a suitable replacement. One question kept bugging me: was Edelgard popular because she was from Fire Emblem? Or was it simply because of how good the model was? Would Bernadetta be a good choice, seeing as how she's the most popular character from the same game? Or maybe Dimitri would look great next to  Edelgard as her nemesis? And seeing how we don't have any male character models, you can get the picture of how desperate I was to even consider him.

But when I decided to let the burden of the choice fall on our patrons' shoulders by opening a poll, neither of the Fire Emblem characters have shown any promising results. I won't mention any other options I considered over the last few months so that people wouldn't get upset about them not making it in the end, but just know there were more than a dozen. The ones that made it were Hatsune Miku's nun look and the orb-pondering witch, so I put both of them in the poll as well. And one last choice for the poll ended up there for the most ridiculous reason: the orb lady had a landscape oriended picture, so I needed another one just to fill the space. After looking through our pic repository for five minutes I suddenly remembered about Megumin, who had many landscape arts. So that's how she appeared on the poll as a complete placeholder with no heavy thought put into it.

I wasn't really worried about Megumin winning because I figured she must have so many models already that nobody would be interested. Now imagine my surprise when she dominated the poll from the very first minute with only the nameless orb lady to provide any real competition. Well, a couple lessons learned! One, the most popular choice can be the least thought through. Two, never underestimate the power of explosions (and orbs)! Either way, the community has spoken, so Megumin will be offered as a 4-months loyalty reward for the next term until we replace her with something else in August 2023!

And if you have any thoughts about picking the next loyalty reward, don't hesitate to share!

Cheers!
Des