The Rest: April 2023

Hello! Before you proceed, please take the time to note the TWO folders containing a combined 700+ AI-generated images attached to the end of this post! (Sorry for the awful organization and naming this time around. I ran out of time to organize things as well as I'd have liked.) These images come from four separate sessions, each of which I'll describe individually, in chronological order. I'll also be including the images I used as the basis for each session to give you all a better sense of what NovelAI had to work with. For some basic notes on my AI image generation process as well as my intent/goals with the Re-AImagined content, check out my previous 'The Rest' posts, where I go into those things in detail.

Evelyn Session #1 - Late December 2022

My notes for the Evelyn and Gloriana sessions will be fairly brief compared to some of the short essays I've written in previous months. This is both because these sessions went very smoothly and because I didn't do anything particularly different with them relative to what I've done with other sessions. Overall, I really love how NovelAI handles angels and especially Evelyn. Something about her combination of features translates well into a more generic anime style (I mean aside from the fox features and massive booba), and there are much fewer common issues with the required angel tags than with those I'd have to use for neko characters. There is still the potential for an extra wing to sprout up, or for the wings to be too small or just be absent, but these issues seem less frequent, meaning it takes me less time to rack up some good quality image generations for angel characters! This isn't to say that things I learned from previous sessions didn't help with these ones though. I found hair tags such as 'side swept bangs', 'curly bangs', and 'hair over shoulder' helpful here, as well as the two-tag hair colour trick I used in the Anya sessions (in this case it looked like this: red hair, [brown hair]). I wasn't able to replicate Evelyn's exact hair style (especially not the stacked hair buns) 90% of the time, so I settled for anything that had a bun and/or looked like a style Evelyn could pull off. Trying to communicate the exact look of Ev's buns is something I'm still working on figuring out, but hopefully some day I'll make some headway there!

Some new tags I tried include 'flying', 'airborne', and 'above clouds'. I played around the the 'aerial view' and 'birds eye view' tags as well for some of the image generations in this session, with decent results. I'll be playing around with all of these tags again when it comes time to do more angel-themed sessions.

I didn't sweat slight discrepancies in colour between ears/tail and hair this time around since the neko sessions have taught me that trying to get NovelAI to colour everything just the way you want it is a waste of time. This touches on what I consider my rule of thumb for image generations: if a real person drew the image for me as a gift, what would be worth me asking them to change or touch up, and what wouldn't be such a big deal? Slight re-interpretations, like Evelyn's ears being a different shade than her hair, wouldn't be worth the trouble to me, as I don't think these discrepancies really harm the integrity of Evelyn's design. On the other hand, significant differences would be things that just don't make sense and are too obvious to overlook, like Evelyn's eyes or hair being a completely different hue, or her chest being petite (I hate to use the boob thing as an example, but I have to be transparent about that. Evelyn's bust size is one of the most distinct and immediately noticeable parts of her design, just like her eyes, musculature, and fox features, so I'd have trouble condoning a depiction of her in which her chest is small or even 'normal' by anime girl standards. Would I feel extremely awkward asking an artist to make Ev's boobs a little more absurdly large? Yes, yes I would, but I did that to myself when I designed her that way, so c'est la vie!)

One final note (which will be true for the next two sessions as well) is that I did not sweat the armour too much. Like hair, clothing can change, and I don't consider Evelyn's standard gold armour to be all that exciting or integral to her character. Sure, I strive to get as close to the look of that armour as possible (gold armour and gold armbands were both tags I emphasized for these sessions), but I don't think it's a make-or-break part of her character. In fact, seeing Evelyn in different styles of armour helps me visualize her potential breadth of fashion better so that when it comes time for me to draw her from scratch, I can feel more motivated to try something new! In addition, aspects of her armour such as the long feather skirt were things I knew I wouldn't be able to replicate using NovelAI from the start (it didn't stop me from using tags like 'feather-trimmed skirt' to try and push NovelAI in the right direction, but the results were about what I expected.) I'll still be experimenting with tags that might help convey these more specific aspects going forward, but it won't be my primary focus.

Gloriana Session #1 - Late December 2022

This session happened immediately after the first Evelyn session, and it went even more smoothly. I'd say it was one of the quickest and most efficient sessions I've done to date, if not the quickest and most efficient, period. I did try a few more unique tags with Gloriana, some of which didn't really pan out, but since the crux of her design is pretty simple and anime-friendly (stern blonde angel mommy with impossible amounts of thicc), I found that most of the image generations from this session were at worst nearly usable, and at best spot-on. Yes, in future sessions I would like to work more toward having Gloriana's armour be its iconic shade of red (the tag 'pink gold armour' didn't seem to have much of an impact, and early attempts to make 'red gold armour' work had no effect on the colour of the armour itself) but like with Evelyn, her armour isn't a vital part of her character, and it was fun to see her in several different styles rather than just one.

Interestingly, I think including the tag 'pink gold armour' may have led to Gloriana's eyes glowing pink and gold moreso than her armour, which was unanticipated but ended up being thematically appropriate for the character. Gloriana's had very little screentime in Axugaem2 and probably isn't the most likeable or relatable character in the game as it stands, but I am hoping to delve more into who she really is and what kind of fight she's really fighting in future updates. For now, suffice to say that duality of light and dark are a good look for her, especially with her eyes. I had already included the tag 'eyes in shadow' to help convey that there's more going on behind those glowing eyes than can be summed up in one word, so in this case the bleeding-over of qualities between tags made the end result more dynamic, which is exactly the kind of thing I love to see when working with NovelAI!

The biggest distinguishing factor between this session and the other two here, in my opinion, is the crazy colourful sky behind Gloriana in almost every single image of her. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but I used the tags '{sunrise}' and 'light rays' for this session. Emphasizing the 'sunrise' tag just once was all it took to get these results, which should speak to the power of that tag alone. Like with Gloriana's eyes, I love how the dynamic sky frames her character and suggests a more complicated story than is immediately apparent. I think this kind of breathtaking background is obviously also appropriate for representing the leader of all Imperium's angels, who I think would strongly approve of being depicted as stunningly as possible. Gloriana's public persona is that of a larger-than-life, immensely powerful and arrestingly attractive being, all qualities that I feel are foregrounded by having her posed in front of a spectacular sunrise.

One final note is that I played around with tags such as 'pout', 'smirk', and 'frown' during this session, but ultimately those tags ended up not being necessary. I can't explain how, but NovelAI frequently got Gloriana's facial expressions dead-right. This, combined with the general lack of issues with the session, meant that I didn't have to do a ton of enhancing with many of the images generated, and some came out pretty near perfect to begin with. As per usual, I had to make a few small edits by hand to areas such as her hands and eyes, but even with those edits factored in, the time I spent editing the images from this session was miniscule compared to the time I've spent editing images from other sessions (see the next section on Raziel for a great example.) The takeaway, I guess, is that Archangel Gloriana is indeed already perfect in every way, and you can't really improve on perfection. (Paid for by the Palace of Light, Incorporated.)

Raziel Session #1 (Castle) - Late December 2022
Raziel Session #2 (Jungle) - Early March 2023

Content Warning: This section contains extended reflection on sensitive social topics such as positive vs harmful representation, racism and exploitation.

I've included these two sessions together since otherwise I'd still be writing about them. Session one began immediately after the first Gloriana session, and only a day or two after the first Evelyn session, which should give some perspective on how quickly those first two sessions went. This session was a bit more spread out, but that's mostly because I took a break from it to be with the family for Christmas. Still, this was by far the most challenging of the three sessions, and thus I ended up spending more time trying to match the results with the core features of Raziel's design. In the end though, this work was necessary, and it paid off by the end of the session (and in the next session as well). Session two was the more successful session (in my opinion), particularly in terms of average image quality. I credit the use of tags such as 'sharp focus', 'highres', and 'pinup art' here (the latter mostly because, shockingly, it made for some good pinup art.) I also credit a much large pool of 'negative tags', that is, tags that I wanted NovelAI to avoid drawing from. I learned from poking around the odd AI art community that negative tags have a massive impact on the quality of image generations, and this session proved that to me. I won't get exhaustive with the details, but the negative tags I included for this session were things like 'misshapen ______', 'lowres', 'missing limbs', 'extra fingers', 'ugly', and 'blurry'- aka, things I would have to try to enhance out of the image normally. I've only just begun using negative tags to this great an extent, so more sessions are needed to establish how and how much they affect the results, but I hope the overall quality of the 'Jungle' session is apparent enough that you don't have to rely solely on my word here.

For the remainder of these notes, I'm going to take a long detour. I need to address the anxieties regarding representation that I had while working on this session, and this is going to be a long vent, so I apologize in advance. I promise I don't mean this as a lecture; rather, it's something I feel I need to establish my stance on, because I think more artists (including fetish artists) should think and talk about it. To start, the most difficult lesson I learned from this session was that NovelAI is absolutely terrible at depicting characters that aren't white (at least in terms of skin tones you could conceivably find on a human being anyway.) Not only do the skin tones themselves fluctuate dramatically, but the average image quality seems to drop noticeably as well. This could partly be the fault of my own uncertainty regarding what tags to use, since the tag I used the most (dark-skinned female) was not the most specific, but even as I tried to use other more specific tags, the consistency of the results didn't change much. My researching how to more consistently achieve specific darker skin tones didn't turn up much info other than 'yeah it's hard', and to some extent I had to concede that a system trained using images from anime art databases would inevitably be biased in the kinds of skintones it can depict, as a lot of anime characters are infamously 'whitewashed' to look more Western than Japanese or otherwise. With that said, I don't want to use that innate bias as an excuse for poorer representation of nonwhite human (or angel) characters, and so I'm still working on a system that leads to better quality results when generating images of those characters.

Positive representation is something I worry about almost constantly when I draw and write my characters. That's partly because of my education (and I promise this isn't a flex or me trying to be condescending): I have a Masters in English Literature which really emphasized the importance of writing and talking respectfully about people from other cultural backgrounds, and throughout my postgraduate studies I got to make friends with and get to know people who are still treated as minorities in Canada and the US. I've taken classes on specific cultural diasporas, settler-colonialism in Canada, and literature on the ethics of writing about war and other human tragedies. These experiences were valuable in helping me understand how much harm words and pictures can do, which in turn made me more wary of how I write and draw my own characters. Now, to be clear, my characters are completely fictional and not meant to represent real people. Raziel specifically isn't meant to represent one certain culture or background (I imagine her as a mix of North American Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean, but I know that's so ridiculously general that it can't possibly reflect the nuances of these peoples' experiences), but I do think it's important that her skintone at least be consistent like that of every other character of mine, and that the art I produce of her isn't offensive or supportive of harmful stereotypes directed toward anyone who might happen to share her skintone.

And this is where my education gives me a lot of anxiety, because the more I've learned about how delicate and context-dependent the etiquette of how to represent other races and cultures can be, the more I realize how little I really understand, and that makes me anxious that I'm going to get something wrong and potentially do representational harm to real people. As a middle-class white person living in Canada, I have a very biased point of reference regarding other races and cultures, and I take a lot of things for granted because I have the privilege of being a less culturally 'visible' individual (I'm not going to get into the details here about eurocentrism and how the West basically controls the narrative that they are the cultural norm of the world, but suffice it to say that these topics are far more than just Twittr fuel and are worth doing a lot of actual reading into beyond the sphere of social media.) I've never had to search for representation in media of my race or culture; it's part of the mainstream. My sexual and gender identity aren't as pervasive, but because I don't feel comfortable expressing these aspects of myself with most people, I still benefit from appearing like a straight white dude. I get off relatively easy when it comes to being judged at face value by others. I cannot emphasize enough how this is not the case for anyone who can't pass as white, which is something I still struggle to conceptualize. Both on a global scale and (especially) in Western countries, racial minorities have to put in far more legwork to establish how they want to be treated because those narratives have a harder time making it into mainstream media. This also means that representation of these minorities that fits in with how the West views them are more likely to gain traction, often squeezing out representations that come from the minorities themselves.

All of this means that any time I want to design a character who isn't white or clearly based on a fictional race, I need to be careful not to design them in a way that feeds into stereotypes or is exploitative of any real people. This can be tough to quantify, and as I've mentioned, peoples' standards as to what is and isn't appropriate representation widely vary, so I often have to rely on my own judgement, which itself is subject to change based on what I've been reading about or experiencing in my real life lately. I tend to do a cursory search every so often when drawing and writing non-white characters to try and increase my frame of reference, but even when I do all that, I never feel quite at ease even when the character is finished and people have had the opportunity to give their opinions on them. A good example to illustrate the kinds of dilemmas I have when designing these characters- and please bear with me here- would be Mercy from Axugaem2 (who is by complete coincidence also an angel. I dunno.) I'd decided I wanted Mercy to be, forgive my bluntness, black, before I named her, but I admit that I was taking a bit of a shot both at myself and at a certain popular FPS when I gave her the name 'Mercy': my worry was with the idea of tokenism, and what kind of representation was meaningful representation; was it ok to make a character a certain skin colour just for the sake of it, or was it better to just leave that to the people who might be affected by any representation of that skin colour? Where was the dividing line between inclusion and exploitation? Could I have a character be black, for instance, and not have to justify their being so? Which was more harmful, writing a black character with very little idea what it was like to actually be black and not having their race be very important to their story, or writing a black character and trying to force the problem of race as integral to understanding them? I assume it's somewhat obvious which side of that argument I ended up falling on based on how I framed the questions: I do think representation itself is better than no representation, especially in a worldbuilding context, because the alternative is just a completely whitewashed planet. But it should still be handled tactfully. My intentions with Mercy weren't to have her be a token black character; I just wanted Axu2 to be less white and more accessible to more people. I figured having her be part of a pair with Sally would provide a positive representation of interracial friendship that wasn't dependent on the issue of anyone's skin colour, and I felt confident enough writing their relationship within the events of the game enough that I didn't feel I had to get into that issue either. But nevertheless, every time I go back to Mercy, I get anxious that I've somehow done wrong with her because of what I don't know. I know that's a lot of pressure to put on myself, but I'd rather have that pressure than assume I can't get it wrong sometimes.

Getting back to Raziel and this session, I felt a lot of these anxieties bouncing back at me as I tried to communicate to NovelAI what was important about Raziel's design. I also ended up using a tag at one point that I regret, even though it was only meant to try and give NovelAI some direction. That tag was 'red skin'. I won't get into the centuries of context surrounding why those two words are currently a hot topic and essentially taboo, but basically the term is widely considered offensive toward indigenous peoples and should not be used to describe them. As someone who has done a lot of research and written essays about indigenous literature and history, I feel like I should have known better than to use this as a tag, and I apologize to anyone who might be offended by me using it. It won't happen again. That aside, my chief concern with this session was to ask myself repeatedly if it was ok to represent Raziel according to the results NovelAI was generating. I have mixed feelings about a lot of these results, but I've done my utmost to feature the ones I was happiest with and which felt the most in-keeping who she is as a character rather than stereotypes regarding what people with her skintone are like, if that makes sense. I also spent an unusual amount of time editing these featured images in paint tool sai, mostly to make sure Raziel's skintone was consistent. For some of these images, I had to do this because her skintone was way off (and in some cases suspiciously white.) For a few, I just made a small colour adjustment for the sake of continuity. I hope that the results are acceptable and not offensive to anyone! I'll end my venting about representation here for now since I could go on for a long, long time about it, but TLDR: Representing other races and skintones can be very stressful for me, and I worry constantly that I'm doing it wrong, but ultimately my goal is always to try and do it in as respectful and positive a manner as possible. With all my characters, my goal is to give them depth and agency rather to have them just exist for the sake of it, and I promise I'll always do my best to factor in what might be offensive or harmful to others when doing this. Obviously, this conversation could be broadened when discussing representation of women as a whole, but I'll save that topic for another time since it would require far more words than I have the time and ability to write at the moment.