Welcome To The Post Where I Ramble About My Fan Design Of Macaria For Hades Game Because I Like Rambling

Welcome to the post where i ramble about my fan design of Macaria for Hades game because i like rambling and you clicked on the link so you did this to yourself.

Anyway i did some research first, not very in depth mind you because my brainrot goes deep but not deep enough to look for primary sources. My source is wikipedia. There's a daughter of Heracles who has the same name so i decided to take some stuff from her story and make this Macaria the goddess of blessed death and sacrifice (also so she doesen't overlap with Thanatos too much.)

Then i sketched her traditionally. I'm not good at letting loose when drawing digitally.

I wanted her to look really demure, kinda tired so it makes her look gentler. I imagine she's not very independent yet and is kind of a doormat. I wanted her to have a very different body type than her siblings. She is considerably taller than both of them (still mortal sized but a really tall mortal) and is very thin (kinda like Chronos but nobody will tell her that). I imagine she doesen't like fighting and works in the house of Hades. Does a lot of paperwork too, lol. She grew up in a more peaceful time unlike Mel so she wasn't trained to be a killing machine. She doesen't like to do it anyway unlike Zagreus. She can use her claws to tear people apart, she just rather not.

Then i decided to design her face first.

I played around while keeping her parents appearance in mind. I decided to make her a witch too (I like putting moons on the characters i design and no one can make me stop) and gave her dove imagery for the whole sacrifice thing. I considered giving her Demeter's hair color and experimented with wacky anime genetics too. I first wanted to give her Persephone's face structure similar to her siblings but then decided i really liked design number 3 where she has a cleft chin and bent nose like Hades does.

The lighter hair color Demeter has didn't work for the color scheme i had in mind. It ended up being too light and the light streaks made the upper part of her design too complicated so i decided not to. As someone pointed out, the Olympian gods don't wear pants but Chthonic gods do. It's a design decision that emphasizes the cultural difference between them so i gave her pants. Also my shorthand for shy character in character design is having them show very little skin.

At this point i was hitting my heads on walls since i didn't want her to look too similar to Thanatos. That was why i gave her the sacrifice symbolism in the first place, so i'd have more imagery to work with. I still think they have a lot of similar elements and don't like that but i also spent too much time on a fan character design already and didn't want to spend more. It's okay for them to have design affinity right, they are both gods of death?? (I'm coping can you tell)

I decided her main color would be white and she'd have a lot of accent colors pointing to her family (Red for Zag, orange for Mel, Green for Persephone and the sigil of the dead for Hades), to symbolize she isn't very independent. I decided to give her talons because bird and because i thought blessing someone in death would require her to be much more emotionally involved, so a weapon that required her to get close and touch mortals to claim their souls seemed logical. The lantern is there because light and blessings seemed similar to me. (I almost modeled her lantern in Blender because i'm horrible at drawing objects but stopped myself at the last second.)

I didn't design her as a main character of a Hades game. I imagine she'd be a helper Npc probably. Like she'd give you a ''blessing'' for your next run when you die. If i turned in this design as a main character of a game where the mc needs to run around, use 6 different weapons and dodge many projectiles and attacks the animators would put my head on a pike. There's a reason boss characters in hades wear clothing with not much to animate. (Hecate takes her hat and skirt off when you fight her even) A design like this would be horrible for clarity in a game where your character model is tiny.

I wanted to give her a shawl around her arms for an unique silhouette. but it made her design too busy. So feather cloak it was.

Anyway this much rambling was enough. I really need to draw my webcomic because i want to launch in August and i want more buffer but i don't think that's happening considering the severity of my brainrot. Uuuh thank you for reading!