Minah manga (Patreon)

Hello all. I’ve been working on a story for Minah that I hope to gradually draw into a manga. It’s slow, and it’s difficult so it will take a long time. This is embarrassing to admit but I used to write fan fiction for Final Fantasy VII in high school because I was hopelessly obsessed with Tifa. That’s the extent of my creative writing experience so please keep your expectations low😭

I will still focus mostly on illustrations, since that is what my supporters are here for. However, I would like to share some WIPs that may get scrapped, and a written draft of a clipped scene to show you a basic glimpse. I will post a monthly poll and a new Yandere art later today. Thank you as always!

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These are some WIPs. they’re unfinished and may or may not be used. Just wanted to show you what I’ve been doing when not working on monthly illustrations

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In my illustrations, Minah is a 25 year old woman who works as a model and more recently as a cosplayer. The basic backstory was that she was the sole provider for her sick sister who had a chronic illness. She wasn’t fluent in English because she was mostly in illustrations and didn’t need to talk. She had a split personality between tsundere and yandere personas.

The manga is kind of like a more fleshed out origin story. She is a 23 year old woman who has modeled for many years but is struggling to keep up with her sister’s medical care. The big change I made here was that I scrapped her language barrier. I tried to work with it but it felt unnecessary so she speaks English fine.

Excerpt of scene in chapter 1 - unrelated to the above images

Minah’s phone buzzed, and the screen flashed with a video call request from Chaerin🎀. The thumbnail preview showed her friend's face mid-laugh, cropped black hair tucked behind one ear. Minah dropped onto the edge of her mattress, legs folded, and hit accept.

Chaerin's face filled the screen, backlit by something warm and golden—a hotel room, from the look of it, with an enormous window showing the amber Los Angeles evening skyline. She was sitting cross-legged on a king-sized bed in a cropped tank top and what appeared to be silk shorts. Her light blue eyes—so close in shade to Minah's own that strangers sometimes asked if they were related—went wide and bright the instant the call connected.

“Hey,” Minah said flatly.

“Hey? Hey?” Chaerin’s voice crackled through the speaker. “Don’t you ‘hey’ me, Unnie. I need details. Details! I swear if you don’t spill everything that happened at the casting in excruciating detail, I will fly back over to Harbor City right now. Tell me you crushed it. Tell me you slayed. Did the other girls wilt when our lovely pocket-sized goddess walked in?”

Minah rubbed her face. “Nobody wilted, Chaerin. It was… fine.”

Chaerin leaned closer to the camera, studying Minah's face with the intensity of a jeweler studying a stone. "Wait. You have your 'I got rejected but I'm pretending I'm fine' face on. I know that face. That's the face where your left eyebrow does the thing—" She pointed at her own brow and made a micro-twitch motion.

Minah's hand moved to her left eyebrow before she could stop it, and she hated herself for it. "My eyebrow doesn't do a thing—hnn, hnn—you're projecting."

"Your eyebrow literally just did the thing, Unnie. I have witnesses." Chaerin leaned off-screen for a second and moved to the edge of the bed to pull in another face into the frame—Tiffani, her silver-white hair pulled up in a loose knot, turquoise eyes calm. She was wearing a hotel robe and reading glasses, a hardcover book open on her lap. The golden light of LA hit her caramel skin in a way that made her look like a painting. "Tiff. Tell Minah her left eyebrow does the thing when she's upset."

Tiffani looked up from her book, adjusted her glasses, and studied Minah's face through the screen with the quiet, focused attention of someone who'd spent years learning to read the blank, unsmiling face of her blue-haired friend. Three seconds passed. Then: "It does do the thing," she said, gently. "Minah. How bad was the casting?"

"It wasn't—hnn, heh, hnn…" Minah started, and stopped because the breathless giggle that erupted mid-sentence dismantled whatever lie she'd been building. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, eyes squeezing shut to stop the tic, and when she opened them again both Chaerin and Tiffani were watching her with the same patient, unblinking affection that they’d shown her for years. "They liked my book," she said finally, flat. "Loved it, actually. Then they measured me and got polite about it." She picked at a loose thread on the oversized shirt, pulling it taut and letting it snap back. "Said they needed someone who could carry the floor length without alterations."

Chaerin's expression flickered with genuine fury. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again, and what came out was measured in a way that Minah recognized as effort. "Without alterations. They said that. To your face."

"It’s fine. Like I said. They were poli—hnn, heheh, hnn..." Another humorless giggle, thin and involuntary. Minah pulled her knees up to her chest, the band tee bunching around her thighs, and stared at the phone screen. The neon city lights from outside her window painted one half of her face in violet while the other half stayed in shadow. "It's fine. It happens. It's not—" She waved her hand. "I have two test shoots next week. And a catalog thing that might come through."

"Might," Tiffani repeated, not as a question. She closed her book, marking her page with a strip of hotel stationery, and gave the camera her full, undivided attention—the kind of focus that had made her one of the most requested faces in the modeling industry, now deployed entirely in the service of understanding her friend. "Minah. How tight is this month?"

Minah's fingers went still on the thread. Her jaw clenched. The familiar internal tug-of-war played out across her face—the twitch of her brow, the way her teeth caught her lower lip for half a second before releasing it, then her frosty blue eyes glazing into glassy emptiness for three, four, five beats before snapping back into focus—another one of her tics.

"It's fine," she said. The word came out clipped. When neither face on the screen moved, she exhaled through her nose. "It's manageable. I just need the catalog gig to land—hnn, heheh, hnn—and I'll be square."

"You said 'might,'" Tiffani pointed out again. She'd taken off her reading glasses, which Minah recognized as a signal. "That's not the same as will."

Minah opened her mouth. Closed it. A breathless giggle slipped through the gap, and she turned her face away from the camera for a moment. "Nine days," she said, barely above a whisper. "Rent's $1,726, due in nine days. I have $780. After that there's Yuna's infusion copay and—" She stopped herself, throat clicking. Her fingers found the edge of the band tee and twisted the fabric, knuckles whitening. "It's around nine-forty short. Give or take."

The silence on the line was brief.

"I can Venmo you tonight," Tiffani said, immediately, like she'd been holding the sentence in reserve. "Minah, it's nothing. I have a Hera campaign check clearing tomorrow and—"

"No." The word came out harder than Minah intended. "Tiff, You've covered me twice this year already. I'm not—hnn, hnn—I'm not doing that again."

"It's not covering, it's—"

"It's the same thing with a nicer word on it,” Minah said. “Anyway, how'd the LA show go? Did you walk yet?"

“Don't 'anyway' us, Minah Bae,” Chaerin interjected. ”I know your 'anyway.' Your 'anyway' means 'I'm bleeding internally but let's talk about you.'" She pointed a finger at the camera, then leaned in until her face was a giant, concerned blur.

​*This dialogue goes on a bit more but I cut it here for the excerpt

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The call ended and the apartment was plunged into a black silence.

Minah sat on the mattress with the phone face-down on the carpet beside her, screen dark, and the sudden absence of Chaerin's voice and Tiffani's steady gaze hit her the way it always did—not as relief but as a kind of free-fall, the sudden removal of a tether she hadn't realized she was hanging from until it was gone. The apartment pressed in around her. The garment rack leaned. The Bat Knight comic waited on the wobbly foldable desk. The neon lights from her window kept pouring its colors on the carpet, pink and green and violet, like the city was trying to paint over the cracks from the outside.

She pulled the oversized tee tighter around herself, knees drawn to her chest, and breathed.

The numbers came first. $946 short. Nine days till rent. Then Yuna’s copay. The catalog gig might—might. She hated that word. It was something half-chewed, promising nothing, a placeholder for a future that hadn't decided whether to let her in. She thought about the casting director's face doing its polite collapse earlier at the warehouse. She thought about the measuring tape. She thought about the way the woman's eyes had traveled down from Minah's crown to her bare feet and then back up, a verdict determined with a brief glance.

A giggle bubbled up. "Hnn—hehehe, hnn.” She pressed her fist against her mouth, hard, and the sound muffled into something strangled. Her other hand gripped her ankle, fingers digging into the skin above the bone, and she didn't notice she was doing it.

She thought about Yuna.

This was where it always got dangerous—not dangerous like a knife or a fire, but dangerous like a depth, a place where the floor dropped away without warning and something cold and vast opened up beneath her. Yuna in the care facility with its regulated routines and its antiseptic hallways. Yuna's voice on the phone last Sunday—"I'm fine, Minah unnie, don't worry"—said in that gentle, careful way that meant she wasn't fine but had learned long ago that saying so would only add weight to the shoulders already buckling miles and miles away in a tiny studio apartment in Harbor City’s East End. Yuna's infusion schedule printed on a sheet Minah kept folded in her wallet.

If the catalog gig doesn't land. If the infusion copay comes due before the rent clears. If Yuna needs something—anything—and I can't—

Her left eye twitched.

Not the eyebrow twitch Chaerin teased her about earlier. Something deeper, behind the socket, a pressure that pushed like steam in a sealed room. Her vision stuttered—the garment rack, the Bat Knight poster, the neon-striped floor all blurring for a half-second into a smear of color and shadow—and in that half-second something shifted in her chest, something ocean deep, a tectonic plate sliding against another plate deep beneath the surface of her skin.

“No, no, no, no…” Minah muttered to no one. To her. To the thing locked in.

The pressure behind her eye spread, warm and electric, crawling down the bridge of her nose and across her cheekbones like a hand pressing against the inside of her face. Minah released her ankle—she'd been gripping it hard enough to leave marks in the skin— and pressed both palms flat against the mattress. Breathe. She'd done this before. She knew the sequence. The warning signs were a language she'd taught herself to read the way Yuna read her bunny picture books as a child: slowly, carefully, with the understanding that what came next depended on how far she turned the page.

Her eyes drifted again—not the gentle, conversational glaze that Chaerin called "going to Minah Land" but something harder, a full disengagement, her pupils contracting to pinpoints while the irises caught the neon light and threw it back wrong. For a moment, just a moment, the cool blue of her eyes wavered at its edges, as if the color itself was being heated from behind. The city outside the window stopped being noise and became data—the rhythm of footsteps on the fire exit, the bass thrum of a stereo three floors down, the specific pitch of her neighbor’s muffled voice through the wall, all of it cataloged and filed and assessed in the space of a single heartbeat as— THREAT.

Yuna Yuna Yuna—Who would take her from me.

The thought surfaced not in words but in a sing-song childlike tune, distorted and wrong—a black, formless pressure that rose from somewhere behind her sternum and choked like car exhaust, like the smell of the intersection where her mother had died in front of her eyes, like the fluorescent hum of the hospital corridor where Yuna's diagnosis had been delivered in the calm tone of a white-jacketed man who would go home to his wife and healthy children. Minah's fingers curled into the mattress fabric. Her breathing changed—shorter, sharper, each inhale a clipped thing that barely reached her lungs before the next one demanded space. A giggle escaped, but it wasn't the breathless little thing from before. This one was lower, thicker, wet at the edges, a sound that started in her throat and ended somewhere near her teeth.

"Heh... heh heh... heheheh…"

Her hand moved to the bandana on her head—the blue one, Yuna's one, tied in its bunny ears—and she gripped it like a handle, like a rope thrown across a chasm. The fabric was soft and worn and smelled faintly of her own shampoo, and the texture of it against her palm was an anchor, a real thing in a moment that was dissolving quickly. She pulled it tighter. Her knuckles went white.

If someone touches her. If someone hurts her. If someone stands between her and what she needs—

The giggle came again, louder, and this time it didn't stop when she pressed her fist against her mouth.

The sound filled the apartment like water filling a glass—rising, rising, until it touched the ceiling and had nowhere else to go. It was no longer a giggle, but a bone-chilling laugh. Her fist muffled it, and her shoulders shook with it, from the effort of keeping something in. The neon outside had gone fully green now, the kind of electric green that made shadows look black, and in that light her reflection in the phone's dark screen was a stranger—eyes too wide, the blue of her irises flickering at the edges like a pilot light searching for a flame. Blue. Orange. Blue. Orange.

BURN IT. BURN WHATEVER STANDS IN THE WAY. SHE IS YOURS. NO ONE ELSE CARES. NO ONE ELSE CAN PROTECT HER.

The thought wasn't a thought. It was a voice, her own voice, speaking from a room she had locked at sixteen years old and thrown away the key. And the door was shaking.