[DPTG] Coach (Patreon)

I haven't done his walk cycle yet, but here the lad is. I'll talk about him in more detail but first a refresher on DTPG's premise:

The protagonist (Ego) is a depressed hikkikomori who doesn't leave their room by choice, spends all their free time online and playing video games, and who begins to suffer a series of nightmares giving form to their depression.

...setting aside the nightmares, that's basically half my friends... no points for guessing any inpsiration. 

anyway, this has some fun implications for the other characters in the game: either they're talked with online where they're represented only by the avatars they would choose, or they're met in a dream where they appear as how Ego thinks of them (...which naturally is also dependent on what avatars they use, as well as any other amount of environmental subjectivity)

although it doesn't make as much sense in most works conceptually, i honestly think that this is how any character should be designed: based on the protagonist's impressions of them. in writing every character should have a specific purpose to the development of the protagonist, and therefore it fits in neatly to create their appearance in a way that matches that. i've seen some Discourse on the tumblrs lately suggesting Studio Ghibli animates many of their films according to this idea as well, and I'm such a fan of it. It's a lot more fun anyway. i don't know if there's a word for this approach so in order to sound fancy i'm going to call it Impressionistic Design.

It's also worth noting that Ego knows characters by their screen names rather than their real names.  So, Coach. If you think of L4D2 you're on the right track. This dude isn't actually a coach, he's a fitness trainer, but that's pretty close. I figure he might like the namesake from that game and adopt it. 

As for his appearance, I was thinking about what kind of avatars someone like that would use online. I decided to check out some famous athletes and see if anyone resonated for him. Top of the list was Muhammad Ali. I felt pretty good about it already, but just to be sure I looked up a bit about him. Then I found a quote sourced to him:
If your dreams don't scare you, they aren't big enough.
Well, honeycusp, this game is all about dreams scaring you. That pretty much solidified it. 

So regardless of what the real Coach on the other end of the computer looks like,  I decided his appearance would be based primarily off of Ali, with colors from LFD2's Coach thrown in on a larger model (it's not ridiculous, Coach is a bit bigger than Ego though, side by side here ), and an inappropriately huge almost-creepy smile just to convey how bright and out of place his optimism is.

I'll finish the walk cycle in the next day or two and then we'll do a stream for another DPTG character towards the end of the week.