This Romantic World Page 482 and 483 (Spread) (Patreon)

Time to bust out some lore! You know it's time to start recapping the visual novel when I re-use artwork from it. I'm actually pretty happy with how well those two panels have held up. Which is rare for me in regards to older work. 

So let's talk about the guardians first. For their design I was aiming for "unsettling." I wanted them to look creepy, uncanny, and with muscles and anatomy in weird places. Something that actually looked like an alien, you know? As Tempest mentions here, they would swap bodies as needed, but I wanted all of them to have weird muscles fused with tubes and metal parts to give them a unifying look. 

On to the crawlers. I believe this is the first time Switch's true form has been shown outside of the visual novel. Though I did work elements of it into her appearance when she's been in people's heads in recent pages of the comic. If I'd had a design pitch for her it would have been "What if a Resident Evil boss monster had been made in Hell instead of a lab?" I remember thinking it would be a good contrast because the crawlers in the comic would be intelligent, well spoken, and (aside from Iris) compassionate. So I thought it would be fun if their true forms were just the most heinously evil-looking things I could come up with. 

Fun fact that's Halver in the bottom left of panel four. The female at his side was a red herring. In the visual novel, this panel appears when Switch is telling Isaac about her people. She didn't want him to know that she was the queen at the time. And so referred to the giant in this image as the crawler king and the long haired female crawler in front was implied to be Switch herself. The twist that Switch was the queen was something I was very proud of at the time, writing-wise. 

And that's all for now! I think these next couple of pages will be the most concentrated lore bombs I've ever dropped. So I hope Tempest's story keeps your interest as we go!