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Nicole

My OC Nicole, a white woman with long limbs, long, wavy hair, and a weak chin. Here, her hair is tied into a bun. She's in a simple, white, sleeveless dress, and is dipping her arms into water. Her dress floats up around her, and she's framed by several plants.

click images to open in a new tab! if you wanna see more drawings i've done of Nicole, here is the tag for her character on my tumblr. please note that some pieces are 18+/feature artistic nudity + suggestive situations!

this page is a WIP! any info here is prone to being rewritten or added onto later :-)

Nicole is one of my very favorites of the characters I've created! She's part of a horror story I might like to write one day, which I originally conceptualized as a part of a wider anthology. Nowadays, I don't know if I'll ever get around to actually writing it, or any of the others (or, uh... anything at all in the way of creative writing lol), which I've made peace with. In the meantime, what better to do than ramble about her online? I'm probably just gonna go ahead and "spoil" a lot here because of that. I'd rather have fun than be cagey for the sake of hypothetical spoilers lol. Her story as it currently exists is inspired a lot by my personal experiences with grief, and questions I asked myself in the throes of it about memory- for a time, a few years ago, I became really fixated on the idea of remembering deceased loved ones in the most "accurate" way I could, because I feared anything else would be effectively overwriting and erasing the people they were. It's not a concern I hold much nowadays, and I don't really subscribe to my own internal logic there anymore, but I still find it an interesting idea. I was also inspired a lot by the cruelty that can exist within childhood and adolescent friendships- both my own and just in general.

Nicole's story is about her going back to her hometown, under the impression that she's been given romantic overtures by Ruth, a childhood friend and source of some intense emotional fixations on Nicole's part for most of her life. She goes back home, only to find a seemingly otherworldly being claiming to be Ruth, who says she has ascended to angelhood. In earlier incarnations of the story, I also included more about Nicole's hometown and the people in it, but currently, they're the only two I really care to focus on. I find things more impactful with such a small scope! In case my phrasing earlier didn't raise an eyebrow to a strong enough degree- that's not /actually/ Ruth. Or, uh... it sorta is?? The Ruth we get in the story is something taking Ruth's form. In reality, it is just something bound to the land and very, very old. She initially "becomes" Ruth as a way of exerting control over Nicole, but eventually comes to like it. The person she is is based entirely in Nicole's incredibly warped + idealized memories of her friend, so she's not really a copy of Ruth- she's Nicole's idea of Ruth given physical form. That said, she does still have free will and her own conceptualization of herself to an extent- she does also sincerely come to enjoy "being Ruth", and is deeply perturbed by the fact that she /knows/ she isn't "really" the woman she's based on. She feels a weird mix of deep bitterness and devotion to Nicole for a multitude of factors- she loves her because Nicole wants to think Ruth loves/d her, she feels indebted to Nicole on some level for making her "herself", and she also hates Nicole for making her "incorrectly". She is a flattened, incomplete replica who is both fully aware of that and would love nothing more than to REALLY crawl beneath Ruth's skin- but at the same time, she doesn't know or acknowledge Ruth 1.0 as a full person any more than Nicole does.

  • An image of Nicole, sitting on top of a suitcase. Behind her is a bright green closeup of an eye partially covered by hair.
  • Nicole is standing on the right, playing with her hands and making an anxious expression. On the right are four panels. The top right depicts a series of hills. A crucifix stands on the one in the back, and wisps of steam or smoke rise from around it. Next to that panel is one with a closeup of a hand, holding up a bleeding index finger. Below that is an image of a plant, with dew dripping off of a leaf. Finally, below that is a closeup of a face and nose, framed by hair. The face depicted in this panel is weeping, and staring directly at the viewer.
  • Nicole stands in a white nightgown, with her back to the viewer. She is in a grassy field next to a lake, with mountains visible in the distance. The sky and lake are both red, and a scalloped star shape is in the sky and reflected in the water.

Nicole herself is also a really fun character for me. I intentionally tried to give her a lot of traits I tend to find grating in real people (as well as myself in some cases lol). I thought it'd be fun to explore those traits + hopefully try and understand them a little more through her. She's prone to infantilizing herself, especially in the face of conflict, is both self-deprecating and unwilling to acknowledge a lot of her faults, and is often willfully ignorant of of the world around her. Notably, she /does/ choose to see Ruth (2.0) as the woman she's based on despite seeing obvious faults in that, just because it's the interpretation that'll make her happier in the moment.