Doodle Diaries: Old original characters

I read through my teenage diary today for shits and giggles, and found an entry pertaining to these two characters I created long, long ago.

Since I was feeling nostalgic, I scoured through all of my old drawings of them. I could have sworn I drew them a lot more often, but these were the only surviving drawings I could find.

The caption for this picture read: "This is some other idea of story/comic... the thing is I don't have a story"

I created these two before I had an actual full-fledged storyline. I knew I wanted to write a sort of medieval fantasy story about them, but didn't know what.

In 2004 (8th grade), we had a creative writing assignment in English class where we could write any story of any genre we desired. By 2004, I had come up with a basic storyline for these two kids, and I knew it was time to write that story.

14 year-old YJS was terrible with coming up with names and titles.
26 year-old YJS isn't really all that better at it either.

The story was about the two protagonists of different social classes fighting against a magical caste system in a medieval fantasy world, where magic-wielders oppress Muggles non-magic people.

There were also side characters, dragons and cute fictional animals.
And a medieval fantasy equivalent of death by police brutality.
And the toppling of an entire goddamn kingdom as a logical conclusion.

The story ended up being 32 pages on Times New Roman size 10. I saw regret in the eyes of my English teacher, who told me, in exact terms, that "the sky was the limit" and that the story assignment had no maximum page limit or word count.

I still got an A+.

The actual story was rather silly because sheltered 14-year-olds do not have the best grasp on How To Fight Against Discrimination. Nevertheless, I was rather proud of my story because willingly churning out 32 pages for a middle school assignment is pretty impressive, and so these two held a special place in my heart.

A doodle from 2009, when I stopped drawing and had to force myself to draw anything.

And so, swept up in a wave of nostalgia, I doodled them again today, complete with select scenes and lines from that old 32-page story (to the best of my memory).

My drawings didn't improve as much in 14 years as I would have liked, but it is what it is. I am also slightly horrified that 2003 was 14 goddamn years ago.

P.S.: I don't know if I still have a digital copy of that 32 page story.