Masked Characters Rock!

You know that character.

The one who shows up wearing a mask, refuses to take it off, and every single episode you're sitting there going, "WHO ARE YOU. WHAT ARE YOU HIDING. WHY WON'T YOU JUST,…" and then they do something completely unhinged and you forget you were even asking.

Char Aznable from Gundam. Kakashi from Naruto. Gojo from Jujutsu Kaisen.

Every single one of them tells you everything about their personality through clothing, body language, and voice without ever giving you the full picture.

But what if the clothing, body language, and voice were all fake too?

My little dumpster fire.

Meet Kurotsuki.

She's a Twitch-streaming, manga-drawing, fox-mask-wearing disaster of a human being who has decided that every person who looks at her will see exactly what she wants them to see and not one detail more. Her shoes defy her real height. Her top hides her proportions. Her voice comes out of a modulator in her Inari mask sounding like a Vocaloid character.

She is operating at a level of paranoia that is honestly kind of impressive.

She doesn't fit any archetype. She's not a tsundere, not a yandere, not a kuudere. She is maniacal and egotistical and she will trample people to get where she's going. But she genuinely cares about people. She just can't show it because somewhere along the way she decided that caring makes you look weak and looking weak gets you used.

And then there's Haru.

Is she in love with him? Is she using him to promote her own manga? Is she literally stalking him? You don't know. She might not even know.

That tension is half the fun of OFFstream, and every single design choice I made for her, from her inverted magical girl top to the plain markings on her half mask, was built to both exemplify her and to hide her.

If you want to see exactly how deep those choices go and why every layer of concealment tells you something she'd never say out loud, come hang out with me in the Adventurer's Guild on Patreon!