Lot of characters designs changed quite a bit when comparing them from Anime Campaign to Epithet Erased. Only realised the changes made when I saw Howie. Was there any specific reasons for updating a character's design and do you have any favourites characters, as for their design or aesthetic?

Q:Lot of characters designs changed quite a bit when comparing them from Anime Campaign to Epithet Erased. Only realised the changes made when I saw Howie. Was there any specific reasons for updating a character's design and do you have any favourites characters, as for their design or aesthetic?

smashernicko

There were a lot of reasons to update the designs.

Almost every character in the original was white so I wanted more PoC characters, specifically more black characters. Team Little Girl (renamed The Neo Trio in Epithet) originally had Molly and Feenie both as little blonde white girls, so I figured one of them should swap because it’d make the group more visually distinct. I tried designs for both Molly and Feenie and I liked Molly’s better.

I recently watched an interview with Cree Summer who was talking about how there were barely any lead black women in any animated shows, and that she herself voiced like 90% of the ones in existence. You also don’t see a lot of biracial characters who are explicitly biracial, so I figured I would change Molly’s mom to be black and Molly and her sister to be mixed.

I also had this design lying around from another project:

I thought the fro + stars was really really cute. So I recycled it into Molly.

Howie’s design I always felt was kind of simple and boring and I’d just watched Black Panther. I thought his design might look cooler with Killmonger’s hairstyle in front of his eye. That’s the only reason he got swapped.

For the record Mera is also mixed-race SE Asian on her dad’s side (which is why I asked Howard Wang to voice him). That’s actually something I had in my head since the original AC but it never came up for obvious reasons.

Most of the other designs were just Siv and Rhea doing a really good job making the characters look cool. Arnold and Gorou got the biggest glow-ups imo.