Hi y'all! It's BowserPuma, again.

Been a while since I made one of these! I wanted to walk through my character design process for Trent Cornell. Again, this kind of post is just made for posterity and to let readers have a glimpse into my character design process.

Before we start, I just want to give a light spoiler warning. Emphasis on light. Here we go!

Trent took a little bit of a unique character design journey. His personality was designed before his appearance.

Usually with dating-sim VN's, there's almost always a "rich-kid" archetype. This kind of archetype is a fun concept in general since it gives the writer permission to put the characters in fun situations.

"How can this character afford to take the MC to a fancy restaurant?" Trust fund.

"How can the character afford to take the MC on a tropical vacation getaway?" Also trust fund.

It also provides me with a great vehicle to add some class commentary in the US by highlighting the different privileges Trent has compared to the MC. I can even go further and do some commentary about how class can influence music taste. I also had the idea of giving Trent an abnormal family dynamic (caused by their wealth) to generate conflict and to highlight some of the downfalls of an opulent lifestyle.

I wanted to subvert this trope in a couple ways. First, I didn't want Trent to have a snobby attitude. Snobby rich kids have been done to death, and I wanted to try something a little different. I thought another way to approach this trope was to make him shy, caring, and a little naïve (despite being a smart cookie).

What I think makes Trent special (and a lot of you have already caught on) is that I'm writing him to be autistic. This is the first time I've confirmed this in any official capacity, but a lot of you have noticed the signs. He easily misunderstands social cues, struggles with relating to others, and is very averse to eye contact.

His autism is something I want to explicitly state later on in the story. Hence, the light spoiler warning. His route will heavily explore this aspect of his character design and will be brought up in other routes as well.

One thing I want to make clear is that autism manifests in many ways for different people. The way it manifests in Trent will be different than how you may see it manifest in other people. Autistic people are infinitely complex. As such, Trent may not exhibit certain symptoms that you're familiar with.

In case you're curious, I'm autistic myself. I was diagnosed when I was very young. I was nonverbal until I was about four/five years old. When I started talking (and didn't stop) my mom was under the impression that my autism was… cured, I guess? It was the 90's, and the common understanding of what autism is and how it works wasn't very well understood. She never told me about my diagnoses, so I went many years exhibiting autistic-like symptoms without understanding why.

The special little neurodivergence cocktail I seemingly have is an even mix of ADHD and autism. This unique experience has given me the tools to write an ADHD character like Darrell and an autistic character like Trent. That being said, I'm not working off of my experience alone. I've done my part to research these things further to see how other neurodivergent experiences differ from mine.

Enough about me, though. All-in-all, I wanted to give Trent a unique blend of rich-kid-energy, sweetness, with a dash of the 'tism.

In line with my philosophy of trying to provide diverse bodies in the ChoPro dating pool, I wanted to pick a body type that was in between the chubby powerhouse of Darrell and the short, trim figure of Cliff. So, I decided a tall, athletic build would do the trick!

(Side note, I do regret giving the tall character antlers 😭. I want to preserve the relative height of each character on screen when displaying sprites, and Trent ended up getting shafted... I had to cut his antlers cut off 😔🤙.)

The hardest part was designing his appearance. I had the personality and body type, but now I needed to figure out the species and unique appearance of the character.

I thought long and hard about it. Given that his family are rich and powerful, I wanted to find a species that was in line with that. The obvious choice would have been lion, but Darrell had already claimed that spot. I eventually was drawn to cervids and had an epiphany. I thought a great visual design would be a leucistic (not albino) deer with orange hair and freckles. From there Trent, the ginger deer, was born!

Francis was the first to design him. After making some tweaks, we eventually landed on a design that I feel head-over-heels for. Labrador Season had come up with this and I thought he was perfect!

Here's another design I enjoy for… reasons 😇. This was done by Snow Kun!

The last note I want to make is the inspiration for his name. It's a mishmash between Trent Reznor and Chris Cornell.

If you don't know, Trent Reznor is the primary songwriter and lead singer for Nine Inch Nails. He also has dozens of songwriting credits for movies, TV shows, and other artists' songs. Fun fact, he helped write Old Town Road by Lil Nas X!

Chris Cornell was the lead singer for Soundgarden, Audioslave, and several other projects. He had a voice like no other. He sadly passed away in 2017.

Last bit of trivia for his name, I had originally named Darrell "Trent" and Trent was originally named "Tre". As you can tell, there was a big problem. It was going to be really hard to not mix them up. After that, I renamed them both and those names have stuck ever since.

That wraps it up! Hope you enjoyed this little insight :3.

Much love! 😸💖