Despa Florescu, Castlevania- Sly Features
Heya, a very minor post for one of the most minor expository characters I've ever bothered to design, I'll give you some background on her. That said, for being a character who originally only shows up for maybe 4-5 paragraphs, I love her design. I'll get to her backstory in a minute. 2 of these are LA Blue Girl with some probably unnessecary Castelvania and Ayami Kojima loras and 2 of them are minimalist 90's vintage animes.
You'd laugh at how much buzz I've blown refining her over months, but once I have it in my head that I want to gen a character at all, I'll follow it through to the end. This post is the result of what I consider usable recipes for her. Especially the 90's vintage anime ones I consider the fundamentals, that is, what I can get away with without alot of extra loras. Don't get me wrong. Netflix and Ayami Kojima and Phantom are all helps, and as always LA Blue Girl is the Ken to the Ryu that is this 1990's anime lora, with the added bonus that it excels at lewd stuff.
But I'm to the point where less is more, especially with Despa. You may notice she takes ALOT of prompts, because she takes alot of troubleshooting. I find that "lustful lecherous" isn't helpful, and using (((long nose, hard features))) births monstrosities almost no matter what combo of loras I use so again, these 90's vintage ones in particular are solid. I want to describe a woman who's got kind of a peasant barfly look almost, not ugly, just not conventionally beautiful, and with AI, this results in anything from generations where she looks like a porn star anyway to a woman who has Jack Daniels every morning for breakfast. If you want a character like this without making them all overly villainous, your best bet on a prompt is "Sly features".
When her design works though, like these, I LOVE it. I've said this before, I get tired of conventional Barbie looking designs, I like characters with flaws that your buddy can look at you with a raised eyebrow like, really, her? I've done some tremendously fun things with Despa in Chatgpt and Sora, I like how she's got that little bit of haggy but I totally wouldn't kick her out of bed thing.
So's anyway, why this MINOR character? Well in my in progress Castlevania Kiss of Stone and Ebon Gaze fic, sometime in chapter 3 Andrei is cleaned up, he's wealthy now, he's floating as one does when one is infatuated with a certain vampire countess. Despa is a 30 year old widowed villager with a reputation almost as bad as Andrei's used to be who with a minimum of subtlety invites him in for "hot tea", not on the basis of sponging off him but just liking the cut of his gib, Andrei takes the compliment but doesn't take her up.
And then I was thinking, well what if I wrote a stupid little sexy thing where he does, but that didn't pan out. But the fleshing her out and a few of the other villagers remained. I might post more, I've got some lewds too but she's also one of those characters just real interesting to stick in like a modern party dress in a club or business dress in an office.