how did you become interested in jesters and clowns? or if that's too vague, when did you first start drawing them?
ok so like. i was one of the people that grew up not really liking clowns. i thought they were weird and they were almost always used for jumpscares and shock imagery so by association i just really disliked them. but it turns out, i just really dislike jumpscares and shock imagery regardless of what it is. fast forward to 2016, to the era of the 2016 clown sightings that happened around that time.
everyone was freaked out of their gourd over this, but i actually thought this was super funny. like people being terrorized is not that funny, but the fact that uniformly a bunch of people with clown masks and clown/character performers were just like "1, 2, 3, fuck it" and just put on their gear and strolled around at night freaking out college kids is like. objectively funny. i didn't really think clowns were that scary anymore because in hindsight and context, they are just people in masks and makeup doing performative stuff.
ALSO during that year i watched a playthrough of chrono cross for the first time and immediately fell in love with it. if you're unfamiliar with the game, there's a semi-antagonist character named Harle, who I Fucking Love. She's meant to be threatening and kind of scary but... her design is so cute??? her personality is completely affable and you actually team up with her for a good part of the game???? and she has some wicked cool lore???? (except a lot of the lore in chrono cross doesn't really make a lot of sense but what i do understand about harle is really neat.)
And so, in the big combo of "yeah, i don't think i'm actually afraid of clowns even when they're being irl threatening" and "here my new blorbo daughter, she's a jester" made for a part of my brain that's just dedicated to liking clowns and clown characters. and boy howdy. there's so many of them. i'm eating so good every day.
this is already stupid long, but outside of my little doodles of harle, i started creating and designing my own clown characters much more recently. i think my oldest clown character might be a tiefling i made named Juliana Rose in 2019. i've never played her in a dnd game before, but i would eventually like to! Here's what she looks like!
