Gokiburi-chan no Diagram

Palette

Eyes
Skin
Hair
Clothes
Older version

???-chan

My first self-insert looks a lot different. I was in a rush to start drawing myself interacting with Sans, and our relationship dynamic was not yet developed. Instead of designing her based around personalised themes, many of my ideas were drawn directly from Undertale.

  • She uses the in-game final boss equips. The Real Knife and the Heart Locket. Inside the locket, there's a pitcure of Sans and a lovingly scratched inscription: "kill me!" Though I guess if it doesn't say "Best Friends," it's not really the H. Locket... hm.
  • Her hair buns are shaped like hearts. The style as a whole was inspired by Himiko Toga, a cute and crazy yandere. All in all ??? is pretty heart shaped, I'd say, not only to give off "valentine" feelings but to mimic the shape of the SOUL. Even the V-neck on her dress is meant to be the point on the bottom of a heart.
  • Initially she was always making a ^u^ or ^q^ sort of face It was meant to be a blend of Frisk -_- and Chara's =) expressions, which is cute, but not very versatile. I already suffer from same face/same expression syndrome, so it was good to break away from that.

Re-Design Process

At some point I got bored of ???-chan and decided I wanted to redesign my character from scratch. So I sat down at my cluttered desk, turned on my lamp and, because I had recently filled up my sketchbook, put pen to college-ruled paper in a water-damaged composition book. My main objectives in the new design were:

  1. Insect theme (specifically cockroach)
  2. Visibly unhinged (yandere)
  3. Colour contrast with Sans
  4. Simple and fun to draw

Goki's initial appearance I began the night studying anime dolls hoping to make my style cuter and more moe. One of them had the perfect outfit, so I stole it and worried only about the hairstyle. This is the one I settled on! The key features are the two arched ahoge, complimented by two tufts of hair sticking out from the sides as well. It's inspired by CLANNAD's Nagisa Furukawa, since I remembered people making fun of her unintentionally bug-like hairstyle. Here it is completely intentional. It's in her name, after all— Gokiburi-chan is a cockroach!

Sans pets Goki You may be wondering what I mean by that, since she is clearly a human, not a primitive Neopteran insect. To that I say: looks are deceiving. A core concept in Undertale is that when a human dies in the Underground, time rewinds to a fixed point before their death. Their death is made permanent only when they give up on living. Sans is aware of this and, as my adversary, the only thing he can do is kill me over and over and hope that it sticks— but it doesn't. I just keep coming back. So out of disdain and annoyance, he calls me "cockroach." And because I don't have an actual name (or at least refuse to tell it to anybody) this perjorative becomes my main form of address.

As an aside, I learned the Japanese word for cockroach from a MARETU song. He is one of my fave VocaPs, but I was about three years late to his 2019 album SIU. It seems I picked it up at just the right time to inpsire myself! How lucky! That said, the song itself, 「ゴキブリの味」, has no bearing on the story of Gokiburi-chan. You may also be wondering why a lot of my self-ship or 夢女子 (yumejoshi, lit. dreaming woman) content is in Japanese. That's just because I'm a weeb.

How Sans addresses Goki Anywho, back to business. Even though the name is his invetion, I think it'd be funny if Sans doesn't actually use it with any regularity. Its origin was a single-use joke at my expense. He's plenty funny; there's no need to rehash the same material. But to his endless irritation, I liked the insult enough to take it up for myself. It persists across timelines because that's how I introduce myself, beating him to the punchline, and Sans can't help but think it's something he might come up with himself. Deja vu...? He tries to ignore it. After all he really dislikes me and honestly does not respect me at all, so he just calls me "you" and, when talking about me to others, "it." When he's feeling polite, "[the] human" will suffice.

Goki kisses Sans I also love Sans' canonical pet names for the human— kid, kiddo, buddy, bud, pal. I doubt he actually says these, but sport, squirt, brat, and short-stack are cute, too. In my case the affection is pure sarcasm, but I'll take what I can get. Other canonical appellations include "some kind of freak," which is much more fitting for me LOL. In Japanese, I struggled to find a succinct noun/form of address/hurled insult to call someone "sick," a "freak," or a "weirdo" with the proper "you're a crazy bitch" connotation. If such a word exists, I assume it would be made from 病んでる (yanderu, to be sick) but I couldn't quite figure it out. For now, the search is retired. I'm but a humble weeb; I don't speak Japanese!

Anyways, up next, I needed to decide on her colour palette. Goki in four different colour schemes I wanted the colours to be visually appealing while also complimenting my theme objectives. Even though I found "Lavender" and "Valentine" to be the cutest of the bunch, I was pouring everything into this unkillable insectoid theme, and such artificial colours just don't mesh. Sadly, pink and purple are too rare in nature to be found on a creepy beetle. Another consideration was values— for example, on paper, it would be annoying to colour in a dark seifuku. On top of that, I don't want her top to blend in too much with her dark skin and hair. So between "Weird Bug" and "Danger Zone," the yellow one became the obvious choice.

Danger Zone palette variations But as noted in the image above, there was just something "off" about the ratio of colours in the original Danger Zone palette. Here you can see me experimenting with different coloured seifuku, shorts, and shoes. I wouldn't compromise on the black turtleneck and OTK socks, so the other pieces needed to be complimentary. Evidently, I settled on the 2nd version: yellow seifuku, white collar and cuffs with black and yellow stripes, white shorts, and yellow shoes. I think her mostly yellow top creates a nice contrast with my blue-wearing beloved, Sans.

And there we have it! All done!

Short-haired Goki ... Or so I thought. At some point I realised, "oh, jeez, my self-insert OC looks a lot like the fallen humans, Frisk and Chara, recoloured into a juvenile alternate outfit." It's the shoulder-length brown hair that trips me up every time. Funnily enough, the same thing happened when I was making my first OC— thankfully I just as quickly saw that she was essentially just Frisk in a dress. My solution then was to give her a different hairstyle: the heart-shaped buns. My solution now? The same. With a few hasty snips from some imaginary scissors, Gokiburi-chan was at last complete. Enjoy your pixie cut, freak!!

    So how did I do?

  1. Insect theme (esp. cockroach)?
    ♥ Golden yellow + brown + antennae-looking ahoge = certified bug girl
  2. Visibly unhinged (yandere)?
    ♥ Messy hair + eye bags + seifuku = possibly homicidal young woman
  3. Colour contrast with Sans?
    ♥ Yellow, black, and tan vs. blue, white, and black = Very nice
  4. Simple and fun to draw?
    ♥ Simple enough, and always fun!
  5. NOT A FRISK/CHARA LOOKALIKE?!
    ♥ Bullet dodged! I doubt anybody would mix them up now