what, u want my backstory??
k... i got a gameboy color and pokemon yellow when i was 5. it's a treasured game for me. my parents got me a computer too, so i got to play a bunch of old windows (95? 98...?) games and try to make pixel art in ms paint. i somehow got ahold of rpgmaker at one point and tried to make a game using sprites from pokemon sapphire (my favorite game at the time). but i didn't understand the tile collision stuff so i had to give up on it...
when i was around 12, my best friend at the time showed me disgaea. it was at their birthday party, and i remember just wanting to play it instead of hanging out with everyone. i got to rent the game myself later on (we went to hollywood video to rent JRPGs all the time) before eventually buying it. i can't stress enough how disgaea changed my brain chemistry. it's still my favorite thing ever. when i actively started drawing, it was so i could make disgaea fan art... laharl was my husband, and i hated flonne (my rival). i drew disgaea sprite edits of me and my brother and made youtube videos of us being silly with disgaea characters. these are, thankfully, lost to time.
one of my first fandoms (before disgaea even!) was yu yu hakusho. i called myself botan before i was nami, but when i introduced myself as that, other kids thought it was weird. i wasn't particularly attached to botan as a character, i just thought she looked really cute (gotta love pink and blue).
my bestie had a fancy laptop and whenever i went to their house we'd search for YYH and other anime stuff on it. they introduced me to yaoi, and we found all sorts of fansites on geocities. we were definitely too young to be on the anime side of the internet unsupervised, but it was at least on our own terms. if we saw something inappropriate, we would yell and close the tab, sort of like a fun game. i knew i was asexual from a young age because of all that, although i wouldn't learn the term for it for another few years.
the first site i spent a lot of time on was neopets. my account name was something like "nami_kawaii"... i changed it to Nami Tsuki when i joined gaia in 2005. i drew comics about me and everyone in the guild i hung out in... i made a deviantart account in the tail-end of my gaia days, and lived there basically for the rest of my teen years. i posted disgaea fan art and did commissions for REAL MONEY (not gaia gold!) for the first time.
here's an old dA icon of one of my early OCs! her name is midi.
when i was in high school, i taught myself how to animate after stealing a copy of flash mx from a school computer. one of the smash bros flashes i made got really popular (it's a marth/roy one... do you know it?), so my art was on the front page of newgrounds for a bit. i looked up to artists like egoraptor, katie tiedrich (awkward zombie), and scottfalco at the time, so getting big numbers like they did made me feel like i joined the ranks of my idols (i didn't really).
i also drew lots of earthbound fan art around this time... one of my first OTPs was jeff and tony. tony might be the first canonically gay character i knew of, and i think i related to him a lot. i always identified most with genderless characters (at the time "anime boy" was as close as i could get). compared to what i draw now, it still feels extremely on-brand.
on dA i made a disgaea icon family that grew pretty big--i told people to send me a ref of their oc (or tell me what they look like) and i'd draw them as their generic class of choice. drawing icons of everyone was really rewarding to me because i could finish them quickly and people usually enjoyed the result (i mean, it was free art). i drew over 200 icons for people (sometimes multiple for the same person), so i think probably everyone knew who i was. the english-speaking disgaea fandom was (and probably still is?) very very small.
this was mine, the first one i drew:
when disgaea 4 was announced, i started drawing fanart/comics about valvatorez and fenrich. my first 100+ page webcomic was about them... i made a tumblr account and posted some of it there. this is hitting my college era now--i spent some of my student loans on a ps3 just to be able to play disgaea 4. i imported the LE from japan and everything, but i still didn't know the language very well so i struggled to play it.
i spent a lot of my free time translating valvatorez/fenrich fancomics that people were posting on pixiv and their personal sites and stuff. by the time the english version came out, i was already a superfan, so my hype levels were at max to see how they'd translate everything. i posted a lot, i drew a lot, and i thought about character dynamics very deeply. i don't think i would've known how to write a good love story without disgaea 4. (valfen, stay winning...!)
i learned about ren'py during this time period. i wanted to make a disgaea fangame, and other fans on tumblr were interested too and wanted to help! so we all tried making a disgaea 4-themed dating sim together... it turned into a really huge project that never got finished, and i wasn't very good at communicating with/managing so many people--it's kind of amazing that we were able to release a demo and one full route. this was my first experience making something that wasn't a small flash game, and i really enjoyed working with ren'py, so it gave me the courage (and skills!) to try making original VNs later on.
i had tried doing original stories before in the form of webcomics. the longest one was about magical girls, since madoka magica had just aired recently and i felt really inspired by it. i developed it with a friend at the time, but it turns out i'm not really cut out to be a comic artist. it takes a really long time to tell a story in comic form... i made it 5 chapters in before leaving it on permanent hiatus.
i've kept quiet about this, but i might as well say it now that a full decade has passed--i honestly have mixed feelings about that collaborator. they made me feel like drawing yuri (especially the nsfw kind) was something to be ashamed of in a time where i was figuring out i was a lesbian. i don't think they're a bad person, i just couldn't be around that anymore. i started clinging to people who would support me drawing yuri, but not all of those were good friendships either. i have a lot of regrets about this time period, and if you've followed me for a while, you probably know what i mean. i'm sorry.
this backstory has gotten really long and probably too personal... but of course a backstory is supposed to be personal. listen, i thought i was straight (or at least heteroromantic) until my 20s. it wasn't until i started drawing genderbends of my OTP (those disgaea 4 guys i mentioned before) that i accepted i'm gay. that's why i started making "games about girls who like girls"... it's expanded to be gays of various genders now, but i needed to let myself have a yuri era at the time. after so many years of drawing BL, i could finally go "what if two girls kissed tho?"
it was a messy road, but in the end, i started making lots of queer art that helps people feel ok with their identity. that's what's most important to me i think, if i can draw something i like that makes other people happy too. that's why i'll keep sharing my art no matter what happens. i think it's valuable work, even if my stories are sometimes seen as shallow or overly-positive fluff. that's the way i like it! i love making things CUTE!!!
❤︎ nami