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Character: skids
post #1325429 post #2125525
"Aloof, paranoid, not much fun at parties but an okay guy"
-Skids' model sheet, jul/2014[1]
Mark "Skids" Boudreaux[2] is an anthropomorphic cat created by the artist Anti_Dev. He is the deuteragonist of the series The Secret Lives Of Flowers. He is 24 years old,[3] has a muscular white body, orange eyes,[4] and only one ear.
Bio:[1]
Skids is a bartender at Club Fierté and the best friend of Tragia. The two attended college together briefly; Trag was expelled for running a gambling ring while Skids got a medical withdraw after developing a speed addiction. He's straight and until recently was dating a human named Jayme until his lack of trust drove her away.
Skids' paranoia stems from his teenage years, when his younger brother Luke (an undiagnosed schizophrenic) cut off his ear while he was sleeping. Aside from Luke, Skids has one other sibling: a twin sister named Mary. His family is fairly wealthy, but he tries to make his own way without asking for their help.
Both the porn shop where Trag works and Skids' bar are owned by the same person: a human named Cray. Tragia thinks Cray is "sketchy" and has reason to believe he's involved in some shady business.[5]
Skids' Family
(Source)
Well I wrote up this whole thing about them and now I guess I might as well dump it here.
I have a major problem with developing characters in my mind that I’ve never even drawn before and then being too intimidated by their strong personalities to actually try designing them. Skid’s family was going to play a major role in TSLoF and the only one I ever drew besides Skids was his little brother Luke. And I had to go back and change his design because everyone thought he was Skids’ ex girlfriend.
They’re supposed to be this very traditional Catholic family. The grandma only speaks French and she’s very senile. Skid’s dad is an engineer who designed an oil drill that efficiently drills in deserts and became really wealthy as a result. His mom has never held a steady job but she’s published two books of poetry. His sister Mary is a theologian but also the least religious person in the family. Luke wanted to be a pilot before he developed schizophrenia and later killed himself.
I wanted to have Tragia come to dinner for a visit at one point. They all love Trag and consider him part of the family, because family means so much to them and they can hardly stand the idea of him being an orphan. Skids’ grandma keeps confusing Trag with Luke and even though he knows enough French to be aware of it he just pretends he doesn’t understand since it's awkward for everybody. Mary’s the only one in the family who wants to acknowledge that Luke ever existed, but Skids’ parents feel guilty that they handled his illness so poorly and are partially responsible for his suicide, so they can’t bear to talk about him. Skids still resents him for attacking him and cutting off his ear and Mary can’t convince him to separate the illness from who Luke really was.
I wanted to have Mary confide in Trag at the end since they both have a lot in common. Skids’ story arc was supposed to be about him learning to trust again and forgive his brother, and also accept that his inability to forgive Luke contributed to his suicide. Looking back now I feel like I might’ve gotten a lot of flack for using mental illness as a plot point but I did want to show that Luke might’ve been okay if his parents had sought professional help for him from the start. Instead they sought spiritual help from priests when he started hearing voices and seeing things, and he never got real psychiatric attention until after he attacked Skids. Once he got therapy and medication he couldn’t live with himself anymore since Skids blamed him completely for what happened.
Kind of complicated. Shit like this is why I’ve never been able to write out a full summary of TSLoF’s plot. Maybe it would be easier to write out individual arcs like this instead of trying to show how they all tied together. I still like this particular idea, that good people can make catastrophic mistakes if they don’t understand a problem well enough, and that sometimes guilt contributes to holding a grudge.
For the record, I know that schizophrenics are only slightly more likely to commit violent acts than average people. The point was supposed to be that his family denied his illness entirely and that made things much worse. I was a psychology student at one point so I do know A BIT about this stuff but if I were going to do this story today I would research the everloving shit out of it first.
(Posted on March 09, 2017)
Trivia:
- In 2003, when he was about 14, Anti Dev made his first fursona.[6] That was "a white cat who eventually became Skids over time".[7]
- Skids got his nickname from an event during 2nd grade. His real name is "Mark", and one day he shat himself in class, so everybody started calling him "Skidmark". He decided to just own it and started calling himself “Skids”, and it stuck.[8] It was so long ago that now even he barely remembers how it happened; Tragia has never heard the story[9] (but would think it was awesome).[10]
- Anti Dev has "always, always imagined" Skids to have the voice of the singer John K. Samsom (from The Weakerthans ). "Introspective, melancholic, unsure and masking fear with humor. His voice is Skids’ voice. The end."[11]
- Skids fences and plays the violin.[12]
- Skids' dad is an Olympic fencer. He tried to get Skids into it, too, but it didn't take.[13]
- Skids is straight but he likes to get pegged. "He is enlightened".[14]
- Has a twin sister named Mary. She gets along better with Tragia than she does her own brother.[15]
- Exploits Tragia's foot fetish for free massages.[16]
- Abused amphetamines in college to the point that he lost control of his life and had to withdraw.[17]
- Has secretly been writing an opera for years. It's called "The 200 Uncles of Barnaby Wilkins."[18]
- Really doesn't like animals. It's one of the few things he and Tragia clash over.[19]
- Anti Dev once quipped: "All of my characters say "fuck" except for Skids who wears a tie and is a gentleman."[20]
- Skids has had "only one serious girlfriend and a handful of less-serious flings". The one serious girlfriend knew that he liked nipple play, which is something he found out while messing with himself as a teen.[21]
- Skids "has a thing for human women".[22]
- Anti Dev has picked Skids as his favorite character.[23]
