Summer Luna - E7 Art Project

Ilynav: “Did you seriously follow me out here, dragon?” she asks angrily.

Luna: “I have no interest in you. My sister is on vacation with her friends and asked me to come along.” She answers dismissively.

JAlter: “You have a sister?” She asks in mild surprise. She’s trying her best to hide how giddy she is about meeting this dragon-girl.

Luna: “Yes. She can be a handful sometimes.” She answers, blushing.

JAlter: “I know the feeling.” She replies with a grimace.

At the same time, Yufine enters the restaurant in her swimsuit, casually chatting with another person. Luna smiles just a little to see her sister, but JAlter grimaces to see her own “sister” coming in as well. 

Having defeated the last of the Crypters and cleared the final Lostbelt, the crew from Chaldea were looking forward to being able to finally enjoy some rest and relaxation without the auspice of the erasure of all of humanity. Or so they thought. Da Vinci detected something that seemed strangely to have the signal of a Lostbelt, but Sheba couldn’t get a good lock onto its coordinates. It was as if the world that they were trying to observe had been so completely warped it wasn’t even something that could be considered Earth anymore. The mana in the air was certainly dense, something more akin to the Age of Gods. But the world was diverse, and more or less seemed peaceful – not perfect, but not a world necessarily teetering on the edge of destruction at the moment. That being said, she isn’t so sure it’s stable enough to stick around for very long either. Everything they can detect about this world is mysterious.

So, Da Vinci comes up with an idea. She’s found a location that they can Rayshift to, and it seems to be near a beach. So, she proposes that they use it as their vacation spot and investigate the potential Singularity or Lostbelt while getting some R&R.

Alongside a number of the Servants they’ve met over the years, Earth’s last master Rayshifts to the tropical getaway. There, they find that they’ve arrived in a world that is very much different from Earth. It’s not just the names of places, but the shapes of the landmasses are different. The mana in the air is very strong. But the people… there are some strange beings about. There are humans with enough mana to rival ancient mages. There are human/beast amalgams of enough variations to fill a fantasy novel (which has some of the accompanying writers and would-be writers excited). There are even androids of enough sophistication to make Frankenstein look like an old model, and make Babbage jealous. They even run into a girl holding a creature that looks like it could be related to Fou, but talks! Like, real words, not just cries as if it expects you actually speak animal!

This… This is Chaldea’s strange vacation in the world of Orbis…

This art project began as a desire to draw Ilynav from E7 around late summer 2021. I knew Ilynav was unlikely to die and had been thinking about how they would save her, which spurred my interest in drawing her. But at the time I was having a hard time developing a solid plan for her outfit, and got stuck. Early 2022 As I was working through that, I came up with the idea for this crossover. Ilynav and Jeanne Alter from FGO have so much in common personality wise, I really wanted to have them share some real estate on a page.

I came up with Ilynav's portion of the story, which is that she's still trying to repay Penelope for saving her, so is volunteering at a shop Penelope opens for the summer months at one of the few "vacation" beaches in Eureka. It so happens that Yufine has invited everyone to vacation there this year instead of the beaches in Ritania. Furthermore, Luna joins in because Yufine begged her to, and she's hesitant about refusing Yufine's wish now that their relationship is on the mends. At around this time is when the Chaldeans detect what appears to them to be a singularity and Rayshift to Eureka. As per usual, the Rayshift ends up with the group scattered, Jeanne Alter making her way to this beach bungalow where Ilynav is working, and where Luna happens to be arriving to wait to meet up with Yufine. JAlter is excited to meet a strong dragon-girl, but is trying to play it cool, leading to the above conversation. Meanwhile, Jeanne had been elsewhere and met with Yufine, their arrival being the closeout of this particular scene. 

My initial inclination was to start with Ilynav and figure out Luna’s outfit later as I expected Luna’s swimsuit options to require a lot more deliberation given the prevalence of options. For Ilynav I thought I was already where I wanted to be with that, having her wear something very similar to her “mother” Moro’s outfit as seen in her flashbacks. But as I started working on Ilynav, I felt too much like I was just copying the outfit, not adapting it, so I wanted to branch out a little more. The problem became the limitation on what I could do to demonstrate a uniqueness. Because of where Ilynav is in the image, how her lower half is obstructed by the bar, you don’t have a ton of visual space for her outfit. That leaves out a lot of options such as having her wearing pants, fussing around with what the skirt looks like, stuff like that.

In any case, having unexpectedly hit that wall, I shifted to getting Luna right in terms of how I wanted her to be seated in the scene, etc. As I was doing that, I wanted to also think about what to do with her swimsuit. Initially the plan was going to be a sort-of-but-not-really “twinsies” setup with Yufine. I was going to have her in a two-piece swimsuit very similar to HYufine’s, just adjusting a few bits and changing colors – enough to see it as a different outfit, keeping enough that it is clearly based on HYufine’s.

But moving beyond that, I thought about what else was going on with the project and realized something. JAlter has two swimsuit options; her in-game Berserker iteration from summer 2019 in global, 2017 in JP, and one from (if I’m recalling correctly) a CE, and now a figure, where she’s in a black swimsuit that is moderately similar to HYufine’s. Jeanne also has a summer version who, by virtue of being a banner servant and not a free servant, has different art for each of her Ascensions, and each of those depicts her in a different swimsuit. Therefore, I immediately had a few options for her swimsuit. I believe she also has a figure in yet another swimsuit, but I didn’t consider it for this project (let alone confirm it’s not one of the Ascensions). And, of course, HYufine exists.

I then started considering all the other summer units and skins in both E7 and FGO, and in any other games I played. I realized how relatively rare it is for a character to go with anything other than a 2-piece swimsuit. Jeanne’s 2^nd Ascension is a 1-piece sports swimsuit, so that does count.

I decided to do a 1-piece for Luna too, but I wanted something a little more different as well – something not definitively sporty, but something classy and a little sexy. I recalled Graf Zeppelin’s swimsuit skin from Azur Lane and immediately thought something like that matched what I was envisioning. So I started working from that to develop Luna’s look.

When I got done with the main body of the swimsuit, I started to think about other tidbits I could maybe add, and once again her sister brought to me a little inspiration. One of the more clever parts about Yufine’s design is the fact that they use the basic symbol of the Covenant Bookmark in her design. It’s on her EE, it’s on the bows in her hair and on her sleeves, and is somewhat referenced by the ring and bow on her tail. For her summer version people are quick to note the one on her left thigh and her bikini top at her throat. But HYufine incorporates not only the Covenant Bookmark, but the Mystic Medal.

The Mystic Medal incorporates two elements for the main design – the blackish-orange crescent moon that most think of immediately, but the biggest and central element is a flower with four petals. While not 100% certain to be deliberate, a more simplified version of the four-petaled leaf is incorporated in the hair band she wears (right beside/underneath the real flowers in hair), as well as on the straps of the top and bottom of her swimsuit. However, the sole white stocking of her right leg uses a more exact version of the Mystic Medal flower in the print design on her thigh – clearly different from the five petals of the flowers in her hair, the flower on her sandals, and the flower print on her swimsuit.

                                

I think it’s one of the neatest design elements they’ve included with any character in E7, and so I thought that since my original plan for having the sisters match fell apart, I would carryover and expound on that. So, I started looking for ways to add the Mystic Medal and/or Galaxy Bookmarks to Luna’s outfit. It especially felt like a good idea to go with once you considered the meaning of Luna’s name. So, going with a bit of inspiration, I decided that Luna would have the same single leg stocking as Yufine, that being the way I would bring in the flower from the Mystic Medal. Then, instead of the star that is on the thigh garter that HYufine has, I gave Luna the armlet and placed the Mystic Medal moon there. I made the Galaxy Bookmark a feature of the swimsuit, setting it at the throat in a similar spot to where one of HYufine’s stars is. Finally, the studs along the “window” of Luna’s swimsuit are each half a star from the Covenant Bookmark. Combine them and you get five stars, her summoned level.

For the colors on Luna’s swimsuit, I chose to make the main body match the Galaxy Bookmark’s crescent. I kept the stocking to same as HYufine’s since that was the whole point of her even having it.

For Luna herself I gave her the red streak of hair for another super-inside joke. 

In Azur Lane, when you reach 100% bond/friendship/affection with a unit, you can give them a ring. That gives some of their stats a minor boost (3%, 6% after maxing out affection @ 200%), unlocks a new voice line, some ships have new wedding-themed skins, adds floating hearts to their image in the lobby and on their info page, and allows you to give them a specific name. For me, paying for the ring is a waste. The stat boost is too limited to help in anything but top of the tier of PvP, and AL’s PvP is one of the biggest jokes I’ve ever seen in gaming. But if I really like a ship’s design, or I like its wedding skin, I will use saved up rings or gems to buy a ring, and go ahead with the oath. I also tend to put a ring on it for personal fun if I want to give them a certain name. For instance, the first ship I oathed in the game was Yorktown because I wanted to rename her Irisviel, that of course being in honor of Irisviel von Einzbern of Fate. When New Jersey released I was rewatching Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko (Ground Control to Psychedelic Girl) and so I renamed her Towa Meme, the mom in that series.

There is a certain PR ship in the game. PR ships are essentially like Connection Heroes in E7, except the quest to unlock each is hard time gated to a minimum of about 5 days, and the only means of maxing them out is collecting enough “blueprints” which themselves are random drops from certain randomly available research missions which are passive, timed, deployments that usually require some kind of investment paid to completion (gold, Wisdom Cubes(summoning currency), completing certain main story maps a certain number of times, etc.). Long story short, even in the best cases, even for mega whales and hardcore gamers, it takes several months to fully max out a PR ship. However, some PR ships are UR level – ultra rare – and therefore are typically the strongest ships in the game – basically a literal example of what some people tend to accuse E7 of doing with MLs.

Getting to the point, one PR ship is the UR KMS/Ironblood (German) ship, KMS Agir, who came out in the game a little more than a year ago. She is a buxom woman with white hair and dragon horns… so I oathed her and named her ML Luna. There are a number of KMS ships that feature a red streak in their bangs, the first being Prinz Eugen. Mage Luna has a diamond-shaped stone in her forehead, just like regular Luna. But Mage Luna’s stone is red instead of blue. Because of how her hair lies it looks at first as if she has a streak of red hair just like a KMS ship, which was a weird coincidence.

So, I decided to keep my Summer Luna’s gem the same as her RGB version’s, and gave her the red streak of hair. My personal theory at the moment is Mage Luna might actually end up being Summer or some other alternate Luna (sort of like Fairytale Tenebria). There’s an entire outlandish theory on that… A bit of a dumb idea, but if the stone is color-coordinated to her element, then you could end up with base/ice Luna having a blue stone, Mage/Fire Luna being red, meaning a Light Luna would have a yellow stone, while Dark Luna would have a black or dark purple stone.

Initially I wasn’t sure what to do about Luna’s footwear. I basically thought I would have to invent some idea the way I did with her swimsuit. But as I was gathering references for the Jeanne and Jalter bits, I realized that Summer Jeanne in her 3^rd Ascension sprite is wearing the same shoes as Summer Jalter, just colored different to match her swimsuit. I decided that was as good an idea as any, so Luna is wearing the same shoes as HYufine.

The last bit of Easter egg hunt stuff is the star pattern on her swimsuit. I decided that, since I was already doing the galaxy print on the swimsuit, it’d be a neat idea to include something extra there. So, among the stars, are constellations. Or, there would be if you could see the entirety of her swimsuit. As she's seated you can see Virgo, which represents the end of summer on the calendar. The second is Libra, which is her Zodiac as summoned as her ice iteration. 

I kept the Libra constellation partially hidden on purpose because the Zodiac of a hero in E7 has no real connection to the character themselves. For instance, Yufine is Libra, but her summer version is Taurus. So, if "my" Summer Luna is technically a variant of Luna, there's no telling what her Zodiac would be. That therefore means that there's no guarantee that if/when Mage/Summer/ML Luna comes out that she would be a Libra. I didn't want to arbitrarily assign her a new Zodiac, so I decided that if ever to draw her again in this swimsuit, the last constellation would be reserved for the one matching the future official variant of Luna that works best for my plans at the time. But, that constellation will be on her other hip. 

Overall, I like how the star print on her swimsuit came out. As you will undoubtedly notice, if you're zoomed out you can easily spot the constellations due to the brighter stars, but when you zoom in you kind of lose them just a little in the myriad of stars. That wasn't the easiest thing to pull off for me, so I'm glad it worked out at all. 

So there you have it. Summer Luna, my summer project for 2022. I don't know for certain who will be the project for 2023, but it will likely be either Ilynav or JAlter. For Ilynav I am still figuring out her outfit, so it's a little bit of planning work still due there. For JAlter I have the sketch done, but I've been going back and forth on changing almost everything about it, so that is its own set of problems. Good news is I have nearly a year to figure that all out. So, until next time...