As I was walking to work this morning I saw a small piece of folded paper laying in the grass. From what I could see it appeared to be a drawing of some sort. I debated picking it up, ultimately deciding not to because it was all wet from overnight rain. I walked on.
Later, my wife called to ask if I wanted her to drop off the car so I could drive home. Boy am I glad I decided to walk. Not only was it a beautiful day, the drawing was still there, now dried by the sun!
I've found an number of interesting things on the street in the last few years, including a romantic letter from prison that referenced fart jokes, but this drawing is by far the best:
Part of why I love this drawing so much is because it reminds me of drawings I made as a dreamy prepubescent. But even more than that I like it because it seems to be a character sheet from a roleplaying game of some sort. I play roleplaying games, specifically Dungeons & Dragons. I'm fascinated by the whole idea of a roleplaying game, and the culture that surrounds it. I'm particularly interested in the status the "character sheet" has in such games. It's a record of an imagined identity which is labored over so much that it becomes an artifact of sorts. For this reason I've saved several retired character sheets from past campaigns. My favorite is this one created by my friend Adam for a half-elf he played named Roland:
(The large yellow stain is that garlic butter they give you with Papa John's pizza.)
I also play World of Warcraft, which is a roleplaying game of sorts, albeit one that exists in the digital realm. It has a window which functions as a character sheet, but something about the handmade quality of the pen-and-paper RGP character sheet is definitely lost. Here's what the character sheet for the avatar I'm currently playing looks like:
Back to the found drawing. As far as I can tell, the stats for "Chelsea the Non-Micronian Time Traveler" were not made using any existing roleplaying system. What could the unit of measure be considering: "Speed: Max, Strength: 400, telecaneses (sic): 1275," and "summoning: 10/1"?
But that's only one small bit of the mystery contained in this drawing. Another question is: Was this drawn by a girl fantasizing herself, or by a boy fantasizing a girl? Let's weigh the clues:
Drawn by a Boy:
*cleavage
*handwriting
*the phrase "curse of infatuation"
Drawn by a Girl
*sympathetic facial expressions
*handwriting (a small section toward the bottom contains handwriting that's clearly different from the rest that looks like it was written by a girl. It says, "profile Angelic/alian," I assume she meant "alien")
The inclusion of the "Angelic/alian" passage leads me to consider a third possibility: that a girl and boy made the drawing together. I'm not sure how likely that is, but it does make imagining the artist's state of emotional well-being considerably more bearable.
definitely a boy.
ever tried any LARPing? hehe
I was in a band a couple years ago. The lead singer found a little bag full of notebooks. Those notebooks were full of paranoid jibberish, none of which made sense to us.
If we would have stayed together, that would have been a pretty awesome concept album, I think.
Wonderful! I love it! Could be a boy, but in one of my 6th grade classes I taught, there was a girl who made some drawings that could be considered very similar, (though definitely not the same). I hope the creator sees this here and is able to fill us in on all the mysteries.
I think the character and art were created by a girl, judging from the style and the character concept. However, I think the character was created for a game in which a boy was the DM (or whatever title their gaming system uses for this) and that he is the one that wrote down the stats for her character in the margins. DMs can be impatient during character creation, or so I've heard.
Thanks for sharing that illustration with us! And for everyone's interpretations of the finer points of the piece--can you imagine a discussion like that on CSI or something? HA!
I didn't know you had my old character sheet Kevin! What I'd like to tell everyone is that as I looked at it in this context, I was literally laughing out loud, but that never would have occurred to me while I was still playing as Roland. The "naked! all nonmagical" in the upper lefthand corner meant something concrete to play at one point--I can no longer remember what--and that phrase "she grapples like a dragon" was probably another concrete simile, but I think I'm going to use it when I'm talking about good kissers.
I'm voting for a girl having drawn this. The pants she's wearing look like a pair of pants she actually owns. They are probably the pair of pants she feels pretty or confident in and, thusly, her empowered character gets to wear them. The pants make me think that this is how a girl wants to see herself- strong and sexy in her favorite pants.