>>119568>something feels familiar about the pic so i think ive seen it beforeSomeone from here drew her when I asked for opinions on her design in the Tengu thread (since she is one) but lamented not being able to do so without having to post AI.
>what was the thread about/whats the story behind it?An AI general related to Touhou, someone posted a screenshot of AI goofing up really hard when asked to describe Aya, then later on that same person decided to generate an image based on this erroneous description and it actually ended up looking pretty cute. Then somebody else suggested we make her our mascot and all of a sudden everybody in the thread started brainstorming stuff for her. The very first thing anons were able to decide on was her name being Tenkai (because it has AI in its name and has links to Buddhism, which Tengu have ties to), then I pitched in with a lengthy write-up about her lore/abilities, which everybody seemed to agree on, as well as refining her original outfit to be a bit more Touhou-like (the original was just contemporary-looking clothes).
From there on, the collective thread effort came in the form of mainly just small adjustments to that base outfit that other anons would suggest, the ones I remember off the top of my head were making her dress a lighter blue (because an anon pointed out that she looked a bit too much like a pink haired Alice beforehand), giving her armholes frills (because it looked cute when another anon did it), and my favorite was having her hair cover up one of her eyes (because AI has notoriously bad depth perception).
When it comes to her lore I had most of the say though, like I said I liked the idea of a mascot so much that I just got to writing and pitched in with a huge post about her, and everybody seemed to agree with it so they didn't really add much to her lore besides a few relationships/interactions with other characters a few months down the line. Given her origins, I tried making her a walking reference to AI image generation. She's a news reporter whose ability is to near-instantly draw anything she's currently looking at (think Rohan from JJBA) with near-perfect accuracy, essentially as if she were taking a picture, but her ability is also cursed to make it so that her drawings always have at least 1 very notable imperfection present in them that gives them away as not being actual pictures, no matter how real they look. She lives in poverty and can't afford a camera, so she's forced to use this ability of hers for her Newspaper, which sells really poorly because, despite her actually being a very diligent, honest girl that always makes it a point to tell the truth and unbiased in her journalism, people usually dismiss her articles as made-up baloney because they assume that if the pictures are fake, so are the articles. She's essentially stuck in this poverty loop of not having a camera because she's poor while also being poor BECAUSE she doesn't have a camera.