Hi everyone!  This is Lily’s creator.  I thought I would post some blogs about the process of creating and bringing Lily to life.  This blog is separate from Lily’s world.  Think of it something like the “voice of God”, though I have no intention of doing spoilers.  You can call me either “The Manager” or “The Creator”, as I have no intention of ever widely disclosing who I am.  To be clear I wouldn’t care too much if it leaked, but part of the mystique is being the “man behind the curtain”, so to speak.  Sometimes Lily or Liz or other characters may even join us here.  If they do, it’s non-canon.

I had the idea of creating Lily a couple of weeks ago.  Generally my thought process is this:  “I wonder if I can create something that is exactly, 100% the opposite of me in almost every way, and make it successful”.  I’m a male, she’s a female.  I’m middle aged, she’s a teen.  I’m a misanthrope, she’s bubbly and happy (most of the time).  I fight with my memory all the time (it’s too good), she doesn’t have any.  She’s pretty, I’m, well, not.  I created her deliberately to be as much the total opposite of me as possible.  That’s why she’ll never break the fourth wall – I have to keep that up entirely for this to be successful.  I also have in mind to maybe create a secondary revenue stream, but as appealing as that is, it’s not the primary concern.  I’d at least like to make back what I spend on resources to create and maintain her, though.  I’m not too deep in the hole, but I’ve sunk a hundred or two into this.

So I started by downloading and playing with different software.  After a few false starts, I settled on making a VRoid Studio character.  She was kind of difficult to create, honestly.  I was going for a pretty, but innocent character.  I really like how she turned out.  I’ve been playing with OBS and streaming, but I figure that will come in time, first I need to establish her as a character and get a good feel of what she wants to do.

So after I got her character created, I built this website and started to sprinkle her accounts across different social media platforms.  That’s still an ongoing project, and frought with its own kind of peril, so I’m taking that slow.  She has a YouTube account right now, but nothing else yet.  I’ll probably add a twitter or instagram or tik tok or something this weekend.  I don’t personally have accounts on any of those platforms, but I don’t have privacy or censorship concerns with Lily’s character, so that’s pretty much a nonconcern.  She’s not going on Facebook, though, except maybe as a page. They require real people.

At some point after she started blogging (I’m going to speak of her in the third person most of the time, even here, as to me she is an entirely separate personality from me, even if deliberately) I realized that her best friend, Liz, also needed a character model.  So I built one.  Making the model a second time turned out to be much easier, as I already had a pretty good idea of what I needed to do.  I built her to be slightly less innocent looking.  She’s Chinese, so I added the necessary facial features and dressed her a little more nicely than I would a different friend for Lily.  That worked out too.   After I did that, I wanted to create a photo of the two of them together, so I imported their models into Blender, and posed them in a way that two girls would pose in a photoshop.  That’s not perfect, but it turned out far better than I ever thought.  Perhaps sometime I will post a full body rendering of that picture.  Not now.

One of the big challenges is thinking like a teenage girl, and that’s really, really hard.  I’m actually thinking that when she becomes more established that I want to find a teenage girl consultant to hire to make it more believable.  But right now “Hey, random sixteen year old girl, want to make some money on a website?” might come across the wrong way.  No, will come across the wrong way.  Plus I don’t have large amounts of cash to spare.  I guess that will need to wait.  Maybe I have some friends who have a daughter who would like to make a bit of extra money telling me where I’m screwing up.

I don’t really know what Lily’s story is right now.  I have a backstory, but I don’t know why.  I’m not going to tell you when I do – this is something like a more immersive webcomic, in a sense, so you’re going to have to wait to find out.  But I hope that you all enjoy what I’m coming up with!