About a month ago I posted a redesign I gave to an old OC I used to draw in high school, (https://www.furaffinity.net/view/60126413/) describing the story I had in mind for her that I ended up never going anywhere with because I was young and stupid and lacked insight into the difference between something being merely derivative, as everything is, and something being paint-by-numbers and generic. In said post I expressed interest in recycling that character and salvaging her story sometime in the future when I'm done working on my Captain N revival, but lamented that even after a decade of thinking about it on again off again I just couldn't come up with a good enough hook, a reason for it to exist compared to all the other "Save the World and Get to School on Time" cartoons it was paying homage to, while also wondering if maybe I should just give up on the whole idea of paying homage to that genre, speculating that maybe the reason they don't make a lot of those anymore is because all the good ones got made already.

Not long after that, I had an idea that kinda clicked with me. I'm not sure how they connected, why I thought of these two things back-to-back, but while thinking about sonas, an OC that's supposed to be a version of the artist, usually as some idealized version of themselves, and how I wonder how many people that have a sona would choose to become said sona in real life. Anyone who follows my fetish handle knows about my femsona Katie, (I've drawn her before on this handle: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/58566173/) a character that's supposed to be me as a woman that admittedly looks nothing like how I'd actually look if I were born female, but if you're gonna reimagine yourself from the ground up, you might as well make yourself hot while you're at it, right? I can say very easily that if given the chance I would totally become my sona in real life, but what about people with multiple sonas? What if you were a furry and had a fursona, but also were a Steven Universe fan and had a gemsona? Would you have to choose which one you become? Would that be an easy choice? Would you even want to have to make that choice, or would you turn down the opportunity completely because of it? So being the big Ben 10 fan that I am, the obvious solution to me was to just have an Omnitrix with all of your sonas loaded into it instead of aliens, that would be pretty cool. Then in like the exact same thought I remembered months ago when my sister, as a hypothetical character design challenge, asked what it would be like if Ben 10 had a "sister show," like how there was He-Man and She-Ra, Barbie and G.I. Joe, Polly Pocket and Mighty Max, the Easy-Bake Oven and the Creepy Crawler Oven, Treasure Trolls and The Stone Protectors, sorry I made you remember that one existed, and for some reason people say that My Little Pony was the sister show to Transformers, I have no idea why cuz it really isn't, but I'll roll with it I guess. The first thought to me seemed like a pretty good answer to the second thought.

Then it ended up sounding to me like a pretty good hook: Ben 10 but instead of aliens it's an artist that can turn into her OCs, because such a big part of Ben 10 fandom was always making up your own aliens. Same with Pokemon and Digimon. And what kid didn't cut pieces of card stock down to size and draw their own Yugioh cards? Now imagine a monster-of-the-week/gotta-catch-em-all type of cartoon where the audience is ENCOURAGED to do that in an affectionate parody of late 2000s/early 2010s DeviantArt culture, so one of her transformations would be a spiky edgelord with hair and/or clothing that covers their eyes, a sparkly overdesigned sherbert-colored fursona, an obvious expie of some video game character, etc. Just hit like all the tropes that usually get sites like DA memed on for being cringe, but this character embraces the cringe and makes it cool. But since I don't intend to do much with this idea until Captain N is done, she's going here, another post I'm making so that if I end up deciding I don't wanna do it after all I'll at least have something to show for it