The Bellcross Mystery

Anyone who knows me knows that I love anything supernatural, especially vampires.

I've been working on writing and illustrating a visual novel with a close friend of mine. Even without Covid19, we have to work online and talk via social media, because she lives all the way in Denmark. We met in 2019 on Tumblr and the rest has been history. Sofia and I absolutely adore those nocturnal pointy lads.

Bonding over our love of visual novel romances and the characters we had come to love from reading others' visual novel games, we came to the decision that we wanted to make our own. Inclusivity is really important to both of us as we're very aware of the issues that surround us all over the world. We also noticed that some things were missing regarding the representation of different groups; we'd also picked up on the backlash that other artists' have received when their projects went live, which is something we wanted to minimise for our own project.

The visual novel we've been working on has been through a bit so far, it was originally called The Twilight Zone, but we thought that might land us into some trouble, and so the name changed and we thought about names for a long time. Eventually, we agreed on The Bellcross Mystery. Within this project, there's six romanceable characters, Sofia created three and I created three. By creating these six characters, for our first project at least, we've tried to be as inclusive as possible.

From left to right: Alistair (he/him), Zahra (she/her), River (he/him), Lana (she/they), Harper (she/her), Eros (they/them).

I've also been working on some finalised pieces of some of the characters, which I'm really in love with. Lana and Zahra are the only ones I've finished so far, which can be seen below, but I hope to get to work on the others soon.