c2switch is the master of coincidences

This might seem weird because c2switch probably doesn’t know me, and I didn’t know of her until two days ago, when Akira wrote this magnificent post about having two entirely separate encounters with her, as part of the blog carnival I posted in yesterday.

Like Akira, I’m totally infatuated with good friends with 2DT, so knowing that c2switch is one of his friends, I became interested in who this person was, and checked out her twitter. Through that, I was linked to her pixiv account, and I saw something…

…interesting.

This looks familiar—in fact, I know I saw this less than a week ago on tumblr. Yeah, it was in the stream of c-221, one of the first people I ever followed. c-221 only posts maybe once a year—usually five images at a time—and I always forget that I’m still following her until something shows up in my feed. But I follow very few tumblrs, and even less artist tumblrs, so why do I follow this particular one?

Because two years ago, I tried to organize 4chan’s /a/ board to create a doujinshi based on the character Bikko, created by Romantic Fool (who is probably best known as the character designer for Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja). Bikko was from a one-volume manga that is impossible to find, despite her design having achieved popularity in art circles and inspired tons of fan art.

A lot of people expressed interest in the project, and hung out in my IRC channel waiting for status updates—but in the end it came down to two things: my writing a script, and securing an artist who would actually draw it. That’s where c2switch comes in. She offered to draw the manga, and since I was impressed with her sketches on tumblr, I thought that would be awesome.

her sketches on tumblr

Out of the fifty pages that I planned, I only ever wrote seven of them—and of those seven, I only storyboarded (i.e. drew terrible sketches of how I invisioned) three of them. I emailed them to c2switch, and she said that she was working on them, but I never saw any of her drawings, and I never ended up making more storyboards to send her. This was how the project died.

But yeah, it was very surprising to see that someone whom I’d always thought of as, “this random artist I spoke to once and was never really able to get in contact with again,” was actually friends with my friends now.

It really is a small world and community!

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(this reminds me of episode 20 of My Little Pony, with c2switch as Rainbow Dash)