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Ludolf Jäger Blog Entry |
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March 11, 2022, 2:12:32 AM August 28, 2024, 5:25:34 PM August 29, 2024, 12:00:13 AM November 25, 2024, 8:43:38 PM 3/11/22: r/SketchDaily theme, "Free Draw Friday." ...I did also a drawing for Free Draw Friday. This week's character portrait attempt from my anthro alternate WWII storyline is Major Ludolf Jäger. He's oddly laid back and easy to get along with, probably because he's a bureaucratic type who accepts his place as just a little cog in the big war machine. (A pencil pusher, as Dr. C disparagingly refers to him, though not to his face, since he has to continually beg Jäger for funding for his experiments.) He also has a nice blond wife and a brood of blond kids because of course he does. (Oh, BTW, he's not albino like Doomsday Rat, he's leucistic. Thus the blue eyes.) There'll be more about him later on in my art Tumblr and Toyhou.se. TUMBLR EDIT: Well heh, remember for my last character portrait I said Jäger is the guy I've been mentally developing lately? That changed quickly afterwards and I started focusing on a couple of other characters who were only mildly important but now have gotten quite detailed histories of their own. Unfortunately I don't know how to draw them yet as they're canine characters. Oh, and just thought I should mention that Dr. Mengele--yes, THAT Dr. Mengele--has somehow entered the mix. ;_; Anyway...Jäger. You can see that like Capt. Otto Himmel (who reports to him), he's in the SS, though as I mentioned he deals more with the tedious, bureaucratic, red-tapey side of things, so unlike, say, Lt. Hesse and Master Sgt. Schulte (two of the canine characters I've been mulling over lately), who do an awful lot of intimidating and shooting bothersome people in the head, Jäger isn't really into all of that, and doesn't come across as particularly threatening for an SS guy. He's just not the shooty type. The most he seems to do is dangle a Sword of Damocles over Dr. C's Project Doomsday, deciding whether it should keep receiving funding or not. (And he doesn't even do that out of spite, but just because he has superiors to report to, too.) He doesn't seem to see much point in losing his temper over anything, either, unless you try to take a shortcut past proper procedures, THEN he will get super pissy, but only then. Like he himself tells it, he's just "a little cog in the big war machine," and a little cog may be necessary but it also knows its place, and doesn't aspire to be any grander than it is. Well, that's how things go throughout most of the series, at least. The Trench Rats series is meant to be divided into several main chronological storylines (titles tentative)--"Genesis," featuring the formation of the Trench Rats near the start of the war, under Camo and Drake, and the discovery of Project Doomsday; "Reborn," taking place after Trench Rats Headquarters is bombed by the Nazis, Camo and Drake are taken captive, and Black and Gold assume command (this is the main part of the storyline where most of what I've been brainstorming lately takes place); "Reunion," when the war is reaching its end and the Third Reich is starting to collapse, Drake is rescued, Camo returns, and a s**tload of important characters end up killed (this part of the storyline seems to run particularly long in my mind, and was originally intended to be two different parts, "Reunion" and "Endgame," but then the plot seemed too thin divided in half) (also I've been super depressed over some of the deaths, which are of THE CHARACTERS I'VE ONLY JUST GOTTEN TO KNOW SO WELL! 😭 ); and then there's a sort of postscript/epilogue called "Ultima Thule" which takes place shortly after the war, when the few Trench Rats remaining in Germany are helping to clean things up but another, final Nazi plot is uncovered. "Ultima Thule" was very, VERY vague in my head until recently; now I have a much clearer picture of what exactly the plot entails, though there are still big gaps. Tiny spoiler, Mengele plays a part, even though he doesn't appear in it. (He DOES show up in a tiny, unnamed blink-and-you-miss-it role in "Reborn," and in an increasingly larger role in "Reunion," though most of this consists of flashbacks, and I'm not sure he's ever referred to by name, the other characters usually just call him the Angel of Death or simply the Angel. Or else some variant of "that f**king doctor.") I won't go into the details of what Project Ultima Thule is, but considering that the entire rest of the series deals with Project Doomsday, and Mengele is involved, that might give you a bit of an idea. Welp..."Ultima Thule" is where Jäger's character just completely goes off the rails. He's lucky to survive the slow-motion bloodbath that's "Reunion," though he just kind of disappears somewhere along the way, likely just one of those SS guys who fled and were never punished. Right around the same time, many documents from Project Doomsday also vanish. Well guess who took 'em. That's right, Jäger stole a lot of Project Doomsday's documentation and made off with it in the hopes of it still being put to good use by the surviving Nazis and especially the surviving Nazi doctors. He escapes to the Alpine Redoubt (I stumbled across this on Wikipedia going down a Nazi rabbit hole one night and hot diggity damn but it fits my "Ultima Thule" plotline PERFECTLY! 😃 --and yeah, I know it's not real, Goebbels invented it or something like that (Goebbels, you lying liar), but hey, I'm taking it and running with it!) in an effort to jumpstart Project Ultima Thule, which partly builds off of the thwarted Project Doomsday. (Jäger's underling, Himmel, was the one to muddle that up, ironically.) Aaaaannnnnd...he kind of loses it in the process. Not in that he goes crazy, but he takes part in the experiment and it kind of goes to his head. Suddenly the little cog imagines himself to be a pretty damn big cog and the entire thing is just bonkers because who would've expected all this from mousy unambitious little bureaucrat Jäger. That's about all I can say about that right now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The more I've been developing these characters, the more I've tried to put myself in this particular really weird mindset; this is fiction and melodramatic so of course it's not true to reality (a sympathetic SS guy like Himmel, for example, is extremely unlikely), but I've tried to build off of grains of truth here and there. SS guys were expected to father a bunch of nice little Aryan offspring for the Fatherland (come on now, good Aryans, have a slew of little blond babies!--no that's not enough, hop to, have another one) and since Jäger considers himself a good little by-the-book Nazi, he fits the bill, and has a plump blond wife and six or seven lookalike kids. (Fun little additional detail: The more I read about these uber-Nazis who believed in the concept of the family unit with the husband and wife and big brood of kids and anything more or less was deviant, the more such Nazis I discover took mistresses despite this. Himmler I think, for example, got mad at some other Nazi guy for getting a divorce when HIMMLER WAS FREAKING HAVING AN AFFAIR. Cripes what hypocrites! But anyway, I tried turning this on its head a little by having Jäger's wife always fretting that he's taken a younger, prettier mistress when in fact he's done no such thing (when would he have the time?) and he always has to reassure her. (There's supposed to be a scene where a female Nazi character bends over to retrieve something in full view of Ratdog (really promiscuous), Himmel (mourning widower), Dr. C (doesn't even realize women exist), and Jäger (faithful hubby); only Ratdog checks her out, then says to the others, "What, are you all castrated?") Master Sgt. Schulte is another SS character who likes having lots of kids, though he's not married; he ribs his superior, Lt. Hesse, for not having any kids, the same way Jäger ribs Himmel for not getting remarried and having a bunch more kids. Because that's just what SS men are supposed to do. Anyway, that's what I know of Jäger so far, details may possibly change. (Some important details of "Ultima Thule" have already changed since I typed up a rough summary...ugh.) And now I find myself in the weird position of needing to figure out how to draw a character portrait of Dr. Mengele. 😐 [Ludolf Jäger 2022 [Friday, March 11, 2022, 2:12:32 AM]] 8/28/24: Rough sketch for a clothing style, is supposed to be more "modern" but lacking a definition of what is modern, I've gone with circa-WWI. Bet you cannot guess which of my characters this is supposed to be; in one scene he mentions his life flashing before his eyes and says something like, "I was a beautiful little boy. My parents dressed me like a girl...granted, that was the style of the time," so he should be grateful I'm going to try to draw him a bit older than that. Bet you still can't guess who it is, and I can't recall if I've shared that story anywhere in my blog, so, let's see if I can do a finished drawing. EDIT: And there it is! It's the budding little fanatic himself. Hard to believe this kid turns into a main bad guy and ends up getting his entire family killed, huh. [Rough Jäger Sketch 2024 [Wednesday, August 28, 2024, 5:25:34 PM]] 8/29/24: r/SketchDaily theme, "Fashion History Week: Recent History." Young Ludolf Jäger, circa WWI. He wears a German boy's sailor suit. Rough concept sketch. [Ludolf Jäger Boyhood Portrait [Thursday, August 29, 2024, 12:00:13 AM]] 11/25/24: Rough concept sketch I didn't intend to save but SIIIIIGH. An idea I have ("Papa's Little Princess") but perhaps not the skill to pull it off yet. [Papa's Little Princess Rough Sketch [Monday, November 25, 2024, 8:43:38 PM]] |
