:CE: Snowy Archipelagans

Edit: Okay, I won My life's ambition is fulfillled~

This is my entry for the Around the World National Costumescontest run by Mowwiie, TigerBites and Opirou. Our task was to design a national costume for our OP OCs’ home islands, so I decided that since I’ve already shown a bit about the Carolingen outfits, I’d introduce Snowy Archipelago – AKA Loki’s home island(s).

Be warned, the information below may read a bit like a small novel Over the course of drawing this, I’ve thought up a crapload of stuff about Snowy Archipelago…

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♦ Snowy Archipelago ♦

Capital City: Quenby (Goose Island)
Location: New World
Island Class: Winter Island(s) – high islands

Snowy Archipelago was heavily based on northern Canada, Russia and Alaska for the most part, although some Scandinavian influences (the names, for example) have crept in there. The costumes shown here weren’t really based off anything in particular, just my imagination – but they do draw some influence from traditional Aleut garments: www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~aka… i39.tinypic.com/1620e83.jpg www.pbs.org/harriman/images/lo…

Basically, Snowy Archipelago is a winter island (duh), and it’s one hell of a winter island. Snow coats the ground year-round except for a patch of about six weeks in high summer, and the average annual temperature is about -2°C (dunno what that translates to in Fahrenheit). So people dress up VERY warmly, in wool and fur-lined garments. There’s an outside jacket (modelled very charmingly by Balder) and an inside jacket (modelled in a sleeveless summer version by Idonea), and pretty much everyone wears one of these all the time. The outside clothes tend to be plain and fairly hard-wearing (the jackets are usually soft leather or skin, often with a knitted lining to the hood), because despite the weather, life in Snowy Archipelago is often very outdoorsy. The inside clothes are much more detailed and prettier, but still usually in shades of brown, yellow or green. Blue and purple are rare – they’re symbols of wealth.

Men usually wear shorter jackets, pants and boots. Women wear long skirts and longer jackets, often with slippers – with two exceptions. Unmarried women working as trappers, miners or fishers often adopt male garments, and the witches (scroll down for an explanation) wear whatever the hell they feel like. Most witches stick with the feminine styles; Romi here is an exception to the rule. Men and women alike grow their hair long, and men very often have full beards. (Balder’s has grown since I last drew him, funnily enough.)

• Geography •

Snowy Archipelago is an island chain of around 1600 mountainous and mostly very small islands in the New World near the northern Calm Belt. Though the archipelago covers a huge area, the total land mass is quite small as a result. Four islands (Goose, Bear, Barrier and Rabbit Islands) make up 83% of the total land mass – of these, Goose Island is the biggest and by far the most populated. The islands are snowbound almost year-round, and in midwinter the shallow seas around the central islands begin to freeze over in a miniature ice cap. Most of the land is covered in pine or taiga forest, though much of Goose and Bear Islands have been cleared for livestock.

Due to its unforgiving climate and out-of-the-way location, few people visit the Archipelago. Those that do are generally traders dealing in iron ore, precious metals, timber and furs. Snowy Archipelago (Bear and Barrier Islands in particular) have huge deposits of very high-quality iron, which makes the archipelago a hotspot for the crafting of fine swords and other bladed weapons. Timber is also felled on many of the smaller islands and exported for construction and shipbuilding.

• Population •

Snowy Archipelago is home to around 10,000 people, most of whom live on the prime island, Goose Island. The capital, Quenby, is a fairly small town of only 5000 people – no other settlement in the archipelago has any more than 1000 inhabitants. Most of the Archipelago’s inhabitants are natives, related to the isolated tribes of the Red Line. Red, blonde or pale brown hair is the norm – it is rare to see anyone with dark hair at all. The native skin tone is a pale tan, and eye colours tend to be lighter also – blue, green, grey and hazel most often. Most of the native population also have very slanted eyes (see Idonea), a trait which is beginning to spread to the nearby islands of the New World and further afield, so is no longer a sure indication of a person having any connection to the Archipelago at all.

Another peculiar trait of ethnic Archipelagans is a tendency among the men for a berserker condition. When severely pissed off, men carrying this trait lose control of themselves, and their conscious minds enter a dormant state while a second layer of their consciousness takes over, giving them a huge boost in physical strength and endurance, numbing their pain receptors, and inducing them to go on a destructive, murderous rampage until their bodies are exhausted and can no longer take the stresses. This trait often evidences in childhood as uncontrollable rages lasting for up to a day; when it is recognised, the child is sent to the closest adult family member or relative with the trait, to learn how to control themselves. Those that don’t learn often end up exiled or killed themselves, because those that don’t learn are at huge risk of snapping and killing those close to them.

N.B: For the crack!kids Marcel and Tharaman, both of whom inherited the trait, this is partly why they grew up based in Snowy Archipelago rather than with the Whitebeard Pirates… They learnt control from granddaddy Balder.

The basic unit is an extended family, all living under one roof. When women marry, they join their husband’s extended family, but often retain strong links to their own parents and siblings. Community is an important value because of the harshness of the environment – if people don’t work together, everyone pays the price. Villages tend to comprise of a dozen or so of these extended family groups, one family specialising in each aspect of life (eg. livestock farming, horticulture, smithing).

The witches of the Archipelago fill a role as shamans, doctors and nurses rolled into one. Girls with particularly inquiring, self-contained or just plain wild natures are picked out as apprentices by elder witches, who then train the girls until they know most of what there is to being a witch (because some stuff you really just have to learn on the job). The girls then either spend their time travelling around the Archipelago, or settling down in a place they feel at home and practicing their trade from there. They don’t actually do any real magic – the job requires more diagnostics, psychology, apothecary stuff and nursing sick people and animals than anything else. They fill a slight religious purpose, as they’re the ones which make the charms and prayers which people in the Archipelago use for luck. Other than that, though, they’re mostly just normal people. They are highly respected by the populace.

Archipelagans don’t have much of a religion. They believe that certain things bring luck – blue abalone, for example – and written words have a sort of truth to them, or a power of prophecy, depending on who you ask. Most people have a birth prophecy, written by the witch that helped deliver them, which they keep among their treasures, and often written on a strip of paper and tucked into a locket. They might make copies of this prophecy (written in an archaic form of the native Archipelagan language) on things that they own, such as written on a plank of wood above the entrance to their home or on the back of a doll’s dress. It’s quite often substituted for a form of identity.

• History •

-tbc, ‘cause I can’t be bothered right now-

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♦ Snowy Archipelago ♦

• Balder Torquil
Age: 49
Home Island: Goose Island, Snowy Archipelago, New World
Status: Swordsmith, civilian
Loki’s daddy. Good-natured, optimistic and creative. Knows how to read and write, and is quite proud of that fact because his parents and siblings can’t (none of that side of the family can; they were poor farm workers. Worked his way up from a rural smith’s apprentice to one of the richest and most skilled and respected smiths in Quenby. When he was studying under a swordsmith on Bear island, he met the man’s great-niece, Idonea, and fell head over heels in love with her. He waited until he had his Mastery to marry her, and then they moved to Quenby and set up shop catering to foreign customers (mostly pirates, but shh, don’t tell the Marines). Is currently training his eighteen-year-old son, Frigg, to succeed him as the Master smith of the family.

•Idonea Svartsengi
Age: 42
Home Island: Bear Island, Snowy Archipelago, New World
Status: Balder’s wife, civilian
Loki’s mama. Cool, calm and collected, quite practical as well. Loves cats, and keeps three-and-their-kittens. Met Balder when she was fifteen, fell madly in love with him, but he wouldn’t marry her until he had his smith’s Mastery, so she had to wait three years. Her first-born, a daughter she named Flos, went missing as a teenager, and was assumed dead, although they never found the body… Her second daughter Freyja, born two months after Flos went missing, is training to be a witch under the guidance of Balder’s cousin, a witch prodigy named Romi Matous. Considered very beautiful by Archipelagan standards, but doesn’t have many friends as Quenby high society considers her and Balder to be ‘wild upstarts’.

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-OP in general belongs to Oda
-Idonea, Balder and Snowy Archipelago belong to me, Kemmasandi