Azumanga Daioh is an anime I watched a lot with my friends when I was in school. In 2020 I had a moment where I rewatched some of it, and found myself really into Yomi. I sketched a bunch of stuff with her at the time, including a couple pics with Tomo, but only one sketch from that session ended up being finished. I considered dusting off one of the ones with Tomo for this Ask, but decided to put together something new instead. I’d still kind of like to go back to those 2020 sketches sometime, and working on this Ask might be the thing that motivates me to do that (but no promises).
It’s true that I usually draw Goku in his base form, but I had a feeling this Ask was looking for a specific transformation I’d mentioned wanting to use for bottoming in the past. I haven’t talked about it much, but a third comic I never started alongside Special Training and Space Emperor Slut was focused on Super Saiya-jin God Goku teaming up with Whis to bottom to Beerus, so I used that for inspiration in handling this Ask.
There’s quite a few “gremlin” type characters in the Studio, I think. Knowing this Subscriber’s tastes I’m also pretty sure who they had in mind, but when I was thinking about Nimona I just had this itch to see her with Denji. I think, beyond them both being definitively gremlin-pilled, Nimona would empathize with Denji’s story and maybe even want to nurture him a little. I have this clear image in my mind of how she’d see him, and I’m trying to allude to a bit of how I read their dynamic here with this answer.
Anzu got quite a few Asks submitted after her debut, which I was happy to see. I would’ve liked to do more of them this month, but the timing didn’t work out well for it. I did want to do at least one, though, and picked this one out of a few that I liked because I thought the “gamer girl” dynamic could be played in a cute way. I liked this idea of Rebecca taking the Studio approach to a question like this, while Anzu’s just focusing on her gaming. If I can, I want to do a lot more with Anzu in the coming months, so hopefully we’ll be seeing more of her down the road.