Drawn on: 4-28-10 | At some point it dawned on me that I had no "cute" couples. I was looking at the "cute kiss meme" on DA and realized that I couldn't really see any of my couples doing that. The guy in pretty much every pairing of mine, and sometimes the girl too, is too shy, stoic, and/or serious. Dante and Tavi? They'd be like that, but no one would ever see it. Konrad and Caia? Pfft, yeah, right. Laik and... can't even say because it's a spoiler? Not happening. Aries and any one of the guys who likes her? Also not happening. Horatio and Jamie? Horatio would rather die. The only couple of mine I could really see doing the cute kiss meme was Sol and Aiden, and since that's shounen-ai, I kind of wanted to avoid working on something I could never show most of the people who watch my work. (They would have my head on a pike if they knew I had a shounen-ai couple.) But it would work with Sol and Aiden because of Sol's personality...So, in the interest of making a cute couple, I decided to invent a couple of characters, and framed Kade's personality off Sol's. I needed a male love interest who was more outgoing, theatrical, and openly affectionate. To balance Kade, I made Ran, the more hard-to-get type. These are my designs, minus the ones that really turned out poorly. And yes, the one on the bottom right, which I drew just because I figured that if I was designing a couple I really ought to draw them together at least once, seems to be everyone's favorite.