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Description
So this has been a long time coming, and I wanted to draw something as a proper send-off, but I haven't had much energy to do something truly beautiful. So! We get a sketch. Heh. It does reflect the state of affairs.

I'm sure a lot of you (who still watch me after all these years) have probably seen this coming a long ways off - you can only keep projects on hiatus for so long before they die. And it's not quite as simple as that, but in a nutshell...

NuzRooke Sun, and Dragontry, will not be continuing.

It's a decision I've put a LOT of thought into, and was hesitant to make because I hate absolutes, but I think I need to be honest with myself and especially with all of you! I owe you that much. <3

So the easier one to explain - NuzRooke Sun. It's an easy answer - it was a very ambitious project, and everyone who was on the NuzRooke Sun team put in AMAZING work. But life got in the way, I couldn't produce the base sketches fast enough... collaborators who joined in high school or college graduated and had their time availabilities change, or just life happened and folks couldn't contribute any longer... while the project was designed to be slow and easy-going from the get-go, as a leader I underestimated how that would stagnate things, and the project just ground to a halt.
I still love the story and might share it in some other form - either by releasing the original script, or writing up a story summation... at the very least, you'll get a lot of the points of the story that was planned because I will be posting all of the concept art. There was a LOT of behind the scenes art made to plan out future characters and such, and I'll be posting all of it to deviantart. (This is stuff I made back in 2017. It's been a long time coming lol.)
The Rooke's Army team and I decided to end the project last year, and I just haven't had the spoons to let y'all know until now. I hope anyone still interested in NuzRooke Sun enjoys the art for it at least, and I apologize for folks who were hoping to see more. I know, I hate to see a webcomic I like never get finished, but the lives of artists come before the life of a project.

Now for the harder one to explain...Dragontry. Honestly this one kills me, just a little, but I knew it had to be done. It's...a bit more complicated than just "folks got busy with other things".

...Dragontry was a really important story to me. I first wrote out the outline in 2015, and it was a saving story for me as I went through some of the worst experiences of my life. I wanted to write it in some form, because I truly believed that it was a story with a purpose, and that it would help other people the same way it helped me. The very bones of the story are founded in beliefs that I cherished at the time of its inception, and it was those ideas that comforted me at that time in my life.
The thing is...I've grown since then. I've changed. A lot of things I believed were absolute and immutable, I've come to learn are nuanced and complicated. A lot of things I believed were the right ways to handle trauma and grief, I now believe are not the universal cure-alls that I once thought. They absolutely can help some people, but not all, and things that helped the person I was then...don't really help the person I am now.

And so it's tricky! The major theme of Dragontry is forgiveness - and I honestly knew very little about forgiveness when I was younger. I know more now, enough to know that the way I was handling those themes in Dragontry don't align with what I would write now. Back then I thought I could share the secret of the universe with the world, heh. Now I know how much I don't know. Which makes it very difficult telling a story that encapsulates what I thought I knew. My beliefs at the time are so inextricably tied to the themes of Dragontry, that I've spent literal years trying to tease them apart and reforge the story into something that would satisfy me - without success.
Not to mention a lot of the...ahem...problematic elements...that I didn't realize were problematic at the time. It's a story about a racial minority, and I am not someone who can write that honestly. I'd need to put together a team of people from similar cultural backgrounds and experiences as Rozali and the Dragontrians, and completely reshape the story to be appropriate. That's the problem when you take something like culture or identity, and use it as a tool to get your story's theme across. It tends to boil down to insensitive representation. "The genocide of this people and the destruction of their culture, is a metaphor for any type of loss! So the way the main character deals with it is the same way you'd deal with it if you lost say a relationship, or a loved one, or a puppy."
...Yeah, not the best. It can trivialize important and very real issues, and I'm not wise enough yet to create something that wouldn't. Not with Dragontry, anyhow.

At the end of the day, the purpose of writing Dragontry was to find an answer to one of life's very complicated questions - how to heal, and what to do after. And that's something I now realize is much, much bigger than me. It's also something that I recognize...I don't know the answer to. And without that, the very foundation of Dragontry as a story crumbles. So after chewing on that bone for the many years since I first put Dragontry on hiatus... I've come to the conclusion that I can't finish Dragontry as originally written. I can't finish the comic, without redoing what I have.

Now the question of how to heal is still a very good one, and I still love my furry dragons and Farol and Rozali and Ted. It's still a story that's near and dear to my heart. Which means that I hope to one day revisit the story, and completely change it to reflect the answers that I DO find. Or probably more likely, to honestly embrace the ambiguity of that question, sit in that space and that emotion, and reach out to the audience to say "I can see how you're hurting, and I'll sit with you through it." I might rework the story to become a healing one for new experiences I go through, or I might let it rest so that I can tell even better stories. I doubt I'll ever make it as a comic, since my comic-making-engine has long burnt out, but I might write it as a novel, or write it as a movie script, or create a pitch bible to turn it into an animated series... Lotta options!

NuzRooke Sun and Dragontry were both a BIG part of my early adulthood, and I will always love them for that. They'll always be a part of me. And I'll always be grateful to all of you, for enjoying them with me as long as we did. I probably won't have any BIG projects like that after this - at least, not for a long while. I'm happy doing small projects with easier goalposts nowadays; animating little Warrior Cat videos, doing little doodles and character designs, some illustrations here and there. I hope to post some stuff from them here (and you can find ALL my new animations on my Youtube, same channel name as here.) You can also see more of my doodles on instagram @sarahsellersrooke. Beyond that, I hope the next BIG project I have will be an ACTUAL tv show, or movie. I have some script projects I'm working on, some pitch bibles I want to make...it's highly likely that the next longterm project I make will be a professional one, and I'll be the first to let y'all know after any NDA is done.

I recognize that a lot of you won't have much reason to stick around following me, now that there's no comics going on. But I don't mind. I'll still post art that makes me happy. I wish you well on all your endeavors, and thanks for being with me on this ride as long as it lasted. It's been an absolute blast. <3

Love,
Sarah "Rooke"

Description
So this has been a long time coming, and I wanted to draw something as a proper send-off, but I haven't had much energy to do something truly beautiful. So! We get a sketch. Heh. It does reflect the state of affairs.

I'm sure a lot of you (who still watch me after all these years) have probably seen this coming a long ways off - you can only keep projects on hiatus for so long before they die. And it's not quite as simple as that, but in a nutshell...

NuzRooke Sun, and Dragontry, will not be continuing.

It's a decision I've put a LOT of thought into, and was hesitant to make because I hate absolutes, but I think I need to be honest with myself and especially with all of you! I owe you that much. <3

So the easier one to explain - NuzRooke Sun. It's an easy answer - it was a very ambitious project, and everyone who was on the NuzRooke Sun team put in AMAZING work. But life got in the way, I couldn't produce the base sketches fast enough... collaborators who joined in high school or college graduated and had their time availabilities change, or just life happened and folks couldn't contribute any longer... while the project was designed to be slow and easy-going from the get-go, as a leader I underestimated how that would stagnate things, and the project just ground to a halt.
I still love the story and might share it in some other form - either by releasing the original script, or writing up a story summation... at the very least, you'll get a lot of the points of the story that was planned because I will be posting all of the concept art. There was a LOT of behind the scenes art made to plan out future characters and such, and I'll be posting all of it to deviantart. (This is stuff I made back in 2017. It's been a long time coming lol.)
The Rooke's Army team and I decided to end the project last year, and I just haven't had the spoons to let y'all know until now. I hope anyone still interested in NuzRooke Sun enjoys the art for it at least, and I apologize for folks who were hoping to see more. I know, I hate to see a webcomic I like never get finished, but the lives of artists come before the life of a project.

Now for the harder one to explain...Dragontry. Honestly this one kills me, just a little, but I knew it had to be done. It's...a bit more complicated than just "folks got busy with other things".

...Dragontry was a really important story to me. I first wrote out the outline in 2015, and it was a saving story for me as I went through some of the worst experiences of my life. I wanted to write it in some form, because I truly believed that it was a story with a purpose, and that it would help other people the same way it helped me. The very bones of the story are founded in beliefs that I cherished at the time of its inception, and it was those ideas that comforted me at that time in my life.
The thing is...I've grown since then. I've changed. A lot of things I believed were absolute and immutable, I've come to learn are nuanced and complicated. A lot of things I believed were the right ways to handle trauma and grief, I now believe are not the universal cure-alls that I once thought. They absolutely can help some people, but not all, and things that helped the person I was then...don't really help the person I am now.

And so it's tricky! The major theme of Dragontry is forgiveness - and I honestly knew very little about forgiveness when I was younger. I know more now, enough to know that the way I was handling those themes in Dragontry don't align with what I would write now. Back then I thought I could share the secret of the universe with the world, heh. Now I know how much I don't know. Which makes it very difficult telling a story that encapsulates what I thought I knew. My beliefs at the time are so inextricably tied to the themes of Dragontry, that I've spent literal years trying to tease them apart and reforge the story into something that would satisfy me - without success.
Not to mention a lot of the...ahem...problematic elements...that I didn't realize were problematic at the time. It's a story about a racial minority, and I am not someone who can write that honestly. I'd need to put together a team of people from similar cultural backgrounds and experiences as Rozali and the Dragontrians, and completely reshape the story to be appropriate. That's the problem when you take something like culture or identity, and use it as a tool to get your story's theme across. It tends to boil down to insensitive representation. "The genocide of this people and the destruction of their culture, is a metaphor for any type of loss! So the way the main character deals with it is the same way you'd deal with it if you lost say a relationship, or a loved one, or a puppy."
...Yeah, not the best. It can trivialize important and very real issues, and I'm not wise enough yet to create something that wouldn't. Not with Dragontry, anyhow.

At the end of the day, the purpose of writing Dragontry was to find an answer to one of life's very complicated questions - how to heal, and what to do after. And that's something I now realize is much, much bigger than me. It's also something that I recognize...I don't know the answer to. And without that, the very foundation of Dragontry as a story crumbles. So after chewing on that bone for the many years since I first put Dragontry on hiatus... I've come to the conclusion that I can't finish Dragontry as originally written. I can't finish the comic, without redoing what I have.

Now the question of how to heal is still a very good one, and I still love my furry dragons and Farol and Rozali and Ted. It's still a story that's near and dear to my heart. Which means that I hope to one day revisit the story, and completely change it to reflect the answers that I DO find. Or probably more likely, to honestly embrace the ambiguity of that question, sit in that space and that emotion, and reach out to the audience to say "I can see how you're hurting, and I'll sit with you through it." I might rework the story to become a healing one for new experiences I go through, or I might let it rest so that I can tell even better stories. I doubt I'll ever make it as a comic, since my comic-making-engine has long burnt out, but I might write it as a novel, or write it as a movie script, or create a pitch bible to turn it into an animated series... Lotta options!

NuzRooke Sun and Dragontry were both a BIG part of my early adulthood, and I will always love them for that. They'll always be a part of me. And I'll always be grateful to all of you, for enjoying them with me as long as we did. I probably won't have any BIG projects like that after this - at least, not for a long while. I'm happy doing small projects with easier goalposts nowadays; animating little Warrior Cat videos, doing little doodles and character designs, some illustrations here and there. I hope to post some stuff from them here (and you can find ALL my new animations on my Youtube, same channel name as here.) You can also see more of my doodles on instagram @sarahsellersrooke. Beyond that, I hope the next BIG project I have will be an ACTUAL tv show, or movie. I have some script projects I'm working on, some pitch bibles I want to make...it's highly likely that the next longterm project I make will be a professional one, and I'll be the first to let y'all know after any NDA is done.

I recognize that a lot of you won't have much reason to stick around following me, now that there's no comics going on. But I don't mind. I'll still post art that makes me happy. I wish you well on all your endeavors, and thanks for being with me on this ride as long as it lasted. It's been an absolute blast. <3

Love,
Sarah "Rooke"