Mel sketches commission //slight nsfw

I want to share something with you that has been in the works for a while now:

On Valentine 2026 there will be a Mel Sub Week and I was commissioned by the wonderful mods to create some promotional art for it.💕

I was given mood boards and pose references for this together with the prompt princess play, lavish girly comfy luxury, slight lacey bondage. I had a blast thinking up outfits for her, I could go back on my full repertoir of remembered lacey boudoir costumes for this and I LOVED IT!

A few of you might know, but I hope most of you are not as online as me, so I would like to explain why this is so important:

Mel is a character from the show Arcane and while I wasn‘t present online for the first season, I was there for the second and subsequent fandom…‘shenigans’…online. To make it short: not only Mel has been subject of indescribable racism and misogynoir online, but so have her fans, who in large part are also black and queer.

Maybe this behaviour was to be expected from online fandom spaces, but, to give you a little selfish insight, I was shocked and I honestly still am and it‘s difficult for me to comprehend the vitriole spewed this way, regularly, just for fun. I have learned a lot about internet etiquette, fandoms, the history of fandoms and black and bipoc people‘s experience online. You might think this is insignificant internet bs and to an and extent, I can see your point, but the way people interact with a story given to them is EVERYTHING. It‘s how religions were made after all, it‘s how stories survive and how archetypes are formed. Its how we learn about human experiences and the lense through which we create our own.

Imagine being subjected to institutionalised racism and bigotry all day and then going online for a bit of reprieve and you see another unfiltered view of the same racism and bigotries enacted on you and characters that look like you or who you identify with. You see a version of yourself distorted into untrue stereotypes, laughingstock, a hurdle to hate and overcome for some other ship and all this behaviour being applauded by the creators of the show.

This is what Mel fans have experienced roughly for the last 4 years and more intensily since season 2 came out a year ago.

Mel has been portrayed by fans as a Mammy (stereotype in media of black women in which they are the care takers of characters around them), the disposable black girlfriend (a very common trope in which the black girl isn‘t the ‚right one‘ for the main character and is discarded of), a strong woman ‚who don‘t need no man‘ (a very common trope in which the black woman is portrayed as strong and too independent for a man and basically doesn‘t get her romantic happy end) and more. While Mel is none of those things.

Its rare to get a black female character (hell, even any female character), that is neither a trope, nor a stereotype or an archetype. Like many other characters in Arcane, Mel is written to be incredibly human, a main character, someone with emotional depth, flaws, wants, needs, a magical girl arch and possibly the protagonist of the following story.

To show our love for Mel we wanted to create a week in which her soft and coquette side is celebrated. Something that is very rare in popular media and even rarer in fandom spaces. And that‘s why this project is very important to me.

Tldr: yes it‘s kink! But it‘s also very important!