Trivia / Sleepless Domain

• Ascended Fan Nickname: The nickname 'Goops' was eventually incorporated into canon as the 'dumb name' Bud gives her.
• Meme Acknowledgment: The alt text for page 16 of Chapter 17 "Confluence" reads "Ah, everyone's favorite meme, the concept of Sleep," in reference to the meme that spawned from Heartful Punch's earlier line, "A good night's sleep is the first step to kicking ass."
• Shrug of God: There are a few topics that Mary Cagle has deliberately avoided making statements on:
  • Whether Tessa's gold pupils are purely cosmetic like Sally's, or represent a power transfer or similar.
  • How magical nonbinary people work. In this case, Mary as a cis woman feels unqualified to imply that something is the way it works for all nonbinary people, so she deliberately leaves it up to interpretation. The only thing stated about magical girls and gender is that the group who are eligible to become magical girls is the group to whom the label "girl" applies.
  • The heights of her characters, which she labels "the forbidden maths." She's gone so far as to claim that characters' heights change when sharing the panel with a tall person to deter the fanbase.
  • The handedness of her characters. When asked, she simply responded:
    Cube: no
• What Could Have Been:
  • The comic was originally called Umbra Rising.
  • Concept art on both the Tumblr and the printed version of Volume 1 showed Alchemical Aether's outfit incorporated all the other colors of Team Alchemical initially, and her hair was a much paler shade of pink (possibly intended to be white hair) with sections colored the other girls' colors.
  • Alchemical Earth was initially going to have poofy shorts instead of a skirt, to reflect Gwen's more tomboyish nature, but Mary decided it would have set a bad precedent to have the heavier girl be the only one without a skirt.
  • The comic was initially pitched as 'Survivor but for magical girls' and early prototypes of Kokoro and Undine were members of a four person team, with a girl in purple and a girl in yellow rounding out the team.
  • Cube briefly considered the alchemical symbol for table salt (🜔) for Tessa's new sigil after Goops merged with her, before eventually settling on the platinum seen in chapter 18 of the comic.
• Word of Gay:
  • For Pride Month, 2018, Mary Cagle tweeted artwork of her LGBTQ characters with their relevant Pride flags. Transgender for Zoe, Gay Pride for Team Melty, and Pansexual for Outrageous Lime. Zoe was confirmed not long prior, while Melty Flame and Melty Frost were Sickeningly Sweethearts from moment one. Outrageous Lime, however, has only been seen or mentioned a few times, with only two related to her sexuality. The first was surprise that she had a boyfriend ("As in a boy boy?") and, on first seeing Heartful Punch and Undine together, remarking "So that was your type", prompting HP to hastily try and change the subject while Lime brushes it off because "she has a guy now".
  • The card collecting minigame on the official Discord server includes◊ all of the above plus Bud and a variation of her Author Avatar as asexual, and Heartful Punch as exclusively gay. The latter is also confirmed in actual words.
  • 2021's International Asexuality day featured another art piece of Bud with asexual flag theme.
• Word of God: Has its own page.

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