Hero Spotlight: Freya
A behind the scenes look at the fearless Freya with CityStates hero concept artist Ein_Art
Welcome to our very first entry into the hero spotlight series where we will be giving fans the chance to discover more about their favourite heroes in CityStates, and what better way to start than go straight to the source where heroes are born with non other than Ein_Art herself!
I asked Ein_Art a few of the burning questions I had about Freya, but going forward we would love to open this up to you guys in the community (more on this later).
To give you a better idea of who Ein_Art is, we decided to start with an origin story question.
How did you start working with CityStates?
It all started when my boyfriend was doing NFT research, he was on Reddit and came across the CityStates: Medieval profile. He got intrigued and looked a little further into the project, that’s when he met Dirk, they got to talking and soon a close friendship was born. A couple of months later, after having gotten to know each other very well, he got to see my art and we joked about him commissioning me to draw Magnus’s wife, not long after, I made the first concepts of Freya and instantly we were a team. I’ve been making the hero concept art and 2D rendering for CityStates Media since then!
How did you come up with the concept of Freya, did any historical figures inspire her design?
When I first started the concept of Freya, I had recently finished watching “Vikings”, I really liked the way one of the main characters, Lagertha looked, along with the style of Astrid from “How to Train your Dragon”. You could say Freya is the forbidden child of Lagertha and Astrid.
Did you have any ideas when designing Freya that you wanted to do but didn’t make it into the final version?
At the beginning she was going to have straight long heavy black hair but when I was testing colors we thought blonde fit her better, she was also going to be a dual sword wielder but scrapped that idea for a long sword.
We have seen that you often take a lot of community feedback during your design process (which we love) did the community offer any useful advice or ideas for Freya?
Yes! The knees, hahaha! When I first made Freya, people commented on how soft her knee caps looked, so I then fleshed those out for her lol! Back then the community was way smaller and since Freya was the first hero there wasn’t too much feedback, the community got way more invested in pitching in ideas with later heroes.
We often see it joked about that Freya is the wife of Magnus, we have even seen some pretty fun designs where she’s equipped with his missing leg, is this cannon at all or speculation?
To this day it’s still a running joke, like I mentioned when we first started talking about hero concepts we joked around making Magnus’s wife and that’s when Freya was born, I consider this is one of those things we should let the community decide. A player driven lore would be an interesting thing to see.
What’s the story (if any) behind Freya’s tattoos/markings?
They’re a combination of runes and markings based on Nordic history and mythology.
A HUGE thanks to Ein_Art for taking the time out of her schedule to answer these and we hope you all enjoyed learning a little bit more about the inspiration behind Freya (I know I did). If there’s any questions you think I missed, or any you might have for future spotlights, feel free to post a comment and let me know, these will be considered for future articles.
