Towel Snapper — v0.2

Current draft

The Snapper is older, cocky, and repeatedly bullies neighborhood kids. Towel snapping hurts, and the Snapper knows it hurts — the weapon is not an innocent visual pun. They run around in a swimsuit with no armor because they expect confidence, speed, and the other kid's hesitation to protect them. The approved originating character is a 14-year-old Latino boy, taller than most of the cast, lean and fast, dressed in a loose, thick, opaque white cotton tank top, navy athletic swim shorts, and wet-pavement-safe footwear; the oversized tank stays fully opaque and hangs away from the body even when damp. The Snapper specifically targets the Pool Noodle Paladin, because the Paladin's stiff wetsuit, solemn reactions, and visible irritation make him satisfying to provoke — they were not former friends, and team assignments sometimes force cooperation.

What changed

• Gave the mechanics-first unit a specific originating identity: a 14-year-old Latino boy, established through the approved v4 art-direction ruling.
• Established the moral boundary ("nobody else gets to pick on them") and the anti-glamorization editorial test: every current draft must show the targeted kid's avoidance or distrust, contain no laughter or admiration attached to the bullying, frame the rescue as territorial loyalty rather than redemption, and check that the thrill comes from speed and pressure rather than humiliation.
• Established specific targeting of the Pool Noodle Paladin as a satisfying, provoked rivalry rather than a former friendship.
• Adopted the swimsuit-as-chosen-overconfidence framing: no armor, chosen through overconfidence rather than poverty or oversight.

Why it changed

"Fast towel kid" explains a matchup but not why the neighborhood fears, follows, or reluctantly fields this child. This revision gives the best mechanics-first unit a behaviorally specific identity whose speed, no-armor silhouette, cruelty, and territorial loyalty agree with each other, while identity fields nobody has decided remain explicit unknowns rather than invented filler.

Evidence and playtest marginalia

• docs/art/prompts/towel-snapper-studies-v4.md: five paired high-fidelity/low-poly studies generated 2026-07-25, approved by Anthony for GitHub storage and public Artbook display the same day (see the artifact records). This pack supersedes the tracked v1 direction and two untracked/blocked directions (v2 rash-guard, v3 shirtless — blocked by the image generator's safety gate before any image was produced).
• Inherited mechanical evidence: TUNING.md "Stage 1 Sprint 2 MG2" and "Stage 1 Sprint 2 MG3" (see v0.1); no new mechanical evidence was produced for this revision. Numeric attack rate, soak, range, and speed remain in that tuning evidence, not invented character prose.

Rejected or alternate directions

• A free-spirited improviser reading.
• A secretly gentle caretaker reading.
• A former friendship with the Paladin.
• Using the rescue beat to reveal that the bully was nice all along.
• Using the "We Had Positions" rescue as repayment, apology, or a demand that the targeted kid forgive the Snapper.
• Wet transparency, emphasized body contours, body close-ups, low-angle hero framing, and humiliation/contact close-ups in art direction.

Still unresolved

Featured question: is the Snapper thrilling to field without making their cruelty feel admirable or harmless?

Secondary unknowns:

• whose older sibling the Snapper is;
• what consequence or growth is possible without turning the dossier into a moral lesson;
• whether high-fidelity and low-poly poses can communicate menace without celebrating humiliation;
• whether the existing art studies should remain evidence, be relabeled, or be superseded after the principal-cast audit.