These two originally looked exactly the same, and to begin with there was no real distinction between the two. I feel a lot more comfortable calling this one an OC though, because it wasn’t long before I gave this Yoshi his own backstory, personality, and character development. It was still kinda bad, but through him I became a much better roleplayer and storyteller, and the next two iterations of Yoshi were much better overall, to the point I still regard them as good characters today.

The reason he looks like this is because he was initially a villain, but it was later revealed he was under the influence of a sort of physical manifestation of his depression and suicidal thoughts. When he got killed, he came back as a soul, free of this darkness.

This version of Yoshi has three alternate forms: his “dark form”, which we will see in the form of another version of him; his original body, which looks exactly like Scratch!Yoshi's; and a variant of this form partially consumed by his dark form, which will not be drawn here.