Sometimes a week is a long time. To get ready for ep18 (broadcast in about 14 hours), I just watched ep17 again and was completely bowled over again. What an episode. What a show. What next?
Yes, bring back Erif. I liked her/him, and would like to see more of her as a him, partly to see how the staff would do that.
I'm not sure if we've seen these before or not, but here are some more model drawings by AS (Nishida Asako, the character designer) from the image board. From the dates, it looks as if all the drawings of people and simouns are from late January. So perhaps the animators got to work starting two months ahead of time to have the animation ready by April?
Alti. I believe the notes near the top left say she is cold (unemotional) and "cool," but that the other side of that is that she is too pure, and a bit eccentric. The balloon near the right says: "Kaimu is mine." And lower down is "eyes like Kaimu's":
Aaeru. I can't read all the notes on these images, but you can see a lot of annotated details about the eyes at the bottom middle of the third one:
And having seen these, I'm wondering who actually did the simoun drawings I posted earlier. Everything has what I think are AS's initials on it, but that might just be approving the models. I think the story is that the mecha designer, Jin Seob Song, was working in a studio in Korea. The director had some work there, and Song came up and showed him drawings of simoun. The director was looking for something totally new and loved them. But maybe some of the details were added by AS? To my untutored eye, the simoun and the characters could have been drawn by the same person.