Every drifting series has the same biography. The character was never written down. She lived in the creator’s head and in a dozen half-remembered prompts, and each new session re-described her slightly differently — hair a shade off, face a season younger, the signature detail quietly dropped. Audiences cannot name what changed, but they can see that something did, and a link page built on recognition cannot afford that.
The spec sheet, field by field
A working spec sheet is short enough to paste and complete enough to cast from. Five fields carry it: age, stated as a number and always 25 or over; hair, as colour, length and one default arrangement; build, in two or three words at most; face marks, one or two durable identifiers — pale grey eyes, a fine scar through one eyebrow; and a signature, the item or detail that survives a tight crop. Wardrobe, setting, light and pose are deliberately absent: those are scene lines, and scene lines are supposed to change.
Two drafting rules keep the sheet honest. Phrase every field as something a camera could verify, not as praise — “dark hair drawn into a low tight bun” survives generation, while “stunning hair” is an opinion each render interprets afresh. And keep the sheet in a file. The moment a spec lives only in a chat history or a memory, it has started to drift already.
The reference frame
The sheet becomes enforceable when one generated frame is approved as the reference: the single image against which batches are compared. Approving it is a decision, not a discovery — generate candidates at the standard 6-credit rate until one matches the character you specified, then stop and record which version of the sheet produced it. From that day, quality control is a comparison instead of a vibe: new frames are laid beside the reference and read for face, hair arrangement, grade and framing.
Versioning, because characters evolve
A deliberate change — a haircut arc, a new signature — is not drift; it is a revision. Save the sheet as version 2, date it, generate a new reference, and keep version 1 on file so earlier sets remain reproducible and explicable. Drift is change without a record. A versioned spec turns the same change into production history.