These are Vilimaini and Aisake, two characters I created for my earlier artwork “Dueling the Demon of the Deep” in which they fight the white sperm whale Moby Dick. Vilimaini is the niece of her community’s “big man” on a Melanesian island near Vanuatu, and Aisake is a tame saltwater crocodile she has raised up from the egg.
Melanesians, by the way, are a group of people who don’t seem to get that much love in fictional media. Even the Polynesians, who are later migrants to Oceania from Taiwan by way of Southeast Asia, get more media attention than the Melanesian peoples for some reason. I think that’s quite a shame, and I suspect there’s a racist reason for that disparity since Melanesians have retained darker skin and more tightly coiled hair than Polynesians (hence why they’ve historically been racialized as “Black” despite being more closely related at the genetic level to Asian than African peoples).