MJ Dev

Design Notes; The Seven Deadly Sins

Greed points at everything they want and grasps anything they can. Their true form is unseen. Their own hand partially blinds them. Different eyes puncture their crown, stolen from others. They float, detached from all. Their stick is sharpened at both ends

It is the first and oldest design, dating back to 2023

The stick sharpened at both ends is a reference to Lord of the Flies (in the book, one end of the stick goes into the earth while the other holds a severed head) I wanted it to symbolize violence

Sloth exists in a wrapped cloth that provides comfort but muffles all sensations. Sloth doesnt see, speak nor hear. The cloth overwhelms them. They are bound by a rope whose edge reaches inside their confinement, giving them the ability to free themselves if so desired.

I made an extra effort to put the rope within Sloth's control, to avoid associating inertion from mental illness to laziness

I wrapped my Blajah plushie with a bed sheet and used my robe's belt as rope to get a picture reference for the upper body. Despite eerie origins, my designs come into paper with a lot of silly methods.

Pride exists inside a golden, hollow statue. Their gaze is set upon a cracked book of pages set in stone. Their laurel crown is sharpened to the point of horns. Pride can be set free if they break the outer shell that binds them with the gavel they use to condemn others.

The pose and clothing is a reference to the painting The School of Athens, by Raphael.

Being mettalic, the book only reflects back themselves. Even if you interpret it as stone, it would still work since the pages remain static

I like to imagine the rotten legs dragging their heavy statue shell around. Ever since I was little I have a strange fear of statues moving

Gluttony is a stomach, living and consuming themselves within their confinment. They’re not represented by an underweight or overweight person; it had to be something everyone has. Their scale is purposefully unspecified; because everyones is different.

The design resembles the Horseman of Famine because gluttony and famine are connected; the excessive hoarding by some people causes famine to others. They're like two different plates on a scale

While the basic representation is just fat, I never considered drawing an underweight person to counter it and appear subversive. When talking to a friend recovering from an eating disorder they mentioned how cheap and uncomfortable it is when people use extreme thinness just for the sake of horror and I have to agree. I always avoid drawing real bodies for horror

Lust is the only one who tries to disguise itself with a human appearance, tho it has too many hands. One hand to beckon, one to threaten, and one to silence you. It kneels because not all of its victims are adults. It lives undercover and invites you in as well

Many asked about the fourth hand: it's the one you only notice afterwards and are left wondering what it means, whether it's an innocent gesture or not. How it made you feel.

It has 2 other variation designs. While what I made before is beautiful, it is not unsettling enough. It has the artstlye of an angel rather than something human and dangerous

I settled on the design after a passage in the book Second-Hand Time, by Svetlana Alexievitch. It was a passage about a teen abused by a military squad, killed when she got pregnant, and mocked over how underveloped her body was. Because of that my original idea was to have Lust wearing military boots, but that would restrict the concept too much. I thought that drawing would make that passage less haunting to me, but to no avail.

Envy is a slowly burning and constricted heart. It covers its identity with a mirror; the more it seeks to resemble the reflection of others the less it will resemble itself. But even the reflection is broken, inaccurate, and unsatisfactory.

Many have said the concept looks like a chrysalis or a flower bud, unable to flourish. I like when people interpret my drawings, they often find beautiful meanings that escaped me

I pondered whether to paint the mirror in front of them black, to symbolize phone screens, but decided against it because it would blend into the background

Least popular design but one where people have told me ''I cant stop thinking about it'' the most, which made me cherish it a lot

Wrath is not a beast acting ravenous, but a human thing slowly crawling towards you. All of their actions are justified by the halo they claim to be righteous. The closer they get, the more they shed their humane appearance

It was a challenge to make wrath differ from someone being rightfully angry. It applies to all designs; how to portray dangerous excess to very common and not entirely wrong emotions.

Wrath has no legs. Nothing to stand on

''Little by little, it turned into that wild fury in which the eyes camouflage with a black veil, the fists contract with a tremedous force and your very teeth find the enemy'' Roughly translated quote by Nikolai Gumilev that I kept in mind while designing it. Amazing writer

Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”

Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.

When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy. Unserious, even.

There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.

What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.

This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.

There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.

Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.

When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.