#bygone lore

[obligatory “when talking about the vessels, i’m talking about characters” disclaimer]

if you’re unfamiliar with the main idea, please check out the TMBTE post & the Sleep lore post.

TPWBYT, to me, is a period of uncertainty. a fresh suicide attempt, surgery, Sleep trying to break Vessel and then mold him in His image. confusing. dissociating. there's a reason why no form Sleep takes has a solid body (except for "ii") - everything is hazy, everything floats and dissipates and comes back wrong, unfamiliar. Sleep, during that time, is mostly an ocean, either spread out thin to appear terrifying or, later on, a deep dark menace.

"Vessel"/Vessel mimic

a watery death. while the Sundowning version of Sleep turns upwards towards Heaven, TPWBYT's "Vessel" drips down heavy, trying to drag Vessel deeper and deeper. it moves by floating, flowing from one space to another, but there's a visible heaviness to it still. everything bleeds into each other, everything is indistinguishable in origin; the only parts that have some semblance of definition are the hood and the hands. it's a constant reminder to Vessel: how much of his own blood he has spilled, how many regrets he drags alongside himself.

"ii"/ii mimic

trapped in a bubble, wrapped up in himself. "ii", while the only one possessing a relatively solid body (that of a spotted moray), still floats in the same realm of haziness as the rest. as the real ii is pulled deeper and deeper into trusting Sleep with whatever he's doing with Vessel, fearing potential consequences, "ii" morphs into a timid creature. his head is a bubble, although opaque and impenetrable, and his arms, while elongated and noodly, are wrapped entirely around his body. this, too, is a mockery.

"iii"/iii mimic

i think that works well personally! the lyrical themes of give/take and longing and Wanting from both sides make sense with it. even the "i want to want to live, and so do you" in Fall For Me. Sleep is driven by wanting, and being made from wanting itself, when it gets what it wants it just continues to go further, to the next step of its desires, ever insatiable. it becomes entwined with Vessel because when they meet for the first time, they want the same thing. they're both dying, and still they want to want to live. to be more precise, Sleep wants fuel; its existence relies largely on humans, and it needs someone who feels strongly and passionately (please don’t ask me why it’s dying, i don’t even know and don’t want to look too much into it). Vessel, on the other hand, wants a way to turn around his life that he may or may not have driven into the ground, and he believes that it cannot be fixed by any existing means, which is why he's lost all hope in living anymore. but those two desires perfectly coincide, do they not? they can help each other get what they want. so they try. 

it doesn't work out. it backfires horribly, in fact. i've talked about it before, but i think it's very important to mention regardless. Sleep, being pretty much desire incarnate, may have harbored certain negative feelings of its own towards humanity, but they never would've become anything if it were not for Vessel. Vessel's anger at the world around him, the way he believes he has been wronged by everyone, is palpable, and with Sleep having to draw on Vessel's emotions to survive for the time being, that anger infects it, too. the passive unnamed negativity becomes a strong desire to take revenge. with all of it combined, Sleep's supernatural power and Vessel's uncontrollable rage slowly takes over both of them, and Him is born, a despicable thing. it's all-consuming blind rage taking on a mind of its own, much like how Sleep came to be but so much more unstable and volatile. the revenge on humanity doesn't go further than a single person torn to bits with bare hands and teeth, both too dull to be effective, but that thing is nothing it not fucking determined. it does fall apart immediately after, though, because it was barely together as is and killing someone was the tipping point for Vessel's consciousness somewhere deep in there. plus Vessel’s body honestly couldn't sustain Him for much longer. sorry for the tangent, i really love talking about that fucked up abomination.

but yeah, this experience changes both of them forever. Sleep gets a taste of feeling human emotions to a full extent, arguably even more so because of just how much Vessel feels; Vessel gets a taste of wielding inhuman power and releasing his emotions through it. Sleep's usual straightforward path of progression (just gaining more power, more control over more things) diverges as it realizes that it needs to feel like humans do again. Vessel, on the other hand, is fucking terrified of Him or something similar coming back, so he closes himself off and tries to repress his feelings back down again. he won’t let Sleep in again no matter how much he wants to be able to express his emotion with the same intensity as he feels them again. Sleep is well aware that Vessel wants that sort of relationship back, too. Sundowning is essentially Sleep trying to win Vessel back over and convince him to “help each other” once again, and realizing by Blood Sport that if Vessel doesn’t think he can handle it this time, he just needs to be made better suited for it. unfortunately, Sleep finds that breaking Vessel’s spirit, making him entirely emotionally dependent on it, and practically isolating him from the only people he interacts with on the daily (his bandmates) by stripping away his humanity in their eyes is very much a working strategy for getting him where it wants him to be.

Sleep’s tactics of manipulation are… algorithmic? for the lack of a better word, in the way that it doesn't really have a reason why exactly it's doing things other than that they're what's worked on Vessel so far. no real understanding of human psychology and whatnot, only trial and error until it pushes the correct set of buttons in the right order at the right time. it does learn more and more as their relationship progresses. Sleep also doesn’t exactly lie; it’s shapeless by nature & only able to embody what others put into it, and even then to a certain extent. it only really talks & shows itself to Vessel at any point because of their connection, and it’s able to draw from all of his emotions instead of just desire like any other human for that same reason. no matter what form Sleep takes, it’s always akin to a shadow, although the exact way the shadows look depends on who Sleep is showing itself to - drawing (pun intended) from Vessel’s artistic heart, Sleep looks to him like pencil on paper. Sleep does distort reality much in the same way that any emotion might - it pushes things to their extremes, makes them seem larger than life to get a response. as it grows and becomes more powerful in itself, it stops being able to appear as something smaller than it is, so pretty much any form it takes is an exaggeration of what it’s imitating. this ties directly into the mimics (see this (tmbte) and this (sundowning) for context), but also just. anything that Sleep appears as to Vessel. during TPWBYT, Vessel feels like his emotional repression is suffocating him, and Sleep’s most commonly assumed form during that time is a literal ocean that Vessel is often trapped in, drowning. during TMBTE, Vessel feels like he cannot escape his situation no matter how miserable it makes him feel, and Sleep appears to him as a reaper, taking that thought to its extreme conclusion that Vessel's only salvation might as well be death. even though Sleep isn’t a dream deity, its appearances still function on dream logic somewhat; it invokes the feeling of something in one’s subconscious that what they’re seeing is the actual thing Sleep is imitating, even if the actual visual resemblance is minor (that makes sense right please tell me it does).

[obligatory "when talking about the vessels, i'm talking about characters" disclaimer]

background info on the whole idea:

Sleep as a being is shapeless in my mind; more of a concept than a creature. it can manifest as sort of an absence of light in any shape to others, usually to appeal to feeling/emotion. the only "rule" for that is that whatever Sleep tries to appear as cannot look more or less innocent/powerful than Sleep actually is, which usually manifests in two things: the size being different from the thing/person it's imitating, scaled according to power, and/or added features, usually in some way threatening or regal.

one of Sleep's more consistent forms it takes throughout interacting with Vessel is mimicking him, partially to create an illusion of the two being more similar than they actually are and partially because Sleep used to exist as Vessel's shadow when they'd just met. the visual itself has changed through time (you can see what it was like during Sundowning in my Higher artwork), and during TMBTE that visual is pretty much the titular song's character with the most minor tweaks (which is why i didn't draw it separately).

all that made me think about the idea of Sleep mimicking the other vessels just to fuck with Vessel further (to be clear, i am a strong believer that Sleep only interacts with Vessel in any way). so now here are the designs of those mimics during the events of TMBTE, utilizing the album's song characters much like the Vessel mimic. because again, i have to start a series from the end, i guess.

"ii"/ii mimic (song character used: AYROK)

the main idea driving the design of "ii" is the real ii's goal to keep Vessel more or less safe by being by his side in worshipping Sleep, which is the reason he'd decided to become the second vessel in the first place. the choice of AYROK as the character to use in this design is obvious. one of the ideas that stem from that is ii's duty/desire to keep his face hidden for Vessel's sake; only his hands are visible & detailed because that's the only part of him Vessel remembers before either of them became vessels of Sleep and the only part ii has really shown after that. another is ii's timidity in telling Vessel to go against Sleep's will because he fears that no matter how bad it may be, it'll be much worse if Vessel doesn't follow it. that part comes through in the pose - shyly holding his hands together as if they're tied.

"iii"/iii mimic (song character used: Aqua Regia)

the song character inspo being Aqua Regia is mostly because of the calmer nature of the song and the dynamic duo it makes with Vore, less so the themes of the lyrics. also its visual design. iii mimic's design themes are iii's adoration/borderline obsession with Vessel (wearing Vessel's jewelry and having elements of his robe in his shirt + his own face/mask slowly melting off) and his enagement with worship as an act/aesthetic rather than something more serious (the overabundance of jewelry and accessories; the extra arms; the body language; the cuffs around his arms and legs being decorative and not actually restricting). also the rings on his fingers make a checkered pattern.

"iv"/iv mimic (song character used: Vore)

the use of Vore for "iv" is obvious too. song wouldn't be the same without his real life self. the design really just aims to combine iv with the Vore character, but there are two big things here. the simplest one is anger issues, which is why he's So Goddamn Spiky and why his jacket looks like scarred skin rather than painted & customized. the anger mostly shows up in the body language: most of the time "iv" just stares unblinkingly with pure palpable ire in the two glowing dots for eyes, and when he does move it's very stiff and snappy and barely controlled. the other thing is that, simply speaking, the real iv got into this whole mess without knowing the full extent of it and now he's in too deep and kinda losing himself. in the design it's expressed through the human features gradually turning into bug-like, such as the hoodie fading into a segmented millipede-like body and the fucked up mantis hands, and the gold of the original iv's mask melting over the face with the horns being part of it. the spikes protrude from him in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish between jacket decorations and actual parts of his body, but the spines are definitely from his body & allow me to live the dream of iv with a mohawk LMAO

[obligatory “when talking about the vessels, i’m talking about characters” disclaimer]

if you're unfamiliar with the main idea, please check out the TMBTE post.

Sleep/"Vessel"/Vessel mimic (sort of?)

the thing with this design is that, as previously mentioned, this isn't exactly an intentional mimic of Vessel. rather than that, it's almost Sleep's "default" state during Sundowning, stemming from him and Vessel having their identities heavily blurred prior. in this form, Sleep tends to mirror Vessel's movements almost perfectly or have them complete a certain pattern (see: Decimation and Higher artworks). most of the silhouette is very blurred; the parts that usually appear the clearest are the ones closest to Vessel himself, but the feet tend to always be blurred and give the appearance of floating. the face is nonexistent under the hood, replaced by protruding beams (?) that are supposed to resemble the Sundowning logo. generally, they face wherever Sleep does without following any three-dimensional rules, but for front views like this they just face up. its design is way better understood if you look at those to artworks, again.

“ii”/ii mimic