#old reposts

Another one from "dug out of the folder with old pieces"

Egglipse (2021). Enough said. Can be used as a 1080p or 1440p wallpaper (although the render turned out a little grainy because it was done on a potato).

Dug out this old piece, originally posted for the Unofficial DA Day 2021

Re-releasing this reaction meme because the vibe is immaculate

[Original] When vhenan tells you not to mess with the delicate fabric of reality

[the other cases are spoilery for the DATV reveal and the Vows of Vengeance podcast]

paprika would def be the fool because lel main character power but also because she really does encapsulate the more naive, starry-eyed facets of the card?  the fool is usually supposed to be the tabula rasa indicative of potential for the main character to mould themselves any which way, but i think paprika would represent the more archaic focus of someone wandering whimsically while still in search of not just the truth, but also happiness.  since she’s a very silly character (the more i think about her, the more i like her as a main character simply because everything about her screams comic relief instead), well, why not also take the title literally as well.  the fool’s “journey” (it was originally supposed to be the vagabond or something iirc, my tarot knowledge is rusty) is supposed to be an oblivious one, with the character often depicted as about to unwittingly step out into the abyss from solid ground—i think that one kind of speaks for itself.  as the main character, her journey is not only in building/evolving her relationships with the rest of the group, but also helping them get to know one another to create mutual bonds all around.  thus, the fool’s zero in paprika’s case steps back from becoming the infinite or cyclical of the void she may or may not step off to, and instead becomes a single, unified “circle of friendship” or something equally symbolically silly.

rose could fit into a lot of categories from the priestess to the hierophant, but in the end, i think justice fits her best.  it combines the highly rational aspects of her personality in terms of balance, logic, and even geometric aesthetic concepts with the emotional aspects in terms of the fact that justice itself is not always blind, nor are a person’s feelings always dictated by/in accordance with logic, since feelings do tend to get in the way.  justice also represents the first step in a journey, since rose is sort of a “late bloomer” in terms of allowing herself to grow for her own sake instead of to please others and keep a balance in her life, another important aspect of the card.  i guess if we’re talking s-links, hers would be both about opening up a romantic relationship with paprika and finding a way to re-balance her life after her parents’ divorce (legal matters also tie into this acard), overloading on stress, and attempting to relax herself more.

basil is definitely the lovers, probably the easiest one to place.  the lovers, naturally, represent physical attraction and sensuality, both of which are pretty prominent parts of his personality given that he’s one of my few very deliberately attractive characters.  he actually has a lot of internal struggle about these things, since he knows his looks get a lot more for him than his natural charisma and understanding of people would alone, and as he starts to explore his personal sexuality he becomes acutely, uncomfortably aware of the thin line of appreciation versus objectification.  at the same time, he’s the character most in tune with all types of love (for such a snark), representing everything from familial to platonic to romantic in his relationships with other people.  the lovers are also usually depicted as adam and eve—combined with his associated animal motif of the snake and the lovers’ meanings of choice and doubt, this is sort of a shout-out to the snake in the garden of eden and the whole “beautiful lucifer isn’t so bad” thing, only basil would rather serve in heaven than rule in hell to turn a page from milton on his head.  his s-link would be about those two key points mostly, and you can set him up either with multiple characters (by which i mean harper or beryl heueheueh).

harper was another hard one—i nearly made him sun, but in the end, i think wheel of fortune represents him best.  the wheel of fortune is all about change, and i guess i’ve sort of fallen into the general plotline with harper that he derives the greatest personal growth from being plopped down in a situation/role the total opposite of what he’s accustomed or inclined to (such as going to a surprisingly studious college for a mundane example or being a sylph-class player for a lel hamsteak example), so i like to run with it.  luck and chance also play a role in this card, as well as being motifs of harper’s character i like to repeat (shsl luck, light player, ends up in relationships with really hot people dfjsgfd) both for humourous effect and to actually see him step up to the plate and broaden his horizons/understanding of himself as someone more than just the comic relief guy.  his s-link would focus on his feelings about himself as nothing but a class clown as he realizes he can’t passively let life deal him any old thing and that he’s not necessarily inferior to the kind of successful but sorrowful people he’s privately torn between admiring and being envious of. 

paprika: obvs as the fool she has 5407950736 personae, but her innate one for the fool arcana is prometheus, which focuses largely on physical attacks and bulk, though he also has some fire spells in there.  i can’t actually design creatures worth beans, but let’s say that prometheus stands about 4m tall in the shape of a rugged, older man with broken manacles on his wrists and ankles, thick eyebrows that furrow down into a shadowed area where the eyes would be (it’s ambiguous whether he has them or not), and a swath of barely controlled flame in a sort of drayden beard dealio covering the rest of the face.  his skin is coated with a thin layer of ash, save for a glowing tron line kind of thing down his stomach, which glows bloody red.  his spine s exaggeratedly pronounced, with each bump of the vertebrae appearing like a small volcanic crater.  each of his sides have three rings traced into the ash, and i guess he’s wearing pants or something idk he hasn’t got time for that shit.  the myth of prometheus is pretty self-explanatory, and it fits both the foolish fool aspect of paprika’s arcana and her associations with fire (as the rogue of blaze, her quest was to be the session’s prometheus, for instance).  same-gender personae are for chumps because honestly this was just too good to pass up ahahahaah  

her ~ultimate persona~ then is atlas, to symbolize the expansion of the burden from humanity’s passion to the world itself—i didn’t think as hard about this one, but i guess it’d be a slightly bigger prometheus (like 5-6m tall) with the chains completely gone, the ashes blown away to reveal skin made from volcanic rock with cracks all around that show magma flowing through his veins.  he carries a massive globe comprised of swirling blue, green, and white lights (in sharp contrast to the rest of his colour scheme) hefted over one shoulder, and his default pose is the archetypal atlas crouch.  you need personae from justice, lovers, fortune, temperance, star, and moon to fuse him—the arcana of your party members, and the two aspects of which atlas is the symbolic titan.

rose: it was pretty much a given that i was going to use demons in judaism for rose’s personae because they’re really fucking cool tbh, so her initial persona isazazel, master of the deserts and empty places, and apparently one of the most enigmatic figures in jewish myth.  he takes the form of a slight, very androgynous humanoid standing about six and a half feet tall—just large enough to seem uncanny-looking.  he has sandy-coloured, feathered wings sprouting from his back, two black diamonds for eyes, curly blonde hair, and a stitched-up mouth that runs all the way from one cheek to the other in an eerie smile.  aside from that, he wears an odd mix of a waistcoat and a flowing robe, all black with a blue ribbon at the collar, and his legs from mid-thigh down are those of a goat’s.  his hands are disproportionately large in comparison to the rest of his body, with spindly fingers that nearly touch the ground, covered in white gloves.  the fingers are constantly moving, curling up into lattices and then retracting themselves.  despite his mythological associations, his magic is mostly ice-based, though his stats are pretty jack-of-all-trades without being too op or too balanced.  azazel’s name can be translated as “scapegoat” (amongst like 106954757 things), and in some accounts, he’s an angel, so i figured i could make it stretch for the justice arcana. he’s already a persona in p2, but this is a radically different take that i’m just going to go ahead and stretch to be an alternate rendition.

rose’s ultimate persona is mastema, an angel given control over demons to test humanity’s sense of morality/justice, though he’s also interpreted as being satan.  mastema appears the same size as azazel, keeping the willowy figure and androgynous appearance, with its face obscured by a white breathing apparatus like the kinds used for heavy construction.  all across the rim, faint inscriptions can be made out, and they glow softly.  he wears an archetypal judge’s robe in a deep blue, and a cravat whose pin is an unblinking white eye that appears to be blind.  his hands are the same as azazel’s, only with 14 fingers rather than 10 on each, and the left glove is black while the right remains white.  in his left hand, he carries a set of scales that wobble constantly though there’s nothing on them, and in his right, he carries a whip whose handle is made from storm clouds and whose thong is made of water.

basil: i realized he kind of had to be a support character in the lovers arcana, so basil’s initial persona is milda, the lithuanian goddess of love and freedom.  like the other lovers personae, she takes the shape of a giant female figure (about 3m high in this case) who appears to be made entirely of pale green stone (something like beryl, for instance).  her eyes are closed and she wears a slight smile, while her hair is comprised entirely of flowers and herbs winding all around her body.  her arms are held in front of her like she’s embracing something, and her hands rest about where basil’s face would be—he’s supposed to be contained within the circle of her hair, where he reads the constantly shifting myriad of glowing lines on her palms to do his analyses.  she’s completely naked, but her symbol is etched across her skin like a reptile’s scales, and she stands in a golden chariot with wings instead of wheels and two dove statuettes posed at the front lip.  symbolically, i just sort of stumbled upon her by pure luck—her forte in the pantheon was helping her worshipers find love through palm-reading and intimate knowledge of their personalities, which i thought was a good fit for basil.  she also represents freedom from being tied down to one place, which i like for the sheer irony value.

basil’s ultimate persona is nahash, the biblical snake from the garden of eden.  it’s never gendered, so i’m going to go ahead and refer to it as female.  nahash takes the shape of a long but slim snake with scales that go in a gradient from white at the head, through shades of green, brown, and then to black.  about a quarter of the way through her extended body (again, wrapped in a coil for basil to step into),  nahash fuses with a massive tree whose leaves/trunk follow the same colour progression as the snake.  flowers and herbs like those that made milda’s hair appear to be bursting from the inside of the trunk, but they’re held in by a thin, golden netting.  in her mouth, hahash of course holds an apple, punctured at both ends by her fangs.  this one is the ~super-symbolic~ one—if lucifer wasn’t in the star arcana, i’d have ascribed him to basil by default fdskhfh  the lovers arcana is often depicted by adam and eve in eden being tempted together by the snake, and so i thought it was a perfect fit for basil in his maxed social link coming to a balance between what other people desire of him (his looks/body, or adam and eve safe together in the garden) and what he desires for himself (the gap between his potential and ambition, or the snake willing to offer its knowledge/freedom not necessarily being a bad thing).

harper: i thought of a couple different approaches i could take, but in the end, i wanted his theme to be australian mythology because it’s also super-cool and very under-represented in smt—his initial persona is bagadjimbiri.  technically, it’s a name for two deities (twins), but he’s the standard speedy elec user because when is harper ever anything else.  bagadjimbiri appears as two dingoes bound together at the hip like in a dogsled harness by a running current of lightning, his fur being mostly a stormy grey with yellow underbellies.  his tails are also shaped like lightning bolts, but they’re twined together like a dna helix, as the brothers of myth invented human genitalia (amongst other things) by basically doing magical dna splicing with mushrooms.  his back legs are replaced by a sort of ghostly blob trail made out of clouds, as the brothers died and were reborn as cloud gods (hence the lightning/storm motifs).  on his faces, he has a faded three-claw scratch scar over one eye per dingo (the left on one, the right on the other), rendering that eye shut in what looks more like a cheeky wink than anything else.  harper is probably kind of good-naturedly buttmad that his persona is a dingo of all things because he thinks it’s lel aussie stereotype, but in one of his s-link events he’ll admit that he did some reading and found the mythos kind of cool, considering the australian half of his background really amounts to “british reject” fdsh

harper’s ultimate persona is mamaragan, god of lightning and fierce storms.  he takes the appearance of a surprisingly sheepish-looking young man with unruly hair (like it’s recently been zapped) in traditional aboriginal dress carrying a large digeridoo (which is actually not even the instrument’s proper name, apparently) with intricate lightning bolt designs down its length.  he sits cross-legged on a deep black storm cloud, the underbelly of which constantly rumbles and crackles with thunder and lightning.  he has what appears to be a cushion on his cloud, which on closer inspection is actually a puddle of water—mamaragan’s non-storm residence.  size-wise, mamaragan is probably the closest persona to human proportions—though he’s always sitting, he appears to be about 6’, though his large cloud seat makes him seem bigger.

beryl: it took me a while to come up with an angle for her personae, but i ended up going with peaceful figures to match the iconography of the temperance—her initial persona is salus, a very archaic roman goddess of security.  salus takes the form of a young woman, almost a girl, sitting with one leg crossed over the other on a small throne made of two lush hills.  she wears generic roman dress, with her hair bound back in a glowing net that looks almost like a tiara.  her eyes are those of a snake’s, but they’re still framed by human lashes, and her mouth appears with a slightly uncertain set.  in one hand, she holds a shallow drinking bowl, the liquid in which rises up and takes the form of a small white snake, whose head has a little red medical cross.  across her lap, resting on the tops of the two hills, is a long oar, the head of which is replaced by a blade like a naginata’s, and the butt of which has a slight hook.  functionally, salus can go for a wide spread of techniques, and is essentially the magic counterpart to prometheus—she sacrifices bulk for speed, though.  salus isn’t a hugely well-known figure, but i liked the symbol of a young woman learning to rule or aid in ruling.  she also is sometimes depicted as an attendant of beryl’s ultimate persona…

termina replied to your post: termina replied to your post: termina replied to…

oooHHH hh h h m y goD LMAO i ju ustuJJTJJSJDF esteban for best taurus based character 2k13

i have to cede that spot to io because my actual princess, but with my own bias in there, i’m really proud of esteban because he’s supposed to be the utter (or should i say udder) antithesis of what you’d expect from the furious male sexual power symbol sign, but his personality doesn’t revolve around being a subversion?  he’s just kind of……………….there to not actually wreck shit despite having physical strength easily on par with any of the fire signs, since that’s just not his thing?  i’d like to have him point out at one point that the whole angry bull thing is kind of a load of, well, bullshit—cows are considered to be some of the most docile and overall helpful animals around, so sticking a dick and some big horns on them doesn’t mean they have to be hideous rage machines, thank you very much

basically he’s a lot of traits you’d expect from a female character (as yumise is a lot of what you’d expect from a male character), but that doesn’t make him lesser?? or something?  the point is that nothing about him would be questioned at all if he were a woman, i guess, but hey wow woah Real People don’t have to fit into stock traits and having traits associated with a different gender doesn’t mean you have to behave a certain way?  though tbh most of the time he isn’t that deep about it because he’s a generally placid person—i have a lot of chill or whimsical characters, but esteban is just genuinely unflappable most of the time because he is an actual nun on the inside and he has the patience of a saint, for better or for worse?  

he and yumise are supposed to play a duality motif on a lot of levels (some a lot more obvious than others), though my favourite is belief vs skepticism—yumise is kind of a Token Atheist Scientist (it’s one of the first hints to her narrative bias, since you’re thinking she’s neutral but actually on an smt scale she’d be chaos) who constantly, compulsively questions everything because she can’t accept the unknown or the unknowable for an answer, while esteban was raised as a ward of the (catholic) church and while he isn’t prone to blind devotion, what he does do is pass off responsibility for his own life (?? it’s hard to describe) to some higher power without really engaging his own existence critically.  aside from being the main characters, yumise and esteban are around ophiuchus the most because they’ve identified those two extremes and are trying to neutralize them (oops there i go with extremism again………..)—yumise is constantly badgering ophiuchus with questions about how she exists as a demigoddess and how a flat world, etc is even a thing, and then on the flipside, esteban is really comfortable with ophiuchus because they’re a concrete-ish representation of his belief that he has some greater purpose or something that led to him being raised up, and his willingness to just put faith in things means he has zero cognitive dissonance about being a demigod and a practicing catholic shdffdh

let’s talk about the yumise-faizel (libra)-scorpio triangle of morality, now featuring smt alignment shit because it fits the theme i’m trying to convey with these three perfectly.

the middle bit of the zodiac deals more or less with justice—yumise is international affairs (which involves a lot of crime because most overt criminal behaviour has been replaced with under-the-table political stuff), scorpio is law enforcement, and libra is justice (basically, he’s the supreme court of the world and in charge of ground rule laws).  faizel draws a lot from the “eye for an eye”/”quid pro quo” hammurabi-type thing—he’s very fair and objective, but at the same time completely tosses that all to the wind because human nature is so volatile that he lets his own bias decide just as often as the facts, leading to some bizarre judgement and him having a very laissez-faire attitude towards the enaction of justice.  ”justice is hardly blind” is kind of his catchphrase, to the point where it’s lampooned as such by multiple characters.  so when the “justice trio” gets together for the first time in-canon, it looks like faizel is chaos, scorpio is law, and yumise as the main character is the neutral between them.  this is where yumise’s narrative bias comes in, though—to use another weird analogy, if scorpio is the militant “sjw” blogger, yumise is a bat straight outta 4chan “edgy” blogger type dsfhjfh  obviously, she’s not some racist/sexist/general asshat, but she as a person is almost overwhelmingly loud/assertive and really big on the “yo fuck the rules i’m going to do the thing and you can’t stop me because why shouldn’t i be free to make this call that may or may not leave my jurisdiction” thing.  the reason scorpio’s lawful alignment (while it is carried to a far greater negative extreme than yumise’s chaotic elements) is smeared more in the overall narrative is largely in part due to the fact that yumise straight-up cannot comprehend his sense of morals, finding it way too rigid and straight-laced.