#paris-rules

of course! I’ll even throw in a walter!

[so sorry it took me a while to answer!]

The archangels and antagonists specifically punched me and took all my lunch money with how spot on they felt

I have actually gotten three asks about this so far, so I’ve decided that I’m going to give an explanation for one of the posts in response to each ask. I’m going to do the antagonists here.

Uriel: This one is very imposing, it looks like a spray of feathers. The gold is striking, and to me it represents power, but it’s the only color outside of black and white, which represents his rigid thinking. The whole image gives me the vibe of a crown of feathers, representing Uriel’s belief in the purity of angels and their cause, as well as his feeling of superiority over humans. But all this aside, this is one of the images that I saw and immediately knew which angel it was, before I thought much about my reasoning at all. I saw it and said, “oh, that one’s definitely Uriel.”

Metatron: This one reminds me of an emperor penguin, because of the colors, the shapes, and the textures. That’s not why I chose it for Metatron but that’s what made it first catch my eye. It’s fairly simplistic in colors, in a similar way to Uriel’s, because Metatron thinks he’s a lot more creative than he actually is. There’s something almost sinister about this picture, although you might not notice it at first glance. I think it’s the way the yellow and white peaks in front stand out, but there are others looming in shadow in the background.

Zachariah: I chose this one for Zachariah because it reminds me of a painting you might see hanging in an upscale hotel. Not like a millionaire hotel but more like a nice hotel your boss puts you up in while you’re on a business trip for your white collar office job. It’s abstract but kind of in a boring and predictable way. It’s colorful, but the colors are kind of muted. There’s also a lot of negative space. I don’t know, this is another one that I looked at and immediately went “oh yeah that’s Zachariah.”

Hester: We don’t really know that much about Hester aside from the fact that she was in Cas’s garrison and said that iconic line about Dean corrupting everything that touches him. Castiel was lost the second he laid a hand on him. Icon. This image looks kind of like blue and light green feathers proliferating out from a single point, which is pretty cool. This one was chosen mostly based on vibes, I don’t have a great explanation besides just saying that this looks like Hester. Idk.

Naomi: Okay THIS one I have a lot to say about. So this one I originally saw in a portrait orientation rather than landscape, with the blue on top, which honestly works better but looked weird when all the other ones were sideways. So the blue on top/the left represents the placid minds of the people who she’s brainwashed, as well as her own outwardly placid demeanor. However, there’s chaos underneath, and it’s trying to break out, represented by the cracks in the blue. In the original orientation, it looked like blood was bleeding down from the red dots, representing the cost of that “peace.” It’s also the exact visual of the blood leaking from Cas’s eyes as he started to remember what she pushed down. There’s a violence to her, underneath the calm veneer.

Anael: This is actually one of the ones from the very first edition of this post before I decided it worked better without the explanations included. Here’s what I had there. “Dark, with a sort of murkiness to the colors. Gives the sense of things hidden, secrets. Inconsistent coloration, with combinations that look ever so slightly off. Deceitful. Lots of negative space, like something has been removed or depleted.” I think that pretty much stands for itself. The shading also lends to this, as well as the sketchiness at the edges of some of the shapes.

Ishim: This is one of the ones that I thought was pretty cool at first but came to really, really love the more I looked at it. It looks somewhat like a third grader’s interpretation of the sun if an artist rendered it. It has a quality to it that makes it almost look like a woodcut. I chose this one for Ishim because of the way it looks like fractured light. I also think that the “body” of the “sun” in the top right corner is dark, like a dying star going supernova. Cas once saw Ishim as someone to look up to and follow, but he sees that the angel army has been rotten from the get-go, causing pain and suffering by carrying out orders they don’t question.

Duma: This one is really cool to me personally because it looks kind of like the inside of a cell and I am a gigantic science nerd. Tell me the left side of this doesn’t look like the Golgi apparatus. I chose this one for Duma because it’s complex and intricate, and it looks almost maze-like. The pattern of the colors makes it look almost like there’s a shape being partially obscured by the negative space. Like a puzzle missing pieces, and if you were to find those pieces an image would emerge.

Ephraim: This one also piques the interest of my science brain because it reminds me of synapses, where electric currents are carried from one brain cell to another. However, there are black veins running down through one side of the image, like death spreading at the cellular level. All of the pinks represent the pink mist left behind after Ephraim’s kills, and the apparent incongruity between that color—the color of bubblegum, a color associated with innocence, levity, happiness—and the gravity of Ephraim’s job is interesting to consider. The side of the image with the black veins running through it is more colorful, with a wider range of colors, even though the black is there—a black that is NOT present on the pink side which represents death—representing the pain that Ephraim senses from humans that naturally comes along with experiencing a wider spectrum of emotions. But this spectrum, with its pain, also includes a happiness and freedom that Ephraim will never know.