#screwtape

I wanted to make them look pretty alien overall, since Screwtape emphasizes multiple times the unearthly nature of demons. I started with their heads, giving them humanoid base features and just sort of messing around until I got something I liked. I knew from the beginning that I didn't want them to have hair, but they looked weird without anything on their heads, and stereotypical demon horns didn't fit the image I was going for. I started thinking about their names; specifically the "tape" in Screwtape and the "worm" in Wormwood. The former gave me mental images of something flat, so I went with a sort of flaccid fin structure (I like to imagine it sticks up straight when he's emotional). The latter, naturally, evoked images of tendrils, so that practically designed itself.

You're probably wondering about those legs now. I originally intended to make them bipedal, but then I remembered an interesting detail in the book; Screwtape has a lot of snarky nicknames for humans, and among them are a couple that specifically mention their number of legs. He calls human beings "two-legged animals" in one instance, then "hairless bipeds" in another. This implies that demons themselves are not bipedal. When I realized this, I tried to think up a centaur-like body plan, but it didn't look quite right. So I got a little creative and ended up giving them four legs without a typical quadrupedal body. It ended up working nicely with my desire to make them alien-looking.

Finally, let's talk clothes... or lack thereof. I wanted to dress them at first, but in addition to not being able to come up with anything fitting, I asked myself why demons would wear clothes anyway. The obvious human-centric answer would be "to cover up their nads", but remember, folks, these aren't humans. I recalled a part in the book where Screwtape mentions that demons don't understand the feeling of lust despite its use as a vessel of sin. A complete lack of lust within demons implies asexual reproduction (and therefore no sex organs), which makes sense considering the emphasis placed on their unearthly qualities. Of course, this begs the question of why demons in the book refer to one another with male pronouns and titles. That's a simple answer; even if only one gender (or none at all depending on how you look at it) exists within a society, those folks still use pronouns, so my guess is the demons borrowed male ones from human society as a default.

That's all I have to say about my Screwtape and Wormwood designs! If the lore I mentioned sounds interesting, I recommend reading The Screwtape Letters for yourself. Even if you're not religious, or religious and not Christian, it's an entertaining read. It's also quite short, which is how I was able to blast through the whole thing in less than two days.