Happy New Year everyone! Today I want to show you my main setting: the Divine World. It’s a dark fantasy world that combines both epic (gods, monsters, magic, saving the world) and mundane (death, decay, bigotry, oppression) aspects of the genre. Worldbuilding and lore is a very important part of DW, to a point where if I could write everything I want about DW it would be one of the biggest books in the history of mankind. But this is an introductory post, so I’ll try to keep it brief!
1. While I’m not going to get into any unpleasant details here let’s still get some trigger warnings out of the way first. As I said DW is dark fantasy, and it’s so dark that Marena came up with the name Macabre Fantasy in order to emphasize how dark DW is and how the aforementioned themes of death and decay play a huge role in it, as well as many other sensitive topics. Aside from what has been already mentioned there's also a lot of cruelty & violence (both interpersonal & socio-political) and also topical problems: sexism, nazism, colonialism, etc. All of this, of course, is not for the sake of being edgy, but to make a lot of important points.
2. The inhabitants of the Divine World are appropriately called Divine Humans [1], aka Homo Mirandum. While they look a lot like regular humans, there are a lot of differences between us and them! They have horns, claws, different hair textures and skin tones, three spinal cords instead of one and are also bigger than us: it depends on a lot of factors and the shortest men are actually not that big, being only 166 cm tall, but the tallest women can go up to 350 cm! And yes, you’ve read it correctly, women are taller! Divine sexual dimorphism is somewhat flipped compared to ours and Divine women are tall, muscular and hairy, while men are short, thin and mostly hairless. Meanwhile their voices are pretty similar and androgynous, and also have a metal (as in material not music) vibe to them.
Physically Divine humans are, for the lack of better word, monumental: they are strong, capable of surviving wounds that would kill a regular human ten times over, have a great memory, but are also stiff and slow, both physically & mentally, for physiological reasons as well simply because they can afford to be — their lifespans can be measured in multiple Earth centuries. However Divine humans rarely enjoy their longevity to its full extent. Outside dangers aside, their illnesses and disabilities are just as monumental as they are. For example, Divine albinism means fully transparent flesh which in turn means complete blindness and high vulnerability towards radiation (levels of which are very high on Mirabilis).
Divine souls are just as physical as anything else. They are also Aetheric in nature, and are another example of Divine sexual dimorphism: white souls belong to men and black to women (with rare exceptions). This plays a huge role in Divine society and became one of the reasons why most Divine societies are patriarchal: men, despite being physically weak, can literally mind-control women when needed. It doesn’t help that too much contact with an aether opposite to your soul can lead to death.
While Divine humans are technically the only race of Mirabilis, thanks to magic they can turn into many various creatures: Demons, Angels, Chorts (lesser Demons, roughly speaking), Bieses (lesser Chorts), Beatas, Vampires, Turnskins (Divine equivalent of werewolves), Beasts, Chimeras, Nocturnals, Urials, Cadavredaxes and so on, many of them having sub-types (for example vampires being living and undead).
4. Technology & society-wise Divine civilization can be compared to 19th century Earth: imperialism and nationalism are at their peak, proto-industrial society, recently invented trains & electricity. However Divine civilization also possesses traits more associated with our Middle Ages: religion being the most important social institute, no concept of humanism, plate armor & melee weapons still being main tools of war.
5. Like Divine humans themselves Mirabilis looks somewhat Earth-ish but is actually very different. For starters, when I say that DW is a dark and oppressive world I mean it a bit literally! Mirabilis has high atmospheric pressure (~8 higher than Earth), it’s a much colder and wetter planet, and most noticeably — it has no sun. Despite this, Mirabilis still has light and heat, even if not as much as we do, all that thanks to the White Aether (a very important magic substance) that fills the space around the planet. A Sun’s fire isn’t the only kind Mirabilis lacks — due to the low oxygen level of 15% fire simply cannot exist in normal conditions on Mirabilis.
If the word “normal” can even be used towards Mirabilis — all of the planet’s flora are technically mushrooms and much closer to the meat-side of things, so stuff like bleeding human-eating trees isn’t exactly shocking to Divine humans. Animals are technically the same as on Earth but with a huge caveat — their appearance is based on the medieval depictions of them which means animals like hyperagressive fishes with limbs, talking horses with human teeth, owls with human faces, giant non-arthropodic insects and so on.
While Mirabilis is bigger than Earth, it has only one continent that is sliced in half by the so-called Black Wall —an impassable wall of Black Aether. The stories I write take place on the western half of the continent, and its inhabitants can’t just cross the ocean to explore the East because of the atrament — a deadly substance that fills the sea and is so dangerous only two western races out of twelve have any level of resistance to it.
The explorers of Mirabilis would be very upset about this if not for the Remnants, mysterious ruins that are both more ancient than anything they have ever seen yet more advanced than anything they could dream of. Exploring Remnants is an incredibly dangerous, often illegal job, but what’s that compared to a chance to learn more about the world? More materialistic folks are attracted by the artifacts that are capable of granting incredible miracles and, of course, even more incredible horrors.
And I think that’s pretty much it for the introductory post! From now on I’m going to repost the stuff I’ve previously posted on my Twitter before but now with all kinds of lore tidbits. There’s other projects we’ll talk about, especially Neon-23, Marena’s cyberpunk setting (that has a crossover with DW we made for fun!) but that’s it for now. Thank you for reading all this! And thanks to ippoteq & miiesedgeworths @ Twitter for beta-reading this text!
[1] — In Russian I call them Дивнолюди, based on an archaic Russian word for “miracle” — диво. “Divine” is a very lucky translation because it sounds similar to the original word and also points at the, well, divine nature of the Divine Humans.
I’ve translated the ones that aren’t in English! (at least the ones in the main photoset, my Chinese isn’t good and I’m too tired from doing those translations to sit and decipher some of the characters that are blurry haha sorry)
frankly I think a lot more people would be open to postmodern art if we all stopped pretending you had to be very smart to understand it and start acknowledging that the starting point for deriving meaning from it is frequently ‘this is stupid bullshit’
To clarify- it’s not just ‘this is stupid’ and then you’re done, finding the meaning in something that seems meaningless can usually be found by starting with that base feeling, ‘This sucks.’ Okay- why does it suck, specifically?
‘This is just a vaccuum cleaner, it doesn’t belong in a museum’. Okay, follow that thread- why is that weird? Is it the elevation of normal commercial products to be put on a pedestal? Does that sentiment remind you of anything? How does that make you feel?
“This is just splatters, anyone could do this.” Anyone could, couldn’t they? Anyone can create things, anyone can make these movements and gestures. Dancing does the same thing, doesn’t it? How do the splatters imply the artist’s movements? What does it say about them?
“This person made a mobile out of twine, flower pots, and pictures of cats. How is this art?” What mediums do you define as ‘art’? Paint? Marble sculpture? Photos? Why are you so sure that this is what art is? Doesn’t this remind you of the kind of crafts a child would make, or maybe a first-time DIYer? Is that intentional? Does the construction or material evoke any other emotions?
This isn’t an end-all be-all, of course- among many other things, there’s postmodern art that’s just for a show of mastery, there’s art that’s commenting on a very certain time in history or about something within the art community you may not be privy to, and there’s art that’s simply about creating and the creative process. It’s hard to approach a full narrative with just a single sentiment. This can’t cover every single topic, obviously.
That being said, it’s just as important to note that in many cases, there’s no wrong answers in art or interpretation. If your takeaway is completely different from the artist, as long as you don’t try to insist that the artist has no real say over their work’s meaning, that’s totally fine. A large part of non-representational art is reliant on emotions, and emotions are informed by your experience as a human being. Your interpretation is just as right as anyone else’s. And you don’t even have to LIKE everything- I hate Jeff Koons and his stupid balloon dogs! Cremaster makes me incredibly uncomfortable and even if that’s the point it’s still uncomfortable enough that it makes me not like it! You can just not like certain art, it’s not all-or-nothing it’s good or it’s not.
TL;DR- if you have a hard time ‘getting’ art, try listening to your base reaction to what you’re looking at, and then ask yourself why it makes you feel that way, and why it’s constructed the way it is.
when i was in high school i used to write my papers thinking wow i’m just bullshitting all of this. then like a week before my senior year ended after all the grades were set, i was talking to my english teacher and told him you know i just bullshitted every paper i wrote. he told me that while i may have thought i was just pulling it all out of my ass, i genuinely knew what i was talking about and made well-supported analyses. i only thought i was bullshitting because it didn’t take much effort and it all seemed obvious to me. if you do well on your essays even though you think you’re just making it up as you go, chances are you’re not pulling it out of your ass. you’re just a genuinely talented analyst, even if the analysis that you’re making comes from a subconscious understanding of the material rather than a conscious effort to study it. give yourself some credit.
You can freely choose backgrounds for any option, but only simple ones, as I am far too uncertain about my skills on detailed scenary background to sell them. Four-legged animals will fall under bust and fullbody only, but with the fullbody at a halfbody price if the animal in question isn’t very complicated (like a cat).
Payment will be via PayPal invoices.
(Please do keep in mind the prices presented here are in BRL, as I am Brazilian.)
WON’T DO:
- NSFW or anything with too explicitly sexual themes
- Heavy explicit gore (like detailed guts, popping eyeballs, rotting bodies, etc.)
- Portraits meant to be of real people without their approval (fictional characters played by real people are ok)
- Mechas and armor
Anything else is pretty much okay.
Reblogs are extremely appreciated🙏
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