hi

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The world after the apocalypse

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Promised Liberator of The One Who Waits Below

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The Chained One and The Sacrifice

And a crown that cannot sit upon two brows

Lyrics from Utena Duel - No One Has Anything to Tell

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i saw your artstyle and genuinely smelled sharpie

Accurate lol. For traditional art, I mostly liked using sharpies and ink because I liked the heavily defined line art and shadows and contours and whatnot and my school pens and highlighters were all I had in the way of art supplies. And now my digital art forever has the imprint of that.

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Having a thought spiral while doing narilamb art. Instead of dropping this long ramble in my future art description I’ll just dump it here:

I’m trying to capture how both of them had a flash of hope of escaping their roles in an oppressive system that was destined to be met with betrayal

because their oppressed roles were necessary to uphold those systems (Death has to be unconditionally feared by mortals and people must be sacrificed for the Old Faith Gods to hold onto power and immortality - by demanding sacrifice in exchange for protection from a deadly force. Interestingly they are just as much a slave to these systems because they do all this out of fear of losing immortality and experiencing death themselves.)

for both there is the risk of hope fading into despair and them clinging to the old system as oppressor out of fear of being powerless and falling victim again or out of belief that power granted by this system is the greatest achievement

rather than envisioning and striving for a life outside the system that limited and ultimately hurt them

they are character foils in terms of *trying to defy one’s perceived nature*

but with the potential dark caveat of prey becoming predator, oppressed becoming oppressor, rather than something more free

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In which Narinder tries to go on a mission and never come back

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You got a fast car

Is it fast enough so we can fly away?

We gotta make a decision

Leave tonight or live and die this way

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Do you really mean it?

(If I had a nickel for every time the Lamb cared for and destructively served an omnicidal God who was planning to sacrifice them, only to betray and liberate that God in end-)

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Anthy tarot WIPs!

The imagery of the Last Resurrection and everyone sitting up from their coffins in the Rider-Waite Judgement art followed right in the sequence of arcana by The World made me emotional about Utena again

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I need to draw something quick or else the spiritual sadness will start setting in.

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Okay FINE, the indescribable dread of the Woolhaven DLC is that the hatred directed to the Lamb as a God, while they are trying to reclaim their lost home, rings with unsettling truth. That no matter how much you want to return to a warm community that you were deprived of, the world has turned you and everyone there into the same callous and recklessly destructive people as the monsters who hurt you. In trying to reclaim that sense of community, to take the world back for yourself, you are inevitably re-inflicting your trauma on a new generation of survivors just looking for a haven like you were. Every step of the way you want to make excuses that no, you aren’t those same people. They’re wrong to characterize you and attack you that way. Don’t they know how much this means to you? How much you’ve suffered? And the realization of the hollowness of these excuses comes too tragically late. And even when you learn to let go of the past and back out of the cycle at the end, the damage is irrevocably done.

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This game’s writing is pretty good at making you sympathize with characters that do monstrous things. I’m just gonna assume everyone in it just exists in a premoral world where egoistic violence is the norm. Where everyone is either a threat or someone to be subdued for survival, and everyone only knew how to secure what they want through conflict and power.

And the Bishops were just mortal creatures who picked up the crowns in order to better achieve what everyone else was using power to achieve anyways. And they only knew others as threats or tools, so that’s how they go about treating mortals until they find someone like them. And rather than treat each other as threats or tools they kinda respect each other for being people in this world who chose to wield the same power to get by, and they kinda decide to cooperate and share in the strange journey of crown wielder-ship with the only other people in the world whose experiences they could relate to.

And it felt nice to finally have another who they weren’t against but who they could embark on life in a really chaotic world with. But as soon as their continued alliance jeopardized power, the only thing they had known to keep them safe up until then, they threw away companionship to hold onto their old way of safety and immediately felt miserable at what they lost. But maybe had to deny it because why let go of safety and prosperity secured by personal power for this new sense of family that they found? Could it really be worth more than that? Better to just blame each other rather than themselves for starting a conflict of interest, for ruining a good thing, when that good thing could have been able to endure a conflict of interest, if they just give up the way of life they knew up until then and relied on someone else even if that meant relinquishing power over them and maybe giving up immortality altogether.

They’re people who chose power over family because the first thing was the only thing they knew to rely on and strive for up until then and it made them feel conflicted. They seem like people who would have preferred companionship over just struggling with everyone for power and survival forever, so now I’m like these are pretty relatable, premoral, recklessly self-interested people. I’m glad they could make up and rekindle a sense of family afterwards. Like wow, I don’t hate these people anymore, good for them actually. RIP to all the people they hurt though, they should do like 100 lifetimes of humble living and unpaid community service to barely start to make up for it or something, idk.

The scene where Narinder praises the Lamb for selling out Ratau, the closest thing Lamb has to a family figure at the time, for a gain in power is so. It just parallels his actions up until then it seems like he’s doubling down like “yes, this is totally what you should do, choose power over caring for people, good job, I respect that” to assuage his own sense of cognitive dissonance and guilt. “yeah the emotional grief of this trade is just weakness leaving the body amiright??” Very interesting and sad.

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Your Sariel and Yngya series is amazing, i really love it! Thank you for the nightmare of blind devotion.

Thank you! They have a funny codependent disaster dynamic to me.

They’re each other’s therapy and they both suck at it.

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Had a thematically fun Narilamb idea:

I like the idea that Narinder, despite his denial of it, is pretty softhearted.

As the embodiment of death he thinks he can only be denied, hated, or feared and so embraces his role as a tyrant to whom everyone’s lives belong in the end, but he really just wants to be accepted.

And The Lamb can accept their own death because they are determined to live on their own terms in service of a cause that will outlive them. They live in a way that conquers rather than spreads the dread of death (the latter would be the case if the Lamb usurped him only to reprise his role as tyrant.)

What I’m saying is The Lamb, given what they’ve been through, thinks about death a lot and how excessive fear of it only seems to spread it (i.e the notion of kill or be killed), sympathizes with its inevitability, and can understand Narinder pretty profoundly.

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I exist. I am here.

I exist!

Missing link from Utena can be so relevant to everything actually

It’s “Why do I live only to be used in service of someone else’s power and die? Why don’t I get to choose the lasting meaning of my life?” the song!