god this just reminds me of. like okay, back on spore? in the 2010's, during the same time as the deviantart oc boom there was a HUGE population of furries, warrior cat girlies, and most relevant to today's lesson, younger teenage girls overwhelmingly obsessed with the edgy 2000's reboot of spyro the dragon, on there.
i say, without exaggeration, that every single one of them had their own legend of spyro oc, who was ALWAYS a Special Legendary Rare Dragon, always a teenage girl that looked 100% like an mspaint recolor of a screenshot of teenage cynder, always had human hair with That One Specific Forwards-Sweep Scene Hairstyle Every Furry Always Had, always had the exact same green sparkly seductive anime girl eyes part, always had crystal horns and flower parts on them, always had a name like "crystal" "candice" "lydia" or "skyler" (all of which are real, direct examples of actual popular users at the time's ocs), always was wearing a "collar" with a crystal or flower or something on it for literally no apparent reason, always had an endless parade of identical spammy wolf head template spaceships themed after them to announce inane things like "i'm online" and "i was thinking about broccoli and OMEHGAWD" in lieu of an actual proper social media element to the game, always had a weirdly mundane and lame boyfriend who quite often had a genderswapped cynder backstory, nearly always had one of the legwarmer-like creature paint styles, if they were not just another purple dragon then they nearly always had a color scheme based heavily on neon green, light blue, cyan, or red, always had a "trilogy" of 50+ part adventure series-es named "The Legend Of (oc name)" featuring them as the chosen one protagonist (if not MULTIPLE "trilogies") and for whatever reason the main big bad in the second series on the trilogy would always be a giant evil crazy lady dragon with a name like "Umbra", and most importantly for today's story, always had-because Dark Spyro exists, so of course they needed one too- an "evil dark side" alter ego with a name like Darknessia (yes really) or Eclipse. Every. Single. One.
There was a standard pattern everyone unquestioningly knew they had to follow when making this obligatory Dark Other. the default model of their precious sparkledragon girl would be taken, their colors set to black, and the detail colors set to red, purple, or green, all with zero regard to how such a color scheme would actually render on the finished product, and often, zero regard for the bug that makes it so when you set a creature's base color to 100% black it makes all the other colors render in an unpleasant chalky neon. Feathers would be removed, frills and horns would be replaced with the exact same long, thin, pale, sharp bony spines, and the eyes would be replaced with the exact same angry red evil eye part from the creepy&cute pack, or, if they were feeling spicy, the lizard eye part from the same. Clothing and jewelry would be inexplicably transformed into sharper, spiked-collar-like affairs. The scene hair, of course, remained the same. it all looked quite like the result of coldsteel the hedgehog taking a dip into open furrydom.
Unlike Dark Spyro, these "evil sides" would nearly always be depicted as fully sapient, separate people of a spirit-like nature who were created by the villains, and would "possess" the main character periodically with the sole motivation of causing chaos in their life. They had their own names, personalities, and motivations-even of those personalities were invariably just "i'm so manipulative and i love chaos and evil and hurting people lol", and those motivations were always just "serve main bad guy because uhhhhh evil".
because i was a fucking edgelord, my primary spyro sparkledragon oc at the time (though not my FIRST primary one-my original primary spyro sparkledragon girl oc is a story for another time) was ALREADY a dark dragon (or, sometimes, "twilight" dragon, which was a class of element type i made up that was basically "dark dragon but not inherently evil and light element dragons make them oppressed because they think they're dark dragons :(" and i waffled back and forth on if dark dragons were actually evil and consequently if said oc was an actual dark dragon for the next 8 years) with necromancy breath powers, who already had the evil lizard eye part in her default form, was not a teenage girl but was instead based on the adult cynder model, had no hair because even to this day the idea of human hair on a dragon makes me unreasonably angry, already had the long thin bone horns, had a color scheme consisting primarily of dark blue and red, was not the chosen one, DID have completely inexplicable shapeshifting powers, was kind of an ass, had a lot of lolzsorandomxd "humor", and instead of a mediocre spyro recolor boy husband she dimension-hopped and dated* kowalski the penguin. Yes, really.
despite all this, i still gave her a dark form. i gave the dark dragon who already had half the evil dark form tropes by default, a dark form. independent inexplicably malicious conscious identity, zero-thought black and red color scheme, bony sharp spine frill replacement, cartoonishly overdone edgy evil red eyes part, i think i even turned the downturned horns up like shadow the hedgehog, and i named this dark form fucking Daedrus V'yarii.
that's what this picture looks like, to me. it looks like a humanized daedrus v'yarii.
*and, as the end result of a plotline in which she brought her penguin boyfriend back to the legend of spyro dimension and it turned out he and all the penguins had secretly been dragons cursed into lesser form all along-mind you, not even fucking spyro dragons, i decided that kowalski was secretly a D&D PLATINUM DRAGON and the other penguins were golds and bronzes-she had kids with kowalski the penguin. said kids went on to go star in their OWN planned trilogies i never got around to making, but that featured among other things the tragic death of a dragon-transformed version of megamind.
