#clockwork dancers

[lostw4nderer]

Emotional damage

[ghost-of-hallownest]

Clockwork Dancers

[buttercatrho]

Clockwork Prince

[dion-onyx]

Too much angst, here's some fluff and/or a crackship. I'm calling it clover clockwork, which involves green prince & either 1 or both of the clockwork dancers.

Something something love preserves, idk 🤷

[cookiqueen13]

⚠️ CONTAINS VISUAL SPOILERS FOR SILKSONG!⚠️

Silksong Fanart!

[exocynraku]

if youre still takin reqs can I ask for cogwork dancers? personal favorite boss so far their theme is soso good

whos your favorite boss? if youve got one

i looove the cogwork dancers... they are so sad but i do love them... i like them + first sinner + last judge + phantom + the unravelled (this is excluding act 3 bosses cause im not there yet)

[beetlelegs2003]

I honestly really need to get a big ramble it out of my system. These are two pieces of art I'm very interested in.

I haven't really seen anyone compare the Cogwork dancers to "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers), despite the fact I think there's clear inspiration. There's a surface-level comparison of gay men (bug men?) and clocks but I really think both of these pieces of media accel in giving dimension and empathy to the overlooked.

Hollow Knight/Silksong doesn't try to make you feel bad for killing, anything really. This is a core mechanic of the game and admittedly, it gets a little weird when you have NPCs and mobs that are the same. Silksong does play around with this idea more than Hollow Knight but 99% of the mobs don't have much of an impact. Which I think is why the Cogwork dancers hit so damn hard for me. It takes you out of the videogame mindset and lets you know "hey btw you just killed his husband infront of himmmmm these characters have lives and relationships outside of your own perspective lmaooo" It's pretty haunting and it plays and interesting subversion with empathy.

Felix Gonzelo, the artist behind Perfect Lovers, made a lot of minimalist art that drew from themes from the death of his Lover. This minimalism was partially due to the pushback from art museums fearing they would face funding cuts from showing overtly gay art. Essentially, he queer coded the clocks. If you're unfamiliar with Perfect Lovers you might of seen another one of Gonzelo's works, "Untitled" (Public Opinion); it's a stack of candy equivalent to the weight of a healthy male. Visitors would take pieces out of the stack and its diminishing quality was to represents Gonzelo's partners decline as he succumbed to HIV. I can't comment on the impact during its initial debut, but his art has seen viral resurgence in post ' vague anti-modern art ' of the 2010s. Ragging on 'modern' art (more specifically anti-art) was a big topic conservative circles. It was during this time PragerU produced its famous empirical research concerning this topic:

...

It is not surprising that, according this this PragerU graph, "ARTISTIC STANDARDS" started declining during segregation and plummeted during the Civil rights movement. It is only shown for a few seconds, probably because it is not subtle at all in its Nazi pseudo-science. The root of this hatred was in minority groups gaining voice in art. It was wrapped in anti-art bait but the movement's end goal was obvious: remove minority voices from the narrative.

Minority perspectives, black, brown, gay, trans, in the public view are a threat to the hierarchy of empathy. How empathy is allotted in mainstream politics is emblematic of who has narrative control and who these people want you to sympathize with. To see this in action, its helpful to skim news stories and think about the following questions: Who's death is a story? Who's death is a statistic?

This is exactly why the virality of Perfect Lover's is so threatening. People were sympathizing with a piece of gay art that told the grief of a life taken by the AIDS epidemic. I wouldn't extend this to say the general public, but through social media it reached people who would of not thought about this tragedy otherwise.

40 million people worldwide have died from the AIDS epidemic, an epidemic that could of been greatly reduced by world leaders if they were not enamored with passive gay genocide. This epidemic has been largely overlooked by mainstream media, and the only public conversation of it has been spurred on by queer artists and historians. I mean, it needs to be; engaging with the idea that a recent American president intentionally let gay people die is radical, despite it being historically factual. The average person does not to think they live in system that arbitrarily punishes people, so they don't.

Empathy forces you to engage with alternative ideas. It disrupts the classification of "us" vs "other" by forcing you to think about someone outside of your ingroup. Their perspective, their values, their understanding of the world.

It's why I love the Cogwork Dancers so much. Besides being a fun and well-choreographed fight, It wakes you up from the game. It gives you this clarity that I can only assume is accessible from exiting the conservative rabbit hole. Your actions effect people and the people that love them.

[xylo-art]

I wanted to experiment with texture in my pieces, because I don't like how clean everything usually feels - so I ended up digitalizing this traditional drawing I did of one of the Clockwork Dancers