Discover Top Posts Tagged with #druj

Navarr: The Druj! So glad you could make it. We were just about to play Twister. It involves me twisting your neck until it snaps.

Navarr: We were also going to play Snap.

Navarr: It has similar rules.

#empire #empire larp #incorrect empire lrp quotes #incorrect quotes #empire lrp #navarr #druj #send em back across the Feverwater #for Therunin!#remember the Great Forest Orcs #our kin and allies #source: yugioh abridged

#the great jahy will not be defeated #jahy sama wa kujikenai #the great jahy will not be defeated!#jahy #druj

I think you would sorely rankle at the Sraosha and Armaiti (And Vohu Manah, althought that was a Persona design first so different school) designs if they were say, new for SMTV. Is there any textual/visual support in Zoroastrian texts for them to appear as strange anthropomorphic, vividly coloured mollusc/amphibian beings without human faces? Your own test for Amemiya's angels required Christians to identify them as such - would a Zoroastrian readily identify Kaneko's Armaiti void of context?

I would love to ask this to a Zoroastrian! But, you know, there are just not that many of them around. It's pretty absurd to compare what's been a religious minority for over a thousand years to a cultural majority religion such as Christianity and its hundreds upon hundreds of years if not near-millennia of evolving-but-consistent art and imagery. I personally don't even know where I would need to go to find modern Zoroastrian depictions of Sraosha or Armaiti. I would imagine they'd just be conceived as humanoid, like the biblical messengers.

I also think these kinds of comparisons between Kaneko and the guest artists/Doi are false equivalences to begin with. Kaneko didn't design Sraosha and Armaiti in a vacuum, he was at that point already responsible for dozens of angel designs--as of Soul Hackers, 45 Heralds/Divines (almost entirely Christian), which alone almost match Doi's current career total of 52 demons overall. Amemiya is on the record stating his six angels are entirely from his own imagination (as they consist largely of his own brand of design tropes like pointy bits abounding, faces galore, and elephant heads). But Kaneko had to make Sraosha/Armaiti's stand out in a crowd of his own making due to their non-Christian origin, just as he did with the first Islamic angel, Azrael (he wears a turban!). And there is a line to Sraosha/Armaiti and it begins at Satan:

Kaneko's never said this as far as I know but Satan's bug-like wings/carapace had to have inspired some of the if... daeva designs, not just Angra Mainyu but Druj and even Bushyasta.

You can practically see Bushyasta's ribbon torso informing Vohu Manah's arm and leg and the further abstraction seen in Sraosha and Armaiti. Kaneko has also stated that this Angra Mainyu was ultimately the template for S&A. I've always guessed that they have that "primordial" quality to them because they would have been seen by Kaneko as older than the Christian/Jewish angels.

So while the religious figures of Sraosha and Armaiti lack their own consistent heritage of artistic depictions, I would nonetheless love to see Doi tackle something similarly undefined and see where his imagination takes him. The problem is, Amemiya and Doi struck out so hard on softballs like Michael or Zeus that they corkscrew their torsos a dozen times around, like a cartoon. Like it or not, Kaneko's designs still define the series and comprise the majority of compendiums; the desire or directive to stray from what makes his/SMT's designs effective and eschew consistency has always been the major underlying design issue since SMT4.