#ice apparitions

[therandomwind]

Part 9: "Why do the best romance plots always end up in non-romance anime?"

A Disney worthy romantic love story.

[crrystalpalace]

S Y L V E S T R E  +  A U G U S T U S 

Two more of this story’s characters, whom are still being developed. This is the first time I’ve drawn them. Please do open the full images... they’re huge. Let’s call them... two of the prince’s, erm... friends. And by his friends I mean his father’s friends... that the prince has to be friends with... whether he likes it or not...

[crrystalpalace]

After thinking on it a while, it seems that ice apparitions wouldn’t need to eat

Or maybe any apparition. I think it depends on how much you want to humanize them. A lot of creatures in a lot of stories are often just humanoids with quirks or powers, but there seems to be enough about their existence to begin with that it would call for more drastic differences in how they function.

For whatever reason, I’m continuously drawn to the concept of tsurara-onna (icycle woman), which is a short and simple Japanese folktale about a man looking upon an icycle and wishing he had a companion who was just as elegant, something like that... And so that companion appears. Then, after being married to the man for some time, she felt unwell and went to take a hot bath... then disappeared. One can deduce she melted in the water. (But was she unsuspecting or was it a suicide?)

I like the story because of the simple way life was stirred: it took the elements + a kind of unintentional witchcraft (a lot of magic is simply one’s earnest will)... So I like the idea of playing with animism and saying that these creatures are nature personified. Everything and everywhere has a soul. A mountain, a cave, a stone. Knowing where the soul of an apparition came from is how one would know how to destroy it, too. Water evaporates, fire is snuffed or burns itself off, ice is melted (maybe cracked?), wind... well, how does one get rid of wind? 

If you set the parameters for a creature’s existence like this, then there is something to work with when it comes time to answer questions like “how is life sustained”, and yeah, it’s not making a lot of sense to me that any apparitions need food to live. I’ve shown the prince at dinner several times, but hm... 

I do think they have a thirst, however. Can’t have ice without liquid, right? So maybe they are just very thirsty... 

More on this another time.