To celebrate our birthday we wanted to share with you some of the amazing work our artists have created over the years each day this week with our project Art Reels!
Today we have our mischievous holiday project Jingle Hells!
[ID: A digital painting of Asmodeus and Zerxus Ilerez from Critical Role, Calamity. They are on a stage, with lights shining down, a snowy background, and artificial snow falling around them. Asmodeus is dressed in black dance shorts, and smiles as he poses gracefully with Zerxus supporting him. Zerxus is dressed in a cream Nutcracker costume, with a blank expression on his face. Bone devils pose in the background like ballerinas. /End ID]
Here's my piece for the @artists-guild-of-exandria Jingle Hells project, featuring Asmodeus and Zerxus in a fiendish version of the Nutcracker Ballet. Check out #Jingle Hells for more naughty and nice holiday-themed art!
To PROPERLY follow the tradition of Die Hard, considering Violent Night is of course the spiritual sequel bastard love child of it and Home Alone, we now of course need a sequel with higher stakes.
May I propose: Jingle Hells.
[spoilers for Violent Night below]
During the events of Violent Night, an ancient enemy of Nicumond the Red, sleeping/locked away, deep within the earth/ancient vault prison, begins to stir.
His enemy has spilt blood again, for the first time in millenia... He can feel it. The stains of his past seeping into the frigid ground, vibrating the threads of destiny tying the two together.
Enraged, not so much at the fact that his enemy still lives and breathes but more because Nicumond has dared to pretend to be something else, to have hung up his hammer for so long, to have run from their eternal struggle...
After an X year long struggle to free his bonds, fueled by a renewed and raging thirst for vengeance, he BURSTS forth from the earth and streaks across the sky through the glimmering trail of the aurora borealis and a conduit, looking to all like a red comet burning away all the glimmering blue and green.
Santa is unprepared, unready. His adventure a few years past, he is no longer actively repressing his memories and accepts that they are part of him, but has still tried not to tap into the violence any more than absolutely necessary. Perhaps a scene or two of Mrs. Claus recognizing the restlessness in him now that it's been awoken, and doing her best to help him express it - pulling him away between breaks for axe throwing and mead, or some fun flirtatious sparring, a couple of other cute couples scenes that are just... sliiiightly violent. in adorable ways (with I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus playing in the BG) - so that he exercises it a little and gets it out just enough it doesn't bottle up and explode.
But it's not enough to fend off his ancient enemy with multiple millennia's worth of rage and vengeance.
After a brief battle, he's dragged down between the cracks in the earth, between the thin slots in the very dimensions themselves, molten rock sizzling and hissing as the craggy ravines begin to seal themselves up behind to leave only the corpses of his elven color guard littering the room as evidence - but not fast enough to avoid Mrs. Clause, jovially entering the room with a tray of cookies.
The platter clatters to the floor, cookies crumbling and scattering everywhere. She takes in the scene, hand to her heart, eyes darting as her brain processes just what's happened.
Then we hear the music change and see her eyes grow stony cold and those low drums from the Nicumond The Red score on the original OST pick up but it's a slightly different melody/song used for her theme and we get the dramatic montage of her braiding her hair and putting half of it up and now for the first time we see the shaved and tattooed side of her head and strapping her Good Boots on and swapping out the floofy dress for war leathers and furs and she grabs her husband's hammer in one hand and her own ornate axe in the other and it's full on silver haired visible buff strength under rotund fat and I can not stress this enough sexy as fuck
Anyways that's the plot of the second movie, she's gotta fight his minions through a couple layers of Holiday Hell to save her husband being held captive by Some Guy He Literally Hasn't Thought About In Millennia And Honestly Kind Of Forgot About And Can't Even Remember His Name, But Who Is Convinced They Are Archenemies With Massive Beef.
Layers include but are not limited to:
Black Friday at Walmart
Creepy Desatured Foggy Massive Christmas Tree Forest Canopy With Ornament Rigged Up Ass Shrapnel Grenades That Explode in Puffs Of Bright Neon And Shattering Glass And The Sound Of Bells, Having To Leap From Huge Branch To Huge Branch As She Fights With Nothing But Eternal Dark Fog Below Shoild She Fall
Silent Hill Style Abandoned Mall Christmas Village
A Distorted Memory Of A Happy Family Christmas Dinner Designed To Try And Trick Her Into Stopping, To Lure Her With A Dream Promise Of Peace And Happiness And Family And Everyone All Okay And Back Home Together (something something tragic child related backstory? a lost sheep son seeming like he's finally come home? a daughter who fell in battle?) That She Has Manage To See Through And Then Kill Everyone She Loves Even Though She Knows It's Not Real It's Not Real Its Not-
Inside A Snowglobe That Keeps Getting Jostled and Shaken And Turned On It's Various Sides For Sick Matrix Style Gravity Changing Fight Scenes
Interspersed with increasing comical scenes of meanwhile back at Hell HQ, Santa is tied up and bloody and frantically wracking his brain and trying to ask leading questions to figure out who the FUCK this guy torturing him IS without clueing the obvious megalomaniac into the fact he's... got no fucking idea.
The big key point the MOST important part of the movie is the way Santa's face lights up and the way he looks at his wife when she kool-aid man's through wall to save him all bloody and clothes torn and hair in disarray and wild eyes, just the biggest brightest most utterly devoted 'I love a woman who can kick my ass' expression possible in the history of time and space.
