Doubtsona 6: Dancing All Night
Special double murder week edition!
Beat- Hermit
"Mining's all about hard things! Hard stone, hard steel! It's about ugly things like grime, soot and unavoidable injury! That's the way I am! I can't be anything else!"
Sometimes artists create something known as a 'found art' sculpture. They take ordinary objects of interesting shapes and appearence and arrange them just so, putting them together into an unfamiliar form that makes for a bizarre, patchwork sculpture. That's what this reminds you of.
Beat's shadow self has two obvious appearances- yes, it is a beautiful woman, sensual and curvaceous, but it is also a golem. It is patched together out of wooden beams and stone and drills and augurs and saws and more. But if you squint a bit, and ignore all of the muck and sharp things, it looks kind of nice, right?
It's even got that moe appeal down- if you strike it too hard, then it'll seize up, flinch, cry like a little girl. It forces you away- but it does so with hideous crushing blades and noxious chemical gases. Its legs are strangely not even there, so it couldn't run away...
Orikus- Temperance
"Plants are nurtured by sucking nutrients from a thorough assortment of dead things. Beauty comes from death. Death results in peace. Death is the logical crux of everything I need and desire!'
Orikus, the SHSL floriculturalist, is a huge person. The intense contrast between their appearence and their inherent nature is writ large in this Shadow self- a hulking mass that is nonetheless made of beautiful flowers.
Of course, every flower is only particularly beautiful when you don't look too far down, past the blossom and into the white roots that tangle through mud and dirt. And that's what you'll find here- for underneath the beauty, its body is an immense tangle of dirt and tendrils and bones, a walking cemetery. Everyone looks the same on the inside, after all.
The pollen of these plants is intoxicating, creating a mellow sense- a feeling that everything would be much more beautiful and right with just some more colorful flowers around. It doesn't matter that those flowers would be growing out of corpses. The green and the blue and the pink is all that would matter to you. It draws you closer, urging you to feed the plants.
Dante- World (Reverse)
"I'm not going to say a thing. The mask is more important than the body it's placed on."
A sphere of faces. A shifting puzzle of masks, a loose, floating globe. That's what Dante's shadow looks like most obviously- but it's clear there's something inside of it. It's as much a masquerade as his title- a guard, a protective cover for some truth inside.
The masks spin around a central figure, sometimes growing in size or shrinking. One rotates to the front to deliver a piercing statement or a powerful attack- or a glib statement that it nonetheless infuriating. The masks are talking about something all the time, but the words can't be made out. Perhaps somewhere in there there's a truth, but it's lost among a susurrus stream of nonsense and taunts.
And strangely, it seems as if that truth is actually rather meaningless. It's just a simple white figure- an utterly featureless human body, with no face, no articulation, nothing at all. If you could part the masks that's what you'd see inside, if you could force your way through all of them. It is an utterly uninteresting plainness, a secret that wasn't seemingly worth discovering.
Akira- Death
"Oh, I just don't know what to do with myself. I've spent so long around corpses that now that I've got real living people I'm close to, how do I react? It'd be easier if they were all corpses too!"
Have you ever dug something important out that relied on lots of fine, long wires or cables and found everything is hopelessly tangled up? You couldn't use it any more because it was just a mess. You couldn't hope to ever untangle it. When you look at Akira's shadow, that's what comes to mind.
The body of this shadow is something like a puppet's control bar- a stick-figure without a head or any real distinguishing features, just a wooden skeleton marked by tattoo patterns. The majority of its body however is the distinct attraction- it's covered in dozens of wadded up, tangled and knotted wires. Some of them are entirely tangled up, others are longer, but they all end in the same thing- puppets. Lots of different puppets. They're obviously designed to look as disturbing as possible- intentionally corpse-like. It has the overall effect of looking like a hangman's tree- a gibbet strung with bodies.
These puppets, with their emaciated appearance, can at times flap loosely to move forward as an attack. At other times, they are bound up even further within the strings, acting as ablative shields. So many students are represented there in marionette form, others closer to Akira than others. Do you dare cut the strings?
Shinji- Hermit
"Keep away, filth. You can't hurt me if you can't touch me. Nobody gets close! That way nobody will see the dirt and sin all over me!"
The shadow has its back turned to you. It does its best to move away from you, as if repelled by magnets. Shinji, the SHSL Librarian, seems to desire as much isolation as possible. Step close and the electrical sparks in the air will make you regret it- a field of crackling painful plasma that seems to purge the dirt of mortal life away.
The shadow itself stoops low, a wooden mannequin; lacquered and sculpted, it is a figure- a librarian- at a desk. It seems to run whisper-silent along rails, moving to and fro with an oiled precision. But the awful secret is that as long as its back is turned- and it can't notice it because it's locked in place- you can see the fact that it has no legs. You can see the obvious mechanisms behind the desk, the oily gears and the greasy pipes. You can even see the bottle of alcohol under the desk- when the shadow isn't grabbing it for a drink when it thinks no one can see.
Even worse, brave close enough and you can see the true dilapidated nature. You can see the wood-eating insects that crawl around eating away and the spots of rust and grim, and the oil stains on the rails.