hello it’s me your local Alexis redeemer spending my paycheck on something none of us need but I want deeply, and this time, it’s Alexis of the Solaire clan as the Death card
Commissioned from the amazing @ventii_art on Instagram; they worked incredibly fast, I cannot recommend them enough!
Discussion of the significance of the Death card in tarot and design notes under the cut!
Why the Death card?
Most people who practice or read tarot will actually tell you the Death card is misunderstood and maligned. The card most people have to fear is actually the Tower which (generally, from an amateur and novice) can signify great change and destruction. Death, in contrast, hardly ever means literal death. It typically means transformation, a change followed by rebirth, the expiration of something that needed to end so something new could begin.
Alexis, in my opinion, can be read as similarly understood. Both she and Death are very rarely dealt with on a personal basis, and we have very little primary evidence of experiencing either. A common misconception of Death is that it’s done with purpose or malice instead of as a chain of events or as a part of the circle of existence, and this remind me of how I think about my Alexis.
It’s often assumed that she turned Sam for selfish, hateful reasons, to manipulate him and keep him with her forever. That is definitely possible- just as purposeful life and death are possible. I also think it’s possible that she did what she did with good intentions, that she is more of an electron bouncing in the valence clouds of the universe rather than a puppet master. The fact Sam’s death was also a beginning lends itself to explore the contradicting, dual complexities.
Why these design choices?
Alexis’s little black date dress also being a funeral dress just hit really good okay
My Alexis is Vietnamese, so I picked white flowers as is common for mourning in Asia
White Chrysanthemums are a common funeral flower while also representing loyalty and devoted love.
White Dahlias, in contrast, represent change and long life, common at births and weddings.
Together, the bloodstained bed of flowers symbolizes not just mourning, not just guilt, not just rebirth, but something along the lines of “my broken, remorseful heart will love you for all our eternal lives.”
character design is hard :))) I see a lot of the redactedverse characters as an AlternateUniverse!Erik when i don't have any clear vision of what they look like.
Here's me doing the most to shapeshift one man into 6 different people
refractions was published a year ago today (yesterday by a few hours but who’s counting) AND i just got a notification on it; please think fondly of it with me if you like. here are a couple of my favorite bits
He can feel their little flare of attraction like sugar melting on his tongue, just as sweet as the first time despite the way they’re shaking their head at him. “Time and place, Gav. Time and place.” They walk past him to get to the cooler in the trunk, intentionally bumping him with their hip on the way, and he follows, hopelessly charmed.
Their hands have clawed at his back, run down his chest, tangled in his hair. It should be easy, to bridge the gap between them and curl his fingers around theirs, a casual and public declaration of affection.
Gavin stands in the middle of their endless shining circuit and feels an uncomplicated wonder as the light refracts across his skin.
As they speak, they stare out at the wall of glass again, their eyes following the looping trail of yet another shark. Gavin watches the rippling green light play over their features and thinks that people should flock to see them.
Someone in our little server mentioned that we don't really know what happens when a demon dies:
And it got me thinking, which is dangerous, but also I'm operating on a layman's understanding of the physical world so don't, like, quote me on the science here.
We're told that Aria doesn't obey the laws of physics the same way that Elegy does, that it is a completely different system that's hard to explain. But, being human, we can only grasp concepts that abide by the laws we understand, so I was considering an analogous explanation.
On one hand, as a sort of disclaimer, there might not BE any conservation laws, the system might be so vastly different that analogies cannot be made, and when a demon dies the magic just ceases to exist. That's kind of boring to speculate about though, SO
Our universe, Elegy in context, is made up of matter, energy, and space. Matter comes in different forms depending on the amount of energy within it: solid, liquid, gas, plasma, and other stuff above my pay grade to understand. Those main ones are what I'll be considering.
We humans are walking forms of energy, solids, and liquids. Sorry for that picture.
Aria, we're told, is magic. Dæmons are also magic. While we might immediately and instinctively think of magic as an energy, I think it's not illogical to compare it with matter in this fictional context. Why? For one, dæmons exist as a physical presence in Elegy, which means that magic, at least in Elegy, exists as a solid. In addition, dæmons need energy from human emotions to sustain their form and use their magic, similar to the way that we need calories (energy) to sustain our forms and use our bodies (matter).
So if we consider dæmons, and magic by extension, as a form of matter, we can think of them as different phases of matter.
Aria and dæmons are both made of magic, but they're also separate and distinct from each other, so we can conceptualize Aria as a gaseous form while dæmons exist as a solid within that gas.
So, what's this mean for conservation of arcana and what happens when a dæmon dies? I posit that the magic they consisted of returns to Aria in a "gaseous" form, conserving the amount of magic within both universes, but losing the sapience and physicality of its former solid state in the process. That magic can then be recycled in the system by eventually coalescing as a new dæmon.
Now, this doesn't really consider where Sovereigns fit. Maybe they're one of those forms of matter above my pay grade. Maybe they're even further outside of our of understanding and cannot have an analogous equivalent.
It also can lead us down a path to understanding that while dæmons are analogous to matter, Hush is analogous to dark matter. Familiar to Vega in one way, but completely alien and wrong, the opposite of what he should be.
