Final artwork of the year! It was mainly inspired by the "Blood-Soaked Petals" color palette from this post. The title reminded of Rose and Shadow from Kaitou Joker, so here we are :D I was also inspired by this French cover of Bad Apple cuz it looks cool and kinda gives me similar vibes to the twins, hehe.
I was inspired some time ago by the KJ Discord to make MLP designs for the cast. I'm not done with everybody I want to do for this, but I did have a... "fun" idea for Shadow that I wanted to draw out here. I'm gonna ramble more about these two below the cut as I've been thinking about this a lot more than I thought I would lol.
=========
For the species, I liked the idea from the KJ Discord where Rose was an Alicorn while Shadow was a Unicorn and ran with that here, hehe. I also wanted to hop on the MLP fandom's trend of giving unicorns cloven hooves like in traditonal depictions. I forgot that a lion's tail was also used in these depictions though, whoops— Not sure whether I'll keep that aspect here too or not, but if I do, let's just say that it's their Earth Pony genes changing a few things.
=========
In my version, Rose is given the name, "Century Rose." It's based on her being, of course, the Witch of Time, and it also references the binomial name of the Cabbage Rose which is "Centifolia Rosa." I didn't know that century roses were also an existing thing already, but hey! That's just another thing to add to the pile of references.
Rose's horns and hooves are a light cream color taken from the bow of her outfit. They also match with Shadow's darker golds. Her patterns are round with spots that look like butterflies and (hopefully) flower petals. They're also an inverse to Shadow's own patterns in terms of placement shape for fun parallels. I'm not entirely sure about the bangs and buns in her mane, but eh, they're alright! Maybe I'll fix them if learn how to draw manes better in the future.
=========
Meanwhile, Shadow here is named "Century Cyanus." I decided to break naming conventions a bit by keeping "Century" as the family name while placing it in the front since MLP doesn't really have consistent rules in that regard. Cornflower also had a similar looking binomial name of "Centaurea Cyanus" coincidentally enough which lets me keep "Cyan" in his name too. Shadow's patterns are loosely based on the petals of the cornflower, particularly in the places where the pattern splits into points. His horn and hooves are gold like his eyes so that I can add some variety and spread out the color a bit more.
Shadow's broken horn was inspired by 2 things. The first and more obvious one is Commander Tempest from the G4 Movie. Seeing that broken horn as something that can and has happened in canon, I just thought "Yeah, sure. Why not?" and did it. I also remember reading a fanart that described it along the lines of "a great tragedy for a unicorn," and I haven't got those words out of my head since then.
The second one is from the story of Charcoal Den's sona. It's only from a small portion mentioned in this video where one of his sona's horns breaks off and he starts wearing it as a necklace. Anyways back to mlp!Shadow, he uses the broken piece of his horn to construct Bloody Rain. As he comes from a line of powerful unicorns, he can still channel his magic into the broken piece albeit only in destructive yet concentrated bursts.
Breaking his horn off also helps me maintain a similar silhouette between Shadow and Joker in this au, and it also keeps Shadow's identity obscured from Joker before the official reveal.
=========
Extras:
I was originally planning of having the coat and mane colors just be the same solid color as the OGs' hair, but where's the fun in that? hehe
I haven't drawn MLP ponies in a long time, and I didn't really study how to draw them back then either. Best way I can describe drawing them now is like drawing not-cats. They are pretty similar to cats, but with some very noticeable differences for sure.
Rose had an alternate color palette where her mane was the color of her OG's hair while her body had darker shades of color. It was supposed to give more inverse parallels between her and Shadow, but I didn't really like how it was looking and went with the matching color value palettes instead. I might revisit the idea tho in the future
Shadow had the alternate name of "Scion Sentry." "Scion" was chosen since it sounds similar to "cyan." It also has 2 meanings: 1) "a descendant of a wealthy, aristocratic, or influential family"; and 2) "a detached living portion of a plant (such as a bud or shoot) joined to a stock in grafting and usually supplying solely aerial parts to a graft." The first is fits in with how his and Rose's lineage would be considered a powerful one, and the second fits with the accidental plant theming. "Sentry" essentially references how Shadow acts as Rose's protector, almost serving as a "knight" to Rose's "princess" status here.
