#setekh

[rukafais]

Once again, when faced with lots of unfamiliar designs, I return to the most effective way to draw them lots of times: shitposts.

[tunaze11x]

[syberfab]

the gang so far, I'm obsessed rn

[capricioussun]

Trying to figure out their faces…

[alabasterpickles]

Y’all ready for some REAL oc stuff?? Excellent cause I’ve got plenty

For the last couple weeks of the school term I’ve been pumping out exploratory sketches of the cast of my ya novel to get a better handle on how I’d like them to look

Have some drawings of Lilith at various stages of her life with all the people she knows and has known in the six thousand years she’s been alive!

(There’ll be a companion post with some stuff I couldn’t fit here)

[shayc]

[angoryt]

Doing a little art dump again.

I want to sketch out what Sannet looks like to me. And then I did the scene where Szeras shows up at solomnec in the silence and the storm.

The second image is just me goofing off, trying to find the way I like to draw Thaszar. My desire for putting necrons in pretty little dresses can never be quenched.

I had a hard time visualizing the clothes in Ghosts, other fanfic. So I just decided to illustrate them myself.

Below that one is a sketch of Obyron taking a nap on Nep’s chest ass the others are goofing around.

These two are very old and as you can clearly see unfinished. The first one is supposed to be the scene in severed where obyron and Zahndrekh are trying to figure out the riddle puzzle to get in to the core.

And the other one I made when the silence and the storm had a particular chapter released that made me emotional to the point of tears for the first time. Thanks Ghost 🫠👍

First one is just a reference I did for Imothk and the other one is my OC Cachet, they are a bit of a fashion geek. Don’t worry about the other fella up in the corner, they are now long gone, hopefully.

And down here below we have our favorite battle fleet armada necrons. I never got to see their full bodies in the play through of the game I saw, so I made the executive decision to try and imagine what their whole bodies look like on my own. I imagine Amarakun being pretty normal and uninteresting down there. And I decided that Zaa secretly has a little tail under a big skirt. Because as everyone know, all astromancers are cats to some degree. 

[ghostinthegallery]

I want to preface all of this by saying I am a Setekh anti, I am a hater eternally and forever, and no I don't see any irony in this.

That said...

Imagine being born into one of the most cut-throat societies imaginable. Life has no inherent value. Death is inevitable, close, and painful. Legacy and power are all you have, so pursue them at all costs if you are lucky enough to be born with access to those things.

Setekh was born with access to those things. And in his mind, played the game exactly how it was meant to be played. He gaslit, he gatekept, he girlbossed. He was model necrontyr nobility, and that must have eaten away at him. He probably believed everyone around him was just as duplicitous as he was, and he was 99% right. The only time he was wrong was Zahndrekh. Zahndrekh who was trusting and naive and who shouldn't have lasted five minutes in the "real world", military genius aside. He should have been eaten alive. He should have been punished for failing to adapt as Setekh had.

Except that didn't happen. Zahndrekh got all the glory, the planet, the hot bodyguard. He won without having to sacrifice his principles or his peace of mind. In fact won in part because of his ability to inspire loyalty and form the type of bond Setekh disdains (namely his bond with Obyron). And Setekh had a front row seat. He was passed over despite doing everything possible (including attempted assassination by giant carnivorous bugs!) to tear Zahndrekh down. How do you handle that? Realizing the world doesn't work the way you thought it did and you gave up any chance at peace or connection chasing a false goal?

Now, presumably Setekh went on to live some kind of normal life after Yama. Maybe he even stopped thinking about Zahndrekh and everything that happened, wrote it off as an anomaly. But then biotransference happens and every necron is reduced to some form of madness or obsession. And what does Setekh have to latch onto? An old grudge. An old wrong that he can make right. That is now the only thing tethering his mind to some semblance of sanity. All that hatred and jealousy and need to prove that he was right all along. Zahndrekh just hasn't gotten his comeuppance yet.

So he makes this plan to destroy Zahndrekh's world like Zahndrekh destroyed his (and get some powerful tech in the bargain). He's going to use the exact connection between Obyron and Zahndrekh that foiled him last time. Overcome both of them to restore his sense of order. But then that plan fails because no, love is fucking real and Setekh gave up any chance he ever had at getting it.

He is stuck in this tragic downward spiral. And it's particularly tragic because this type of bitter resentment is so real. He hates Zahndrekh because of what he represents, what he achieved, not because of anything Zahndrekh ever did to him. Raise your hand if you've met this person. Raise your hand if you've been this person. It is such an easy mental trap to fall into, hating a person because of how they challenge your view of the world.

Is Setekh "redeemable" or whatever? Can he change? Who knows. Love is real and it is powerful, but only if you choose it. Setekh has never chosen it. Not yet anyway.