tell me about your choices for the tarot troll signs........ im stalking your artfight to remember which one is which again- the world one i get, obviously astrological terra, though because of that im surprised you didnt use sol for the sun, seems like the magician has it on their forehead instead? the devil has some sort of opposing forces thing going on... the rest of them im clueless. sorry if this is a bit much im passionate about tarot but i am a bit rusty on their individual meanings
what a great question :) unfortunately very boring answers inbound hahaha.
my mission with these designs was to capture what was iconic about the artwork associated with each card, rather than necessarily to address their esoteric meaning, so the signs largely reflect that. they are abstractions of what is depicted on the card in the same way a constellation only very abstractly represents the thing it is named after (TOTALLY DELIBERATE CONCEPTUAL PARALLEL). in the case of the hanged man and the hermit i found the silhouettes of those characters strong enough that i went for straightforwardly gestural depictions of them in symbol. but temperance (gold)'s is a pictograph of two drinking vessels overflowing for instance. the solar disc is just on their forehead cus i noticed it in the card art and thought it worked for a psychic character like a goldblood LOL
there are a few cases where i was so uninspired i just adapted a symbol that is literally on the card. see: strength and the empress. i had a particularly hard time finding anything on the empress card at all that was interesting enough to adapt into a fantroll design. SORRY. first ever female character i have completely failed to be compelled by despite repeated attempts...
outside of the motifs common to each caste i tend to avoid using established symbology as anything more than a starting point for fantroll symbols. it's been so long i don't even remember if the world's sign looking like the symbol for planet earth was intentional LMAO i guess it probably was though. but i don't know if i really have a proper justification for this approach. i guess it's like any other part of a character design in that if i ever felt like i had drawn something that someone else was just as likely to come up with then i probably haven't pushed the design hard enough. that said i think i am particularly irrational and neurotic about the idea of one of my trolls having the same sign as someone else's fantroll who isn't even in the same caste LOL like THAT'S NOT HOW SIGNS WORK. THAT COULD NEVER BE CANON. no doubt i picked this up when when i first found out about that art project giving symbols to every single constellation and i was naturally like wow, this would be really great for my homestuck oc! and then subsequently discovered that literally everyone had already had that idea. that will never happen to me again... anyway /rant /vent /traumadump
specifically for the sun card i wanted to avoid any symbol that seemed particularly obvious. cus what i like about the zodiac symbols is that they're so abstract that they don't really depict anything at all, but when you know what they're SUPPOSED to be you can kind of squint your eyes and see it. like scorpio is clearly not a picture OF a scorpion but you can see why it represents what it does. so i didn't want the symbol representing the sun to be anything we would already traditionally recognise as a pictograph of the sun. i don't know if it even would have occurred to me to use the alchemical symbol for the sun, but i think i basically arrived at the same IDEA as the solar disc even if my conclusion wasn't identical. and i think there's a certain in-universe sense to approaching things this way too, because if you were a troll and all the trolls around you had abstract symbols it would be weird if you were just walking around wearing a picture of the sun right? like, you're not The Sun Guy. you're just a guy. i mean you ARE the Sun Guy but you don't know it. the fact that you're the Sun Guy is a secret that nobody is ever supposed to call attention to
