dara | ru/eng | adult | don't believe in sending death threats over pixels
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Spookyscaryfox - Between Lions And Men - Tumblr Blog
It is my pleasure to finally be able to share with you the project that I've been working on for the past 2 years!
For my final project for my masters degree, I decided to create a visual development artbook for an animated movie adaptation of the Leviathan trilogy by Scott Westerfeld. This 100+ page long book contains all the research that I put into this project, from sketches and concept art to final designs and illustrations, as well as explanations of my creative process.
I am aware that the timing is not ideal, but I promise that this has absolutely nothing to do with the upcoming Netflix adaptation! That adaptation wasn't announced until after I'd completed my project, and I had absolutely no idea that it was happening. This is a fully fan-made project, and has no affiliation with Scott Westerfeld whatsoever.
All that being said: I hope you enjoy! This was a very long labour of love, and I am so so happy to finally share it with you all. These books hold a very special place in my heart, and it is my sincerest hope that my work manages to do them justice.
LINK TO THE COMPLETE PDF
whoever decided to start implementing ads on here that automatically unmute and cut off any music app you might have on in the background as you scroll by should be hunted for sport
the theme is same faces
(ID in alt text)
bonus + design notes:
sparknotes:
tridentarii: the building block was "lions" (corona's mane of hair and king vibes + ianthe's scar lionking swagger) but i think i lost that plot at some point. regardless peep the earrings for symbols of their twisted mutualism. also they have dimples <3 bc on corona they're perfect and on ianthe (when she smiles wide enough) they're sickeningly dissonant
the nonas: harrow has curls bc i think the only thing funnier than saddling a nun who's been shaving her head since infancy with fast-growing hair is for that hair to be horrible messy springy curls that are barely spared from frizz by the sheer grease #bathingisn'tsafeformern. please also applaud my restraint in adhering to canon and not giving nona dimples. she deserved them
the sixth: came to me fully formed honestly. palamedes calls camilla beautiful enough for the alexandrites so i just let my heart and sapphism take the wheel here. for pal when i first read gtn i visualized him very differently but other artists made such a compelling case for scruffy pal that now i can't see him any other way
the second: also let my heart take the wheel here. wanted to draw a man carved out of hardwood so i did <3 at the caliber of necromancer that g1d is i know he probably wouldn't have so much scarring but the heart wants what it wants (cool factor). in my head and in my heart they're from wake
naberius: i don't have anything to say in my defense. i rewatched teen beach movie, found the perfect face claim and set the wheels of fate in motion. i think babs is hot the way a ken doll is hot, y'know? it takes yanny piloting his flesh mecha for him to be gender (<- testimonial from my masc nb friend)
...you know, jean has the means to take over in absence of riko and kevin too.
he's the number three in the court, he's a property of moriyamas, sure, but so is kevin. he plays excellently when beaten everyday. remove riko as an active threat to his wellbeing that he can't remove and what does that leave? tetsuji would beat the hell out of him, sure, but he did that to riko when he overstepped too. tetsuji does not give a shit about dynamics as long as the team provides the results.
the obstacle for jean's takeover is the grayson and rape that keeps circulating among the rumors. if jean eliminates grayson as the only one rapist left on the team and somehow extinguishes the rumors, he has a free run.
I don't think he would want to be the captain though. too much exy bullshit. but being the captain would mean there's no one higher than him on hierarchy=no one to hold power over his head aside from tetsuji.
I feel like fox AU's where Kevin and riko leave to Palmetto together are Jeans villain origin.
Those two fuckers who shaped his life into what it is now dare to just say actually bye and fuck off???? Just like that ?????
He will hunt them for sport if you thought Riko was bad wait for Jean as he takes over nest. Fucking holiday break but it's Jean dragging them back to evermore
do you ever think about how g1deon was an engineer and how it almost never gets brought up and how a lot of the jokes about him are how he's a huge mass of muscle and how he has no personality and
had to see it with my own two eyes.
yep.
No Riko did not had the power to end up cycle of abuse anyone who thinks that need go back and read up books on abuse dynamics not re read aftg for third time. Riko was groomed and shaped by his environment, never loved never cared for, you want this character to start witting poetry in language he never even heard
“Teacher, may I ask a question? What does it mean to love God?”
Thinking about Judith Deuteros, told that her Blood of Eden captors are debating letting her die from peritonitis without pain relief:
"I thank the Prince Undying my God, merciful in justice and gentle in remembrance, for this being so. I haven’t thanked God enough over my life. It always seemed incredibly sentimental. And I didn’t wish to presuppose his interest."
About Ianthe, who doesn't pray, but who
“studied what happened when the Lord our Kindly God took our dead and dying Houses and brought them back to life, all those years ago … what price he would have had to pay."
And yet, who will ultimately turn on her mentor to save god himself.
Abigail, who doubts:
“I firmly believe that the Kindly Emperor knows nothing of that undiscovered country. He never claimed omnipotence. I longed my whole life to give him my findings”
And yet amidst that doubt, even in death, believes the god whose servant brutally murdered her is good and prays for help to the man who never claimed omnipotence:
"Pent even murmured, “The King over the River is good”
“Oh, God,” she heard Abigail say. “God, please help me.”
About Silas, a child raised in vengeful fundamentalism to exploit his cavalier, and yet who cannot fathom the possibility that god would ask the brutality of Lyctorhood of him:
"I understand that if the Emperor and King Undying came to me now and asked me why I was not a Lyctor, I would fall on my knees and beg his forgiveness, that any of us had ever failed this test. May I be burnt one atom at a time in the most silent hole in the most lightless part of space, Lord—Kindly Prince—should I ever contemplate betraying the compact you appointed between him, and you, and me.”
And Harrow, the product of the murder of 200 children in the name of preventing the death of god, who desperately asks god what it means to love him:
“Decent dinner and a bottle of average rosé. Maybe a movie. I’m not picky,” he said.
i respect the hell out of tasmuir character work but don't fully understand it and that's exactly the reason why i do not read and write fiction for the locked tomb.
it goes like this: i read book. i digest. i scream into the sky. i go on my phone to commiserate with other people who were personally victimised by her writing. i open ao3. read the premise for fic. go "nope" and close the tab. i open the note app on my phone to write. i try to grasp what exactly makes gideon gideon and harrow harrow. i fail.
i am used to characters made up of two maybe three layers. like a cake, there are tiers and the most i had consumed had like, three things going on.
gideon is a fucking monstrosity of 55 tier cake with different fillings and covered in frosting. harrow is worse. camilla is unknowable for me like macarons or shu. palamedes barely makes sense. how the fuck do i make you, i scream when trying to write a single fucking au post, like i am making souffle instructed by french pastry website. the recipe requires me to get WHAT? what else do you want besides saffron, my fucking blood?
one of the best gideon moments hands down is when, post battle with new lyctor ianthe, she finds out that dulcinea and palamedes are sort of exes and she LIES DOWN ON THE GROUND ABOUT IT AND GROANS FOR FIVE WHOLE MINUTES. everyone is like “gideon get up” “gideon it’s not a big deal” and she is like literally i’m going to end it all. this is so embarrassing for me and palamedes must hate me (cam has told her four times this is Not True) i must go make things right with him immediately. babygirl there’s a feral infant proto-god who just consumed the soul of her 1950s greaser chewtoy sprinting around canaan house you HAVE to change your priorities. and yet she won’t and she doesn’t. i love her so bad
Jean Moreau is like. And don’t shoot me for this. As a character he’s what happens when the “sold to one direction as a teenager” concept really really does not pan out
the usamerican concept of generations worked exactly once, kinda, a little, and since then people have been trying really hard to insist that it's a universal principal
office siren kevin….all the blood has gone from my brain and has rushed to my-
kevin can yuo. bend over and get this filefor me
FUCKING HATEEEEEEEEEEEE FANDOM. like i love fandom but i HATE FANDOM. HARROWHARK IS NOT YOUR PATHETIC WET CAT SHE’S NOT A GREMLIN SHE’S NOT YOUR LITTLE MEOW MEOW. STOP IT RN. SHE’S AN INCREDIBLY CAPABLE NECROMANCER AND AN AMAZINGLY INTELLIGENT PERSON WHO JUST HAPPENED TO BE PUT IN AN INCREDIBLY TOUGH SITUATION. she’s fucking 18 y’all. she did what she could and do you know what? she did well for being completely out of her depth and EIGHTEEN GOD FUCJING DAMMIT. i hate it when characters get boiled down to one fandomable aspect of themselves especially in a fandom with such prolific writers and artists (that’s you!) it literally happens with every character. ianthe is not your cool suave boyfriend she’s a desperate young woman. pyrrha is not your dom mommy she’s just been put into a situation where she is surrounded by children. dulcie? guess what: she exists. gideon isn’t a golden retriever silly boy she’s a complex and capable person. gideon the first isn’t some angry dog he’s loyal to his brother that killed him twice over. paul is a cool and interesting character that i want to see more of. I FUCKING HATE THE FANDOMIZATION OF CHARACTERS JESUS CHRISTTTTTTTTTTT KILL ME NOWWW ACTUALLY GOINT INSANE. anyway rant over sorry i dont have any friends that have read tlt so i have to resort to going insane on anon
this was a fun surprise to receive. that aside i Do agree with you it seems very much like the nature of fandom to fall into stereotypes and tropes for characters because its easier to make content when there is a type of script to follow + its more effort to always dissect things and rebuild them for every au scenario. alas everything is always nicer when you can make your own little circle of people to discuss with
“The stone corrupts all those who wield it, it is fueled by their ambitions and dreams. So we need someone with no ambitions, no dreams, someone who doesn’t care about what the future holds for themselves. That’s why we found you.”
Part II of the perfume series.
Nicky:
That man does not give a single fuck if a perfume is for women man or Unix, he likes what he likes period.
I see him as a sweet and fruity perfume guy and I can imagine him with more than one.
One I can see for daily wear is mugler angel nova in the evening or for clubbing I could see him with lust for sun from Juliet has a gin.
I can also imagine that Erik gifted him something like boss orange.
Seth:
Axe Bodyspray, and too much of that.
Matt:
Matt is a rich boy, so he will wear more expensive perfumes, but not like Allison in a "I want the best" way but more in a "oh that smells nice what do you mean 200$ is expensive" kind of way.
I see Matt with like a woody clean scent with maybe a bit of green.
Examples would be xerjoff nio or parfums de Marly Perseus.
Kevin:
While from vibe alone he would peg me as someone who would spend time on something like perfume, I don't think his exy brain allows it.
I think he will want to smell clean and sophisticated for appearance sake, but he will not spend a lot of time.
I could also imagine him going with a brand who used him for advertisement.
I could see him in something like Paco rabanne invictus or parfums de Marly Percival.
Renee:
I take her shoes meine who doesn't take it too seriously, but will get joy out of trying new things.
I see her with perfumes with stranger notes, but still firmly rooted in the wearable area.
I think she is quite versatile but will maybe have 3 perfumes max at the time.
Perfumes I could see her with are yes I am by cacharel, Maison margiela matcha meditation or issey miyake l'eau d'issey.
Andrew:
Bow Andrew, with everything he does, is very intentional with perfume.
I don't see him as someone who will take that decision lightly and I definitely think he is someone with a signature scent.
He will spend money on that and he will not be afraid to go into niche territory.
I could imagine tobacco notes but I would also firmly put him with sweeter gourmand fragrances.
Something I could imagine on him is Montale Arabians Tonka or something like bdk gris charnel.
Please comment if you want someone else from the series✨
i really need tlt asoiaf and aftg sideblogs huh
🗣️ (also sorry this got long, turns out i have thoughts) so like riko is one of the weirdest fandom cases i've ever seen. i've been in fandoms where characters who commit actual war crimes and genocide are badass babes or uwu soft bois, and even spoiled mafia brats who commit terrible crimes against the heroes for daddy's attention that get love and redemption. it's so weird to see just how isolated from all that riko is to me.
i do think it's partly how aftg is written, and that's also partly because niel's pov is not at all forgiving of riko, while is entirely forgiving of people like andrew. but i also think it's because of how riko himself is written. he's one of these characters that's better on paper than he is in the book to me. because he's never presented as smart enough to fall into the magnificent bastard trope where everyone applauds how devious his plans are, but he's not outright hammy enough to just be a fun read, he doesn't even get the same stupidly dramatic flare as andrew. and while we're told he's powerful and doing dangerous stuff, he's presented on page, more often than not, as a petulant child that neil is just done with or a guy who likes to torture people who neil is also done with. neil is never actually scared of riko, or even particularly threatened by him, and i think that hurts him and makes his position in the narrative weaker. especially when nora is trying to play him as a villain and a threat in a mafia story rather than a good old fashioned rival in a sports drama. for example, his first impression on the kathy show should live up to the hype of this imposing charismatic villain who broke kevin's hand, but instead loses him temper, forgets all of his media training and lets a nobody like neil goad him into losing control of the interview, and then his payback, things like shoving neil around and seth's death, are basically brushed off because neil doesn't really care that much. it's not given the weight to be a seriously omg this guys a threat first impression. and this isn't uncommon, lots of media hamstrings their villains at the start by making sure we know the main character is too sassy for them and can humiliate them, without thinking about how weak that can make the villain seem. it feels sometimes like nora wanted riko to be this chess master villain or tragic child who's lashing out at the world, without committing to it fully to either, or was just not an experienced enough writer to have known how to write either of those things in the pov of someone who hates riko's guts, which is understandable, writing is hard and that sort of nuance takes practice, especially if you just go by the books and not the extra content, and i do wonder how differently nora would have portrayed riko if she rewrote the main trilogy now with presumably a lot more practice under her belt. in the end riko ends up in this weird grey area to me where i understand why he's not popular, given he has none of the usual obvious traits that fans like to latch onto when redeeming a villainous character, and even the ones that are there are glossed over pretty quickly because of neil's pov, and a lot of his more interesting pieces are on paper not actively presented in the book, and not everyone reads super deep, but i also don't understand the amount of hate. i have literally never seen a character in any other fandom i've been in have this much fandom wide hatred.
See I have nothing to add here because you single handedly dropped the best analysis of Riko's character in the series I had pleasure to read so far and summed up all my feelings about why and what of the fandom. If the goal was to write a character that is impactful yet easy to hate then that goal was achieved but for me it real takes away form the magnitude of feelings Riko could evoke in reader and questions he could provoke in narrative if he was given bit different presentation that woudl still align with the lore we already have.
Do you ever just think about how the headboard on Kevin's bed on the Nest doesn't budge. Of all the hints about what his life there was like that's the one that gets to me the most because it's so deliberate. Because even though he's probably physically stronger than Riko or at least evenly matched, Kevin wouldn't fight back. But he wasn't given the choice to anyway
honestly i think putting neil in kevin’s side of the room is such a telling choice during the castle evermore scenes. we spend so much of the first and second book hearing about how much kevin fears his so-called family, their haunting of the narrative as bloodthirsty hounds who can sniff out his fear, and when we actually get to finding out why that is we see it from someone who was immediately shoved into kevin’s old place. riko wasn’t just hurting neil because he wanted to (“i’m going to enjoy hurting you just as much as i enjoyed hurting kevin”), he was making sure neil knew he was inferior by putting him in direct contact with the roles kevin and jean played in the nest, using him as a substitute for the one that got away. neil gets a speedrun of some of the worst moments of kevin’s life, and he gets not a single breathing moment for it before he has to be shoved back into exy, like kevin was
i wouldn’t dare presume nora sakavic’s intentions on anything at this point, but i like the idea that neil’s stay at evermore was supposed to tell us all we needed to know about kevin’s time there, without kevin ever having to actually recount the years (he wouldn’t, even if he could): that it was horrifying, and that being in his shoes will never be as glamorous as neil previously thought. i like the breaking of neil’s expectations for kevin; i like how it makes neil realize the life kevin led was not better. and that’s the point, isn’t it? when neil is lying in kevin’s bed, handcuffed to kevin’s headboard, his legs pinned under kevin’s only friend, getting hurt by kevin’s brother, that’s what neil realizes: this is not better. it might be different than life on the run, but it is not better.
Usually I want to avoid discourse at all costs but like,,, if I don't say this once I'll explode
Riko is the prime example of the "I was treated this way so I'm going to treat others this way" abused to abuser pipeline.
Andrew is the prime example of the "I was treated this way so I refuse to treat others this way" abused to not abuser pipeline.
(And even those two above statements are dis-including nuance that I don't have time to dissect)
Every other character seems to lie somewhere on the spectrum of this idea. Neil lies closer to where Andrew lies. Grayson lies closer to where Riko lies. Etc etc. And their positions on that spectrum are not fixed points but rather dynamic positions based on their choices made every day of their lives. Choice and agency and yadda yadda
All this back and forth about whether or not acknowledging the truth that Riko was abused erases the truth that Riko was an abuser is just missing the fundamental truth that I honestly think is Andrew's whole main Principle Of Life:
Everyone, no matter how kind they seem, is capable of the greatest atrocities. It just depends on what might push them to that point and how much they resist the temptation when brought to it. And everyone, no matter how fucked up they seem, could fall or have fallen prey to the greatest atrocities of others. Because "the shit people did to me" and "the shit I do to others" is not a fucking linear graph with a one to one ratio in any fucking configuration. People get what they get and it's not about "deserving". And people do what they do and whether they're held accountable follows the same logic as above. The universe is apathetic about human morals and humans are biased and fallible and easily manipulated when we try to uphold and enforce our morals in its stead - and humans don't even universally agree on morals in the first place so it's a fucking mess from the start.
And honestly, sometimes those people who don't grasp this idea are like Jeremy "But they're your parents, they're supposed to love you" Knox. That's a sentiment of morality, not an observation of how reality actually plays out. I see the best you are capable of and I see the worst you are capable of but I expect nothing because I don't have perfect foresight, I don't have perfect information, nor can I read minds.
Riko was a victim of abuse. Riko was a perpetrator of abuse. These two truths exist in harmony and cannot be separated. Whatever you feel or think about him after that is your fucking business and exists as separate from those two truths because it is born from you and not from Riko or any truths regarding him.
"Hurt people hurt people" is TRUE and "You'll never know the violence it took to be this gentle" is TRUE but not all truths manifest in all people but that doesn't make them less true!!! It just makes humans the canvas of infinite possibilities each born from the same finite palette of colors!
But at that point we're talking about nuance and discourse doesn't like nuance and also these characters aren't real people in the first place so imma shut up now I guess
the idea of katelyn’s family not liking aaron is really interesting. aaron views katelyn as a way to get that normal life he so desperately wants, a way to even momentarily escape his family’s insanity. but even though he views katelyn as a solace, her family doesn’t like him. for good reason, i mean he was an ex drug addict who killed a guy, but still, it stings him. now he has to face the idea that maybe even though he wants a normal life more than anything, maybe that life doesn’t want him. it also adds depth to katelyn, making her have to choose between two different kinds of people.
Have you ever met a person with such a high sense of empathy it circles right back down to no empathy at all? Because the truth is you cannot be impartial to every side and still care. You will tell a person like that how you were wronged and they will understand you, but at the same time, they'll try to convince you of your own wrongs in the situation because they can't help but look at it from all perspectives. It's just a different kind of not listening.
Anyway. Renee Walker.