Friday Art Attack

Zuggtmoy, in my esteem, bounced back and forth between being a truly Lovecraftian entity, and being about equivalent to Ursula the Sea-Witch.  Love/hate certainly describes her.  It helps, though, when we get some decent material to work with; some good Giger-esque art, maybe, and the crap that she's up to in Out of the Abyss, which remains pretty good stuff, still.

There's a kind of exotic Orientalism or chinoiserie vibe to fantasy sometimes.  Sometimes this can be cool.  Sometimes it's merely an expression of nihilism or hate for "lily white" European peoples and their culture.

If you're going to have exotic foreign fantasy influences, it had better be savage, barbaric splendour, like the Moguls or something, in my experience.  Otherwise, what's the point?

My rediscovery of the medusa as a D&D monster type, and my integration of medusae as a lesser reflection of the actual Medusa (and the snake-men, yuan-ti, or whatever else you want to call them) as a side effect of that was a long time coming.  But it shouldn't have been.  One of the three pillars of Western civilization is the Greco-Roman heritage, after all.

That said, one of the other three pillars of Western civilization is Christianity, and I was very reluctant to admit that into my fantasy for years.  For reasons that, in retrospect, aren't entirely clear to me.

I'm not really a fan of the Amazon warrior archetype that much.  Especially as it's been enabled by soyboy beta fantasy fans who truly imagine that they can be beat up by some warrior woman.  Heck, for many of them it might even be true.

Sigh.

That said, speaking of Greco-Roman tradition, it's not like Athena and Artemis don't represent some... atypical female archetypes, I suppose. The third pillar of Western civilization is the European nations; specifically the Celtic and Germanic peoples who underwent the crucible that created the Hajnal Line.  And they've got their warrior woman archetypes too, I suppose.

Fantasy Naboo!  Speaking of Greco-Roman, the golden age that's got a vaguely Greco-Roman architectural vibe to it is a classic, right?

I'm not really sure what's going on here.  But speaking of Lovecraftian, that's some bad business.

This Destiny race, whatever they're called (I should know, but I can't remember.  My kids play Destiny, not me) replicates a bunch of ideas I already had.  Sigh.  Not that when I came up with it it was all that original, of course. 

What the devil is going on here?  I'm not sure, but don't you want to know?  I do!

UNDEAD!  I just can't get enough.  With apologies to Vince Clark.

Church Rock, in southern Utah.  I can't tell you how many times I've driven past this formation over the years, especially when we used to take regular roadtrips from Texas to SLC to visit extended family.  It's one of my favorite rock formations still, especially standing as it does as an island in an otherwise rather flat basin.

See?  I remembered to throw in my scenery image too!