#Codi is planning to draw Mae ehen they get through his insane backlog

[autisticrosewilson]

here to ask about Spencer and Mae

pls may I have some knowledge on them 👀

YES!!! Okay so Mae'rot is my character, she's a part of a team of characters that came from me thinking about if there was a Lantern team that was full of magical girls! Spencer was made by @andi-dromeda and he's technically a part of the flash fam, but he spends most of his time with the Lanterns.

CW for Death, bugs, body horror, ect. My characters are freaks guys

Mae is a part of a made up species of fungus people and she's the black lantern! I did rewrite the lantern lore a little because I thought what they did with the Pink and Black Lantern's specifically were stupid and boring.

The Pulchra Putredo are a people that worship death, although they themselves cannot die in the traditional sense. See they inhabit the land of Pulput, a floating island that was all that's left of an older, long forgotten planet, home to a piece of the Black Lantern's reactor core. No one knows where the Pulchra originated from but the first recorded records were of them turning the dry barren soil into a bustling hub of foliage, this is because though their bodies breakdown they become a part of the land. Which makes Pulput a living planet crawling with the overgrown bodies of everything that's ever died there.

It's easy to see why they grew to revere the concept of death, as this beautiful unattainable thing that they all reach for with open arms. Despite how much they all love death because they have no true concept of mortality none of them can wield it.

Until Mae. See she was originally Kryptonian but when the Pulchra came to collect what was left of the planet, they found a lone baby girl. And this was exciting, because she was born from death, and while she would live a long time she could die. She WOULD die, eventually. They take her to their planet, very far from any sun at all, and make her one of them. They do this basically allowing their roots and mold and whatnot to spread to her, inside and out she is overtaken by moss and spores. She's raised by a family of Ink Caps, which are the first mushrooms to begin growing from her skin which is weakened by the lack of sunlight.

The Pulchra are also a hive mind species! They all have something of a mental link to each other and Mae is included in this, although she's born only linked to her family instead of the entire species. She has to manually collect the others by becoming infected by their spores, and she can give this link to others by giving them hers!

Because she's so far from any kind of sun she's very sickly and weak with almost none of her Kryptonian powers and very little connection to her roots, and she has no desire to explore it. Because she's always on death's door with her health the lantern core reacts to her but she can't control it, mostly it just overwhelms her with the voices of the dead when she's near it. She's almost like a prophet to the Pulchra as the spirits come from past, present, and future and they can give her messages that she passes on.

It's only when she's older that she gets her ring, she dies on an excavation into a planet's ruins and is reanimated by the ring after rot and decay has had time to set in. She's stronger now ironically, no longer shambling about half unconscious, although now she's being consumed by multiple insects from her planet (a great honor, if death is their holy spirit, the land is their father, and the insects are the son) and she needs to feed on dead things to survive.

Her hobbies include gardening, rock collecting, learning dead languages, and grave robbing! She's close with my Yellow and Pink lanterns, she has a crush on the Indigo, and she's got a homoerotic rivalry with the White lantern (of which I also changed the lore for because these are magical girls and I have a theme here).

She now has a lesser version of the core's powers, so while she can control ghosts it's only ones that have died recently. She can reanimate things but they'd just be mindless puppets, not truly alive. She can cause people to age/decay rapidly (usually this acts like a bad sickness) and she can manipulate shadows instead of light. Along with the flight, strength, and durability the rings give all their users. While near gamma radiation she can access her Kryptonian powers but doesn't really like them so she uses Kryptonite to weaken herself.

Is she a horrific mass of maggots and rot? Yes. Does this exclude her from a magical girl transformation or sparkly outfit? Of course not!! I'm actually so mad that all the lantern suits are so boring like you can literally make them look however you want and you all look the same. I know the meta reason is because who wants to draw that many different suits but I don't care, all my girls are slaying.

All of the girls have three core motifs and a mix of different aesthetics that I'd draw from if I had artistic skill. Mae's are plague doctors, ink, and fungus and she prefers looser baggier clothes to make room for all of the creatures and plants growing out of her skin. She would prefer not wearing shoes at all, but because she's one big contaminant she has to wear very thick gloves and boots when interacting with people of Earth, and she usually wears her mask too because her appearance is generally pretty off-putting.

The other Kryptonians...well let's just say they're not super fond of her, and she really doesn't like them. They're insistent that she's an abomination, something that needs to be fixed, mostly they just feel bad for her, for her whole existence. Mae doesn't take kindly to their pity, this is everything she's ever aspired to be. She feels equally bad for them! It must be terribly lonely, isolated within their own flesh and mind, islands onto themselves, unfathomable even to each other. It's her worst nightmare and she tries to avoid them where possible.

Her people are pacifists so she only uses her abilities defensively and honestly isn't much for combat anyway, she believes that death is a gift that should come to people through natural means only, but this changes the longer she's on the team. As her character progresses she gradually decides some people should have to earn their death, and she's the person who should make them. This is the only time she uses her rapid decay powers. She rarely uses the ghost powers as she doesn't like disturbing their rest but she can be convinced by people she's close to, so she usually relies on shadow manipulation during battles.

Growing up with a species that only communicates through a mental link means she never learned how to talk! Her ring usually speaks for her, although she eventually learns some ASL the longer she's on earth. It has the default AI voice at first but when she learns how to change it I think she'd sound like Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

I won't say too much about Spencer but he's one of the people she's closest to, and the only person on earth who shares the link with her and her family. They have an obsessive kind of queer platonic relationship, where although they love each other it's not explicitly romantic and there's definitely nothing sexual about it. Not in human terms at least, the Pulchra have sex and relationship dynamics the likes of which we couldn't comprehend. They're the definition of soulmates and unfortunately I am obsessed with them.