#a mythological Un-Hyena. An Un-Jackal | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

oozeandgoo-art · 7 months ago

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no, by "weird" i mean "uncanny". i mean it's a "weird dog" in the same way one could describe a parrot as a "weird autoresponder". this is not Actually a dog any more than it is Actually a dead thing, but when it walks like a duck and winks and says "quack" clear as day, might as well call it a weird duck, no?

this guy was pretty strongly inspired by the character Coyote from Gunnerkrigg Court, who is also a weird coyote in the sense that he's some other thing, but he's called Coyote, and he looks like a coyote, and it's as good a presumed name as anything else. personally I wasn't impressed by the original comic nor its execution of the character, and it treads into territory I don't want to touch vis-a-vis trying to "respectfully" turn characters from Indigenous American mythology into characters for one's own storytelling and entertainment, but I liked the idea of a mischievous Not A Dog with magic powers and a knack for showing up just before everything else goes wrong lurking about in my creative repertoire, and I think I could do a character like GC's Coyote just as well as GC pulled it off, if not, frankly, better lol. never let it be said I do not create with ego first and skill second XD

i suppose by weird dog I could mean awesome weird dog, but [weird dog] comes first!

made a weird dog

#sorry for the essay lol i don't mean this in a 'how dare you say this' sort of way #i just love an excuse to get up on a soapbox #and this is a new character i'm cooking up so there's a lot more soup-per-capita vs concrete details thus far - but the Only actual #concrete detail i have is that they're a Weird in the sense of... like...#if you took the mythological concept of A Hyena really. or A Jackal Mythological Interpretation. and compared it to a real hyena or jackal #this is what you get when you subtract the two #a mythological Un-Hyena. An Un-Jackal #not the mythological figure nor the beast itself but something that treads in the cast shadows and cuts its shape from what is not shared #i would call it an UnDog but this is not the shadow between your dog and the mythological Man's Best Friend #this is a firelight watcher; this is a bone-snatcher who waits for your back to be turned. it sniffs the food in your hand and then bites #your fingers and leaves just to remind you that it is your friend by choice and only by choice and it will turn on you in a heartbeat if yo #give it cause. it has to be wild to have the dignity it has in my head and it has to be wild to have the sharpness #the only other concrete thing i have is that it passes from Alive to Dead and back with ease. It's a carrion beast. Simultaneously roadkill #and roadkill-eater and it only wears its flesh as long as it feels like it #<- i have been toying with using it/its pronouns as a Symbol Of Respect TM for a while and im probably gonna do that with this one #it's got better things to do than worry about the boundaries between human conceptions of gender and sex. look at it. it's dead and alive #at the same time and only acts one out by choice. this thing has access to the shrimp genders and probably only puts them on for fun #anyway thanks for the comment and the interest #i'm glad you like my awesome Weird Dog #i'm planning to animate something with it when i finish the essays i need to write for school #so i can show it stepping out of its skin and the way i imagine its eyes doing smudge-frame shit and appearing in transitions in a really #eerie unusual sort of way #can't see it in movement here because this is static so i just wanted to scribble the things down that i would remember about it #but i'm envisioning the eyes being sort of like the eyes in Felix Colgrave's legendary animation Double King #not tethered by anything except like the vague essence of what's inside #capable of coming out and rolling around like marbles #and maybe even acting like screws holding things in place. little pegs. 'Got my eye on you' taking on another meaning #i do want this to be a tongue-that-does-not-lie-but-certainly-misleads trickster after all #correction: just the eyes of the dead rat king

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