#i consider it body horror but like

[heavenlyantennas]

ultrakill oc content except I super redesigned her so shes barely recognizable

[solar-eclipsed]

The Birth of a Star

(The Birth of a Ghost)

[tekatonic]

huh, Princess Elise is looking a lil different today

[mumblingsage]

The first piece of writing by Octavia Butler I ever read was "Bloodchild." Followed by her author's note which - don't fully take my word for it, because I might be misremembering, but my prominent impression is that while the reader is reeling from the alien-reproduction-body-horror, Butler seems to have found this story quite pleasant and interesting (the Wikipedia article for Bloodchild and Other Stories backs me up a bit, with some whiplash between the story's background and critics' takeaways).

Then I devoured the rest of the collection, which also has some damn good stuff in it.

Anyway, if you have never read any Octavia Butler...I think you should also begin with "Bloodchild."

[veinsfullofstars]

✨ The wizard and the jester ✨

(ID: Kirby series fanart sketches of Marx and Magolor in humanized form, with some Marxolor shenanigans tossed in for funsies, plus one guest appearance by Kirby. More detailed descriptions in Alt Text. END ID)

Sketches started some time in 2021, finished 10/28/24.

[moshaeu]

you had always said red was my color

[regular-gnome]

hey..

at what point do collectors opt to turn things from puppets to scrolls? I feel like turning an entire living creature into [a piece of paper] is very complicated, while turning them into simple puppets is easier because they keep all the same parts, just simplified and wood?

It is! It depends on the person's proficiency and understanding of the mechanism regarding when and how they change the creature. Once someone gets good at it, the creature can be transformed into a lifeless object without it dying in the process, and they will move on to more complex and efficient ways.

The way I see it, archiving is a form of information compression and storage—and there is A LOT of information. When looking at Earth creatures we have everything from single-cell bacteria to whales that range up to 100 quadrillion cells, all with different sizes. The smallest single-cell critter is 0.3 μm, while the largest single cell is an ostrich egg that can get to 18 cm. So it's not just noting "a cell"—there's also a lot of information about the cell content, size, the DNA, current water, and oxygen levels, what protein it contains and how much. Then there are spatial dimensions. (While we can consider there being more, especially in fiction, I’m sticking to three; trying to visualize four fills me with frustration and existential dread xD) Every cell has its place in space in relation to the others, and all the contents' relations are also important. If, suddenly, all histones materialize inside a mitochondria instead of the nucleus, we can have a problem. Additionally, physical and chemical processes gotta be considered. There's electricity powering our brains, hearts, running nerves, air in airways traveling to lungs, chemical signals traveling between synapses that also need to be accounted for. So, you have all the contents in space, their vectors, and building blocks. Thats a ton to save. This information has to be compressed to be preserved in an organized manner while also remaining lossless so that when returned to its original shape, it's as it was. Not even mentioning that in intelligent beings, there are also minds to take care of. Jellyfish might be fine after 100 years in a static void, but a human? Yhhhhh.

I think the mechanism would work by saving information in intangible magic and assigning it to a physical medium—be it a statue, doll, book, or scroll. If it is physical and can carry information, it can be used. We can argue the mind is part of the soul, or it is a biochemical process, but the fact is nobody really knows for sure what it is and Im not a theolog, so for the sake of this universe, I'll say it's something that occupies the same space magic does and is influenced by chemical processes, meeeeaning it can also be tricked by them. And the magic.

The first degree of preservation would be spells that only change the material but keep all shapes and info in place. This wouldn't require much thought while executing and could be "automated" or worse, taught to mortals (if they have enough magic to power the spell), like petrification or changing someone into wood, metal, or any other solid material. It's not perfect, if the structure is damaged, the spatial information is damaged too. Breaking is one thing, but imagine if the statue melts.

The next step would be assigning objects with some compression and change, like toys and dolls. I feel like there would need to be a system like a content library, so not every single atom is saved each time, but chemical structures like nucleotides in DNA (the ATGC thingies) would just have a shortcut. Larger repeating patterns could also be assigned their own id to save data, and it would slowly stack up. While things are written in intangible magic form and anchored to the medium, the medium can be somewhat customized, like the decorations the Collector added to the dolls. The mind, running in controlled magic, can also be affected, as we saw with Collie trying to scare them and Luz’s dream. On the spell keeping the preserved critter stable has a link to what shortcut it uses so with countless diffrent worlds and structres it wouldnt mix up.

Then we go further into compression, reducing size and dimensions until we reach a point where one axis is almost entirely removed, and we end up with a scroll. Then there are other things—creatures saved as amber miniatures, snow globes, scrolls, or drawings, sometimes purely to annoy the sibling that has to deal with the creature in unhandy form. A more permanent binding would be in a book that can contain a bunch of different animals. Rebinding for long-term preservation is the Curator’s job.

Looking at Earth creatures, eucariotic life shares ancestry with some ancient bacteria that decided to rebel and started to cooperate, so we share similarities even with distant organisms in some strutures since they come from each other. So when it comes to preserving whole populations with relations, the library of compression doesn’t have to be separate for every single animal or plant. For each section of the archive, there would be a common library of building blocks, and scrolls being somewhat separate carrying the exact instructions for body arrangement and the soul/mind/the part that makes them alive attached.

Next is unpacking the information. I think this requires the ability to interpret and recreate what was saved that mortals lack. While they couldn't really unpetrify others, a collector could (assuming the mind hadn’t deteriorated into a husk). In the case of an automated spell, I think it would result in a very lossy transmutation—like a jpg losing pixels, the creature might lose like heart funtion. The Collector's spell also looked temporary or incomplete since an influx of other types of magic (like in Amity or Raine’s case) was able to push back on it. That might also be why they were conscious in the form they were in. Not meant for long just enough to take them to archive in normal conditions. When a creature is heavily compressed, it needs external force to rebuild, as it's essentially written fully in magic. That’s what I think happened to the Owl Beast. Lilith released it from the medium, but since it wasn’t fully rebuilt, it being a magic form attached itself to a magic source.

SO YEAH, its a process that takes quite a while for them to master and it comes with experience. But when experience is based on life it often makes it hard to practice so those with less empathetic approach master it faster. Thanks for the ask! I was dying to talk about that for such a long time and that was a perfect thing to organise thoughts

[silvershadow1711]

CW: blood, gore

Y'all see my vision, right?

[fallloverfic]

I know at one point it's shown Laios was walking behind Kabru (so he could see Mithrun's head, upper torso, and arms), but... given we only see part of their trying to figure a way out of the maze house, how long was Laios staring pointedly (and longingly) at Mithrun's ass before coming up with an excuse (the story about silk) to get Kabru to let him do this?

[whereismyhat5678]

Me when I actually draw Kaufmo:

👁️💗👁️

Anyways- did some doodles of the silly 🫶🫶💕💕

And Tw: for body horror 👇 (It’s him abstracting..)

(If the quality looks like shit I am so sorry, for some reason IT ISN’T NOT BLURRING THE LINEART AND I HATE IT‼️‼️ >:(()

[chimerahyperfix]

isat everyone loops au but it’s very much a horror thing and it’s in like a conga line type formation. Based on the concept of saving the game lol. Only one person is looping and the LAST person looping is ‘Loop’ [aka they take their roles, its referred 2 as redacting in mmy notes as it basically removes them from the world entirely.] The timeloop goes through everyone, one at a time, all in a row, over and over. If your redacted you remember, until the next save happens and THEY redact and you aren’t anymore and you forget. Yeah the plot’s still 90% the same. Yeah the world kinda forms around the empty hole whoever is redacted has left. Loop is the only one who remembers everything and interacts with whoever is redacted and like…. is tthe reason the save stars exist? which makes them, technically, a secondary antagonist. Sorgy loop :[

oh to be in a cycle of love and hate and life and death and you! can’t escape! no one can! And you loop, and everyone loops, and it’s ssuffering all the way down!!!!!!!! rahhhh rahhhhhh

bonus redacted sif as an example. Haiiiii

[tornrose24]

Well wasn't that a delightful surprise–one of the new monsters in Poppy Playtime looked almost exactly like me! So of course I had to draw myself out as Miss Delight.

(With a bonus @artistcaptainbendy )

[thedeafprophet]

i think we could do with some more disability symptom representation thats not for a character thats intended to be a criminal/antagonist and not using the symptoms for body horror shock content

[keeps-ache]

blood of the covenant

[luminary-of-the-marz]

Body horror warning for the parachutist (uncensored under the cut)

I finished guys!! The parachutist or Roger and Maurice are my fave to come out of this

[maria-aegyptiaca2]

The substance was Not Good and maybe even Bad…