#kind of meandering directionless definitely need to take a break from this project bc

[ketavinsky]

here we’ll dance, in this dark place...

oop, here’s my first venture into painting my gods in all their weird glory. it’ll be a long time before i can accurately depict any of the eldritch maximalist nonsense that day and night have got going on, but anyways: here’s sublime, the eldest of the new divinities, your local sleazy club promoter, that one fucking guy, etc. a bit of writing + some rambling under the cut!

sublime is the eldest son of night, and was modelled in night’s image. as night Himself is afflicted by the same inability to create anything of any originality, same as all the other old gods, sublime is almost a carbon copy of night in His youth. (think around the ming dynasty, during the perihelion phase of Their rule.)

after night’s marriage to dawn, and prompt divorce, night experiences a great deal of something that we’ll call shame and totally renounces all His creations prior to His marriage. 

His second son, scherzo, is modelled in dawn’s perfect image -- or, you know, as a caricature of dawn -- and sublime is shunned and eventually exiled. the sons of night do not get along: sublime is the prodigal eldest who is suddenly being denied his father’s empire, and scherzo is the over-spoilt youngest. 

sublime claims that scherzo is a glorified puppet sculpted by a lovestruck idiot; scherzo claims that sublime is a puddle of dark that their holy father accidentally spat onto.

missing word here, if you’ve ever... 

sublime now has no contact with his father or the nocturne, but he’s fond of his sisters, and will check up on them frequently. scherzo is very ‘i don’t give a fuck about humans, why should i, i am the flawless fucking machine, the eidolon, the hiemal almighty’ sigma bro hashtag grindset but sublime loves humans and is constantly making pacts with them even though he does very literally drive them nuts and distort them and uhh completely fuck up their lives. i’ve been really enjoying filling up his pinterest board hehe bc i really dig that oversaturated neon vibe where everything is a little too bright and vibrant to be entirely real + psychedelic nightmare surrealist clusterfuck etc etc. 

think coloured lights so bright they wash out the expression and the humanity out of the people you see, a warehouse packed full of bodies, your throat dry and pulsing with panic, sensory overload, a shape in the fog machines moving towards you, eyes like flashlights. sublime is very much a horror-oriented character mostly inspired by the struggle of clinging onto reality when you’re not entirely sure what you’ve taken.

he also loves cults and setting up cults, it’s like a hobby for him. he’s very much the black sheep of all the young gods, even considering the Exquisite Distillation, who is very much a mass murderer, but it’s, you know, well deserved. sublime is a slimy dude.

^^ above and below are from an oooold draft. im still trying to get the hang of how sublime interacts with scherzo. the sons of night are not strictly brothers due to the nature of how He creates things, but they certainly do not like each other. sublime cannot stand his successor even though he is forced to admit that scherzo is a flawless new god in both design and ability

it’s worth mentioning here that scherzo loves to lord his status over sublime. scherzo protects night’s great labyrinthine library and thus has unfiltered access to most of the well of human knowledge, as well as surveillance over most human individuals. sublime trades secrets, and puts a little piece of himself into every person he makes a pact with. they are both constantly going apeshit nuts that the other has something they don’t. 

anyways i hope to draw them more as i get a little bit more comfortable with more abstract stuff and then maybe i can even shift to painting the old gods someday. for now i struggle to plan out their character arcs

also they have fucking typing quirks for their weird i am everywhere and everything voices. i will never everrr escape homestuck unfortunately . ah well

im also playing with this idea where each of the new gods represent the inevitability of a great catastrophe (and the continuation of the cosmic cycle) in some way. still playing with this but minuet is the catalyst, sublime is the premonition of it, scherzo is the consequence and the rubble in the aftermath, ofluxe/the exquisite distillation is of course the huge fuckoff problem.

some minuet pov below because she is as of this current draft hellbent on dragging him into a family that embraces him. minuet is a total garbage fire shipwreck car crash of a functional goddess, but she has an iron conviction in the sanctity of family. this will of course obliterate her later.

sublime’s love for his sisters and his wife is probably his only redeeming characteristic, at least until minuet’s POV starts narrating the majority of the shitshow. dare i say misandrist icon.