#thanks for inquiring. love motu. love to clown on him. enjoy

[1ore]

went through the art on your site and I absolutely love motu's mask . I fully was under the impression he was a guy with a animal head at first, out of curiosity what was your inspiration for its design ?

THANK YOU!! I love that he gives the impression of having a real critter head. He would be so indignant about this, which is great, because we have to keep him humble.

so Motu came about after I replayed Morrowind for the first time as an adult, and I wanted to port my player character, Roan, into Moribund. I had put a lot of time into her story, and I guess by that point it had drifted from the source material enough that it was time to wiggle out onto dry land.

Back then, Moribund was distinctly lacking in war and sociopolitical beef, so I needed a real guy-of-all-time to fill the shoes of Dagoth Ur and the Sixth House... which is to say that yeah, the fact that Motu wears a mask, the burnished gold/bronze color, the engraved rays in his sideburns, those are all nods to the og

The earliest iterations of Motu's mask were modeled after baboons and macaques.

couldn't tell you why I gravitated to them. I think part of it was because I had written off primates for most of my life. I grew up a wolf girl and I thought that any animal without prominent fuzzy ears looked weird. (oh how the turn tables.)

Then he pivoted to a chimeric, set beast-type critter. I was younger and I didn't have the language for what I was observing at the time, but I was drawn to cynocephaly as a cross-cultural phenomenon. I also liked the idea of him being a visual wordplay on "dog-headed" and "god-headed"

I don't remember if I designed boondogs concurrently with him or after him, but that's the in-world justification for why he looks Like That. his mask is modeled after them.

I also had Roan and Koda's masks to reference. they were early examples of the mask-wearing practice in high Asthaom, and I knew I wanted Motu's mask to mirror theirs.

honestly, I feel like his mask is still a work-in-progress. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the planes of his cheeks and eyes. I think they can be done better.

(i swear i've drawn it more recently i just don't have access to my sketchbooks right now)

this also isn't unique to Motu, but his colors/geometry/asthaom's identity/my art in general draw heavily from settler and indigenous folk art in the Southwest, folk art in general, and also the cultural exchange happening in east asia during the time of the maritime silk road. people were making cheap crafts for mass export to satisfy the tastes of a wide variety of people who had never seen this part of the world, but this was also before the colonial powers that be, so It's a bunch of cultural and material knockoffs of knockoffs of knockoffs in a way that's not... like... always benign, but Different, sometimes less asymmetrical, and endearing to me as a knockoff myself LOL. it's an excuse to learn more and make clumsy efforts to reconnect with whatever tha hell it means to be japanese american.

now that I think of it, this comes full circle with Morrowind taking heavily from Indian history and Hindu cosmology. really playing a game of telephone with another guy's orientalism all the way back to the silk road. motu would hate this regardless. totally ruining his illusion of a pure and static cultural heritage.

but what can i say. i love when we pass around the Creature

[shishi] [shachihoko] [inugami]

:)