Happy Birthday, Aubrey! 🐰

uhh I wanted to try a new style.

ok that's all bye

OOOUUUGGGHHHHHHMYYYYDAYS.

RATMARIRATMARIRATMARIRATMARI!!!!

AND YES!!! YOU GOT ZIEMIA RIGHT!!

pls don't call urself dumb!!! ( ;｀Д´)

I GOT ABSOLUTELY JUMPSCARED BY THE NOTIF FOR THIS POST BUT IT WAS SO WORTH IT???

I LOVE LOVE LOVEEE THE USE OF RATS, SINCE THEY ARE MOSTLY ASSOCIATED WITH PLAGUE AND ETC!!

AND YEAH IM POLISH!! SO IF U NEED ANY TRANSLATIONS JUST TELL ME!!! ( ＾ω＾ )

AAAAOOOUUUUUGGHHHHH I NEED TO DRAW HER BUT MY CSP IS TWEAKING RN.. (ｙﾟﾛﾟ)ｙ

I ALSO HAVE TO KNOW HOW AUBREY LOOKS IN THIS AU OR ILL EXPLODE

but take this sol sneak peek I did a quick screen of... (ohmygodwhathappenedwiththequality???)

the moment you’ve all been waiting for

Ziemia

Or as I’ve been calling her up until now- Rat Mari! Now to tell you the truth Rat Mari/Ziemia took me AGES to properly figure out and when I was first getting started with Marzenie I had no idea what to do about Mari- then I had the rot metaphor idea and decided “rats in the shape of a person is pretty horrible I could do that!”… thus, Mari shaped rat pile and some wooden limbs in there too for vague symbolism reasons? Which. What I mean by that is that I’m drawing a similarity between her and Sol

The whole thing with Sol is the idea of perfection, a person is not capable of perfection and so he must be a doll, must be wood and light and no more- Mari was once perfect too, but her idea is tainted and gone and all that remains is rot. Do you see what I’m saying here? I’m not sure honestly I’ve been brainfogged as hell lately and started this drawing two days ago only to finish it NOW, and to be totally honest the design isn’t everything I wanted from it… but it dawned on me sometime lately that what I do want would be very tedious to draw

I cannot physically draw enough rats for me to be happy with so I compromised with not that many rats- and they aren’t very good rats either I’m not that great with animals … anyhow! Why Ziemia? Well. I think I’ve brought it up before but the in-world explanation for this character is that she was once a nature goddess, like how Sol is a god of the sun- but she was tainted by something terrible and consumed by pests, so Ziemia (in my rudimentary understanding of the polish language thanks to imperfect software because I don’t actually know polish and am doing my best to choose correct translations) is a word that means Earth. There were alternate translations and other words I could’ve used, but I picked Ziemia because it’s 1: a relatively simple word that matches the other ones I’ve used and 2: sounds enough like a name that I find it easy to call a character that and 3: is relatively easy to pronounce for … what I imagine to be my mostly English speaking audience? What five of you there are- other then @/birdzman ! Who I think might actually be polish? Not sure but shout out to you if you’re reading this!! Not fully sure if I’m right but if so then uhhh I apologize for being a dumb little American because I doubt I’m doing these translations right, anyhow!

Rat Mari/Ziemia isn’t just accociated with rats, I also want her to have themes of decay and other scavenger animals such as maggots or worms, the focus on rats is to do with Marzenie’s setting, I guess the idea is that Rats invade homes in winter to survive, whereas bugs mostly die off in winter regardless of available human homes to inhabit, so rats are one of the only pest animals which persist through the snow, which is why they might appear in some places outside Ziemia’s tree area, whilst other associated creatures would be unique to that area

Last but not least of my statements on this character, Ziemia does not represent the grief of Mari’s death, but rather the tangible brutality of it, how death feels in the eyes of a child, the inherent horror of a corpse, of knowing a person was once alive is no longer so, the horror of feeling their body stiff and cold in your arms, arms that once held you … this is what the rot theme comes from, one of Basil’s frequent hallucinations is of her body, decaying on the rope, decaying where he left her.

Cough. YAY!!!!!

i love saying “girl fuck you”… regardless of the occasion its so healing. i could literally be alone in my room ummm girl fuck you!

*does this to you*

Fun fact about Marzenie:

The red tendrils from, HIM/Sunny’s parasite are based on “the crawl” from YouTube analog horror series vita carnis <3

This stuff is basically what Basil is hallucinating plaguing his best friend

OWL UPON YE

Ok so this is Alter Boy’s actual appearance, that other one is just how he’s usually presented, I’ve mentioned before how he’s a very antagonistic character towards Marze despite not directly attacking him, but that’s only half true- Alter boy DOES attack Marze but only in very specific situations

It has to do with my idea of Marzenie having multiple routes (game-like talk again), in my head this fight is part of the good ending route

(which can be taken as a metaphor for a lot of things but the interpretation I’m going with is that Basil has to learn to confront his paranoia’s around others, drawing on how Alter Boy is a very inaccurate representation of Kel based more on Basil’s inner anxieties and bitterness then who Kel actually is, to confront him is to push aside this warped perspective and begin to trust that others aren’t out to get him)

Anyhow- I had the idea for Alter Boy spinning his head around pretty early on but it was combined with several other scattered ideas that hadn’t been decided upon- so certain things I’ve said have since become inaccurate, as to why he’s green? Well believe or not but that’s a very very silly nod to him and reflection being related, mirrors are technically green! Look it up it’s very interesting

Also slight tinges of color in Marzenie look cool to me. There’s that too

That’s about all I have to say in regards to this, Alter boy being a weird owl creature isn’t super relevant- it’s one of those rule of cool moments where I disregard symbolism because I thought an idea I had was scary/visually cool enough to use anyway, I just had it in my head that if Marzenie were a game it would be MORTIFYING if his overworld sprite suddenly spun its head around to lead into the fight- even if I can’t execute this it’s still a very fun idea to me, and I’ve thought about using it for an animation later on

Last thing: His face gave me a lot of trouble so here’s a little demo of all the ones I went through trying to get it right ⬇️

An aquarium in Japan was closed for renovations, and their resident sunfish got depressed not seeing visitors. So the staff put some uniforms with printed faces against the tank, and it immediately recovered.

GUESS WHAT???

THATS RIGHT, MORE MARZE FANART!

I used the folk dress from Krakow, Poland as the primary reference, since the au has some references to Polish. I'm so proud of this one.I'm sorry if it seems a bit rushed; it's because I got this idea just recentlyy. :)

I actually had to do some research, which was surprising since I live pretty close to Krakow, I was also tempted to add a flower crown, but I'm way too lazyy.

Gang I’ve run into a problem

I can’t. I can’t draw beetle (Marzenie) … I don’t know what it is but every time I try (which I have three times now) I completely blank on what to do with her… this feels crazy but I think I gotta completely rework her concept so uh

Ideas welcome !!! Clegfly already gave me a great idea but I’d feel bad just nabbing it from them like that so I’ll stray away from that realm of concepts for now

Anyway. This sucks soooo bad… I might even need to update the map depending on how big of change it is because the whole concept was based around beetle- GAH I MIGHT EVEN HAVE TO CHANGE KIM TOOOOOO

EDIT: HOLY SHIT I GOT IT I KNOW I KNOW WHAT TO DO HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHSHWWUWUSIWONI FEEL SO SMART I KNOW EXACTLYWHAT TO DOOOOOOOOOOO💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥

Ena’s your Basil

So I could NOT get this idea out of my head after having it, so finally I decided to actually DRAW it instead of just sitting on the concept

As number one basil enjoyer it was inevitable i’d start shoving him into other universes- I’m just surprised it took this long! I suppose I’ve just been really preoccupied with my AU’s and whatnot