luna_rainbow | Entries tagged with art

There are few characters who elevated so quickly in my opinions as this guy...apart from maybe Neillan.

The little prince of southwest Talgrith. It's funny to call him that, because he has a pretty big personality and even though I do imagine him as...well, not a large person, but I don't associate him with being the little pampered royalty, like Sigmund. LOL. Vivrael can get away with patronising Sigmund and calling him "princeling", but Rossaer doesn't have the protected greenhouse feel to him. And he'd probably hit Vivant if he tried LOL.

The Hanged Man is associated with sacrificing physical wealth for spiritual wealth. I think his choices later on fit the descriptions of the card more closely - the loss of his attachments to his current identity (okay...I have to say, it wasn't so much HIS choice as Vivant's fault), the change in perspective, the wisdom he gains from that.

I don't think he ever has an epiphany as the card suggests, not even quite as dramatic as Vivant's "reverse epiphany", if there is such a thing >_>;;; The changes come over him slowly, but I think he does change. Even though a lot of the chapters since his introduction are changing the readers' first impressions of him, I think he also changes during that time. But I don't think he tries to be the good guy or wants to pay the price, there is a strong element of selfishness in his decisions, which might sound bad, but I think he also tries to balance his own selfishness with the number of people he would hurt.

On that thread he's similar with Vivant (although I think there are many points in which the two of them are similar, and many others in which they are interesting dichotomies), who also makes a lot of choices out of selfishness, but I think they both understand that, and there's a little part of themselves who won't forgive their own actions.

There are a lot of female entities in the tarot deck, and I have a dearth of important female characters ~~that I like enough to use as tarot~~. Here is one I had always intended to use, somewhere:

I hadn't decided on what Hinkan would be until I read Aeclectic's interpretation.

On the bleak landscape where the Tower stood, the Fool sits, empty, despairing. He hoped to find himself on this spiritual journey, but now he feels he's lost everything, even himself. Sitting on the cold stones, he gazes up at the night sky wondering what's left. And that is when he notices, nearby, a beautiful girl with two water urns. As he watches, she kneels by a pool of water illuminated with reflected starlight. She empties the urns, one into the pool, one onto the thirsty ground.

"What are you doing," he asks her. She looks up at him, her eyes twinkling like stars. "I am refilling this pool, so that those who are thirsty may drink, and I am also watering the earth so that, come spring, the seeds will grow," she tells him. And then she adds, "Come. Drink." The Fool comes to kneel with her by the pool and drink. The water tastes wonderful, like liquid starlight. "I can see you are sad," the girl continues, "and I know why. But you must remember that you have not lost all. Knowledge, possibilities, and hope, you still have all of these. Like stars, they can lead you to a new future." Even as she says this, she began to fade away, like dew, vanishing. All that remains is a gleam that was at the center of her forehead. This rises up and up, until it settles in the night sky as a shining star. "Follow your star," the woman's voice seems to sing from that light, "and have hope." The Fool takes in a breath and rises. It is a dark night, a desolate land. But for the first time, he has a guiding light to show him the way. Distant as it is, it heals his heart, and restores his faith.

Hinkan is one of the few characters that loves Vivant unwaveringly, but I hesitate to put the word love anywhere near them because I don't want their relationship to be mistaken. Probably once or twice, Vivant might have mistaken his own feelings of gratitude and thought he loved her like a woman, but she herself always knows where she stands with him. She loves him, but there is a distance between them, just as there was a different distance between she and Mordan. She's not someone to fall blindly and irreversibly in love. She believes that all meetings come at the price of an eventual parting, and she's never tied down a man simply because she loved him.

Without spoiling what their relationship becomes... Vivant is an important existence in her life, bound by the love of friendship and the duty of oath and the burden of guilt. I think she is an amazing girl, who becomes what people need her to be - not what they want or what she wants.

The picture would have been set some years after she parted with Vivant. I mentioned her in the epilogue, the Prilloni boy who asked Vivant to visit her. I think she knows he'll never come, and she takes solace in knowing that they are watching the same night sky. Even if the constellations she sees won't be the same as what he sees, she knows he'll see the same constellations some day. Even if she searched the endless oceans for him she may never find him, but she takes solace in knowing that he's drinking from a river somewhere that will one day run to the sea and join her. Even if she dies without meeting him again, she takes heart in believing their bond, and that they'll meet again in some other life. I don't think she's absurdly optimistic, just possessed of an incredible tranquillity of the mind.

As for Vivant, Hinkan becomes the hope...the light at the end of the tunnel that he knows will always be there, and so he can find his way with its help, without having to go towards it. Because he knows that if he ever needs her, if he ever feels starved of hope, he could find her and she would accept him, and so...perhaps he could hold out just that little longer...perhaps he could bear just a little more. And I think she is incredibly foresighted to send him that Prilloni child, who will equally dote on Vivant, and who will be there even when she is gone, so that when his mind tires, his heart will always have someone to turn to.

After being the main character for a story I've tried to write over three years, you'd think I'd have more than two pictures of just this kid by himself....

Like Vivrael and Vivant, I decided pretty quickly on Rowan being "The Hermit". Unlike "The Fool" or "The Magician", the meaning of "The Hermit" card is fairly close to our impressions of hermitage. The lone person, who seeks solitude, who needs to retreat from human society, who may be knowledgeable but his wariness of human contact prevents him from sharing that knowledge.

The meaning of the card is "need for withdrawal or introspection" or "the need to step out of their retreat". Rowan is naturally in the first stage and through his growing relationships with other characters, learns to do the second.

Unlike Sigmund or Vivrael, Rowan isn't "good-looking", so I always try not to draw him as so. I guess his most noticeable characteristics are innocence and uncertainty.

I know I often say that I don't like him. I don't tend to like uncertain personalities, especially in fiction, but as far as being a "character" - a tool of the story - I do like Rowan. He grew from reading too much postmodernist theory in year 12.

Where Vivant is a very traditional main character - he learns fast, he's quick-thinking, he has limited tolerance for tyranny, he gets along with people (when he wants to) etc...Rowan was invented purposely to overturn much of that. He's hesitant, he's slow to be drawn out of his shell, he's naive and can be short-sighted, and it takes a long time for him to grow.

Vivant is neither a follower nor a leader, but Rowan is quite decidedly a follower. He needs to be told what to do for him to feel any sense of purpose. In the end he becomes a limited narrator, because although his existence instigated much of the events, his participation in them is limited.

But I do like Rowan as a "character", in that he develops and grows and becomes comparatively stronger and confident to the withdrawn boy at the beginning. Vivant grows too, but I think he more or less reaches in for the nastiness that he's always had in place, whereas Rowan really works at pushing himself towards the optimism he's never had.

Come to think of it, I think Rowan and Sigmund's relationship would work quite normally if Rowan was a girl. LOL.

I've drawn pictures of Pendillius on and off for a while, but I haven't written anything about him since year 10! Aww. He's probably the happiest character in any of my stories. He's just adorable ♥

Well, okay, I think it's harder to tell whether he's cuter or Kamaeh's cuter. He's "older" than what Kamaeh appears to be, although in technical age he's younger. He's not quite as effusively warm as Kamaeh is, and he isn't quite vulnerable enough to want to latch onto other humans the way Kamaeh does. He isn't as full of mistrust as Kamaeh can be, and he doesn't need to trust anyone, and so he's never been really hurt either. I think the difference is Pendillius is very much a people's person - probably more than any of my other characters, more than even Vivrael - because he's a good kid and he doesn't have Vivrael's aggressive streak.

I think when I first started out I tried to make Pendillius and Dariayle direct opposites...but they're not really. They turned out to be just two different people, bound by blood but separated by their experience. It's funny...I think Pendillius and Dariayle love each other out of duty, rather than any emotional attachment. This is quite different to how Kamaeh feels about Ruelli (their previous counterparts), and I wonder, if Kamaeh knew, which he would have preferred?

In the original story Pendillius was also (the only one who was) quite fond of Vivant. I'm guessing - because I haven't read what I wrote for...ever - it's because he admired Vivant's perceptiveness. The ability to read what Pendillius is hiding behind that untiring happiness and the ability to read, also, what his twin is thinking.

I don't think the water runs too deep. I don't think Pendillius has a dark and depressing interior...but I think that, just for the sake of his brother, he tries that little harder to smile, to laugh, to act the clown.

Because I think, each in their own way, the last thing Pendillius and Dariayle wanted to do was to make the other worry.

I've changed the layout to one that has bigger font, and seems somehow more appealing to read O_o

The tree still stands
When its petals fall
The stars still shine
When morning falls
The Fool will dance
Unfettered by time
Until his last curtain fall

I think that about sums up Vivant's fate from here on. LOL. (Yes yes it's sad)

Occasionally I wonder if it's too early to say all these things about Vivant. For Next Assignment at least I'm more than halfway through the story and none of the characters - except Rowan - deviate much from then on. Okay okay, even Rowan keeps much of his personality, just something very important about his past is revealed. It doesn't change who he is, but I think it allows him to understand himself better.

But back to Vivant. True, he hasn't changed much since he wrote himself into stability about ten chapters ago, but nothing that was meant to change him has happened. He's learned things, about others and about himself, but he hasn't had the need to change yet. He might - or might not - change in the next ten chapters, but he will definitely change soon after that. Depending on how much I can fit in ten chapters LOL

At least I think we will see a very different Vivant when he returns to Isshaten, which will form the final arc (and a little less than half) of the story. Yes...Vivant spends a lot of time in Talgrith. I guess you could call his time in Talgrith his "formative" years. What happens there determines his mindset at least until the conclusion of his time in Issaten.

In some ways, Vivant becomes an adolescent earlier than most children. Maybe it's the lack of parents, the lack of secure familial love, the lack of stable adult examples. He seems to learn to question adults quite early in his life. That must be where he has acquired both his perpetual amusement and his perpetual distrust. Too perceptive for his own good, he sees through the actions of adults to the selfish desires behind them, and he finds their efforts at feigning otherwise amusing.

Thus, the Fool. Naive - but not quite so. Full of curiosity, like a sponge he could content himself with watching and absorbing the world. The Fool card in a Tarot spread means optimism, fresh starts and difficult challenges; as well as on the negative side recklessness, immaturity and inability to commit, all of which describe Vivant or his fate.

The negative aspects probably describe both Vivant and Vivrael, although Vivant only seems to exhibit these when badly provoked. If there's anything in which Vivant is worse than Vivrael, it must be his uncertainty - because he can never really decide what's most important to himself.

Perhaps the last thing in the world he learns to understand is himself.

I thought I'd post some of my pictures (especially those related to character design and writing) here so that this place has more life and variety.

So this picture goes with the common representation of The Magician: wearing a cloak and with the four "elements" before him (some of them only visible in the full picture) - a wand, a cup, coins (they're on the chain that fastens his cloak) and a sword - "signifying the control over elements". Not that Vivrael has any control over these elements apart from his "conjuration" skill.

The other stuff are just common magician props - bunny out of top hat (impossibility), and dice and cards (probability). I know this is a trivial detail, but the only card he's holding face-up is the Joker, which is a derivate of "The Fool". In one version of Tarot interpretation I've read, the Major Arcana is presented as a chronicle of the Fool's journey - and he meets the other cards, the Magician, the Emperor, the Hanged Man and so on, and learns lessons of life from them.

But that's not really related here. Vivant never meets Vivrael except possibly in one very bizarre trouser of time when Vivrael walks through the Bermuda Triangle and gets thrown into Vivant's world, where he becomes a professional swindler by lack of choice.

But why Vivrael as "The Magician" and not Vivant? - When Vivant is the one who has the broadest (and most powerful) range of magic, when he's just as much of a coy trickster, and he probably projects more illusions about himself than Vivrael does?

I guess it was because he suited "The Fool" much more aptly. A nameless man with no ties to home or family, with all his worldly possessions slung over his back in one small bag, and welcoming the world's challenges - always with that faint smile of both optimism and mistrust. Unlike Vivrael, the world's perceptions no longer matter to Vivant, and for many years he is allowed to simply be "no one".

I might talk about "The Fool" card more when/if I ever get to draw Vivant.

But for "The Magician", the card describes Vivrael well - intelligent and articulate, self-confident and possesses many practical skills. On the reverse, there is lack of confidence, indecision and hesitation, and strengths being used for dishonesty. I think the lack of confidence and hesitation is something he only allows Solen to see. I never managed to get up to writing about that part, but Vivrael falters when he knows Solen isn't behind his back.

I think...though these qualities apply to Vivant as well, he doesn't quite have the same aggressive self-belief, nor the same irresponsibility that leads to using his skills for petty wants.

Just about Vivrael in the picture: maybe his face really isn't as pretty as Sigmund's, but I think his charisma matches Sigmund's. Perhaps the archetypal "bad boy" appeal - the tousled hair, the unfastened shirt, the askew cloak - and an expression that is both smile and a smirk, saying "Throw at me whatever you have, I'm ready."

Maybe that's where their difference lies. Vivant's smile would also be unswayable in his confidence, but it was not one that invited fights.