murmurillo

[murmurillo]

hades ii arcana (i-xxv) i-v || vi-x || xi-xv || xvi-xx || xxi-xxv

[murmurillo]

absolute masterpiece. flawless perfection. I’ve been staring at this for 5 hours.

Here we are, y'all. This is the first gif I have made in 10 years! Wow, it feels good to flex that muscle after a loooong rest. Maybe it's a bit choppy, but eh it's fine with me as long as I get to watch my meow meow Thanatos tonguing his Zagreus, heh

[murmurillo]

Oh, to be Thanatos. You are tied to the House you were born in, title already in your hands, godhood all ready to shape you, with the starry sky of your mother's eyes holding you close. You don't really like the noise of the busy souls that crowd the hall, it's not that you didn't enjoy being a child, but the announcement of the Gentle Death was too big that your little bones had to learn how to carry it for your mother, and for the House.

And then, he is born. He is tiny, so so tiny. And he is bright and he is fire and he burns. He laughs and it echoes all throughout the house, running around with you hand in hand, a complicit smile on your face when he touched things he shouldn't, or toed the rules clumsily, falling headfirst into them. He always got on his feet, brushed the pain off his knees and smiled and giggled for you.

He used to pluck leaves off his laurels and give them to you, hide in obvious places in such a way it had to be on purpose. He always wanted to find you, and to be found. He would stand at every corner of the House of Hades, awaiting the toll of your bells. He liked your hair, and your eyes, and your smile. You don't understand how every strand of his being can radiate warmth.

You are being pulled, always. By him, and by what you must do. Cries and dying breaths, and blood of thousands of men, praying for someone to take them to a good place. Praying for one second more. And then, two seconds, for one hour. You never really understood, life can only last so much. They have to let it go, traverse the waters, so other people can see the sun, the night.

They won't stop existing. Because after the crossing of the river there are other places they can go to. Places where higher forces tell them they belong to. Just like you. Everything born in this house is tied to it. To its walls and ceilings. No one ever goes so far. No one ever leaves forever.

Except her, of course. But it's not for you to presume, whether she left because she belonged too much, or if she didn't. Neither or both, it doesn't really matter right now.

You grow up, and so does he. He is always fluttering around, the House bends at his feet. He stares bored at his papers. Spars and he looks like he is soaring with a sword in his hand. He loves. So much. So much it hurts you. It's written across his face, lettering all around his body.

You however, choke with your own thoughts, too many to ever stop and contemplate, because when you think about him there is always a glowing tangle of things you want to say, but you can never. He looks, like he knows what you want to say, but you feel like you're pushing yourself from him, when you swallow the sentences to the pit of your stomach.

They will always come back though. Acidic and a bad aftertaste of loneliness and regret, you mull their bitter ends and chew them as you wander the upper land, far away so he cannot read you. Because he is an all consuming presence, and even far away, he is around you. The bending flowers at the river. When the clouds embrace the sun, you couldn't help but think of holding him like that, too. Covering him for a moment, draping him with your figure, a breath near his own.

But that's too much. Too much. You can't, you are not there, and the war unfolding just makes you longer for him more. For the House and your mother, and the cold, gold pillars.

And then he leaves. He fucking leaves. You have to pull Hypnos's teeth and stare at your mother until she raises a brow, still shielding him. How can he go? Why would he leave? He was born here, he was here all the time. Your world, the world you love is down here, why would he discard it so easily as well?

The House is in shambles, and the steps close to the river are never fully clean. Blurred footprints that leave a messy trail.

You find him. Because how could you not? Why would you not? You have to shake him awake, remind him that his life is down here, very deeply burrowed in this realm. That upstairs and above there's nothing for them, nothing for you or him. That a search for the silhouette of a mother gone is absurd. That dying and waking, and dying and waking will drive him inside. Making you insane as well. The river Lethe is a few steps ahead, and you feel like drinking all of it so you can forget how it feels having him cut his way out of your chest. Out of your heart.

You just don't get it. Maybe you never did. Maybe you should've told him all those things that you left up there, maybe that's why he is leaving. Or maybe, he was never supposed to be known by you. Maybe he was being lended to you, and now the world wants him back.

Or maybe he just doesn't get it. Swan diving directly to the pits of seething heat, and cooling swords. To the gritty of the plagues, just to be stopped by a spear. A spear all of you know.

And he finds her. And you still don't get it. You say things that freeze his face; and he retorts back with a crackle of a flame. You used to blend so well together. Now you can't even remember how to talk to him.

It comes slowly, in long, suffering waves. He is not leaving. Just searching. Maybe because you never had to, you never understood. Maybe it's not that people are made for places; but they carve their own shapes into them. Maybe he just had to figure out the knife or his shape. But he's not leaving, he would never leave you, he says.

He would always come back and hold his breath for the toll of your bells, so you can both learn how you can blend once again, how it would feel to hold Zagreus with no choked words. Or no scathing heart breaks, left uncompleted all across the Underworld, for no one to find them, or run into them.

You never really liked the sun. But if it means that Zagreus brings back its light everytime it returns, as if he stole it or took a piece of it, to bring alight everything else; then, you wouldn't mind its warmth for a while. Life and Death, one and the same.

Thanatos and Zagreus, forevermore.

[murmurillo]

I’m back! (to painting everything in a single layer)

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an overdressed shepherd.

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How to plan a long-term creative project for serial publication:

1. Make a firm decision about how big a single update is going to be, and estimate your sustainable update frequency based on that. This estimate should be based solely on your own demonstrated performance; you may anticipate that future productivity will exceed past productivity, but never make long-range plans on the assumption that future productivity will exceed past productivity. That is called the Planning Fallacy, and it will eat you alive.

2. Estimate how often you’re likely to miss updates. As a rough guideline, if you’re physically and mentally healthy and have no major commitments that would interfere with your ability to work on the project, figure that you’ll miss about 10% of your updates for various reasons. If you have health issues or frequent Real Life commitments, make it 20%. If 20% sounds low to you, you weren’t being honest with yourself about your sustainable update frequency; return to step 1 and re-assess.

3. Figure that you’ve got about two years before you lose interest in the project, gain some new commitment that will preclude continuing to work on it, or your art style evolves enough to make creative continuity impractical. If there’s some upcoming major life change that you’re able to anticipate – like, say, graduating from school – use either two years or that event as your soft deadline, whichever is less.

4. Use the figures from steps 1-3 to estimate how many updates you’re likely to be able to squeeze into this project, and write your outline/script based on that. You don’t need to wrap up every tiny little loose thread by that point, but ideally it needs to reach a point where you could stop and be satisfied with whatever conclusion has been reached. If you get there and you’re still enthusiastic about continuing, fantastic – return to step 1 and re-assess.

So, as a simple example: if you’re planning a webcomic, you figure you can reasonably manage about 1 page a week, and you’ve got a lot going on that’s likely to get in your way, that’s (2 years * 52 weeks/year * 1 update/week * 80% success rate on updates) = around 83 pages to work with, or about the length of a four-issue miniseries. What kind of story can you tell in 80-odd pages?

(Hint: it’s not a story that involves fifty-page combat scenes!)

[murmurillo]

oh how much i miss ker in hades. thank you op this is genius

Ker (keres, plural) goddess of violent death

it has come to my attention that when there is Thanatos, the god of gentle death, then there must be another personification of death but of the violent kind and i just found out that they're called the Keres. very shallow research later and i wanted Ker personified in hades game style fashion

took some liberties on how they've become a horde of battlefield body scavenging daughters of Nyx and Erebus, Night and Darkness, and made them all start from a single goddess (Ker) but violent deaths suddenly came at a surplus and so more help was needed hence the death-spirits known as Keres. These death-spirits are likened to the very first iteration of Ker so they're more savage with a single-minded focus and purpose. They did not inherit her capacity of speech nor for scavenging of little trinkets in battlefields.

[murmurillo]

Nerevar Portrait

matching Voryn portrait is here

Do not use or reupload without my permission, please.

[murmurillo]

Voryn Dagoth

matching Nerevar portrait is here

Do not use or reupload without my permission, please.

[murmurillo]

I have literally just finished reading that Euripides play and this comes up?? time for INCORRECT MYTH RETELLINGS lmao

so basically, apollo angered zeus who made him a servant of king admetus as a punishment (this is not ‘alcestis’ yet, more like a prequel to it). but our god of light was just a chill guy who didn’t mind herding sheep, plus admetus was nice to him, so apollo fell in love.

he became a secret ‘god in disguise’ protector for admetus. in a myth separate from ‘alcestis’, baby hermes (who was born like a year ago and felt particularly mischievous) stole admetus’s herds. apollo found him and said, ‘wtf little dude, give me my sheep back’. hermes played innocent (‘who, I? look at me, I am TINY, I can’t steal anything being this SMALL’).

but apollo took hermes to zeus who saw through his little lies and told him to stop messing around. they headed back to retrieve the herd; baby hermes got bored, made a lyre out of a turtle shell and started playing. apollo got absolutely enchanted and traded the herd for this lyre, also becoming hermes’s best friend forever.

and admetus? apparently, he loved apollo too, so he didn’t mind.

this explains apollo’s later intervention in ‘alcestis’. apollo helped admetus marry alcestis, but was accidentally rude to artemis in the process so she tried to kill the king. admetus managed to escape death (thanatos: 0, everybody: 1), but now someone had to agree to die in his stead.

he rushed to his elderly parents (weak), but they told him ‘what do you MEAN we’re already old anyway? what a fucked up son you are. we aren’t descending to hades for you, get out of our house’.

alcestis, on the other hand, was super loyal to her husband, and volunteered to die so he could live.

thanatos comes to get her, and apollo (who fucked up in the first place and was now actively trying to fix it) begs him to leave. but thanatos says ‘yeah no, please step aside’, to which apollo clenches his fists ‘okay then, trickery it is’.

death takes alcestis, but gets his ass physically kicked by heracles (a friend of both apollo and admetus) who literally snatches the woman’s soul from under his nose. thanatos: 0, everybody: 2.

and they lived happily ever after, and apollo continued being a chill guy. unless you thought you were better at lyre-playing, of course. in that case, he would literally skin you. (poor marsyas.)

and thanatos, who was just doing his job, suffered because of it once more. it’s super funny, because even euripides describes him as an impartial force who wishes no evil but merely delivers the inevitable. yet he is the one with ‘greedy teeth’ and a scapegoat.

man, he doesn’t even choose who has to die. please be kind to death. his job sucks.

not sure if your aware of this one already

but i found a very interesting myth involving Thanatos while scrolling through Theoi.com

so in essence Thanatos is first delayed by a debate with Apollo from collecting the soul of this woman named Alcestis so that she may end up living a long life

(unsure why Apollo is intervening so strongly here? but i think it has something to do with her maybe being fated to marry someone important later in life?)

Then Thanatos is delayed from his duties a second time when Heracles guarding Alcestis’s tomb and wrestles with him until he is forced to turn away

pretty much sure this is part of a large myth from the Euripides, but man Thanatos can’t catch a break

Oh! No, I didn't know that. I've tried finding stuff for Thanatos and it felt like the only thing I found was the whole King Sisyphus incident. That all sounds pretty hilarious. The poor guy is just trying to go to work and everybody is trying to distract him. By the time his shift is over, he's just like:

Thanatos: Ares, man, your brothers are annoying the crap out of me.

Ares: Saaaame.

Thanatos: I didn't even say what they did. Or which brothers I was talking about.

Ares: It doesn't matter.

[murmurillo]

you only start appreciating the original character design after you come up with an unhinged modern au and try to redesign them

(okay, that’s not technically a ‘modern’ au, it’s a 1942 au. just gods doing godly things on the surface in the middle of WWII. Thanatos is busier than ever.)

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Hades Zagreus walkcycle 2D animation

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would you like a nice glass of

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Dad

[murmurillo]

Dude next time could you just float

Bonus another doodle