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funniest skulduggery moment is making us think a skeleton had a baby somehow and then going SIKE!! you idiots how would that event work

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Always the desired, never the beloved.

(so I found this dress on pinterest and my head went: CHINA SORROWS CHINA SORROWS CHINA SORROWS!!!)

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those golden eyes

(aka ravel in the art donaldson puppy dog eyes pose)

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Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Skulduggery Pleasant - Derek Landy Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Skulduggery Pleasant/Nefarian Serpine (implied) Characters: Skulduggery Pleasant, Tanith Low, Saracen Rue, Dexter Vex, Nefarian Serpine Additional Tags: Implied Sexual Content 

Summary:

During the three week walk towards Tahil na Kurge, Skulduggery pulls Serpine to the side for a "private talk". Tanith and the others are left behind to wonder at the implications.

Set in SoW, just before Chapter 65.

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These two have taken over my brain currently so here's a lil bit of indulgent China and alive!skulduggery for yall

I love doing shippy fanart of these books cause it is not representative of the series AT ALL. I do not care however. Chinduggery for all

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"Sharon and my kid are at her cult meeting, so I'm not doing anything for the next few hours."

"Sharon's in a cult?"

"Yeah, it's one of those funny ones that try to get the women members to sacrifice their husbands at every full moon or something. I don't know if that's an appropriate atmosphere to bring a kid into, but everyone needs a hobby, am I right?"

Derek Landy, Dark Days (Chapter 18)

Finbar Wrong heard "God forbid women do anything" once and decided he would be the polar opposite of that, and good for him honestly

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valkyrie cain moodboard pt. 9 🙇‍♀️

all my sp "moodboards"

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Every few years I cycle back to my Skulduggery Pleasant hyperfixation and coming back into the fandom always feels like this gif:

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SKULLS! To get the FREE MONTHLY How to THINK When You Draw digital MAGAZINE (including NEW tutorials, a YEAR before they appear online!) just send “Magazine, please!” to ThinkDraw@yahoo.com

Lorenzo!

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Nefarian as a character was a really interesting look at Skulduggery and Valkyrie's relationship, hear me out on this.

He first shows up when Val is seventeen, which also happens to be the first time he gets a glimpse of their dynamic. From his perspective, they probably seem weird as hell, but that could easily be chalked up to them being from another dimension. The vibes are off but it's probably fine. Something to note though, Nef asks Skulduggery if he still has any intention of hurting him, and Skulduggery tells him that no, he doesn't care anymore.

He shows up again when Valkyrie is eighteen, and she takes the opportunity to truly demonstrate her commitment to Skulduggery by walking into a very deadly scenario with Mevolent with absolutely no magic to protect her. Again, probably weird as hell to Nefarian, who has never really had a friend. Why is this teenager and this grown ass man so dedicated to sticking with each other? Who even knows, but it's not like he cares.

Seasons of War is really where it all comes together. Stuck on a trip together for seven whole months, of course Nefarian is going to get a much clearer look at what is going on than ever before. And at first, the vibes are probably even more bizarre than previously, since Val and Skug have since separated before coming back to each other and Valkyrie is struggling with a drug addiction. But it's fine, right? Just get this mission done and everyone can go home. It's only when Valkyrie goes missing that he really realizes the extent of what is going on.

That extent, of course, is the sheer fucking obsession that Skulduggery has about Valkyrie. His blind, unfaltering commitment to her. Far more insane than she ever acted about him, even. While Valkyrie was willing to act self-deprecating in order to save him, he is willing to sell the souls and lives of all his other teammates if he thinks that it will get him back to her. And it's insane just how fast he devolves back into that state, it's a level of cruelty that Nefarian hasn't seen in him since before he became Vile. While KotW Skulduggery wishes no harm upon Nefarian, SoW Skug will gladly strip him of his ability to move and hold him down so the necromancers can cut off his dominant hand.

The whole party feels the impact, and really they all know what it is. But Dexter and Tanith and Saracen have become almost used to this dynamic; they've become too comfortable with Skulduggery to really criticize who he is or what he's doing. What he's becoming. They're all too scared to face it. They're all too scared to even really admit it to themselves because who are they if not a team?

And so Nefarian actually saying the words they're all thinking, Nefarian being able to criticize Skulduggery for the absolute monster he is when Valkyrie isn't there, is a good thing. It's a great thing. A fresh pair of eyes, a perspective that hasn't been adjusted to see this as fine or normal. We've heard about it when characters talk about who Skulduggery became after Valkyrie left, we see hints of it in DotL and LSoDM, but this is really the first time that we get to see how emotionally dependent Skulduggery is on Valkyrie in all it's ugly colours.

And just...it's interesting. The difference in how Skulduggery and Valkyrie handled the separation has always been interesting to me.

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Gotta admit this ship is really nice to draw spicy shit for, so here's another one, much more explicit this time lol

I definitely bit off WAY more than I could chew with this perspective, and I'm far away from being entirely happy with it, but I did the best I could and I think I did well enough

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I did in fact go back and fix up that skul from yesterday. now they can, and will, slay together

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never been happy with how ive drawn china until right now

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I want your quiet, your screaming and thrashing The salt on your lips and the hands that God gave you And I want your violence, your silent sedation Your moon eyes, your telescope, morbid fixation Spiracle - Flower Face

I am. giving the canon "fair haired" version of Mevolent a chance. And I think I managed to find a combination of skin/hairtone that I'm happy enough with.

Also look at me finally doing something for this ship again haha

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Me and @mortalcoils were talking about how Guild and Cadaver would rip eachother to pieces if left in the same room together so I had to wip this up lmao

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China is never gonna let her live this down.

I'm not gonna let MYSELF live this down. I can't believe I drew this at all, much less a whole ass comic.

You're welcome

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actually i want to talk about how auron tenebrae is an awesome plot-progressing minor character because everything we know about him is like

>be me

>dying in the mud in a battlefield somewhere in the 1600s

>witness some irish twink accidentally necromance someone to death

>decide then and there that he's your next dark messiah

>put time and effort into scamming the second most dangerous man on the planet into acquiring an insta-kill magical weapon that has a built-in Reanimate function SPECIFICALLY for the irish twink you're obsessed with

>he kills the irish twink and burns him at the stake

>not according to plan?

>twink comes back as a skeleton anyway, awesome

>psychological issues and social alienation turn him evil and he joins your evil temple to train up as the next dark messiah

>leaves when he gets bored, joins the war on the opposite side to the one where he started, and kills a bunch of people indiscriminately

>inexplicable crisis of conscience a few years later

>abandons necromancy for good

>fast forward 200 years

>you trap him in a temple with his spunky young protege and reveal that he was the now-infamous mass-murdering dark messiah you trained

>they start fighting

>lmao

>leave room

>instantly murdered by new dark messiah you were low-key ignoring in favour of spunky young protege

>never come up again