subzeroparade
subzeroparade
deadly ginger time bomb
542 posts
art historian who likes to push paint around in their spare time & unabashed Bloodborne propagandist ✧ AO3: aurillium ✧ asks open in: english ⋆ french ⋆ italian. ✧ header by @tinygigas
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subzeroparade · 2 days ago
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Though I’m still painting and writing, I haven’t been as active lately because moving cities was exhausting and I’ve been on several other projects, but most importantly: I adopted another dog.
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He is a Spanish greyhound, which means once he was a fierce and deadly hunter, but now he’s just a sad old dog. So naturally his name is Gehrman.
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subzeroparade · 2 days ago
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🔮 YHARNAM SUNRISE: A BLOODBORNE TAROT DECK
Give a Gothic twist to your next divination using our full-color 78-card Bloodborne tarot deck, coming soon to Kickstarter! The crowdfund will begin at 10am PST June 19 and run until 10am PST July 10. If you come across this post after the campaign ends, we'll be running preorders starting July 10, click through to the Kickstarter to find where!
Participating artists include @aceiestartist @dovenart @elliottcassel @kairisk @kingofreddragons @lieutenantraziel @rococospade @subzeroparade @whitecatarts and @ziarendrawingspree on Tumblr, piarie on Bluesky, needleimp on instagram, and jhnfar on X/Twitter.
Not only have we put together an amazing deck artistically speaking, but we have a passion for tarot as well! Our tarot consultant is @creepysora and with their help we have made a Bloodborne tarot deck as usable for readings and as lore accurate as we possibly could.
You can find the project on Kickstarter here!
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subzeroparade · 3 days ago
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a Cainhurst-adjacent version of Ludwig, even though nothing in Bloodborne is this colourful.
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subzeroparade · 14 days ago
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Get it 😌
Unlock the secrets within with the Yharnam Sunrise Bloodborne Tarot Deck coming June 19th!
Get notified of launch!
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subzeroparade · 14 days ago
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make your lullabies and take care of the rest
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subzeroparade · 18 days ago
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Will be yelling about this for the next few weeks - a great project, and an excellent crop of artists. Reblogs appreciated <3
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🔮 YHARNAM SUNRISE: A BLOODBORNE TAROT DECK
Give a Gothic twist to your next divination using our full-color 78-card Bloodborne tarot deck, coming soon to Kickstarter! The crowdfund will begin at 10am PST June 19 and run until 10am PST July 10. If you come across this post after the campaign ends, we'll be running preorders starting July 10, click through to the Kickstarter to find where!
Participating artists include @aceiestartist @dovenart @elliottcassel @kairisk @kingofreddragons @lieutenantraziel @rococospade @subzeroparade @whitecatarts and @ziarendrawingspree on Tumblr, piarie on Bluesky, needleimp on instagram, and jhnfar on X/Twitter.
Not only have we put together an amazing deck artistically speaking, but we have a passion for tarot as well! Our tarot consultant is @creepysora and with their help we have made a Bloodborne tarot deck as usable for readings and as lore accurate as we possibly could.
You can find the project on Kickstarter here!
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subzeroparade · 26 days ago
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Part 1 while I work on Part 2.
Anon who sent me the “please don’t answer this ask” ask with the broadly fic-related art linked through twitter - thank you. I will never be on that hellsite but I absolutely appreciate getting the good stuff filtered by someone else 🙏🏻
Chapters: 12/12 COMPLETE (part 1 of 2) Fandom: Elden Ring (Shadow of the Erdtree spoilers) Characters: Messmer, Melina, Queen Marika Additional Tags: Messmer and Melina are twins and Marika is going at it single-mom style,  featuring assorted Shadow Realm NPC cameos (Black Knight Huw, Count Ymir, Inquisitor Jori, Rellana, Messmer’s assorted knights); the usual greek tragedy family dynamics, a frankly disproportionate amount of worldbuilding, Hornsent culture pre-crusade (is theocratic apartheid), some shipping as set dressing though not until later chapters
Summary:
Those who have never birthed something from a forge think all fires burn the same. Messmer and Melina know better.
*
Updated every week
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subzeroparade · 29 days ago
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The Left and Right Hands of the Divine
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subzeroparade · 1 month ago
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My contribution to @gracedbygold - Kotschei, tarnished astrologer, being sad in the woods.
I returned to the Lands Between to find the academy in shambles and the dynasty of the Full Moon cut short. Raya Lucaria has gone dark, and the Queen is a shadow of her former self. For all we thought it could do, glintstone has failed us - its glow now as uncaring as this land has become. I have fled Liurnia, and on my way I have met the Prince of Death, gold and black as a funeral procession. I have plucked a dark bird from the sky and used its skull for a staff. I have communed with an ancestral spirit, a creature that walks on air and breathes power older than the Moon herself. It has crowned me with its horns. They are as heavy as my old Carian cloak - so I’ve left that behind. Can I still call myself an astrologer, looking up at the false sky of the Eternal Cities? Or is this one heresy too many? At least I remember my own name. There is no one left to say it now, so I will. 
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subzeroparade · 1 month ago
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jumped for joy and clicked my heels when i got the notification that you posted a new work on ao3, just thought i'd let you know
ty anon <33 as thanks here is my oc hunter Egg pamphleteering eldritch horror fanfic for the Healing Church.
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subzeroparade · 1 month ago
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Hi! Anon here, just wanted to let you know that I spent better part of my day re-reading your most recent bloodborne one shot and that i will do so for the next three weeks.
Just wanted to ask, out of curiosity, when describing yharnam's architecture and they layout of the city and do you draw from in-game yharnam, or is it part of the knowledge you've acquired in your profession?
(I must confess that I once stood in the Grand Cathedral lamp looking at the ceiling for half an hour, it's so pretty i love gothic architecture)
I ask this because in all of your bloodborne works, I've always been really drawn to the way you describe yharnam, making it feel like a place that could actually exist in real life and, as someone who would much rather be studying art history in college, I find that much of what I've learnt pops up more often than not in your works, and I always get really excited when it does. I am also so obsessed with the way you twist and manipulate prose to make it feel organic, almost like a living being—it's so fitting for what bloodborne is about and the era it's set in.
Dear gods I am rambling now, sorry for the long ask and thank you very much for the work you do!
Ty anon <3 even if you don’t study art history, there’s no reason not to appreciate the built environment or objects in museum contexts - sometimes exploring art history through this purely pleasurable/hobbyist path is much better than heady academic specificities. Everyone loves a survey course. 
do you draw from in-game yharnam, or is it part of the knowledge you've acquired in your profession?
Both! I pull as much as I can from art history (my specialty is late 19th/early 20th French) but also cultural and economic history. The more precise these aspects and the more specific the anecdotes in world-building, the more believable (and relatable) the world itself. 
So I don’t necessarily describe Yharnam one-to-one as we witness it in-game - I like to embellish a little. I’ve pulled mainly from Victorian London, for obvious reasons - on trips to the V&A or Westminster, for example, I will gather images or jot down bits of research I think might add a little specific colour and broader life to the fic. There is silverware in the V&A’s collection:
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 as well as this whole-ass choir screen:
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 ...which both appear in The Feast we Were Promised; while the descriptions of the Chapel of the Good Chalice in Bring Me the Mountain are based on the facade of Notre-Dame de Bordeaux, which is Baroque (despite its quite modest interior):
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...in part to distinguish it in Yharnam’s imagined history from the Grand Cathedral, which is markedly High Gothic. The chapel’s burned doors in Feast are a reference to those at the Hotel de Ville in Bordeaux, burned in a protest not long ago (though not over the price of bread).
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The multiple mentions of the iconostasis are specific to orthodox iconographic practices - the very orderly, traditional kind, like this one in Romania: 
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…but I’m also thinking of the soaring work of my favourite artist of the Russian silver age, Viktor Vasnetsov, and his very human, very intimate, very individual, soulful icons at St Volodymyr. 
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Inferring there was once this tradition of iconography, including of the Great Ones, implies the additional possibility of an iconoclasm at some point in Yharnam’s history, which adds another layer of world-building (both visual and temporal), and serves as a fun anecdote to explain why there seem to be many statues and very few frescos or mosaics in Yharnam. This Byzantine colour is also inflected in the Italianate architecture in a place like the Basilica of the Santa Casa at Loreto, for example. 
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I am not a medievalist nor a specialist in ecclesiastical architecture (but I have a colleague who would probably think smashing all these disparate styles together is a bit exaggerated) but it’s for the reader’s benefit. It almost feels hard to imagine Yharnam with some kind of colour, given how washed-out it is when we play through it - but because all my work takes place before the Night of the Hunt, this visual difference feels necessary. 
I also like to stand around in many of the in-game locations and find things that are jarringly out of place (e.g. time period or aesthetic continuity) but I also greatly appreciate the gesamtkunstwerk totality of it, given it is fantasy, and if you suspend your disbelief (and are not a professional academic intent on nitpicking) it’s brilliantly done. 
It’s also one of the reasons I appreciate environmental storytelling but don’t engage or rely on those insanely specific breakdowns of in-game environments fuelled by lore speculation because they generally miss the irl way cultural artefacts, the built environment, and material conditions actually develop, and I’m more interested in making my work entertaining and believable than getting hamstrung by weird in-game details that are probably just assets being reused or reshuffled for convenience because sometimes you gotta do that in a workplace context, whether it’s creative or not. 
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subzeroparade · 1 month ago
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Oh lovely, thank you for this! Do tag me if your work directly references mine, I love to see this kind of thing :)
Bring Me the Mountain and the rest of my Bloodborne work can be found here.
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"[Gehrman] is in every room with Laurence, a discreet, poorly-dressed shadow at every negotiation... 'With respect, all my secrets are his,' the almost-vicar cheerfully tells his interlocutors. Pay no mind to my dog, who is trained and will not soil your rug, and who does not speak our language anyway."
— Bring Me the Mountain (by aurillium)
When I reached this passage, I thought, oh my gosh, I have to draw this. I have to draw this relationship. This gnawing frustration and pent-up desire. The unfaltering loyalty of the dog lying at the doorstep, wondering why it's been abandoned by its dead master. The vision of this painting appeared in my head so vividly.
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subzeroparade · 2 months ago
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My contribution to @gracedbygold - Kotschei, tarnished astrologer, being sad in the woods.
I returned to the Lands Between to find the academy in shambles and the dynasty of the Full Moon cut short. Raya Lucaria has gone dark, and the Queen is a shadow of her former self. For all we thought it could do, glintstone has failed us - its glow now as uncaring as this land has become. I have fled Liurnia, and on my way I have met the Prince of Death, gold and black as a funeral procession. I have plucked a dark bird from the sky and used its skull for a staff. I have communed with an ancestral spirit, a creature that walks on air and breathes power older than the Moon herself. It has crowned me with its horns. They are as heavy as my old Carian cloak - so I’ve left that behind. Can I still call myself an astrologer, looking up at the false sky of the Eternal Cities? Or is this one heresy too many? At least I remember my own name. There is no one left to say it now, so I will. 
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subzeroparade · 2 months ago
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Hello again! I'm the learning anon. I don't know why you called it a "word salad", but I'll say it was one of the tastiest salads I've ever had. And you're cooking another 🔥
As for the new words that stuck with me - what actually sticks are the sentences and scenes where those words appear, while the words themselves (like malleable, affable, verdant, fealty, vesper, query, diffidence, bough, nacre, sequin and others) are the keys. But there are also words that stuck for the wrong reason. "Petulant", for example. WHY is it pronounced like "PECH" + "uh" + "luhnt"? It's so counterintuitive.
Tldr: I'm learning. I really love your word salad. And I wish you good luck with your stressful things.
Thanks for sharing anon, some of my favourites in there. I am not on the hellscape that is twitter but your comment reminds me of my favourite thing to ever come out of there:
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(caveat that I have no idea who this person is) Sometimes the word is evident, sometimes I spend excessive time finding the right one: for its stress, tone, colour, its influence on the rhythm or poetic metre of the sentence; as well as for the multiple meanings or the specific images it evokes. A little wip of word salad part 2 for you:
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subzeroparade · 2 months ago
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Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Bloodborne  Relationships: Gehrman/Laurence  Additional Tags: mentions of the usual suspects, some Ludwig/Laurence hints, ambiguously homoerotic pining, a reluctant Gehrman imagines a future with an ambitious Laurence in a ruined old church, and Yharnam will suffer for it.
They’d quarrelled that evening, but only in their comfortably familiar way. Laurence had called Willem’s entourage of young scholars fools applauding fools. “You ranked among them,” Gehrman countered - flatly, without pause. There was a half-bottle of gin on the table between them. Laurence had answered, “But it’s they who are warm by Willem’s hearth, and you alone with me in the wilderness.” 
Night fell, and he’d raised his glass.
“To fools.”
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subzeroparade · 2 months ago
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I'm not the first to say it I'll bet, but I just wanted to tell you that your Laurence is the most captivating interpretation of his character I have ever seen! Both with your words and your art, you bring your vision of him to life with such convincing beauty and I am always hooked by the way his character is explored and portrayed in your works. In general, your work for Bloodborne (and ER) is some of the absolute best and I keep coming back to it time and again (many sleepless nights spent on your AO3 lmao) So, thank you very much for all the hours of joy your work provides! ✨️ Always looking forward to seeing what you cook up next!
Ty so much anon 💖 I adore writing Laurence, so much that in between the stress of moving to another city and solving a million tiny problems and already elbows-deep writing another multi-chapter work, I coughed out a little Bloodborne one-shot, now in the hands of my beta. a snippet for you:
Presently he finds Laurence in conversation with clerics of the diocese. For now the only blue is the modest knot at his neck, and there isn’t a single fleck of gold on him, so that he seems to merge with the softness of dusk in a blur of amaranthine. The former magister is carefully, plainly dressed - black, brown, wool in earthy tones, and his coat, thrown over the back of a dusty pew, has not been brushed in some time. His waistcoat is unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled up. His russet hair is pulled back loosely; a few strands escape to hover around his shoulders, as though he’s been exerting himself, rebuilding this chapel with his own hands, stone by stone. It’s a neat trick, Gehrman knows: to look as if one has performed work, stir sympathy with nothing more than the illusion of honest labour. It is little shabbier than Laurence likes to present, and it is easier to think about that, about the stains on his cuffs and his hair uncombed and the threads unfurling from the embroidered trim of his waistcoat than it is to think about the narrow slope of his cheek, the dull copper glint at his crown, the glow of recognition when he sees Gehrman - is there anything better, Gehrman wonders, than to be recognised? And Gehrman is sure he knows which one of them is the lighthouse and which is the ship but sometimes he wonders if Laurence isn’t just water in the black of night, and he a poor judge of depth. 
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subzeroparade · 2 months ago
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not actually part of my personal headcanon but i like to rotisserie the concept in my brain from time to time
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