#a lot of the magic system is also inspired by baltic finnish mythology

[kittensartswriting]

Happy Story-teller Saturday!

Your WIPS all sounds like so much fun. I am especially captivated by Golden Maiden/Silver Bride! So much tension!

What myths/history are you inspired by? I would love to hear more about your characters and what inspires the situations you out them in :)

Happy STS!!

And thank you so much!!! ;-; <3<3 I'm so glad you find it interesting!!

In general I get most of my inspiration from Finnish/Baltic Finnish mythology, but I love learning about other mythologies too and getting inspired by them, for example Old Norse, Slavic and Etruscan mythologies. Golden Maiden, Silver Bride is mostly inspired by and a loose retelling of the Baltic Finnish myth "The Forging of the Golden Maiden". It's one of my favorite myths of Baltic Finnish mythology.

In the myth Ilmarinen (a smith god or maybe giant/demigod, he's one of the Kaleva's sons who are a group of men, usually brothers, that are superhuman giants and possibly gods) lost his wife, who he loved deeply, and in a misguided attempt to ease the loss he forges a replacement wife out of silver and gold. But when she is cold and hard (I assume both physically and figuratively), he realizes gold and silver won't replace his wife and destroys the Golden Maiden. This is presented very much as a lesson for Ilmarinen to learn about grief, and it's that too, but I always wondered what about the Golden Maiden? The myth doesn't really tell anything about her, but she's such a cool character, an ancient magic robot lady?? It's also kinda fucked up how she is described as being very alive and his wife, yet treated very much like a literal object and just killed off because she didn't make the man less sad. So for a long time I wanted to do a short comic about the myth from the perspective of the Maiden, and the idea eventually morphed into a whole fantasy story :D

My story sets in a fantasy world and the Golden Maiden, Miävi in the story, survives and the story basically start where the actual myth ends. In my story her character arc is about figuring out who she is outside of her creator, Tyynövin, and detangling the expectations she was born to from her personhood. She starts as very lost and confused, and basically unable to want anything, but becomes my favorite kind of female character, unhinged and full of rage, as she comes to understand how terribly she was treated. I have some sketches of her!

Tiera is also very loosely inspired by Baltic Finnish mythology. His mythological namesake was a human (?) warrior side character, but beside that he has very little to do with his mythological counterpart. In the story he was Tyynövin's trusted house guard and keeping Miävi (who he named because Tyynövin didn't even bother to name her) safe became his responsibility after her creation. He's really the only person she forms a meaningful relationship with and when he hears Tyynövin is planning to kill her, he can't bear to watch by and instead runs away with her. It's very much a oh-shit-I-accidentally-adopted-this-child-I-guess-I'm-a-father-now situation (she's not developmentally a child, but she has very limited experience and understanding like a child, because by the story starts she was created like two years ago). I also have couple of sketches of him!

His curse is inspired by Baltic Finnish mythology too. The elves are basically forces of nature and more akin to spirits, though physical and corporeal. Powerful elves sometimes called gods are rulers of an elf realm, for example a forest or a sea. Elves are väki (a Finnish word which literally means power and folk) which is also magic. When hey are angered, they can curse with their hate. (This all has some basis in Baltic Finnish mythology, the rest is more of my invention.) It crumbles the body until there's only the elf/väki left (everything has it) trapped in the husk of the body. The hate eats the väki and births new malicious elves that grow out of the husk of a body. The only way to really lift the curse is to make amends to the angered elf. Tyynövin and the other veere lords of the empire have figured out a way to stop the spread of the hate, so they decided to use that information to capture elves and gods to serve them, instead of the other way around. Tiera took part in capturing a god and got cursed with their hate, which is why the curse starts spreading after he leaves the empire and Tyynövi's healing behind.