#anyway! Mona!

[princes-creations-askblog]

Oh boy, Mona has a ref sheet now! Good for it!

This uh. Thing! My beloved crazy bitch :)

All its info + hex codes under the cut!

CW: Experimentation, violence, descriptions of gore, implied cannibalism

Full name: It just goes by Pheromone

Aliases: ‘Mona’ (don’t call it that unless you feel like being eaten alive)

Species: Imp (Concept Species 12)

Planet of Origination: Concept Universe (“the Void”)

Age: 132

Height: 6’5”

Gender: Biologically female; identifies as genderless

Pronouns: It/Its/Itself — She/Her/Hers (CLOSE FRIENDS ONLY)

Sexuality: Prefers not to label its sexuality; simply refers to itself as gay

S/O: Astrallon

Family: Unnamed parents, unnamed sister

Curious traveler from the Concept Universe, created by the Goddess of Ykka.

Experimented on and transformed into… something.

After escaping the experimentation facility, it settled in the Fae Forest with another victim of the experiments.

It enjoys scaring the living hell out of people it doesn’t like. It utilises its new abilities to do so to the furthest extent.

Loud, sassy, and easily upset. It’s not the kindest when socialising, but it definitely loves to talk, and is never not seen speaking its mind. The experiments done on it had some odd effects, including thicker, bioluminescent blood, the newfound ability to shapeshift specific parts of its body (specifically its wings and the length of its tail), and strangest of all, effective immortality. Even if its head were to be completely detached, it would still be able to move both its disembodied head and the rest of its body, and reconnect the parts. One of the surgeries conducted on it removed the vast majority of its internal organs, replacing them with inorganic structures with unknown uses. Its modified body responded to the foreign objects by forcibly ripping them out, developing odd tentacle-like organs in place of them. The tentacles are coated in an acidic substance capable of burning through most organic materials, including bones if left for long enough, that its body protects itself against with a coating of an unknown substance, that acts similarly to how the stomach prevents its acid from digesting itself.

It usually stays in the forest, occasionally leaving to visit its Earthling friends, or to find something to eat when food in the surrounding forest is low or not to its liking (it is mostly carnivorous, and it has a very large appetite; woodland animals tend to not be enough to fill it).

It utilises its tail and stingers to attack, immobilise and kill its prey, occasionally using its teeth to simply bite through sensitive areas, or scratching through to the internal organs with its claws. When it feels like it, it might also use its tentacles to burn and rip its prey apart.

Hex codes

Both:

#000000 — Nose / Fishnets

#131313 — Eyes

#141613 — Hair

#33392F — Skin 2

#EBF3E7 — Skin 1

#EEF0E8 — Wing bones

#FFFFFF — Claws / Teeth

#5FFF28 — Pupil / Blood

Before escape:

#919191 — Chains / Collar

#B4B8B1 — Bandages

#CCE8E0 — Medical gown

After escape:

#101010 — Harnesses

#232323 — Shirt

#184200 — Sutures

#35443F — Shorts

#C4DFB6 — Scars

#C1C1C1 — Metal… things? I’ll be honest, I don’t know what those are called

Wings:

#111111 — Feathers base

#001D01 — Flight feathers fade

[joycrispy]

One thing I love about Crowley --never stated, but consistently shown-- is that he is, at heart, an engineer.

I have a few different things to say about that. Let's unpack them.

As the Unnamed Angel, we see his designs for the Pillars of Creation are millions of pages long, comprised of cramped text, footnotes, diagrams, schematics, etc. It's very...Renaissance polymath, in the way it implies a particular intersection of artist and inventor.

Also: in the naked romanticism with which he views his stars.

We already knew he made stars, but in s2 we learn that he did NOT sculpt each of them by hand. He designed a nebula ("a star factory," he says) that will form several thousand young stars and proto-planets, and all --aside from getting the 'factory' running-- without him lifting a finger. We also learn that these young stars and proto-planets stand in contrast to those made by other angels, which are going to come 'pre-aged.'

...I'm reminded of Hastur and Ligur's approach to temptations. Damning one human soul at a time, devoting singular attention to it over the course of years or decades, and how that stands in contrast to Crowley's reliance on, quote, 'knock-on effects.'

Ligur: It's not exactly...craftsmanship. Crowley: Head office don't seem to mind. They love me down there.

Hm.

I'm also reminded of the M25.

The M25 may not be as grand as a nebula (sentences you only say in GOmens fandom...), but LIKE his nebula it's an intricate, self-sustaining engine that does Crowley's work for him, many times over. Again.

That's some pretty neat characterization --and so is the indication towards Crowley's disinterest in victimizing anyone tempting individual people. It takes a considerable amount of planning and effort (and creeping about in wellies), but in accordance with his design the M25 generates a constant stream of low-grade evil on a gigantic scale.

Cumulatively gigantic, that is. Individually? Negligible.

But no other demon understands human nature well enough to parse that one million ticked-off motorists are not, in any meaningful way, actually equivalent to one dictator, or one mass-murderer, or even one little influential regressive. That's the trick of it. Crowley gets Hell's approval (which he NEEDS to survive, and to maintain the degree of freedom he's eked out for himself), and at the same time ensures that any actual ~Evil Influence~ is spread nice and thin.

It's some clever machinery. And he knows it, too:

The Unnamed Angel and Crowley are both proud of their ideas.

(musings on professional pride, Leonardo da Vinci, the crank handle, and 'the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale' under the cut)

In the 1970's Crowley gives a presentation on the M25, projector and all, to a room full of increasingly impatient demons. Maybe the presentation was work-ordered; the 'can I hear a WAHOO?' definitely wasn't.

Before the Beginning, the Unnamed Angel can barely contain his excitement about his nebula. Aziraphale manages a baffled-but-polite, "....That's nice... :)"

11 years ago, Hastur and Ligur want to 'tell the deeds of the day,' and Crowley smiles to himself because (according to the script-book) he knows he has 'the best one.'

(Naturally, his 'deed' has nothing to do with tempting anybody, and everything to do with setting up a human-powered Rube-Goldberg machine of petty annoyance. Oodles of 'Evil' generated; very little harm done.)

Hastur and Ligur don't get it, of course. That's also consistent.

Nobody ever knows what the hell he's talking about.

It didn't make it on-screen, but, in both the novel AND the script-book, Crowley was friends with Leonardo da Vinci. The quintessential Renaissance polymath. That's where he got his drawing of the Mona Lisa --they're getting very drunk together, and Crowley picks up the 'most beautiful' of the preliminary sketches. He wants to buy it. Leonardo agrees almost off-the-cuff, very casual, because they're friends, and because he has bigger fish to fry than haggling over a doodle:

He goes, "Now, explain this helicopter thingie again, will you?" Because he's an engineer, too.

(It is 1519 at the latest, in this scene. Why the FUCK would Crowley know about helicopters, and be able to explain them, comprehensively, to Leonardo da Vinci?

...Well. I choose to believe he got bored one day and worked it out. Look, if you know how to build a nebula, you can probably handle aerodynamics. And anyway, I think it's telling that this is his idea of shooting the shit. 'A drunken mind speaks a sober heart,' and all. He probably babbled about Aziraphale long enough to make poor Leo sick)

Apart from Aziraphale, Leonardo da Vinci is the only person Crowley has any keepsakes or mementos of.

Think about that, though. Aziraphale's bookshop is bursting with letters, paintings, busts, and personalized signatures memorializing all the humans he's known and befriended over 6000 years (indeed: Aziraphale has living human friends up and down Whickber Street. He's part of a community).

Crowley doesn't have any of that. It's just the stone albatross from the Church (for pining), the infamous gay sex statue (for spicy pining), the houseplants (for roleplaying his deepest trauma over and over, as one does), and this one piece of artwork, inscribed, "To my friend Anthony from your friend Leo da V."

To me, at least, that suggests a level of attachment that seems to be rare for Crowley.

...Maybe he liked having someone to talk shop with? Someone who was interested? Someone engaged enough to ask questions when they didn't immediately understand?

...Anyway.

There's also the matter of the crank handle.

This thing:

This is one of the subtler changes from the book. In the book, Crowley knows Satan is coming and, desperate, arms himself with a tire iron. It's the best he can do. He's not Aziraphale; he wasn't made to wield a flaming sword.

The show, IMO, improves on this considerably. Now he, like Aziraphale, gets to face annihilation with what he was made for in his hand. And it's not a weapon, not even an improvised one like the tire iron.

He made stars with it.

[both gifs by @fuckyeahgoodomens]

If you Google 'crank handle,' you'll get variations on this:

Crank handles have been around for centuries. Consisting of a mechanical arm that's connected to a perpendicular rotating shaft, they are designed to convert circular motion into rotary or reciprocating motion.

Which is to say they're one of the 'simple machines,' like a lever or a pulley; the bread and butter of engineering. You'll also get a list of uses for a crank handle, archaic and modern. Among them: cranking up the engine of an old-fashioned car... say, a 1933 Bentley. That's what Crowley has been using his for, lately. But he's had it since he was an angel and he's still, it seems, very capable of it's angelic applications.

Stopping time. For instance.

(This is conjecture on my part, but, I like to imagine that Crowley has the ability to stop time for the same reason I can --and should-- unplug my computer before I perform maintenance on it. Time and Space are a matched set, after all, and in his designs in particular, one feeds into the other.)

I know everyone has already said this, but: I REALLY LIKE that when he needs to channel the heights of his power, he does so not with a weapon but with a tool. Practically with a little handheld metaphor for ingenuity. One from long-lost days when he made beautiful things.

(And he loved it. Still loves it --he incorporated that metaphor into the Bentley, didn't he?)

Let Aziraphale rock up to the apocalypse with a weapon: he has his own compelling thematic reasons to do exactly that. Crowley's story is different, and fighting isn't the only way to express defiance. And if you've been condemned as a demon and assumed to be destructive by your very nature, what better way than this?

He made stars. They didn't manage to take that from him.

Neither Crowley nor Aziraphale are fighters, really --they have no intention of fighting in any war. They'll annoy everyone until there's no war to fight in, for a start. But between the two, if one must be, then that one is Aziraphale. Principality of the Earth, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, Wielder of the Flaming Sword... all that stuff. Even if he'd prefer not to, it's very clear that Aziraphale can rise to the occasion, if he must.

Crowley was never that kind of angel. He wasn't a Principality. He doesn't have a sword.

...And yet.

It's Crowley who protects. He's the one who paces, who stands guard, who circles Aziraphale and glares out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near.

In light of everything else I've said here, I think that's interesting.

Obviously part of it is that Aziraphale enjoys it and, you know, good for him. He's living his best life, no doubt no doubt no doubt. But what about Crowley? What's driving that behavior, really?

Have you heard the phrase, 'loved to the point of invention'? Well, what if 'the point of invention' was where you started? What if where you end up involves glaring out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near? What is that, in relation to the bright-eyed thing you used to be?

What do we name the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale?

...Thinking about how an excitable angel with three million pages of star design he wants to tell you all about...becomes a guard dog. Is all.

[cor-lapis]

Fontaine is in remarkably good shape after getting completely submerged. Even Dvalin threw a few signs on roofs and whatnot

Kaveh and al-Haitham redesigns are mine (still WIP), while Nahida's is by fallencrowkarma

Masterpost of other quest sketches

[wherestoriescomefrom]

rian johnson took all that time, put in all that effort to make glass onion a fantastic period piece to the first four months of pandemic, a prescient narrative that anticipates the stupidity of rich billionaires, and then pulled the rug from under us because the world of benoit blanc just straight up doesn't have the mona lisa anymore

[samarecharm]

Ryuji having the worst bi crisis of his fucking life bc his mom just had to fucking ask “oh, whats this young ladys name?” when he showed her a picture of Akira petting Morgana. Like okay yeah Akira is like objectively pretty, hes like the Classic Delicate Pretty Boy just like Yusuke which is like whatever; straight dudes have eyes, and they know what women like to see. But now hes like. Seeing things he likes in girls IN Akira now and he cant make it Stop like its genuinely keeping him up at night 😭

Pretty boy used to be A Face that would come up in his mind when he thought of the term. There was no specifics in mind, just like. Pretty Boy. Pretty boy! You say that and theres like a Face Template that shows up in ur minds eye and hed just attribute that to any dude who was like Vaguely Pretty. But now its Akira 😭 and he finds himself cataloging things that Akira does that he KNOWS he finds cute when girls do it. The hairtuck behind the ears. The headtilt when he mishears a question. The Actually Pretty Doe Eyes. The breathy, nearly inaudible chuckle he does in place of a Real laugh (thats made better by the fact that its so hard to get him to laugh in the first place). He likes cute snacks. He blushes easily. Ryuji is sitting here like ‘theres no fucking way man. Like theres just no way. That shit makes NO sense (a lie)’ lying in bed in the middle of the night looking like this vvvv w his phone in his hands (looking at pictures of akira)

It drives him insane bc like he did Not see any of these things as like inherently girly or whatever. Like thats just akira thats just his bro! And he does OTHER weird shit that cancels all that shit out. Hes like a messy engineer/tinkerer, he rolls out of bed and whatever situation his hair is is everyones problem. He wears that AWFUL gym uniform and doesnt tweak it AT ALL?? He likes baseball?? hes got a whole binder of trading cards that he will show off if u show any moment of weakness. Like hes just Some Dude but also manages to be Some Girl at the same time and Ryuji is like thats not fair. Life sucked ass but at least it made sense before Akira stumbled into it 😭

[michimarytheworld]

Woohoo this time its genshin impact

[ronanxing]

heehoo

[skillbattle]

pushes them in your general direction 👍🏽

[queerofthedagger]

gay people can never be normal it always gotta be some shit like and the thought of their ancient friendship stung his heart

[pictureofdoriaaaaaangay]

chaotic book ramble so I can stop spiraling into the abyss: dark academia books you've heard of and probably already read edition

I need to talk about books I love to stay sane please stand by <3

Bunny by Mona Awad. I love this book SO MUCH. it's beautifully written, the characters are all unhinged women, there's murder, there's creation, there's a creative writing class. it drips with insanity and eroticism. reading it is like living a fever dream. you can picture the events of the book perfectly, but could never hope to explain it to anyone.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt. this book is the entire world to me. I love the characters [they're all terrible and irredeemable people], I love the story [they kill a man then they kill their friend and also worship Dionysus], and I absolutely want a friend group just like the Greek class [to reiterate: they are all walking red flags]. it's a book you have to read once, then again, and again, just to notice more and more so you can analyze it and make deductions. at the end of the day, it goes beyond the age-old "moral implications of murder" and delves into "moral implications of love". don't ask me how many times I've read it. that's my red flag.

If We Were Villains by ML Rio. it was only recently that I read this over the course of twenty four hours, and I honesty have yet to recover. I'm not a Shakespeare girlie, but I still loved the way his work was so inherently and intricately woven into the story of the iwwv characters. it was transcendent. it was a tragedy, it was a love story, it was a comedy. it depends on your perception of it, I suppose. but I digress - it's a really good bloody book. expect the ending to make you cry.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by our lord and savior Oscar Wilde. this, technically, can't really be classified under the textbook definition of "dark academia" since there's not exactly any academia (can Harry even read let's be honest here), but it goes in this list because VIBES. this is one of my favorite novels of all time, and another one I've read one too many times for it to not be a red flag. I mean, the name of my damn blog is my red flag. I love it so much. it's got everything, from art to obsession to murder to gay people to the most heartachingly profound lines you've ever read. I mean, why wouldn't you read it if you haven't already?

These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever. this one snuck up on me. towards the beginning, I wasn't sure if I'd like it, but by the middle, I was hooked. by the ending, I was shooketh. reading the author note, I was sitting silently in abject horror. more gay people, more obsession, more murder - what else do I have to say?

this has been a chaotic book ramble. thank you for being here <3

[desire-mona]

2011

[bulbabutt]

Raphaella Meets His Match

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7

oh shes a BIG big girl! poor raphie what happened ? :C

[muppetminge]

gd i get so fucking angry when i see crying about "boys are doing worse in school :(" being pulled up to look like a huge problem. you're not upset about boys doing 'badly' - you're upset about girls doing well. blaming it on the school system is so funny because tell me how the school system is suddenly modelled after the girls when we weren't even allowed in when the basis of the current system was being created lmao.

the difference between average grade by sex is about the same as the regional/geographic difference and it's less than the difference sorted by race/ethnicity (not even to mention the socioeconomic differences), yet these aren't the differences creating headlines every year. why?

because you find girls doing well wrong, like it's upsetting the natural order. you're hanging on to this idea that girls are stupid, yet when you're proved wrong you refuse to accept it, hanging on to an excuse of systematic differences that have to be solved now, because won't somebody please think of the poor boys :(

so we're looking at averages. here's the thing: those are never going to level out. we're always going to see one group being above/below others. you're just upset it's not in the "right" order.

the difference is smaller than you'd think, by the way. when i was in high school (non-us system, meaning voluntary/different kinds of secondary) we were 70 percent women. you know what else? the girls, in general, were working fucking hard. every single grade point they fucking earned. there's this story of girls' grades being inflated due to this and that, but all i've seen is boys getting grades for doing less - because they're outnumbered, the poor things, so it's obviously the teacher's job to support them, right? right??

even in trade school where we were a handful of girls per year, i saw nothing but the girls putting in their all and the boys showing up. sometimes. if they felt like it.

but it's a systemic problem, right? how else would girls be doing well? we've got to solve this, lest the boys get their egoes wounded by not placing in their 'natural' position. gd forbid we end up with an overweight of women professionals.

[fawnchives]

happy excited extrovert gf!reader who’s kinda gullible and trusts people too easily & skeptical introvert bf!simon who has to remind her that she shouldn’t be quick to befriend every person she meets and that most people are just very terrible…walk with me as i expand on this topic!

[geoledgy]

The volcanologist and the spirit medium.

[amadeuszdraws]

I know I don't post much on here anymore, I really want to go back to making art, but I don't have the motivation or time to do so.

Anyways, until I make something I'm actually proud of, have this Claudia sketch I don't entirely hate