OOOUUUGGGHHHHHHMYYYYDAYS.

OOOUUUGGGHHHHHHMYYYYDAYS.

RATMARIRATMARIRATMARIRATMARI!!!!

AND YES!!! YOU GOT ZIEMIA RIGHT!!

pls don't call urself dumb!!! ( ;｀Д´)

I GOT ABSOLUTELY JUMPSCARED BY THE NOTIF FOR THIS POST BUT IT WAS SO WORTH IT???

I LOVE LOVE LOVEEE THE USE OF RATS, SINCE THEY ARE MOSTLY ASSOCIATED WITH PLAGUE AND ETC!!

AND YEAH IM POLISH!! SO IF U NEED ANY TRANSLATIONS JUST TELL ME!!! ( ＾ω＾ )

AAAAOOOUUUUUGGHHHHH I NEED TO DRAW HER BUT MY CSP IS TWEAKING RN.. (ｙﾟﾛﾟ)ｙ

I ALSO HAVE TO KNOW HOW AUBREY LOOKS IN THIS AU OR ILL EXPLODE

but take this sol sneak peek I did a quick screen of... (ohmygodwhathappenedwiththequality???)

the moment you’ve all been waiting for

Ziemia

Or as I’ve been calling her up until now- Rat Mari! Now to tell you the truth Rat Mari/Ziemia took me AGES to properly figure out and when I was first getting started with Marzenie I had no idea what to do about Mari- then I had the rot metaphor idea and decided “rats in the shape of a person is pretty horrible I could do that!”… thus, Mari shaped rat pile and some wooden limbs in there too for vague symbolism reasons? Which. What I mean by that is that I’m drawing a similarity between her and Sol

The whole thing with Sol is the idea of perfection, a person is not capable of perfection and so he must be a doll, must be wood and light and no more- Mari was once perfect too, but her idea is tainted and gone and all that remains is rot. Do you see what I’m saying here? I’m not sure honestly I’ve been brainfogged as hell lately and started this drawing two days ago only to finish it NOW, and to be totally honest the design isn’t everything I wanted from it… but it dawned on me sometime lately that what I do want would be very tedious to draw

I cannot physically draw enough rats for me to be happy with so I compromised with not that many rats- and they aren’t very good rats either I’m not that great with animals … anyhow! Why Ziemia? Well. I think I’ve brought it up before but the in-world explanation for this character is that she was once a nature goddess, like how Sol is a god of the sun- but she was tainted by something terrible and consumed by pests, so Ziemia (in my rudimentary understanding of the polish language thanks to imperfect software because I don’t actually know polish and am doing my best to choose correct translations) is a word that means Earth. There were alternate translations and other words I could’ve used, but I picked Ziemia because it’s 1: a relatively simple word that matches the other ones I’ve used and 2: sounds enough like a name that I find it easy to call a character that and 3: is relatively easy to pronounce for … what I imagine to be my mostly English speaking audience? What five of you there are- other then @/birdzman ! Who I think might actually be polish? Not sure but shout out to you if you’re reading this!! Not fully sure if I’m right but if so then uhhh I apologize for being a dumb little American because I doubt I’m doing these translations right, anyhow!

Rat Mari/Ziemia isn’t just accociated with rats, I also want her to have themes of decay and other scavenger animals such as maggots or worms, the focus on rats is to do with Marzenie’s setting, I guess the idea is that Rats invade homes in winter to survive, whereas bugs mostly die off in winter regardless of available human homes to inhabit, so rats are one of the only pest animals which persist through the snow, which is why they might appear in some places outside Ziemia’s tree area, whilst other associated creatures would be unique to that area

Last but not least of my statements on this character, Ziemia does not represent the grief of Mari’s death, but rather the tangible brutality of it, how death feels in the eyes of a child, the inherent horror of a corpse, of knowing a person was once alive is no longer so, the horror of feeling their body stiff and cold in your arms, arms that once held you … this is what the rot theme comes from, one of Basil’s frequent hallucinations is of her body, decaying on the rope, decaying where he left her.

Cough. YAY!!!!!