Jana Brike (Latvian, B. 1980)

miquella miqscalculates

sometimes when I'm sad I think about how the hollow knight's fighting style and hornet's are so similar. look at the way they both guard with their nail! how they do that dash darting forward move! baby hornet wanted to be like her big sibling so bad 😞

anyway and then I get more sad 👍🏻

SDV feels like it could so easily become a fairy story.

You move to a little coastal town where you begin recovering a plot of land, some of the locals take a shine to you and you to them. It's nice, homey. Everyone is welcoming except for the established town grumps.

Suddenly you realize you never leave town. Everything you want is obtainable at the little mom'n'pop general store, or from some of the locals themselves. You never go into the city to sell goods because the mayor does it for you- right? You never really see him do it. You just lie down in bed and wake up in the morning. When was the last time you dreamed?

You need new shoes and the adventurers club sells you handmade leather boots that fit perfectly despite never asking for a shoe size. Your clothes sew themselves when you lay a bolt of fabric and a random item onto the sewing machine- you blink and it's done.

The general store sells fertilizers that turn your garden plot into a verdant field. You spend all day harvesting crops with tools that gleam silver, gold, purple. Saplings grow over a month into fully productive fruit trees, your beehives drop jars of honey into your hands.

The blacksmith cracks open geodes full of polished gemstones. There's a man in the woods who says he found you in the mines but you were 80 levels deep. The elevator works but the minecarts don't. You gave a diamond to a local girl and she ate it like a plum.

And suddenly everyone is drinking mayonnaise.

Scrunkly awkward emo teenager Messmer save me...save me scrunkly awkward emo teenager Messmer

the full piece

They now have a mouth and they must scream

Buy me a kofi?

a few more sketches

I made this bc I had a convo with a friend, where we came to the conclusion that Hollow couldn't use a can opener because they are left handed

"Golden Rule, motherfucker."

FISH EYE PERSPECTIVE IS HARD

I’ve think I’ve figured it out

I think I know what MDR is doing and what lumon is doing and where this story is going to go

It’s Orpheus and Eurydice. Eurydice dies and goes to hell, Orpheus descends down there and gets the chance to bring her back, but loses her forever because he turns round to look at her.

If mark is Orpheus, and Gemma is Euridyce, and the severed floor is hell, that means that by going down there as a severed employee Mark got a chance to bring Gemma back, but he’s going to lose it by looking back to find her. By reintegrating.

Gemma died. Like actually died. She wasn’t brain dead and intercepted by lumon. She died, mark identified the body. Somewhere between that and the cremation lumon took her.

Lumon is trying to raise the dead, presumably to bring back Kier (who’s body im sure is being preserved in some horrid cult place of worship somewhere in the depths of lumon) and has been pretty successful so far. At getting the body back. The mind is trickier, and that’s what MDR is doing. They’re tidying up brain waves, trying to bring a persons memory and conciousness back.

That’s why the files expire. The person gets too dead, their brain gets too damaged, and there’s no point trying anymore.

Gemma has been the most successful so far. She’s not just physically alive, but her brain is functioning too. Her position as wellness counsellor was an experiment to see how she interacts with other people, to see how well her consciousness is recovering

Coldharbour is her last file. When it’s done, she’ll be completely back and lumon will have successfully brought a dead person fully back to life, a major milestone for them. If it expires, she’ll be gone forever

Mark reintegrated. He’s going to be suspicious of lumon, suspicious of the work, and so caught up in looking for Gemma he won’t finish cold harbour

He looked back. So he’s going to lose her forever