I hate the look of the Mother of Serpents

[Kristoffer O]

The mother of serpents is a minoan figurine. Whats not to like

[HoneyBadger]

Well, for a topless woman clutching two live snakes, she just looks a little too...matronly. Like somebody's dear Aunt Edna, if their Aunt Edna worked really hard core strip clubs.

[Aezeal]

looks to matronly... ehm she is called the MOTHER of snakes for a reason I guess she's not called the hot 'n horny lapdancer of snakes

[HoneyBadger]

Well, dear old sweet topless snakeloving mother though she certainly may be, she still doesn't quite say "Mighty Pretender to Godhood" to me. She probably bakes a mean pie though

[Kristoffer O]

Actually, not that many gods are awe inspiring. What about the 'god with backward feet', or the 'two-faced eater of filth'. I imagine most peoples have considered christ rather bland when they first encounter him. Pale, weak and impaled on a crucifix. Not very impressive

I once found this hilarious piece of text:

CHALCHIUHTOTOLIN: God of Pestilence. He is the Precious Night Turkey and a God of Mystery.

It is a mystery we have been unable to unravel. There is a picture of him in the Codex Borbonias that is so utterly weird it must be seen to be disbelieved. In the midst of seemingly undecipherable symbols he is dressed in a turkey suit and seems to be vomiting into a large pot.

We may need to come back to this later, but not without a stiff drink or two first.

[Herode]

Hey, don't touch MoS' sprite ! She's just fine like that. I love her Babylonian fierce and introverted look.

The alternate Final-Fantasy sprite I saw some posts ago is just a Disneyworld's joke

[Poopsi]

My biggest beef is that with size 5, the upraised hands, and the huge skirts, she reminds me of the cardboard giants that are displayed at rural festivities. I sort of expected a death and nature goddess to be more... awe-inspiring

[HoneyBadger]

Kristoffer-I agree with you, gods aren't very dramatic in their original forms, taken as a whole. Usually just humans written large, or strange, or just deformed in some way. Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" had some great insights into that trend.

I understand that having something with a history behind it is ofcourse often preferrable to something made up, but I've always been of the opinion that there wasn't anything wrong with making things up, either. Especially if it helps tell a good story. That's what myths are, afterall, good stories that people believed. So I can appreciate and respect that she's a fine Babylonian icon-and I'm not the one who started this thread, keep in mind-but I can also understand the desire for something greater, weirder, more grand and mysterious and monstrous-to the eyes of our generation, as opposed to an ancient Babylonian native.


Also:
The request was for a less human version of Mother of Serpents, and I think I came up with something suitably inhuman-she's hardly a 'Disneyworld's joke', whatever that's supposed to mean...No mickey mouse ears that I could see? She's animated, true, but it was my reasoning that it'd be better to have something that could easily be transformed into a sprite, than not. Aside from that, Disney's responsible for some of the best animation ever made. So it's hardly an insult to compare an image to Disney's. Comparing real myths to Disney versions is ofcourse another story altogether, but artistically they're one of the highest institutions in animation-and share a great deal of the responsibility for creating-and certainly popularizing-the animation art-form, in the first place.

[Herode]

KO said "Minoean", it's me that erroneously assimilated the icon to a Babylonian look.

Also, no personal offense was intended when comparing your sprite to a Disney thing. If you feel my note as agressive then please accept my apologizes. Don't forget I'm not an english native speaker and I may miss many nuances and subtleties when reading/writing english posts.

This being said, on a strictly aesthetic point of view, I can say 2 things :

- Personnaly, I definitely hate the Final Fantasy stuff and look. Sorry for that. I don't hate Snagga-like monsters, just FF ones. As well as FF heroes as a whole, at least the ones we often see as avatars in forums. That's just a personnal and deeply subjective matter, I agree.

- As for the Disney thing, I also agree they made great stuff... for children. I used to love many of their cartoons when I was a child. On the other hand, Disney iconography has greatly contributed to develop a sanitized aesthetic of mythologies (folklores/faery tales/etc) that I feel insuitable with the European tradition. I am European. So I don't favour Dysney, nor Final Fantasy, things. And of course I don't play Dom III as a "children oriented" game

But I'm afraid such considerations will drive us far away from the original subject of the thread. I just wanted to make my personnal and subjective point clear. I recognize anybody else the ability to refuse to share my positions and as you said, "it's hardly an insult" to make such comparisons. It's just an opinion.

And I love the actual MoS

[HoneyBadger]

I'll correct that-a Minoan figure, not Babylonian-I must have read "Minoan" and thought "Babylonian"?

I don't particularly like FF either-and I took no offense-I'm not promoting FF as a game-I think I might have played it once, and I couldn't tell you which version. and I also don't like what Disney has done to various myths. I do have to defend their artwork some, because studying drawing techniques from various Disney films has been very educational for me, as an artist. Not that it shows through all that much in bitmap sprites

But taken as a piece of art, I think the picture fits the topic. It doesn't shout out to me "Final Fantasy art!", and it really might not even *be* from FF-I found it accidentally online and then made an educated guess, after searching for the source of it.

And you're doing better with English than I am with any other language, so no worries!