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| There Wait My Bone-Fires |
| Written by Paul D. Batteiger | |||
| Monday, 07 May 2012 04:26 | |||
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Seventh chapter of The Red Winter Queen is up, and this is by far the most transgressive and intense chapter of the book. There have been a lot of versions of Snow White, and even some, no doubt, where she gets gang-banged by the dwarves. However, I don't think there has been a version where the 'dwarves' are her semi-incorporeal undead brothers, and they chain her down and flat-out rape her. This is the part of the saga of Inanna when she proceeds into the underworld, and there she must symbolically die. In the Sumerian myth she went there to seek the release of her lover, Dumuzi. But here Ereshkigal turned her stone glance upon her, slew her in a heartbeat, and in the words of the original tale "hung her on a hook'. A hard thing about transforming myth into fiction is that myth is so much harsher than the tales we tell ourselves now. People are tortured, killed, and mutilated with an abandon we reserve for horror movies, reducing our myths to big, candy-coated fantasies where the rough edges of life have been filed away and replaced with something gentler. This chapter is not gentle, and I might perhaps urge a bit of caution. The illustration for this is one I really, really like. It helped to have Naamah's smilodon skull there to look at, so the skulls look sort-of right. I originally intended to go back in and do a bunch of crosshatching and shading, but when the black and white was done I thought it looked fine like it is. The stark look made it look more harshly-lit, like that fire was really bright and everything else was really dark. This was one of the drawings that made me abandon the one-red-part idea, as I thought about doing the eyes red, or the fire, but anything I thought of would just overpower the composition. It remains one of the pieces I'm most proud of.
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| Last Updated on Monday, 07 May 2012 04:26 |
