(January 30th, 2023)

Hello all! My partner Kai needs some help, and I’m offering up commissions for those willing to donate. Text version of the images is under the cut.

Anything helps, and if you aren’t able to donate, please do share this around! It was absolutely devastating to see the cost of surgery increase more than tenfold the original amount.

ALL PRICES IN USD

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I am doing some commissions to help out my partner in paying off his top surgery. Anything helps!

Drowcember themes - 2022

Hello! This may be unexpected, but Drowcember is officially coming back this year, with a brand new list! This is your drow / dark elf specific event, where the idea is to create all sorts of art related to them and their culture. 

We tried to keep it setting agnostic, meaning the topics have been kept vague enough to work with homebrew settings that may be vastly different from established canon. We will be checking the drowcember tag and reblogging any dark elf related art we can find in there.

Feel free to follow the list, or check the lists for the other years (which are available in here), or do your own. You don’t need to draw them all either, draw at your own pace! Make the pictures as simple or as elaborate as you’d like, the idea is to have fun with it. 

(As a side-note: The original creators of this event and blog, kavos-plz and aiffe, are no longer active on tumblr. I ( @leidensygdom​ ) asked them for permission to run the event this year, and I’ll be handling the account. I’m really excited to bring this back!)

Hey hello!! Do you like drow?? I really mean it- Do you like drow enough to draw them for a whole month? Well, drowcember is finally back after a long hiatus, and I got permission to run it officially!

Check this list, check the older list, or just draw your own- I’ll be reblogging all the entries I see in tags <3 I hope y’all have fun!

(And maybe give a follow to the drowcember account if you’re up for Much Drow Content)

Yeah! The only reason Harrpw had gold eyes in NtN is because Alecto was squatting in her delicious nun bod. Which has fascinating implications, since the gold eyes that are Alecto's actually used to be Jod's. So performing Lyctorhood literally and physically swaps which eyes belong to your soul, to the point where You squatting in some rando's body will be shown through having Your Partner's eyes.

When Ianthe was possessing Bab's corpse, his body had his OG eyes. Which means that normally his corpse must have her lavender eyes. Except when palamedes took his hot potato turn with Babs, of course, and it got Cam's brown-ish eyes to show Palamedes was in control.

Now here's where it gets complicated:

John genetically passed his golden eyes down to his child, Gideon—despite the fact that the eyes have been physically on Alecto for 10,000 eyes. Also despite the fact that John dIDN'T EVEN HAVE GOLD EYES GENETICALLY!! He used to have brown eyes. Alecto passed those "hot, inside-of-an-egg" eyes to him seemingly as a package deal with his Enormous powers. Furthermore, Cytherea told Gideon her eyes were a recessive lipochrome which means that Wake had to have at least been carrying a passive trait for Gideon to inherit, since her eyes are never, not once, described as yellow. So, options. A: Alecto changed the actual genetics of John when she gave him Enormous Powers (EP). Then either Wake somehow has the EP yellow eyed gene, confusingly right now but maybe—given how legendary she was, I could see the books lead up to some reveal of her having extra powers—OR Cytherea was lying/simplifying bc she's That Bitch and it's a dominant gene lol. Or B(C?) : It's not genetic at all and is a symbol of EP that anyone who ascended might be given. Gideon as God's child definitely inherited some powers even Lyctors don't have, which we have yet to fully explore.

Also honorable mention in this slurried mix of eye stuff is that Lyctors appear to be sterile. All of the "dolls" Mercy made with John's semen and her eggs died, despite being "perfect." It remains to be seen whether John was the exception because he is a god or because he is a Perfect Lyctor orrrr because he is a Perfect Lyctor with the soul of a Planet as his other half (which could also be why he is a god). Is Alecto sterile? Could Alecto have a child with the ringed void eyes we associate with John that are actually hers? Is Paul sterile? Is Kiriona? If a lot of the Houses have similar looks to the OG Lyctors still ten thousand years later, that means the OG Lyctors were reproducing like crazy at the start of everything before ascending right? Did they care that they watched their children and grandchildren die? How many generations did it take before they stopped recognizing their descendants eyes as their originals?

And, most fascinatingly: WHO did Jod stuff in Ulysses and Titania's corpses? And did they keep their original eyes?

Btw this didn't even cover soul melanges like Teacher, or the Stoma-tentacles in Colums eyes OR the Stoma-tentacle-eyed zombies Kiriona is fighting at the front, which may be the same thing that was in Colum, which given the nature of possessions being shown through the eyes implies that Hell Itself (or whatever lives beyond the River/IS the River) is so pissed at John for mucking up the afterlife/awaking it, a great evil, that it is doing this whole Ood/Mind Flayer/What-the-FUCK-Muir demonic horrible Thing!!!!!!!!

The "lipochrome, recessive" thing drives me NUTS because that is a real eye color! That's an eye color real people right now have. About 5% of the world's population have amber eyes, eyes that appear to be golden, yellow, or copper in color, pigmented by lipochrome.

So I guess Cytherea assumed the yellow was John's natural eye color, after she saw his daughter had inherited it. It wouldn't be weird for Wake to be a carrier for the phenotype while having darker eyes herself, since it's a recessive trait. Like John must be a carrier for red hair, for Gideon to have inherited that from Wake. Meanwhile we now know something Cytherea doesn't: the yellow isn't natural lipochromatic pigment at all, it's magical girl bullshit! So it's entirely probable the eyes came with whatever power made little baby Gideon not die when she was killed, and Cytherea used the wrong equation to get the right answer.

I would LOVE to confirm if Babs' eyes changed color too. Unlike John, Ianthe didn't put any of herself into her cavalier. She just slurped Babs' soul up and swallowed it whole. So would the eye color be a two-way swap for that kind of lyctorhood? If Harrow hadn't been able to save Gideon, would the dull clouded eyes on Gideon's corpse have been black or gold?

Swerving away from the eye color thing for a minute, there is a lot to explore in that last paragraph of your first reply!

First off, I'm not sure if we have enough information to conclude that all lyctors are sterile. It'd make sense if lyctorhood fucked with reproduction, since necromancy sure does, but we don't really know why all of Mercy's eggs died. It could be that lyctors are reproductively incompatible with John specifically; or it could be just be something to do with Mercymorn, and not her lyctorhood. Totally a good theory, and I think you may be right, but more research needed before Pyrrha and/or Paul can start counting on lyctorhood as birth control.

As to the lyctors having had tons of children before they ascended: I suppose it's possible, but I doubt it. No House other than the Ninth has been established as tracing their genetic lineage back to a founding ancestor, and I have trouble imagining that of Mercymorn or Gideon the First. Totally see where you're getting the correlation between lyctor and House, with Ninth eyes and Cytherea saying that "the Seventh House is awfully predictable for looks," but Cytherea didn't found the Seventh. She was born there, meaning she had family there. She doesn't need to have personally contributed anything to that gene pool for a passable look-alike to pop up millenia later.

I'm kind of hesitant about assuming all the Houses have distinctive phenotypes. It's been implied some other stereotypes exist in the setting, like Silas wondering if Gideon's mother had been Third because of their hair, but Silas was being a creep when he said that, and he was wrong besides. It's not the kind of world building I want to lean into. Protesilaus and Dulcinea look nothing alike, despite what Cytherea said, and the necrocav pairs that do look alike also tend to be fairly closely related and thus not a good measure for the House as a whole. Our sample size is small, our standard deviation is high, ect.

Some of the disciples having had children, tho, whose descendants they watched live and die through generations? That is a fascinating idea, and I'd love to explore it. Would their descendants know? If yes, do the other Houses have heroes they claim are descended from lyctors? Were Anastasia's children still young when she built the Tomb, or was she already the grandmother of the Ninth, ancestor of her people? John kept his disciples young and immortal for centuries, but only if they stayed close to him. Was Anastasia having a family part of the original push for an independent lyctorhood?

Made a thing of my PC’s love interest! Gale thinks the absolute world of her. Been feeling a bit ass about my art, but I’m pretty happy with how this turned out.