Alter Ego Dark

The Pen

| March 18, 2008

This post starts as an excuse for me to exclaim, that DEMONOPHOBIA ROCKS. I let this game sit in my drive for a couple weeks, only to find some time tonight to fire it up. And I'm already in LOVE.

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The Pen (2006-Aug-26). Pen as in an enclosure for domestic animals.

This picture is inspired by two things. First is a comic about a girl being kept in a chicken pen (I can't remember who the artist is, only that he seems to be famous for doing "weird" type of guro work (not "bloody" type as Uziga)). That illustration made me want to draw something about girls kept and fed in a lifestock pen.

The other is a little "historic guro". To be brief, back in the Han Dynasty (200 something BC), a certain queen hates the concubine of the emperor so much, after the death of the emperor she cut off the concubine's limbs, gouge out her eyes, cut off her ears and nose, then kept her in a toilet (or a pig pen, in other versions) calling her a "human pig".

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Retrieving what I wrote when I first posted this pic, I noticed I said that "I always wanted to draw a guro pic where there are insects crawling all over the victim's body". Well, I still do. However I find it interesting that a number of people, even while they frequent guro image boards, have a certain disgust on insect-theme pictures. Insectophobia perhaps? (Is that a word?) One detail I find a few such work neglects was the skin rash on the insects' "paths". I got rash from just one cockroach crawled over my arm, I can't pretend to be able to imagine how it'd feel with hundreds of ants on the body.

On the "technical" side of this picture, one thing I'm proud of (maybe I shouldn't) is the portrayal of pig-swill (*). I tried a few approaches and cannot get the dirty, messy, "slimey" look. (As in something you won't put near your nose, let alone eating it everyday.) Finally I took a picture of my dirty, messy, "slimey" kitchen sink. And it serves as an perfect reference for the portrayal. I've cleaned the mess up since then. Actually I think I've "just" cleaned it again around last Christmas.

(*): I have to look this word up in google. Since I don't know how to call a certain kind of pig-feed that is made from food waste. This practice seems seldom used or mentioned outside Asia.

The marks on the girls' bottom reads "奴", or slave. The marks of those inside the pen were crossed out by a blade. A little backstory I thought of is that the slaves that deemed "unusable" due to mistakes they made, or some other transgression, have their marks crossed out and thrown into the pen to be kept as "human pigs".

One other "backstory" is that the length of their hair conveys their time spent inside the pen, since I imagined that all "slave" class has the same bowl-cut hairstyle (As some readers might notice from my works).

The cross behind her neck was a surgical mark, that I would use to explain her lack of emotion due to some surgical process. In Futaba-guro, one of the readers correctly noticed that the mark would imply "brainwashing".