Ritualistic in HD (Patreon)

So, as per usual, I almost forgot to upload these in the month they were published in, which I feel would have been very bad form of me :b

Both of these share a bit of a theme, at least remotely, in that both psychoactive materials and dances originate from tribal rituals in the wider context of culture. I'm sure that both can also be considered extensions of natural behavior and processes, such as animals eating fermenting fruit to get a high, or bunnies binky-ing when they're happy being something akin to a dance, but I refer to the twilight zone between these deeply primal behaviors and the order of a society.

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First we have the trippy image with Kalahari's Juno. Now this one fought me immensely along the way and looking at it now, there's still something about it that leaves me somewhat dissatisfied, but I fail to figure out exactly what it is.

Both her face and the outstretched hand were points of failure in the previous iteration of the image and I ended up correcting that by finding myself a good image of a hand and matte-painting over it. The face I tweaked a little bit, but I can't quite put my finger on what's bugging me there still :/ ah well

Either way, the image is largely inspired by Kalahari's own "Fraying Colors" from a little while back and was also done as a response to the beautiful rendition of a fire fennec he did recently =w= thank you again for that!

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Second we have something that comes from very close to heart with the fire fennecs, who I know I neglect far too much for many peoples' liking, including my own X3

I'd mentioned in the public upload that their dances tell stories. The Dance Of The Avatar is one of their origin myths, though I suppose calling it a myth is somewhat disingenuous when your god literally walks among your people and they can recite the story to you as their own memory.

In it a young tribesman had left his homeland in search for power to aid his kin, who suffered from a lack of resources and encroachment upon them by other peoples. Wandering alone through a ruin in a far away land, he was visited by their god who, after testing his will in a challenge, would gift him the power to feel the energies of the universe, both to help find fertile lands in their inhospitable home, and conjure fire with them, to ward off conquerors.

The dance is usually carried out by a number of talented wielders, who shape flames as moving backdrops, while the two best performers will play the tribesman and god respectively, with a firepit in the center and accompanied by drums and chants from the crowd. The tribesman will walk through the shapes and arcs cast by their supporting dancers, wielding nothing themselves. The god player will rise up from the fire pit and engulf the tribesman in flames, which they must struggle free from and then enter a duel with the god, ending in a spectacular display of harmonised movement and complementing casts of flame towards and around eachother.

Given the complex nature of the final act of the dance, the two dancers performing as the main cast are usually intimately acquainted with eachother, and it's not rare for them to be lovers either. It's not surprising then, that it is often chosen as the celebratory dance at weddings.

Outside of this it is also performed during the winter and summer solstice, which is when the actual god choses a new avatar to host them for the next season. During these events they will usually take on their actual role in the dance, and the "duel" in the final act will see them transfer their essence to the tribesman player, becoming their new avatar in the process.

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So there you have it. A little bit of the crazy lore I came up with back in the day when Resurgence was still a thing. Most of this works outside the context of that story aswell though, so you can consider any of this entirely canonical :3

Doodles to upload and then we're done with the month again. My, my, how time flies ._.

LYA~