You’ve heard of Tezzerat…. but consider…. Tezzebat!!! (dramatic gasp)
Or, tezzeflying fox, I guess (infer from that what you will). I wanted to try something I hadn’t seen before, and I liked the bat design from the released art.
Also here’s fanart I drew last month of Tezzerat dying in a glue trap 😌
You mentioned potentially redesigning characters as Compleated in a post a while back, and if you’re still interested in that, I’d *love* to see how you’d go about compleating Teferi! There’s a lot of potential there I feel like
Sorry for the (checks calendar) two month delay, but I wanted to give this some thought
I kind of went a bit overboard with this, cuz I wanted to explore a few different ideas
I added some notes, I hope they’re legible (side note but I found some old art of mine and apparently my handwriting has not improved since i was about 10 years old)
Also I felt like doing something shapey so I did a very straightforward (by which I mean barely changed) porcelain host design. I think the gold inlaid in the porcelain looks pretty good, as well as being a bit of a hint at his true autonomy (gold hued metals being much more associated with mirrans and the resistance than any new phyrexian faction, from what I can tell)
I think a design combining porcelain and chrome would be cool, but alas, is spent a lot of time on this already, so that might come later
Anyways—thank you for this suggestion, I ended up having a lot of fun with it, and I might have to draw more teferi art now, because I adore his visual design.
one of the few pieces in the entire Phyrexian arc I’m willing to take as authoritative canon, along with A Hollow Body
To elaborate on this:
I really like how it both explored Phyrexian biology (white Phyrexians being able to change the shape of their porcelain and manifest natural weapons?? So cool!!) and the deep insecurity that lays at the heart of Phyrexian tyranny.
Norn is insecure about her position, her fertility, her power. In Phyrexia, and particularly as the Mother of Machines, fertility–the ability to transform others–is the lynchpin of a lot of Phyrexian power, and Ashiok attacks that. It digs deeper into the idea I’ve had for a while that Phyrexia centers upon reproductive horror, at least from the perspective of its own people. Both the fear of impotency, and the way the state exploits people’s fertility to spread its own agenda.
It also shows how deeply Norn has repressed herself, how (for lack of a better word) human she is and how vehemently she denies it. Her reign of terror is driven, at its core, by a deep and abiding self-loathing. Scores of Phyrexians worship the facade of the Mother. Norn knows that her true internality as a person would receive no such respect.
The last thing she wants is for someone to recognize the person at the Mother’s heart, and to show her compassion, or worse, pity. Her position is not one of glory, no matter how hard she tries to persuade herself it is. It’s the cruel domination of a sick, insecure person who craves power over others, others who have been deliberately starved of meaning and affection so that they may chain themselves to her. Someone not only seeing that, but pitying her for it, is quite literally her worst nightmare.
I am extremely grateful to Lora Gray for showing the psychological depths of Phyrexian domination within their own society. They aren’t evil monsters who worship their cruel leaders wholeheartedly. They are people who have very deliberately been made that way.
I have even more to rant about this actually–
Because something else I took away from A Garden of Flesh is how disconnected Norn really is from the reality of the Phyrexian experience. She repeatedly claims that Phyrexians don’t dream, even though that is a primary form of ichor scrying and connecting to the past. She claims to be the pinnacle of Phyrexian perfection and yet denies the way her people connect with their heritage and collective memory.
