Gathering of the Monster Girls

Welcome back. To wrap up my binge of Halloween themed content, I have for your viewing pleasure a couple of Monster Girls, variants of ladies out of the Book of the Shadows series, of course. For the background, keep reading. For the pictures, jump to the next post.

This has been an idea in the making for a long while, but it wasn’t until recently I had the gumption to take a stab at the whole thing.

Not long after I came to the idea of the Two-Six within the BotS fan-fiction, I also came to the idea that each of the ladies would be paired with an avatar of some sort. I already knew I would pair them off equally among the celestial bodies – sun, moon, stars – and I already knew that at the very least Anzu would have an enduring and strong connection to a dragon theme. As the list of the Two-Six grew I initially put the avatar idea on the backburner, but some spots started filling themselves in. As they did I began to have to resolve competitions, such as the idea that the avatar of the cat could conceivably work with multiple ladies.

In essence, the idea behind the avatars is that each of the Two-Six have some form of creature that is their calling-card or representative of sorts. This idea cemented itself for me with Umineko no Naku Koro Ni, in which the golden butterfly was the symbol of Beatrice’s magic. The original idea for avatars, however, goes all the way back near the outset of the BotS, back in 9^th or 10^th grade in high school, where we had to design a coat-of-arms for an English class project. As an aside to that, I created one for the Rosencraft, featuring a Blue-Eyes White Dragon at the center, establishing then that the Rosencraft, and Anzu by extension, would be connected to dragons.

In any event, the idea eventually came to me of having the ladies of the Two-Six be capable of transforming into their avatars to some extent. This idea came from a combination of two things. First, the transformation abilities already demonstrated by Anzu and the Rosencraft. I already established that the Lucifer Hawks were an animalistic looking species in earlier stages of evolution, and that some of these traits carried over when the Rosencraft used enough of their Hawk powers. Second, the long standing cat-girl trope of anime presented itself for a time as a possible entertaining story for a chapter during the Anzu Soul Fragment Arc of the First Moon Saga. In that abandoned idea, Anzu would have one of her fits where she would lose control of her powers and end up temporarily stuck in a dragon-girl form. I couldn’t logically justify that story right away, and by the time I found a way, I had too many stories for that arc anyway, so in the end it was scrapped. After that I kind of soured on the whole idea of the Two-Six even turning into their avatars even partially, instead using the avatars more like Beatrice’s butterflies or as cats are to witches; messengers or signs of the presence or power of that particular member of the Two-Six. Later I decided to add their avatars to the Gathering of the Two-Six large portrait, presenting each avatar somewhere in the collective image.

The Phoenix and Spider avatars from Kali of the Two-Six portrait

Fast forward a few years and you have the Etotama anime that aired in the Spring 2015 anime season, and Monster Musume anime that aired during the Summer 2015 anime season. These anime were the first time I got to see an entire story dedicated to the genre of monster girls, outside the sporadic series over the years that feature repeat appearances of mainly cat-girls or fox-girls. The only other entry into the broader genre in terms of anime that I can recall was Dog Days, which is entirely different in tone and content from Etotama and Monster Musume, and less varied in terms of human/non-human mergers. In any event, seeing the Etotama series immediately followed up by the Monster Musume series sort of inspired me to get back to assigning the avatars for the Two-Six, as I still had two of the Two-Six without an avatar.

Unfortunately, I still couldn’t figure out what to assign the two of them. Having used up dragon, cat, snake, butterfly, bird/phoenix, wolf, fox/kyuubi, rabbit, spider, and even Nue, I couldn’t figure out a final entry. I am somewhat convinced that there will be a sea creature entry, only because they are the only unrepresented animal group unless you set sea-serpent as a consideration as a sub-entry under snake or dragon. Problem is, I can’t really pick a particular sea creature that I think would fit with the last two I’m working on assignments for. I’m determined not to simply use “mermaid” as a cop-out. I may end up going really general and saying “fish”, just as snake, butterfly, and cat are really general even though snake mainly pertains to boa constrictors, butterfly is mainly swallowtails, and cat is generally any domestic black-haired breed.

Anyway, by extension of wracking my brain on that, I decided that I would work on a new series of pictures, depicting the Two-Six in human-avatar appearances. Being that this is “non-canon” to the BotS, I figured it would work best as a Halloween themed picture instead, sort of the ladies getting together to show off a transformation in lieu of a Halloween costume. 

So, as I said, this is the background of how this all came about. Jump to the next post to see how the actual projects got done.