Doctor Who:: The Empress of Racnoss...

[fajrdrako]

Thanks to raissad, I was looking at the original concept art for The Empress of Racnoss.

I would have been so much happier if the finished product had looked like this!

I know, the problem is I'm not an eight year old boy and never have been.

Comments

[cupati.livejournal.com]

She's still ath.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

What does ath mean?

[cupati.livejournal.com]

All Too Human.

http://cupati.livejournal.com/18950.html

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Ah. Interesting. Thanks for directing me to your post, which I'd missed.

Yes, the Empress is very much ATH, which is good because I don't find spiders all that interesting. She is human in the same ways Shelob and Ungoliant are human, in that she becomes a metaphor for a certain kind of maternal/ingestatory greed. It probably says more about the human attitude to spiders than it does about anything alien.

So I'd rather make her seem as human as possible, with spiderlike traits. The legs are okay but the eyes - though cool - were over the top.

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

Wow, really lovely. All that web-stuff all over her. Thinking of her as looking like Miss Havisham is a clear mental images as well. Hard to tell about the teeth, but maybe Sarah Parish could have done some acting instead of just struggling to talk.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I like it that this sort of comines the Miss Havisham look with the spider look, and gets the best of both images - something predatory and scary.

And yes, she wouldn't have sounded so silly when she spoke!

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Oh that's much nicer!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I think so. Just as I would have enjoyed, say, "The Lazarus Experiment" if Lazarus had simply looked weird but human in his unevolved form. Putting monsters into a story tends to make them more difficult for me to enjoy.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

She's prettier, but not sure about having a spider looking as if she's tangled in her own web: a bit self-defeating.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I think the idea is that she is master/mistress of the web. Sort of the same way Spider-Man has webbing all over his costume.