Feelings on Faces (King's and Mine)
Throughout my journeys with commissioning character portraits, a failure of mine has been put out into the open: my failure to really ‘see’ some of my characters faces (the Humanoid ones especially). This is a weakness of my visualization and my mind’s eye. I know it and accept it, but it’s also relatively well hidden.
This weakness is hidden well because the original main characters don’t have ‘normal’ faces. Cyclone’s head is a skull that is underneath a striking helmet. Spellbinder and Farrco are robots with simple heads.
King…King, well…King does actually have a face, but he’s always wearing that green helmet, save in a few stark scenes. That helmet is more him than his actual face. The helmet hides it and so becomes it. King and his helmet were always a ‘thing’. But I’m digressing…this is about faces.
Faces.
Sigh.
Faces are hard and faces are weird. Especially Human-ish ones. Yes, that sounds strange coming from a Human, but I find noses and ears to be so strange. Eyes…eyes and mouths make sense. It’s the ears and noses that get me. And eyebrows. I just…I just want them to not be there. And they aren’t in my mind’s eye for some of the races. Flana don’t exactly have those things, or maybe, they do and I just don’t want to think about it.
But even removed, the more humanoid races like the Flana still have a face that’s too…too Human and that’s hard for me to grasp, even though I’ve made it so. I don’t identify with faces like that, not really. It’s not face blindness, just…a disassociation from it. Sometimes I can get into them, but most times they are just fuzzy in my mind. A blob of mass that I know to be their face, but it has no real detail.
The disassociation is how it relates back to King. King feels disassociated from his own face. The helmet is more him than his face…his face is kind-of ‘abhorrent’. It’s alien to him. It’s like a random part of your body. You don’t feel that much kinship to it. At least, I don’t. My face…I think I feel some understanding of it, but it’s hyponotically begrudging. Sometimes I’m drawn into it, inspecting it, but…I don’t feel like it’s a deep connection. It’s more a weird obsession.
But back to King. As in: why does he feel like he has to hide his face…the face of the Last Flana? I think it’s the same thing. His face never felt like his own…part of a race he was never really a part of. He’s away from it. He’s his own person…for reasons beyond him and yet of him in the end. And that person doesn’t necessarily include the face that he was born with.
So…that was a bit of a ramble. The thoughts aren’t fully formed and they never will…just the same as my thoughts over the faces themselves.
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