Weiche, Satan

Finished this painting after what must have been almost a year. I had a looong break in between because I continually did some research on the topic (child abuse) and that dragged me down, so I didn't want to work on it anymore. Also because the topic is important to me, therefore I wanted the picture to be good and I invested more time in it than usually. Now I call it finished/abandoned, although there are several points I'm not happy with. Can't improve them with my current skills, so I need to improve my skills (with more sketches and paintings).



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Here's something for the "Fantasy readers worship Satan" faction (who are probably not reading this blog):

While this is a topic that I'm not researching, it might have been my topic if my first noe had been rejected and I'm still moving on its borders (in an unplanned sort of way). I may be wrong, but my reading so far suggests otherwise. It seems that Fantasy was initially not written to fulfill all our devilish desires, to oppose the Pope and the Church and to lead unsuspecting children to black masses, so they try cursing each other with wands. Quite the contrary.
Tolkien may be the godfather of Fantasy, but the genre started earlier - that is, in my thesis period, the Victorian age. And it began with writers William Morris and George MacDonald, who were devoutly Christian (isn't that a surprise?). How did this happen? My semi-proved theory says that the Enlightenment caused people to become rational on the one hand, but on the other hand a group of people formed a counter-movement to rationality and fully delved into Victorian sentimentality. With the Enlightenment, people brutally found out that man is fallible and imperfect and that their Eden-esque ideal does not and cannot exist. Imagine how crushed they were. So the crushed people tried to hold up their ideal and their moral standards by writing books of morality. Either realistic novels in which the protagonist is some kind of emotional and social uber-human who is - despite what science had shown - perfect, or Fantasy novels that bring the protagonist into a different world (-> "Otherworld Fantasy"), which resembles Eden, where he/she experiences stuff that improves him/her morally and from whence he/she returns as an improved human being to spread the love.
(Sort of like going out to do a sport that challenges you physically and mentally and returning as a better person.)
So, there you go, book-burners! The original idea of Fantasy was not to make people worship Satan, but to turn them into good Christians. I'll just sit here and cringe for a bit as this insight fully fills my mind.