Along with all the doll spammage I was busy with today, I had a phrase floating in my head from yesterday.
Dance is a doll who originally embodied a character from my books. He is not an exact resemblance, but he’s awfully close for the limits of resin.
The viewpoint character in the books, Naga, has a name that originally came from an interesting sound I liked in a Kipling story, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, where the cobras, Naga and Nagaina, are the bad guys. I wasn’t interested in their badness. Their name-root was interesting to me: Naga.
It’s a Sanskrit name that goes back to a lot of Indian iconography. The entities referred to serve many of the same functions as a Chinese dragon: They were human-headed snakes or shapeshifters associated with mountains, springs, earthquakes, lakes, and rainstorms who had control over sources of water. The lines of the Great Wall of Chine, for instance, gives you a sense of the sinuous backbone of a giant reptile sleeping within that earth. You can see where the blur from a naga into a dragon isn’t that far away. They could also go off in the hydra direction, too. All of that happened in *my* head around the same time Gary Gygax was making Dragons & Dungeons famous, believe it or not. Computer gaming came later on. Now you can see how pop-culture grabbed onto these figures as minor monsters.
As it happens, there are hill-tribes in Burma called Nagas, some of whom who have ceremonies involving snakes, and many of whom are famous as head-hunters and ferocious fighters. (Never mind that they are also known to be terrific musicians and silversmiths.) I didn’t learn any of that until later on.
I was considering the practicality of making such a doll, or perhaps the lower body of one with a more human upper body using Dance or somebody like him. It would look similar to the resin versions we’ve seen of a mermaid. Then I draw back from this idea as being a whole lot of work.
Even adapting something like one of the mermaid resin characters, this would be a considerable amount of work to do, and it has nothing to do with any of the books at all. It’s a fantasy magickal-world element that shoots off at a complete tangent that I don’t currently need in the book manuscript I’m working on.
But it’s…an interesting image.
How would you handle the skin, the scaling, so it’s not paint that would flake off at the jointing?
So I’m considering how it could work, on a practical basis.
Mermaid-like lower body, yes, that would make sense.
But then I got a cool, dismissive comment in my head.
“Oh, you can always tell where a mermaid is hanging around.
They’re very messy feeders.
Rather like leopards.”
Right.
You heard it here first.