Better Aesthetic Representations of Cosmic Beings?

[Vrock_Summoner]

If you’re a player in my Digimon - Digital Adventure game, please don’t read, major spoilers ahead.

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So there are a tripartite of divine/cosmic entities in my world:

The “Force of Order,” King Drasil, a former human powered by the positive emotional “cores” of every Digimon in the world, who in ancient times turned his consciousness and power into the world tree Yggdrasil to keep the Digital World (main setting) and Dark Ocean (world of viruses and darkness) sealed apart from one another, leaving only his comatose body on the throne of the kingdom he established;

The “Force of Destruction,” Digital Biohazard, the culminated manifestation of all of the power in the negative emotional “cores” of every Digimon, corrupted many Digimon to create the first Viruses, currently split into seven pieces (the Seven Great Demon Lords) and sealed within the Dark Ocean;

And the “Force of Harmony,” Homeostasis, the extremely reclusive original deity of the digital world who manipulates things behind the scenes to maintain balance, only directly interfering in very dire circumstances.

Now, I’m not really here to discuss the “who” of these gods; I’ll make a post in World-Building for that. I just said all that to provide context on their roles in order to inspire suitable visual manifestations. Instead, I’m here to handle the kind of thing people in the art threads here have shown me they’re good at: aesthetics.

See, while I’m happy with these entities conceptually, I’m not so much happy with what I imagine them looking like. At this point, my ideas are quite unoriginal and decidedly unimpressive, and I want to think of ways to change that.

Like, Yggdrasil is a towering glowing tree with hypnotic/blurry swaying branches, Drasil himself is literally just a guy, the Digital Biohazard is a horizon-defying floating symbol surrounded by reality glitching, and Homeostasis is the closest thing to really divine-looking I’ve come up with, as a sentient golden aura spread across the expansive sky that wills magic and objects into reality just by speaking of them in its native tongue.

I don’t want to make them too ethereal or conceptual because this is the sort of setting where the players and NPCs are able (and likely) to eventually fight the gods. But I still feel like I should be able to do better than this, on all accounts.

So I come to you guys. Any genius ideas?

[Lapak]

Yggdrasil should be fractal, with layers revealing themselves as you approach. So at first you think it's just a scraggly branch sticking out of the ground, but as you approach you realize it's actually a large tree, where each branch is shaped like what you thought you saw at first and with the whole tree also in that shape. Then you get closer still and realize that what you thought was a tree is a tower that stretches out of sight in every direction.

And as you enter its presence you finally realize that the pattern runs deeper: you can see its own shape in the swirls of its bark. You look up and see the skies are patterned like its branches. You look at your arm and see the tree's pattern in the veins running under your skin.

Leaving its presence, you no longer quite remember the core shape or see it in everything around you, but the memory of that feeling is very clear.

[gkathellar]

Yggdrasil should be fractal, with layers revealing themselves as you approach. So at first you think it's just a scraggly branch sticking out of the ground, but as you approach you realize it's actually a large tree, where each branch is shaped like what you thought you saw at first and with the whole tree also in that shape. Then you get closer still and realize that what you thought was a tree is a tower that stretches out of sight in every direction.

And as you enter its presence you finally realize that the pattern runs deeper: you can see its own shape in the swirls of its bark. You look up and see the skies are patterned like its branches. You look at your arm and see the tree's pattern in the veins running under your skin.

Leaving its presence, you no longer quite remember the core shape or see it in everything around you, but the memory of that feeling is very clear.

... alright, that's pretty awesome.

[Durkoala]

Making something as good as Lapak's idea is going to be very difficult, but here's my best shot.

The Digital Biohazard first seems to be a simple symbol carved on a nearby surface, flickering with a sinister light. Slowly, you become aware of a tuneless electronic hum in the background, may contain the hint of something like words. Maddeningly, the hum remains neither constant nor tuneful, but instead shifts through fragments of melodies with neither rhyme no reason.

At around this time, you become aware of more of the Digital Biohazard's symbols etched around the area. You're almost sure they weren't there before, but you can't say for certain that you overlooked them until they began to glow. The colour begins to run around you: the sky washes into the land and becomes a lurid purple (or is it turquoise?), the green of the trees takes on a yellowish hue and leaks down the trunks until it meets the acid green of the grass running up in mottled streaks. The landscape becomes strangely flat; if an object or a point of view moves, trails of fragments and smears may mark their passage on what appears to be a painted background or the still air itself.

And then you notice the shadows have become thick and deep black. The swirling, melting effect of the world gives the impression that something is crawling inside them, something that can only be seen as glints of reflected light.

When it leaves, the buzz fades away into the distance. The symbols lose their glow and rapidly degrade. There is a sudden moment of silence, and then the sky, land and drifting fragments burst in a fuzz of colours that settles into the old horizon. The surrounding area as been weathered to black and white sand, in which faint imprints of unfamilar bones, ruins and writing can be seen.

[TeChameleon]

Another option for Biohazard would be... well, ink-in-water, basically, just free-floating and swooping through stuff without any apparent effect, at least at first- anything that gets swooped-through too often starts its own glitchout, echoing the glitches that occasionally flash around Biohazard's inky form.