Terraria's Moon Lord

The Moon Lord's Hand Sees All (...the Food You Are Not Eating at Lunch)

The Terraria game resurfaces as a favorite with our kids on a regular basis. Hanging out with a couple of friends at camp reinvigorated their interest recently.

I don't know much about the Moon Lord beyond the fact that his face resembles Cthulhu and he has a glowing eye in each palm.  For whatever it is worth, the eyes in his palms are oriented vertically and are not like the "Hamsa" hand common in eastern religious iconography. 

The Terraria wiki says: "Moon Lord is a Hardmode, post-Lunatic Cultistboss.  It is Terraria's final boss."

There's a lot more to this boss, thematically, and visually. I just went for the aspect that was easiest to draw on a napkin.

Terraria Avatar with "Steampunk Wings" and Inappropriately Colored Weapon

Terraria Avatars

I have been quite remiss about posting napkins this summer. There have been fewer new ones of course, as we have been working off of the backlog from the school year. And, I have been busy obsessing about my health, the kids'  health and about food.  This is all probably a story for another day and another venue.

But I am going to try to post a few that have gone undigitized over the last month or so.

These two were specific requests that I draw "realistic" versions of the kids' personal avatars in the game Terraria.  Terraria is a fairly low detail, 8 bit sort of game, visually speaking.  While the bosses, NPCs and other characters and costumes are many and creatively conceived and named, there is not a lot of realistic detail available.

Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of these two avatars from the game itself... but suffice it to say, I exercised a good bit of creative license.  These two napkins HAD to be completed simultaneously, as, OBVIOUSLY, one kids could not take an avatar napkin to camp while the other kid went without... so these were drawn in perhaps one third the time that I might usually spend on a napkin, so they are what they are...

Thank You Napkin with Ocram Trophy

My sons and I spent some time at a friends' lovely country house during the last week before school started.

At home, we live in the sort of apartment where I keep my socks on because otherwise it takes me too long to scrub my feet clean in the shower in the morning.   We are usually short on food that a guest might want to eat, but there is petrified food on the floor, our towels are definitely not fluffy and have long threads trailing off of them, and we don't have any extra beds. We have never been very good at extending comfort and hospitality to our guests.

So what sort of token could we give to a family that put us up so graciously?....Yes, I have resorted to drawing on a napkin.

During our visit, when the kids were not forced outside to engage in more commendable activities like swimming and running around in the woods shooting one another with Nerf weapons, they were inside, engaged in a what was reportedly a massive collaborative battle to vanquish one of the big bosses in Terraria, Ocram.

Ocram is large, ugly, ridiculous and not exactly the stuff of polite thank you notes, but he obscures most of my rather less than sparkling portraits of the kids.

Elderly Mutant Karate Tortoise

Cowabunga.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were never really popular with my sons... but we certainly watched some of the original animated TV show and a couple of the movies. We did miss the most recent movie,  and no one seems particularly sorry about that.

But they are perfectly happy to encounter a TMNT reference in the Terraria game. I am unclear on the details, but I think there is a Karate Tortoise costume in Terraria, which looks a whole lot like a basic TMNT getup. But while we were discussing this game feature a couple of days ago, it seemed like we needed a related napkin.

The drawing is relatively realistic, so perhaps it should be an "Elderly Unmutated Karate Tortoise".... I had trouble coming up with a replacement for "Mutant."  As a parallel term, there is "Deviant," but I didn't really want to draw a deviant tortoise... and as far as I know, there is no antonym for "mutant."

"Elderly" did seem appropriate, however.  The franchise started out back in 1984.  The turtles are nearly as old as I am.

No one is taking a packed lunch to school or camp at the moment, and this is a rather hypothetical napkin for a potential lunch in the fall, so it couldn't be too weird.

Turkor the Ungrateful From Terraria

We've gone a few days without a Terraria boss napkin, so we were overdue.

Ansel was a bit suspicious of this drawing when he saw it this morning before school.  His endlessly-informed-about-all-video-games older brother reassured him that, yes, Turkor really does have a cooked turkey body, and really does, Hydra-like, sprout extra heads. 

I had seen a video clip on Youtube last night that featured two heads.  If I had know that there could be more, I definitely would have included them.  I am always pleased when I get a chance to draw a wild turkey head.

Here is a link to the Turkor page on the Terraria Wiki if you still doubt that this could possibly be a character:

Duke Fishron From Terraria

When Pigs Fly:
Just when you thought there could not be another Terraria boss napkin....

A boss who can do it all: swim, and....oink?

According to the Terraria Wiki, Duke Fishron "appears to be part pig, part dragon, and part fish."

Below is an image from the game.  I slimmed him down and made him look more sharklike.  I am not sure why...Maybe because I like to draw sharks?

Now that we are 8 napkins in, I am definitely ready for a new obsession.

Terraria's Plantera

When Plants Attack:
Terraria's Plantera offers a carnivorous, yet vegetarian, lunch option today.

My son seems to have an inexhaustible enthusiasm for Terraria bosses on his napkins.

Over the last few weeks, it was beginning to seem like his social self-consciousness was making the napkins maybe more trouble than they were worth. He was often concerned that whatever was on his napkin might be too weird or too revealing to let his classmates look at it. His older brother Archer is an unselfconscious and indefatigable proselytizer for his own pop culture enthusiasms. Ansel, however, is both very socially acute and quite concerned about how he and his stuff are being received.

For the moment, the Terraria boss series seems to have pulled the napkins back from the brink of retirement. There appears to be a lot of positive response from his classmates and a couple of burgeoning friendships developing around the topic of a shared interest in Terraria.

The Twins From Terraria

What could be worse than a giant laser shooting eyeball?

Perhaps a giant eyeball with teeth?

As I may have mentioned before, Terraria features many creative monsters and bosses, and several pair sensitive body parts with pointy teeth. 

Ansel was so pleased with the giant eyeball concept that he made some additions to our zombie eye paperweight so that it would look more like a Terraria boss. (Why do we have a zombie eye paperweight?... Excellent question that)

 

And speaking of disturbing images.  I was googling a bit, looking for a good close up of a human eye to use while drawing this napkin, when I came across several good views of what is really going on in human eye anatomy.  I'm not sure why I never really gave much thought to what feature physically creates the beautiful color patterns that we see in irises. Now that I have seen the actual structure, it makes perfect sense...and I see it whenever I look at an eye.... and I find it very disturbing.  

...more disturbing even than an imaginary eyeball with teeth.

Terraria Boss Ocram, Second Form

Not Just Another Pretty Face:
Finishing up the week with another Terraria boss

The Terraria wiki entry tells me that this handsome guy is the final boss of the mobile and console versions of the game.  The wiki goes on to offer all sorts of information and advice, including the usual compliment of colorful Terraria names: Ocram can be summoned using the "Suspicious Looking Skull." He (or she?) can be fought using a "MegaShark" and 1000 Crystal Bullets. When defeated, he drops "Souls of Blight."

Ocram looks a good bit like a Predator, (the pop culture alien rather than lions, tigers and bears) so it is not surprising that my older son found him to be rather interesting.

I don't think my younger son knew what he was going to get when he requested this one, however.  When I showed him the napkin this morning, his reaction was something like, "huh."

Golem From Terraria

Yes, it is another boss from Terraria.

Terraria seems to have upstaged Minecraft in popularity in my son's second grade classroom this week.

Ansel has already plotted out the next few days of napkins featuring Terraria bosses for me. We haven't had a run of napkins on one topic like this for quite a long time. My older son had an unfortunate obsession with DragonVale several years ago. Before that, there was an even more entrenched fixation on Pokemon.

Now, as in the case of the two previous obsessions, there is a bit of compensation via napkin going on. Terraria bosses that have not yet been encountered, much less defeated, DragonVale dragons that had not been hatched, and Pokemon cards that could not be afforded can at least appear on napkins.

Ansel is usually much more ambivalent about the napkins than by his older brother was. He tells me that he often does not show them to the other kids at lunch. But he does seem to be enjoying the attention of his Terraria-fan classmates lately. I suspect the recent requests might even be coming from other kids

I know that my ability to help him seem cool to his peers is going to disappear as he gets older, so if it's working a little bit now, I am pretty happy to oblige.

Here's an image of the Golem from the Terraria Wiki:

Brain of Cthulhu, Second Form

"Really! I want to see a brain in my lunch!"

The Brain of Cthulhu is another unappetizing boss from the Terraria game.  While this flying, teleporting brain is perhaps not quite as lunch-spoiling as the previous napkin depicting the Wall of Flesh, I would not have drawn it had Ansel not insisted. I completely failed in my attempt to make it any more aesthetically pleasing.

As the napkins recipients' grandmother just pointed out to me, it does look like it is a heart being eaten by a brain. I suppose the metaphorical possibilities of that situation are extensive and fraught. My limited understanding, however,  is that the brain opens up to reveal the heart inside as the game progresses... so perhaps the suggestion is that the heart is chronically imperiled.

Or maybe it is just designed to be a nasty combination of vulnerable body parts and teeth and should not be given too much thought.

I hope it is not upsetting any impressionable 8 year olds at lunch today.

Skeletron Prime fromTerraria

Watch out for "Rage Mode":


When you live with two kids who are utterly unconvinced by the axiom that "children should be seen and not heard," it is hard to steer dinner table conversation to contemporary events, world politics, or even to what happened at school today....

...when you could be discussing the endlessly fascinating topic of Terraria instead.

Skeletron Prime is a "Hardmode Mechanical Boss" in the game, in case you are wondering. He is comprised of a skull, sometimes spinning and sporting spikes, and four autonomous weaponized limbs.  He will "occasionally enter 'Rage Mode' in which his attacks become more aggressive." And from what I can tell, if one does not kill him by dawn, one's goose is pretty much cooked.

I quoted the above information from the Terraria wiki, but it has probably been lobbed across the dinner table in the middle of the adults' attempted conversation about....well, anything.  Sometimes it is hard for me to catch the precise details being offered about a game when I am busy expressing my opinion that perhaps we could be discussing something else.

As you can tell by the napkins, I do make a genuine effort to take an interest in my sons' interests.
And I try to positively and gently encourage them to take an occasional interest in MY interests.

And I am working on my parental Rage Mode.

Wall of Flesh from Terraria

Possibly the last thing you would like to find in your lunchbox...and the last thing you would want to put in your child's lunchbox.

Or...

Definitive evidence that the napkin project has "jumped the shark."

Firstly, in defense of the indefensible, I want to mention that this image was specifically requested by my sons...at least in the abstract. They have been avidly playing a game called Terraria.   Similar to Minecraft, it is a two dimensional "sandbox game.'  If you are not the parent of video game playing kids, and/or that does not mean anything to you: The players can alter the environment, collect raw materials and build things. There are also animals to exploit and bad guys and "bosses" (ultimate bad guys) to battle.

The kids had requested the "main boss of the underworld," this "Wall of Flesh."(helpfully abbreviated as "WoF") I discovered this morning that they had not yet reached the appropriate level in the game and didn't really know what the WoF looked like. I had googled last night after they went to sleep and was indeed dubious that I was going to be able to come up with something that could go to lunch without inducing nausea. Delusionally, I decided to forge ahead and try to pretty it up a bit.

How can I explain that decision?
It was late and I didn't know what else to draw? I had been at an indoor water park over the preceding weekend and inhaled so many chlorine byproducts that my judgement was impaired? (Ironically, after a few hours at the park, my eyes looked quite a bit like these eyes on the napkin, but less attractive).

As to why I used the phrase "jumped the shark": I mean that less in the sense of "the point at which something that was once great reaches a point of sharp decline in quality and popularity" and more in the sense that I have been drawing these napkins for a long time and am willing to try something that is destined for failure just for variety's sake.  Many of the napkins end up with a similar format: a character or two close up in the foreground and some indeterminate sky and green stuff in the far background.  We just don't have too many hot pink walls of anything.

There have been other gross napkin failures in the past. Most memorable among them was the night that Archer perversely insisted that what he really, really wanted on his napkin was "a cut toenail blasting a pile of poop with a laser." Yes, model parent that I am, I tried to draw that for him. And yes, my tone here is sarcastic. I didn't do a particularly good job (It was no "WoF"!)  I think that the casual viewer would have assumed the image was a strange piece of modernist sculpture spraying yellow paint on a large pile of soft serve chocolate ice cream. Maybe.

Archer, in his then 5 year old wisdom, decided not to take the toenail napkin to school.
And this morning, Ansel sagely took a napkin picturing Paddington Bear holding a lightsaber.


Here's the WoF in the game: