Hi-Rez Foulmonella + Concept Details

It's been a few years since I made the Fectoid class, and this artwork honestly looks pretty bad to me now. I could do so much better (by my personal standards) in 2019!

I don't know what it is about "dead fish" I love as a monster theme, but Foulmonella is the embodiment of that. Obviously the tail is a fish skeleton and the two-lobed head is an abstraction of a fish head, but it's also meant to look like an entire pair of fish, as well as two sacs of fish roe or 'caviar:'

http://www.eatmedaily.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/trout-roe-sacs.jpg

Together these ideas form a creature deliberately shaped like a trilobite, partly because trilobites just look cool, partly because trilobites were scavengers of the earliest fish, and partly because trilobites are, themselves, the deadest possible sea life.

You can also kind of interpret the monster as a "brain" atop a spinal column, though that wasn't completely intended.

I was originally going to make it obvious that there was an eye on each side of each lobe, giving the monster four eyes in total and further driving the motif that those are a pair of fish, and I could probably still go back and add that in easily enough...but maybe it would be too busy?

I like the idea that this monster slithers flat on the ground like an actual trilobite, but when it needs to, it walks or runs on its two lobs and uses the tail like a third leg or like a "trunk" held in front of it.

When it swims, it does so on its "side," waving through the water like an actual fish.

I don't know how evident it is, but the overall feel of the Fectoids was also inspired a little by Evangelion angels. I like to think that when they first appeared in Mortasheen, it was in their kaiju-sized forms, one by one, until they were defeated by other monsters and split apart. Don't quote me on that as canon; I simultaneously prefer to think the origin of every monster is kind of ambiguous and likely to be thousands of years in the past, which is why when I mention an origin story in a Mortasheen profile I'll usually use terms like "it is believed" or "it has been said."