Namio - A Face Is For Sitting

The weather is turning!  The nights are getting colder.  There are piles of pumpkins for sale at the grocery store.  A few posts ago I related a dream that put me in mind of an artist I might review.  So now I think it's time for...

Evil Dolly's Featured Fetish Artist of the Day:  Harukawa Namio.

There's not much I can say about the Japanese artist Namio (1947 - ?) as a person since I've been able to find out little about him.  His art, however, may be instantly recognizable by many in this particular subculture, especially by submissive males.  It's possible you've come across his drawings without even knowing it; so common are they online that most any search for femdom or smothering topics will come up with a few of them. 

The reason it is so common is because the man produced over a thousand detailed drawings during his career.  Now that's dedication!  Or, possibly, obsession.  I can only assume most were published during the 80s.  Scans of varying quality were disseminated across the internet mainly in the 90s.  I've seen a few that bear the markings of having been around during the BBS days when the dialing modems were much... noisier.  And fetish art, especially femdom, was harder to find in those days, so Namio likely helped shape the fantasies of many a submissive male.

The work was almost entirely pencil sketches using soft shading on textured paper.  Done in a pencil gray, the only other colors were very minimal skin tones and a dark red, most often used to put a woman's dress pattern, heels, or lipstick in bright contrast.  Namio's very favorite subject, it would seem, was serious facesitting, with a smaller, wimpish men's faces and heads being absolutely enveloped by the plush posteriors of much larger and full-figured women.  Stanton did the same thing, having weak tiny men being physically overpowered, dominated and smothered by stronger, taller voluptuous women.  I don't know if Namio and Stanton influenced each other way back in the day.  I suppose it's possible.  Or perhaps small men being overpowered and turned into furniture for big women is simply part of a Jungian zeitgeist for many submissives.  A convergent evolution, if you will.

Other common Namio subjects were graphic toilet slavery, watersports, and various forms of cruelty.  He sometimes diverged into fantasy such as doll-sized men in, ah, awkward situations, and some kind of mutant male race evolved to service women.  He was inventive with the use of harnesses and special outfits to hold a man's face firmly in a woman's rear while she strolled about town.  The women, apart from being plush, often smoked and bore serene expressions even when engaged in acts of sadism.

Speaking personally, I'm not generally a fan of F-m subject matter.  I can't empathize too greatly with the male sub situation.  I would have enjoyed seeing more female-on-female domination, but that was extremely rare in Namio's art, so you take what you can get.  However, despite being a domme myself, I do love facesitting/smothering even to the point of being the bottom, and so can easily imagine myself in some of the positions Namio's males find themselves in.

I'm not aware of any current publications featuring Namio's work, though there may be some.  I saw that there is one company, a VW Productions, which claims to have the rights to publish, though I don't know anything about them or if they're on the level.

I'm a plant person

I got Guild Wars 2, so that's been a distraction.  It's pretty and seems fun so far.  Playing as a plant person.  I haven't played many MMO's, but I did play Star Wars Galaxies for a number of years.  Like, seven years or so.  Ended up as the leader of a guild and the mayor of a player-built city.  My favorite profession was the creature handler.  I had all manner of strange and rare pets.  Had a lot of good times in that game.  But then SWG closed shop as SW-TOR started up.  I played it for a couple months but found the limitations discouraging, and I quickly lost interest.  At least GW doesn't require a monthly subscription, so that's a plus right away.

On a completely random note, there's this.  I don't know where it's from, but it's fun to look at.

Windy Windy Rainy Rainy

What's been going on?  A hurricane went overhead!  Okay, more like the remnants of a hurricane.  I'm nowhere near the coast.  About 400 miles from the coast, give or take.  But it still got plenty windy.  As windy as it gets here.  And lots and lots of rain.  But that's good.  The lawn was looking a bit dry.  Now things are looking extra-soggy.  Drink you plants, you!

I've been writing some.  Actually, I've written a fair chunk since my last post, but the last couple of weeks haven't been too productive.  I've been all scatterbrained.  Can't focus!  I can't even focus writing this post.  What was I saying?  Wasn't there something I was supposed to be doing?  I'm sleepy.

And now geese!

Productivity

What have I been up to?  Well, nothing productive!  For a couple weeks I've been playing Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 (with the water park and zoo add-ons).  I just love little building sims like that.  Planning layouts and themes, making them work.  Of course, I don't have the patience and creativity of some people who go about replicating the entire Magic Kingdom in their spare time. 

Playing that kind of game has got me thinking about making my own game again, so then I go and torture myself by looking up game programming tutorials (which is so totally over my head and sooo horribly mathematical) for that slave mansion simulation game I got in my head.  Everything I'd want to do with it is entirely feasible from a programming sense, as in it could be done, but would require so much modeling and animating.  Just think of the work involved in the props alone: different wall, floor, and rug textures, chairs, sofas, tables, lamps, cabinets, potted plants, all the little details to make it look right and give the rooms some variety, not to mention the kinky bondage props and all that.  And then there's the grounds, with trees and flowers, architecture and walls.  And then of course there's the coming up with a variety of costumes.  eeeeee.  Yet despite all that I just can't get it outta my head.

Also, I've been watching some of those Olympics.  Oh Olympics, you and your tight, tight spandex.

The princess and the amazon.

So I had this odd dream.  There was a medieval sort of capital city in the middle of a large country with a central temple.  Inside they kept a woman who was selected to be a "princess goddess", an idol of sorts, chosen to be a kind of elected goddess.  Quite an important role, one might imagine.  The various surrounding provinces each picked a girl of noble blood and the right attributes (some kind of psychic attunement or other), and she was pampered and groomed from youth to be a candidate for the next goddess for when the time came.  The candidates knew that there would be a degree of physical immobility and so trained for that, but they had never actually met the princess goddess, and certain details of the position were kept secret from them.

Well, the time came and one teenage girl was selected.  She was greatly honored and excited, though nervous as one might expect.  She was taken to the capital and brought to the temple where she would be staying.  In the temple, in the center of a round dais, was a hollow, polished stone cone.  Picture a traffic cone cut in half.  In a solemn but rather rough ceremony that ignored her confusion, she was seated naked inside the cone, the top level with her neck.  A fancy neck brace of brass and ebony was fixed around her neck, though it was just slightly too long for the girl's neck, so they had to force it shut despite her discomfort... she was too overwhelmed and too well bred to complain.  Then two thick halves of a round wooden lid with a hole in the center were closed around her neck like a pillory with her head poking out the center, so that she was trapped inside and her head and the top of the brace were the only parts left visible. 

She had been trained for this, so while she didn't know it would be quite so immobilizing, it wasn't terribly traumatic.  But it turned out they weren't quite finished.  A naked woman was then brought in... a tall, heavy, amazonian sort of woman with her head and hands encased in brass spheres.  She, too, had been groomed, had only one duty in life and sight and hands weren't needed for it.  She was also filthy, spattered with mud all over.  As she approached the dais, the frazzled girl attempted a formal greeting, but the woman was uninterested in formalities.

The people, it seemed, worshiped their goddess, but also believed that something of such importance and reverence should be kept humbled.  So the dirt-spackled woman turned around, leaned back, and rested her weight against the girl's face.  The stunned noble girl, her nose and face buried deeply in the large round cheeks, could breathe only through the narrow space below the woman's crotch, in the gap between her spread thighs.  And that, apart from ceremonies and audiences, was how the girl would spend most of the rest of her long tenure as a goddess.

Heh.  Dreams are funny.

Though the imagery did put in me mind of a possible future featured fetish artist... Namio!

Chickens? Marriage? Frogs? What is this?

First of all... Chick-fil-a, noooo!

I do enjoy Chick-fil-A, especially the nuggets.  I've enjoyed them ever since they showed up in a local mall in the mid 80s, back then right next to a large video game arcade.  They've always been closed on Sundays for religious reasons, which I found a rather antiquated policy and often annoying (how often have I had a craving for Chick-fil-A and realized that it's Sunday?), but whatever.  You don't have to open a business when you don't want to, for any reason you choose.

But the other week I heard their president has announced opposition to marriage equality, touting biblical marriage, that he knows better than the rest of us, saying "I pray God's mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about."  As if that's not what people have always done, including him.  Not to mention that marriage in the Bible is pretty darn weird, what with the concubines and rape victims being forced to marry their rapists and polygamy and executing non-virgin brides and so on and so forth.  What, you don't follow those outdated precepts and traditions anymore, Mr Chicken?  Are you, too, guilty of arrogantly defining marriage due to changing cultural and social standards?

And even then, up until the 11th and 12th centuries, the Church didn't get involved in marriage.  Marriage was a common law thing, defined by the community.  Priests weren't involved and marriages didn't even take place inside the church.  It wasn't until the middle ages that they decided to turn marriage into a holy sacrament and made various laws enforcing it.  Later on, protestants would come out against that, removing marriage as a sacrament and returning it to the realm of earthly, civic jurisdiction.  Marriage has always been defined and redefined as needed by a society.

Well, anyway, even that's not all that important when it comes to selecting your vendor of battered chicken.  You can believe what you want.  Every CEO has their own personal beliefs or lack thereof, and is free to live his or her life accordingly.  Closing your business for whatever reason doesn't hurt anyone.  It's when I learned the company's been donating millions of dollars to oppose legalization of gay marriage, support of anti-gay conversion camps, and criminalization of homosexuality that I have to ask myself if I can give any money to a company that purposefully attempts to actively cause harm to others, make life harder people they don't like, and stand in the way of other people's pursuit of happiness while using religious dogma as an excuse for their own bigotry.

[Edit 8-04: This morning I was stuck behind an suv with its back and side windows painted "LOVES GOD AND JESUS, GOING STRAIGHT TO CHICK-FIL-A!"  Lovely, so now eating fried chicken is a religious statement.  And then, as if to punctuate his piety and demonstrate his civic-mindedness, the driver chucked an empty Chick-fil-A cup out of his window into the street.  Littering is next to godliness!]

But I was pleased to hear that the Jim Henson Company, which had been working with Chick-fil-A, has ceased their business relationship because of the company's stance.  Good on ya.  There's a company that's never ceased to amaze and, thanks to its movies and shows (Fraggle Rock, Dark Crystal, Labyrinth) shaped my childhood imagination to a strong degree.  So I thought I'd share this to wash away the bitterness.  Remember it?

Busy Bee

It's been a while since I've made an entry.  You might well ask what I've been up to?  You might well ask, indeed.

Well, I haven't been drawing.  I can only effectively focus on one creative task at a time.  No, I've been writing.  Write, write, write.  I've been working on this one story - er, novel really - for several years.  It's set in a mysterious and somewhat shabby hospital.  The patients aren't sure why they're there or why they're being subject to seemingly unnecessary surgeries.  Medical madness abounds.  Intrigues!  Escapes!  Bedpan lickers.  Why, it's fun for the whole family!

It's so big that many times trying to figure out the logistics of what happens when has stymied me.  The thing has pages and pages worth of outlines alone.  So I've frequently left it to work on other things, though I've never abandoned it.  I was moved to pick it up again a few weeks ago, so that's what I've been doing.  But I doubt I'm more than halfway through, so it's still going to be a long time before it's finished.

In other news, the heat wave broke and it rained a little, ending the drought.  The trees have been getting so dry that they've been turning brown and losing leaves.  In a strong wind there were so many leaves flying around it looked like late October.  Very strange weather.