“Every ruler must have a shadow, a being who watches and waits every moment of the day. At the first sign of weakness, the shadow pounces, defeats the ruler, and assumes the throne for himself. It is a brutal but necessary way to make sure compassion and doubt never enter a ruler’s heart. Darkness is my shadow.” ~The Shadowed One (Dark Hunters, p. 19)
The original Darkness model has a nice silhouette going for it, but has some questionable design choices, so for mine I took what I thought worked and redesigned it in my own style. That being said, what prompted me to make my own version of this character comes from the passage in Legacy of Evil where he catches the Piraka during their attempted coup. For whatever reason, I always imagine Darkness as hanging upside-down when speaking to them, and that reads as very bat-like to me; so the most significant change I made from the original model to mine was turning his arms into wings.
Unfortunately, because of their construction, they don’t bend at the elbows (for want of a better term) which is very unusual of a figure of this size, but I think it’s worth it to make the wings look good. As far as I can tell, Darkness is possible to build in real life, and if so would set you back 199 pieces.
I like how you preserved the lanky aspects of Darkness’s original model. I do feel that he looks a little too like a Makuta, who shared that bat-like influence, as well as the same mask and upper back torso piece. Also, I feel like he’s lost the uniqueness of the extra arms. Still, I do quite like the construction. The lower legs look really good, and the Slizer heads add a lot as shoulder armor. Plus, the arms are very well-made. The yellow eyes do provide a good distinction from Makuta that I like (in contrast to the other similarities) and the hands are impressive.
I gotta say, with all the unique dieas the original models puts forward, this one is… Really plain. He went from being this bizarre Teridax-lookalike with alien proportions and a bulky torso to being a better version of the 2008 Makuta sets. Not a bad model by any means, but far less interesting as a result
He also lost his tail, which I imagine must’ve hurt
Using the Phantoka torso was definitely on me (I’m not even sure why I did that, I hate working with that piece), but there’s not really much I could’ve done about the head. This character wouldn’t feel like Darkness to me without his Kraahkan.
He still has a tail, albeit much smaller like a real bat’s. I’ll concede that the render doesn’t really show it tho.
