Art: The Dream of Fire; PG (body damage)
Warning: Largish image!
Castiel encounters Dean in Hell.
The thing is, I have zero interest in Castiel or any of the other angels as looking like human beings with wings pastede on. And I have a lot of headcanon about the SPN angels, starting with the belief that they don't actually have wings, and that the shapes in the shadows that we see are really just expressions of multidimensional energy lifeforms being crammed into four-dimensional spacetime and squeezed. So that's why they look like that. They're expressing something far more complex and impossible to conceptualize.
This image here owes a lot to different stuff. The most obvious is the similarity to the Ohmu in Nausicaa. And also I was trying to get a sea-creature look, because life in the oceans is so much older than life on land. Also I tried to sneak in some elements from all the other trueform!Cas pics I've done, though sometimes only in terms of concept rather than image.
Above all else, I like to imagine the angels as constantly shifting form, depending on mood and environment and whatever else. So that's why I try to avoid repeating appearances. And that's why there are all these random lines all over the place. Well, that, and I like the idea that all those lines--every single one--are words. Because the thing about mystical traditions, in both East and West, is the significance of words. You find a lot of focus on the written word in eastern traditions, which is why I tried to give the sense of some strange banners or scrolls being attached to the angel's physical form here. But overall I like the idea that the waveparticles making up an angel are individually crafted vibrations, syllables of pure creation. Because how awesome would that be?
The look Dean sports here I lifted directly from my other Hell!Dean pic The biggest thing about it, to me, is that I thought it would be neat if the souls in Hell all got their eyes torn out. So it isn't that he has black eyes here, it's that he has no eyes. And no eyelashes, and the 'flesh' around his sockets is damaged and scarred.