🌴 Benduti

Benduti is a vast rainforest that spreads around the Twisted Tree of Life, as twisted as the life of an average youth here. The locals use the same word for health and flexibility, while inflexibility is treated like an illness and the tribal doctors make sure the population stays as healthy as possible.

To develop the healthiest bodies possible, they master many massaging and dieting techniques and will gladly practice on tourists.

The place is known for its sunny beaches, tropical climate and the friendly attitude and caring hands of the scantily clad natives who don't need wine or weed to be happy, as long as they get to massage and stretch each other. And it can last for hours a day!

While the tropical climate is generally very revitalizing, sometimes it's way too revitalizing... Very often, even the deads come back to life, though not in the best possible mental condition. These undeads are obsessed with twisting and contorting their bodies and their bite can infect the living! Usually they're taken care of quickly but in the past some epidemics were known to turn the whole village into a mass of spineless zombies, squirming like worms and obsessively trying to find out how much further they can bend and twist each other.

While these stories send shivers down the spine of wide-eyed tourists, the Benduti people claim that those are nothing but fairytales...

What do you think? 😄
I love the lore around Benduti and I'm happy to see this kind of world building for them and for Yunia in general.
This generated art also looks terrific. I assume it takes a lot of attempts, tweaking and post-processing to get it to look this good.
I will try to put together more of the lore, but it's all old ideas that were born years ago while discussing with friends. Today I have nobody to discuss anything with, so I haven't had any new lore ideas for a long while.

Yeah, AI is like gacha games, a lot of rerolls and sometimes you get super lucky and sometimes you just end up rage quitting after never getting what you want for hours... Well, at least it's free 😂
Why is there no face on the tree?
Wanted the trees to resemble bodies of twisted people at first but didn't manage to get anything good 😂
So beautiful beginning of very promising story about naked and endlessly happy people in paradise. Story of my dream.
Not without a couple of issues caused by neighbors... those magical swamps and mushrooms whose spores actually cause all these anomalies... but more about that once I finish the entry about Fungaard 😉
Your "just simply enjoying life" pictures and stories always makes me feel warm, and not because of tropical ladscape.
I'm just not skilled enough to make that kind of art very well, so if something looks good it's just my luck (won't you believe it) 😂
You are finding real style in landscape pictures. This one seems best so far! And lore is great extension of already known bits from benduti life. You are really making this tool to work for you not other way arround. Really looking forward to more places from your great world :)
Shifty
This tree or trees have always been on the Yunia map, just wondered what they look like up close :D
Very glad that you liked how it looks, even though I didn't paint it myself obv, but can think of it as commissioning another artist to illustrate my description, plus credit myself for the patience working with this awfully random "artist" to get them to do something close to what I want 😂
You have truly described a paradise most pleasing. Simple and beautiful. One could live happily under such pleasant conditions.
Hmm, paradise... My hope is that afterlife/heaven is the same planet Earth but all the places change to their utopian forms, like Africa becomes a place described here, and all the people in the world are 18 at the peak of their libido, no stupid kids or adults anywhere.
A very minor proofreader correction: "Very often, even the deads come back to life, though not in the best possible mental condition. " The phrase "the deads" should read, "the dead". The latter is a curious grammatical specimen known as a "plural adjective noun": -singular- noun form referring to a collective group and taking a plural verb form.

www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/dead_2

Feel free to delete this after correcting the text. :)
I've seen a book by the African writer Amos Tutuola "The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town". It's a well known book with many reviews, it was published in 1952 and had an editor... Maybe "the deads" is a deliberate folklore stylization?
The lore of the Benduti gives that one slender native in the late afternoon shadows, a faintly sinister ambiguity. Are they one of the living or the revitalized dead?

"They're coming to fold you, Barbara!"
Looks to be the living to me, maybe there to warn the crew of that pirate ship on the horizon about the ongoing epidemic but they don't listen and end up as a living totem of contorted bodies with the zomboys dancing around them... 😂
Where even the trees are twisted - that must be paradise...
Well, it's like in evil places even trees look evil, so in bendy places even trees look bendy XD
Just beautiful!
/<o>
Thanks!! 😄
I don't care that it's not totally original, this is cool. A good artist doesn't discount tools, and I love that you're always up to try new things.
-tbj
Well a good artist doesn't cut pieces from existing art and glue them together... The AI algorithm essentially does that... But it's a nice feeling to finally see the scenes you always imagined but never had the skills to do, like landscapes...
I have created some images. With help of ai ofcourse. I hope at least one will be to your liking.

Butterfly song
prnt.sc/ywe3WoypAFJj

Moon dancer
prnt.sc/YjckjggFUMeN

Bending flames
prnt.sc/6QLg5QTB4qn4

Greetings from past
prnt.sc/gLeAIPIeOi_3

Iam posting it here because you removed me from your discord without as much as word. Iam really confused if I offended you somehow. Its hard to know without explaining what might be a problem.
Shifty
Been playing just for my own funn with ai again. These aren't any masterpieces just casual pictures. Still I hope you find them ok :)

prnt.sc/9QlTbMAe2ypc
prnt.sc/7OpA865AqRAC
prnt.sc/1NX3E49CIJWZ
prnt.sc/BHeEnqAsZo3n
prnt.sc/PkDU2DEfiCen

ps: if you do not want this comment here just delete it
Shifty
¯\_(ツ)_/¯