Oh boy, I wouldn't have guessed that I'd actually finish this in time for the weekly challenge.

This is an homage to Goya's etching "The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters" , which I used as my main inspiration and reference. Goya showed a preference for using monsters and other creatures of superstition to present the foolishness and horrors of everyday reality, which were plentiful before the age of Enlightenment. This brought a new fear with itself, though: The looming abscence of a god who could be put trust into. On the other hand, which his etching in question showed, the confidence to think for oneself would be a deadly weapon against the monstrous powers of ignorance which fuel superstition.

I'm really into film theory and have been absorbed in a few essays on the essential, cathartic cultural role of the Horror genre in fiction (I'd really recommend "The Philosophy of Horror: Or Paradoxes of the Heart" by Noel Carrol). Looking at "The Sleep of Reason" with a modern perspective means, to me, acknowledging a certain aspect such monsters play for us nowadays: While the monsters of olde might have been born from a lack of understanding, even now we're still afraid of that which we can't understand. Even after reason has mostly won, we're still afraid that those old superstitions may hold true, and that there is something mightier than us, that we live in ignorance of.

Centuries later, we're still just as afraid, it's just that the faces of our monsters have slightly changed.

The text is a free translation of the original title into german, since that just made sense to me, speaking it natively and all.

I was also heavily inspired by bugs and insects in general, since, for a cute little fun fact, bug and boo are etymologycally linked, which means that everybody has always been creeped out by the little buggers.