I might have a real weakness for sorceresses, but not for princesses, even if they are designed like the fearsome but alluring Michiko Maeda.  If you’re a sorceress, you can keep all your clothes on and you’ll still have me at the word “abracadabra,” but princesses will have to work harder, even if Rob’s dream-self will fall hopelessly and fatally for you.

What constitutes working harder in the context of an oriental fantasy might be easy to specify but not that easy to find.  But I have a certain weakness for orientalist art (more evidence that I am a Bad Person) and it turns out that Flickr makes available a pool of fine orientalist art, from which the image to the right stood out for me.  This will do very nicely as the image of an oriental princess working harder for my attention.  I am especially pleased by the use of jewelry here, which seems to me spot-on.  I’m not sure that the image was originally intended to represent any sort of royalty but really, who cares?

But the thing that really tickled my fancy when I looked into the provenance of this image a little further was that I found out it had been created by Henri Privat-Livemont (1861-1936), who was more famous as a creator of this Art Nouveau advertising poster.

An advertisement for Absinthe Robette. That works for me double. Not only does it reference the fact that Rob undergoes a dream analogue of the Apsinthion Protocol, but it also picks up on a theme I find personally appealing…