#big damn project
The Szayel Compendium (Part 1 - Physical Appearance)
FULL NAME
Szayelaporro Granz
PREFERRED NAME/NICKNAME
Szayel as a nickname at most times. The Octava works too in formal situations.
APPEARANCE.
Because he’s the pink gremlin who lives in my head, I constantly forget how attractive he is.
He looks so sweet and helpful (They always use this pose for him in BBS)
FACECLAIM: [Do you have a faceclaim for your character?]
We already know what he looks like. Szayel is obsessed with what he looks like. Gods I have the most vain muses ever.
SEX: [Is their anatomy male, female, or other? Was this always the case?]
(Before anyone gets upset—gender identity is talked about in a different post. This day is just talking about his physical body rather than his identities.)
He’s phenotypically ‘male’ for the most part in his unreleased form, but as a hollow soul that is by its very nature compound, he’s a mix of male and female hollows, with a great deal more female hollows within him than male. In his released forms it gets complicated, however, and there are universes and situations where he has auxiliary organs that function as male and female reproductive organs, and some where he literally has both sets of reproductive organs and not just the ability to do certain things in spirit. I’ll describe certain parts of this later in this post, that are based on canonical and supplementary materials.
His plus/human self is AMAB, without any ambiguity that would suggest being intersex, and no coercive or voluntary surgeries were ever done in his human life. Szayel’s hollow forms likewise are difficult to explain that way, but the arrancar have never been placed on a binary interpretation for phenotypes of apparent sex. He’s just Szayel, and it’s not really relevant as he’s not human. The one thing we do know is that he does have a penis, lol, regardless of anything else he might have but Kubo hasn’t told us. :)
HEIGHT: [how tall/short are they?]
Szayel is 6’1’’
WEIGHT: [how heavy/light are they?]
He’s roughly 147 lbs…though it will fluctuate to as low as 140 when he’s researching and not paying attention to whether he’s hungry or not.
BUILD: [Thin? Fat? Bulky? Muscular? Toned? etc]
He’s very thin and light-boned, but he’s not devoid of muscle. Instead, he has a lean look to him, more like a male catwalk model. He tends to look a bit fragile, though this is not exactly true. He’s just like any other arrancar in that department, having superhuman strength, agility, and energy.
HAIR: [describe their hair, is it long or short? Soft or course? Do they style it a certain way? Do they dye it?]
His hair is longish for a man, brushing his shoulders, but it’s pink and very soft. Mostly he just styles it in the parts he puts in and uses a very light hold mousse to keep it in place. As a human though, I HC that his hair was red.
SKIN: [What colour is their skin? Is it rough or smooth? Is it soft or hard?]
His skin is relatively pale, with a bit of a cooler neutral cast. In release, he has his estigma which go over his eye, and color his lips. But, he *does*also have some extra colors below the belt in release too.
But one of the more interesting HC’s I have about his skin deals with his hierro. Szayel’s hierro works as a non-Newtonian fluid. If you strike it with a hard force, it hardens in return. But if you touch him gently, it’s very soft and pliable. Hence the very long, slow, soft way that Mayuri impaled him…was essentially the only way to do it. He’s a fighter who dies with a lover’s touch, which suits him well.
EYES: [What colour are their eyes? Do they have a distinctive sparkle or do they look kind of dull and tired? Long or short eyelashes? Eye bags? Wrinkles? Hooded lids?]
He has golden, somewhat amber eyes, much like you see in wildtype hollows. It seems to be rare for those evolved into Arrancar, so I’ve always HC’d that because he wasn’t formed with the hougyoku, his feralness ended up dictating his final color, rather than fully reverting back to how he looked as a plus. His eyes are deeply expressive, and its easy to see how he feels. They sparkle with joy, flash with anger, and dull with regret. He wears mascara to darken his already somewhat long lashes, and wears just a barest bit of makeup to enhance rather than cover, though there are times that he enjoys putting on a full face of makeup. I HC that when he was human/a plus, his eyes were actually green.
MOUTH: [Big mouth or small? Plump lips or thin lips? Perfect white teeth or crooked, gappy ones?]
His mouth is on the larger side, but his lips are rather thin compared to it. He has perfect white teeth that are actually quite sharp. His tongue is long and somewhat prehensile, though not quite as much as most animals formed that way.
NOSE: [Big or little? Pointy or bulbous? Huge, cavernous nostrils or teeny little ones?]
His nose is relatively unobtrusive. The lines are sharp, but the tip and nostril are softly rounded. Nothing very notable, just proportionate to his face, maybe just slightly long…though that may just be the sharpness that gives it that illusion from certain angles/in certain lights.
HANDS: [Big or small? Manicured fingernails? Claws? Wrinkles? Visible veins? Bony knuckles? Or smooth skin and soft features?]
His hands are very long and thin. The fingernails are meticulously manicured, buffed, and varnished in mostly soft nude colors. But he wears gloves the majority of the time, so you do not see them unless he removes them in your presence.
FEET: [Big or small? Bony or plump? Trimmed toenails? Claws?]
They are similar in character to his hands given that they have a long, thin look to them, but they don’t come across as ‘big’. He’s relatively tall, so he needs feet that would support that. He’s a US men’s 10.5. Something always sold in stores and ‘average’, but in the larger end of it.
SCARS: [Any visible scars?]
No. Given that his body, especially in release is based on the concepts of growth, birth, and regeneration…he generally heals all wounds very fast, and scar tissues don’t tend to form. And those that do tend to be cannibalized by his metabolism, as it’s essentially extra protein and not a lean tissue.
CLOTHES: [What is their clothing style?]
Whatisn’this clothing style.
He prefers things that are light in color. He likes clothing pieces that have long lines that accentuate just how lanky his body is. Sometimes he prefers an ultra-modern, minimalist and sharp aesthetic, like you see in his lab coats. But he really likes things that evoke the delicate and intricate nature of his release form/dress. In his free time, he enjoys wearing many kinds of outfits. He dislikes current masculine styles (finds it way too boring/difficult for self-expression, though there are some houses of design that he does love that are flamboyant)..so you’ll see him dressing androgynously most of the time. But as a rule, he prefers the intricacies of men’s clothing found before the 1900’s and women’s clothing after it.
OTHER PHYSICAL FEATURES: [Optional for non-human characters, or human characters with uncommon features]
Well, clearly Szayel is a hollow. So, one of the most asked questions is ‘where it his hole?’ LMAO. His hollow hole, as per official media, is through is glans. (And honestly, I think that the last name of Granz is a pun on this given how Japanese is pronounced with a flap phoneme that makes l’s/r’s appear to switch to an native English speaker.) It runs front to back, the same way that it would with an apadravya piercing and is just big enough to fit an average fingertip through, though it can stretch a bit.
For him, it’s incredibly sensitive to touch…but ironically not in a sexual way. Instead, you’re more likely to put him into more of a trance/relaxed state, given the nature of how a hollow hole is formed. It gives deep bliss in his heart, a feeling of connection and feeling self-worth outside of simple self-objectification and being competent at sexual gratification.
OTHER NOTEABLE FEATURES: [Optional - anything you need to mention that isn’t covered by the above.]
Well…given that he’s an Arrancar, his body changes in release. He has a pair of wings that can synthesize both medicines and poisons in the sacs that hang from them. He can create tentacles that have the ability to inject his DNA into a host, and he has tentacles that can intake genetic material, making him functionally hermaphroditic essentially. And this idea even bears out in some of the official concept art, where one of Szayel’s releases conceptualized him as a succubus. (Yes you read that right a succubus—he actually had a tentacle that essentially doubled as a vagina, and you can see how the idea was used in how he creates his dolls from sucking the host into it, creating the doll, and spitting it back out.)
I also really liked his CFYOW form, as it tied together his manga release form with the idea of him being the ‘phoenix’. I love his clawed bird feet and feathers and his ‘tail’ (Kubo…thank you for sneaking that past the censors–I mean LOOK). And from what I’ve read, the glowing pattern on his lower abdomen is in the shape of a uterus so if he’s got that as well as his uhhh ‘tail’, he’s still hinted at being hermaphroditic as Kubo seems to be fond of this idea for him—and I’m 100% in agreement based on how I’ve had the intuitions of the muse myself. I also kind of like the idea that his tongue is technically prehensile that’s hinted at in some of the concept art.
IDK…he has so many cool features. I could go on forever.
