WIP
https://i.imgur.com/OqgANxU.png
Obviously way too big an image size, but this IS just a draft after all. Anyway, considering that several people already did Egyptian/Sahara-themed submissions I was worried that mine would be kinda formulaic, but after some encouragement and feedback from the Discord chat I decided to roll with it anyway. With Doom Desire, Steel/Ground, and a special attacker setup, I was wondering what could possibly tie all three design elements coherently, and given that this move is canonically the signature attack of a Mythical Pokemon I knew I had to work with something significant in real-world folklore. I originally considered an Aztec jaguar statue with a reference to the Mayan end-of-the-world calendar but I couldn't make it work as a special attacker, so I went instead with a
Sha, or Set animal, the weird scary creature that's associated with the eponymous Egyptian god. Set is described by Wikipedia as being "a god of chaos, the desert, storms, disorder, violence, and foreigners", but also has a positive role as an accomplice of Ra during his daily solar boat trip, so he's not necessarily an evil deity; still, an association with chaos incarnate works well enough with Doom Desire. The Sha itself was associated by the Greeks with their own mythical monster Typhon, further tying into the notion of Doom Desire as a destructive force.
I wasn't sure whether to go with a werebeast feel homaging the common depictions of Egyptian gods as animal-headed people (which is more of a stylization than an actual rendition of their appearance) or a quadrupedal fully animalistic creature, so I sketched both of them for viewer evaluation. I like the top one slightly better but someone on the Discord warned that it looks a lot like Pyroak, cannon-arms especially (they're supposed to be sandblasters, btw). If I do go with the bottom version I'll have it fire its special attacks from its mouth instead. Readers' choice, basically!
Special thanks to Sun, Quanyails, MrDollSteak, and Reiga for helping me improve upon this design!
Modedit: Please place oversized images in link tags.