mind the agenda

Haven't picked up a pencil once in those 2 years. (Or well, I went back to academic drawing classes for a while but having the inspiration to do something of own? Yeah, no)

This one is still the thing I'm most proudest of hahaha and probably will forever be. It's so silly and was such fun making, I still love it

Like, in the standard version of Hanahaki, the point is that the disease is caused by unrequited love, and the afflicted end up coughing up increasingly large amounts of flowers, until either they suffocate or the other person returns their feelings.

A lot of versions do require a confession on top of that, but fundamentally the most important thing is the object of your affections developing specifically romantic feelings for you. Or you die.

As an aro person, I’m sure I don’t need to explain why this trope is uncomfortable for me, considering that it basically paints me as a potential death trap.

Plus some stories also feature ‘The Surgery’, which removes the roots of the flowers from the victim’s lungs, thus saving their life, but in the process makes them incapable of romantic love, which is treated as the highest tragedy.

Chronic Hanahaki on its own would still kind of have this problem, it’s just toning it down a bit— rather than being responsible for your death, your crush is instead just responsible for your continued pain/discomfort and frequent hospital visits. Better, but still kind of icky.

Chronic Hanahaki (that could still be potentially terminal in the long term, if you need extra drama) caused by not saying your feelings aloud, regardless of how the other person feels, on the other hand?

Beautiful. Great metaphor for the real effects that repressing your emotions can have on your body. Lots of dramatic potential.

Like, obviously there’s your bog-standard “I love you but don’t believe that you love me, so I will choose to suffer tragically alone rather than risk making you feel bad for not loving me back” thing that the Hanahaki genre was made for, but there’s room for more here as well.

Especially if you expand it to be about supressed emotions in general, rather than just romantic love.

For example:

The character who is in a relationship, but still has trouble verbalising their feelings sometimes, due to past trauma/mental illness, and thus still experiences recurring bouts of Hanahaki. Their partner who reassures them that it’s okay, that they know they love them, and that if they want to say it then that’s fine, but if they don’t feel they can right now then your flowers are beautiful babe, and that’s fine too.

The character who notices flower petals lying around their kid’s room, and doesn’t understand why their child won’t just tell them who they are in love with, so they can support them in confessing their feelings. Only to find out that their kid has actually been dating their same gender best friend for months now, and the Hanahaki was about coming out to their parent.

The autistic character with alexithymia, who by this point just treats coughing up the occasional flower petal as another, rather annoying autistic trait. “Fuck,” they say, coughing up a blood-stained rose and holding it up for their friends to see. “Anyone got any ideas what this one could be about?”

The polar opposite of the traditional Hanahaki thing. The ever happy, toxic positivity character who will die from the flowers choking their lungs unless they finally admit that they kind of hate you sometimes.

The character at the funeral of a family member they had an extremely dysfunctional relationship with, defiantly coughing their flower petals right onto the grave, and refusing to admit that they felt anything other than dislike or indifference for them deep down, because even now, when they’re dead and gone and it doesn’t matter, “you first, bitch.”

The character who witnessed or was told something that they aren’t supposed to know, and not only has to deal with the secret eating away at them, but also has to come up with more and more reasons for why their Hanahaki isn’t going away, even after they confess all their other secrets.

There is a huge following of people who believe the petals or type of flower from Hanahaki symptoms somehow represents a person’s inner feelings, emotions, or state of being.

Does a rose mean you’re holding back a romantic attraction? If your friend is coughing up daisy petals, are they hiding a secret? If you start finding lavender petals in your coughs, should you think about who it is you don’t trust?

On the flip side, perhaps each person experiences Hanahaki with a very specific type of flower, and there are some who believe that flower represents the person in some form–perhaps to the degree of astrology. Someone who is a daffodil shouldn’t date someone who is a lilac, the two of them are intrinsic opposites and they’ll never get along!

Jeff and Tong via BeOnCloud's ig post

Translation --->

and better

okay, yall remember my timeline gifsets? well, i promised i'd write out an explanationfor them and now i finally have the time and energy for that.

first of all, thank you to my bestie @farnfuchs for constructing the timeline with me. it connects 4 videos, the dum dum mv, the ghost mv, the space shuttle nr 8 tour announcement video and the yellow leaf mv

second, we should establish our characters. we’ve got: military jeff, the wife, ghost and sunshine

what happened is this: 

military jeff takes part in some dubiously ethical cloning experiment

at first they cloned his horse and when that worked they try making their first clone of military jeff

they fail. they do get a clone, but that clone is defective. his body is disintegrating a little and he is an insane murderer. sunshine

the military (maybe even military jeff himself) sends people to kill sunshine and they succeed

or at least they think they did. because, and the military doesn’t know this yet, clones can’t die. sunshine discovers this when he wakes up after getting shot 

meanwhile, military jeff meets the wife and marries her and they are in love

the cloning experiments go on. and end up successful, we get ghost

military jeff is sent on a space mission but he doesn’t want his wife to be lonely, so he leaves her the product of the second human cloning experiment, ghost 

while military jeff is on his space mission, sunshine hunts down all those who were sent to kill him and then escapes to space where he tries to find a way to fix himself

the wife and ghost fall in love, an outcome that military jeff should have foreseen but didn’t

military jeff and sunshine meet in space. sunshine wants to kill military jeff but military jeff makes a deal with him

something along the lines of “hey sunshine, remember how you are defective? well i’ve got a perfect clone back at home, if you let me live, i’ll do unethical human experimentation on him so we can figure out how to fix you” 

sunshine, as you remember, his body is disintegrating, agrees

military jeff comes home and does unethical human experimentation on ghost

they figure some things out, sunshine gets some implants that keep him from disintegrating

but before they figure out how to fix him completely

the wife, who has fallen in love with ghost helps ghost escape

ghost hides in the woods and isn’t found again

him and the wife write letters

military jeff is in emotional turmoil, because his wife is in love with his clone and because he is scared that sunshine will come to kill him, now the he is no longer useful to him

he is right, sunshine does eventually come to kill him

the wife gets old, ghost doesn’t, as he can’t die or age (same goes for the cloned horse)

ghost visits the wife one last time before she dies. he buries her

sunshine knows he will never be fixed now, as the wife was the last person who knew about the science of the cloning

ghost rides into the woods, completely alone now. sunshine tries to kill himself, but he can’t die

so yeah, that’s the timeline, the good thing about it, it is not certain that the clone was the second cloning attempt, so you can fit most other jeffs in there by just saying they were other failed clones that turned out just slightly less homicidal than sunshine. 

dumdum/ghost/black tie/stranger/fade

Yellow Leaf - Jeff Satur 「Full Gifset」 🪐✨