meowdy

Definitely wanted to incorporate their Chinese & German influences into it. So much wedding fanart goes with flat boring modern western styles with little personality.

Now for anyone interested, I'll proceed to explain ALL of the details (bc I love it all a lot), but I'm curious how many details you initially caught!

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So fun fact, traditional German wedding dresses were mainly black before Queen Victoria popularized white. And of course, the main German wedding dress color palette is black/white/red (with perhaps a green sash for luck), so yknow, exactly Elly's color palette, it's perfect. Rather than a sash I incorporated green through the Wave Existence inspired earrings instead 😄

I was going for a German dress from the start, but realized later that the German colors really remind me of Aruru's wedding dress (white/red/green/blue), the only in-universe idea of what one of their cultures' wedding dresses looks like. Really colorful, a classic wedding dress.

Was looking up traditional German bridal attire after I'd already started sketching and it was like, "there's 4 main things: black, floral crown, accessorized w/family heirlooms, and a lace-edged veil [that they can do the Schleiertanz (wedding veil dance) under]", and I was like nice, I already checked all the boxes, if only the Nisan rosary was visible at all here 😅 And yeah the schleiertanz was what inspired the veil as it is. Sounds like a lovely wedding tradition.

Kinda hard to see at this angle, but Elly's specifically wearing a German dirndle style wedding dress laced in the front and roses at the bust. Would've given her a red skirt too if it were at all visible. And ofc I always love balloon-style-into-form-fitting lace sleeves; they kinda remind me of Elly's uniform as well, big shoulders down to long gloves.

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Then looking up Chinese wedding hanfu I realized it had some of those (german dress) colors as well. Red male hanfu were for the highest ranking in society, blue & green were the next two down in social rank, hence why you don't see green often, but with a sashed hanfu all colors can be represented.

Then paired with the fenghuang guan… So male fenghuang (known in the west as ""Chinese phoenixes"". double quotation for the incorrect name)—specifically more modern fenghuang with the tail of a peacock—have an odd number (yang) of tail feathers and female fenghuang have an even number (yin) of tail feathers.

So 5 was perfect for inlaying the 5 Chinese sacred colors, white/black/red/blue-green/yellow, in its tail feathers. Then the 3 jewels on top would be red for joy/celebration & yellow for huang/virtue. (huang means yellow, wong is an alternate romanization, the color yellow is a color symbolizing nobility, the surname Huang/Wong/etc has heavy ties to emperors & nobility)

As for the fenghuang patterning on his hanfu and the fenghuang guan, as to why he's fenghuang themed... Feng is an alternate romanization of (part of his given name) Fong. …and huang is an alternate romanization of wong… fenghuang, Fong Wong

(Even tho when saying his name the Wong should come first, as it was deliberately that way in the JP version of the game [compared to other chars, even Shitan's, Japanese inspired as he is, didn't start with Uzuki, it was only Fei and Khan, but NOT Karen]. It was only reversed for Western players in the localization, for who don't know Chinese family names come first.) Not to mention the symbolism of the phoenix is Fei 100%

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Did a lot of research about Chinese male hairstyles as well, but I already went all out on ko-fi about that so I'll just screenshot it. Very interesting info, even if I didn't actually end up using much of that knowledge here, considering this was only Chinese-inspired, as the Wongs are.

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