Kacakaca

Then, in the midst of her wandering, she perceived something.

Her eyes were drawn toward it, by a weight she could not name.

For a moment, even despair forgot to speak.

Beneath the moonlight, someone stood among the branches.

An Indigenous woman, silent and watching.

More than a stranger. As though she had always been there, as a witness long appointed to this place.

She had the stillness of earth, the gravity of stone, and the patience of one who had watched everything.

（rant below)

1938: America hears about Superman for the first time.

So, recently I’ve been falling into American superhero comic history, and it is fascinating in a very specific way.

I didn’t grow up with these comics, so everything about them feels strangely fresh to me. They are childish, amazing, stupid, toxic, ridiculous, iconic — all at once. Reading them feels like watching almost ninety years of popular culture history unfold in one loud, colorful, deeply chaotic archive.

So naturally, I wanted to go back to the beginning.

Superman is such an iconic figure now that it is easy to forget there was a moment when he was simply a very new, very exciting character in a children’s comic book. A man from another planet! He can lift cars! Bullets can’t hurt him! You can imagine how wild that must have sounded to a child in 1938.

So I drew my female America hearing about Superman for the first time from a child reading the comic beside her. I like the idea that this huge piece of American pop culture begins here as something small and ordinary: a child excitedly explaining a new hero, and She listening with curiosity.

She went on,

not knowing how far she had gone.

There were voices within her,

and they would not cease.

Before she knew it,

only moonlight and branches remained,

closing in around her.

(Rant below)

So, I have a lot of sketches sitting around that are presentable enough to show, even though they are nowhere near the level of polish I would want for a “proper” post. Recently I’ve been trying to draw less like I’m making quick isolated sketches, and more like I’m trying to express a concept, a story, or a very specific historical/character mood.

Which means everything takes forever. Naturally. Because apparently I chose the most inefficient way to have fun.

So here are some recent unfinished things, character studies, fake comic fragments, and visual notes.

Basically, I am treating the internet as a public dumping ground for my thoughts with pictures attached.

1. Bryce Wayne / woman Batman situation

Yes, this is my “what if Batman was a woman?” situation.

Bryce Wayne is a character I’ve already written a lot about on AO3, and now I’m trying to pin down what she actually looks like in my head.

The concept is: a terribly handsome woman, nicknamed “the Vampire Duchess” by the tabloids.

She should look aristocratic, cold, haunted, absurdly good-looking, and still very clearly a woman. I’m still not fully satisfied with the design, but she is getting there.

2–3. Female Mongolia character study

This is me trying to refine my female Mongolia design, another character I wrote a lot before I actually drew her.

The core idea is that she has to be ugly.

And by ugly, I mean specifically outside modern East Asian beauty standards for women: darker skin, high cheekbones, narrow eyes, a flatter nose, a rougher jawline, and a face that does not chase softness, cuteness, or fashionable delicacy.

I tried to make her look harsh, weathered, and physically intimidating. In my writing, I describe her skin as rough like a rocky mountain, so I gave her face that grainy texture with layered dots.

The hairstyle and clothing are based on medieval Mongolian women’s dress, around the 13th–14th century.

There is also a very juicy historical detail here. From what I’ve read, some stereotypical Western images of “East Asian features” seem to draw heavily from Mongolian facial features — narrow eyes, high cheekbones, flatter nose, and that specific facial structure. In the 19th century, some British racial “science” basically folded East Asian peoples into a Mongolian template.

And because the Mongol Empire’s reputation in the 19th century was already tied to the stereotype of the ruthless, primitive Asian conqueror, those features became part of a larger racist image of Asia.

So, in a very darkly funny historical way, the countries once conquered by the Mongol Empire already had plenty of reasons to blame it for many things. Now they can also blame it for helping supply Western racism with one of its favorite visual stereotypes.

Fantastic. History remains a trash fire with excellent footnotes.

The shadow version is also intentional. In my fanfiction, I often write her with half her face buried in darkness, with only her eyes gleaming out. That is part of how terrifying she is supposed to feel to other people.

4. Superhero comics in the 1930s

So, recently I’ve become very interested in American superhero comics, partly because I’m not American, so the whole thing feels fresh and bizarrely rich to me.

Superhero comics feel like a dense little container of American popular culture history. So naturally I had the idea: what if female America was reading superhero comics with a child in the 1930s, when superhero comics were just beginning as a new thing?

There is something very sweet about that image to me. A new kind of cheap, energetic, child-focused popular culture appears, and someone is just sitting there with a kid, discovering this weird new heroic fantasy together.

It makes me smile. It has that very specific “new mass culture just dropped” wholesomeness.

5. Female England and 17th-century Puritan horror

This is part of my long-running attempt to explore female England in the context of the 17th-century British colonies, Puritanism, religious pressure, and general psychological madness.

This is a long-ass project and I have no idea whether I will finish it, but I’m happy with the first two panels so far.

The mood I want is children’s-book horror: simple shapes, blackness, moonlight, fear, doctrine, and the feeling that something deeply wrong is being taught as normal.

6. Young female America under Puritan upbringing

Related to the previous idea: this is young female America as a child, raised by Puritans.

I imagine her childhood almost like a psychological horror film. Basically, she is living inside a cult-like world of religious fear, surveillance, punishment, and spiritual paranoia.

This is concept art trying to capture that atmosphere. I’m currently stuck on the hand motion, but the overall idea is there: small child, huge shadow, hostile world.

7. Ghost of Yōtei doodle

The last one is from Ghost of Yōtei.

Originally I wanted to draw the costume properly because I really like it, but game costumes are insane. The moment you try to recreate them on paper, you realize there are about five hundred layers, straps, textures, and tiny design decisions, and then your motivation starts quietly walking into the sea.

I still like the overall silhouette, especially the combination of the cape and the mask. It gives Atsu this “general returning from hell” feeling, which is extremely good.

So, I’ve been playing Aether & Iron a lot recently, and I really enjoy it.

The main reason is the setting. It has this cool 1930s vibe, with many small historical references I enjoy — comic books, radio shows, and the whole noir-style storytelling.

I also like that all of this is given to a female protagonist. Gia’s design is really good. She looks like a very cool, handsome detective, and I like her personality a lot.

But there is one thing that makes me laugh every time: the pocket system.

In the game, some small items (like a notebook) have to go in the car. Meanwhile, the pockets can hold cash, jerky, shoes, a watch… even a dumbbell?

I don’t know what kind of coat this is, but I want one.

She came like night over the steppe.

Under her shadow, the world bled.

Cities burned, rivers darkened,

and men gave her the names of monsters and gods.

She rose like the sun over the world.

Under her light, the lands flourished.

Roads opened, goods and knowledge traveled far,

and distant lands learned to speak to one another.

Posting some work-in-progress drafts of my Mongol Empire duality concept again, because I’ve accepted that I draw at the speed of continental drift 😭

Also, recently I realize I’m kind of obsessed with the whole “giant deity sit on Earth” setup. I’ve already made a few pieces with that cosmic-scale staging, and I keep coming back to it because the vibe just works —you can load the whole historical context into the composition and it instantly feels mythic and dramatic. It’s fun as hell to draw.

So…this is nowhere near a finished piece — just a concept sketch set that I decided to post before I lose momentum. My patience for refinement is… limited 😅 so I’ll probably come back to polish it later when I have the energy. For now, I just want to share the idea while it’s fresh.

Basically,these two drawings are meant to be a pair — a diptych exploring the duality of the Mongol Empire. I’ve always found Mongol empire history fascinating because it embodies two completely opposite narratives at once.

On one side, there’s the fearsome conqueror — the unstoppable steppe force that burned its way across Eurasia, remembered in so many records as a nightmare out of nowhere. The first sketch is about that — the ruthless, inhuman intensity, the unreadable face behind conquest, the sense that one person’s calm could mean devastation for half the world.

The second drawing mirrors that same figure after the storm — the empire-builder who created an unprecedented network across the continent. Despite the brutality of expansion, the Mongol era also brought peace, prosperity, and an early form of globalization. Trade routes opened, religions coexisted, ideas and products began to move with a freedom that feels shockingly modern for the 13th–14th centuries.

It was a time when goods from Baghdad, Samarkand, and Venice could meet Chinese artisans — when the blue-and-white porcelain that later defined Chinese craftsmanship was literally born from Islamic aesthetics and pigments imported from Iran and Iraq. Under nomadic mentality, the Mongol rulers gathered the finest skills and ideas from every corner of their empire and mashed them together into new cultural forms. Even the first world history book(Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh) compiled in Iran, existed only because the empire’s sheer size and curiosity made it possible: they collected records from across their territories and let scholars write a unified history of humanity.

So the first image is darkness — conquest and terror — and the second is light — order and connection. Same person, two worlds. I wanted the pair to feel like day and night versions of the same consciousness.

So, I have finished playing Ghost of Yotei, and one thing keeps cracking me up.

Like, the combat is brutal — every encounter leaves Atsu soaked in blood, calmly wiping her blade like it’s just another day at work. Total unstoppable killer energy. But then the game also gives her the purest animal-lover side quest vibe — she can pet wolves, foxes, and if you stay still long enough, a bird literally flies over and lands on her hand.

So now every time it happens, I can’t stop thinking: she’s basically a bloody version Disney princess who just committed mass murder. That contrast is so darkly funny I had to draw it.

Also (spoiler alert):

Oh God, why? What kind of mockery, what kind of retribution is this?

A child born in a season of wrath, to carry the iniquity of her mother’s blood!

More doodles! So here’s my Hetalia Mongolia, nobly struggling with Chinese text reading… and then gloriously defeated by a cat.

For anyone who doesn’t know, classical Chinese texts are hard to read — the written form was often completely different from how people actually spoke, and there were no punctuation marks at all. You had to figure out sentence breaks yourself. So imagine Mongolia here, trying to make sense of a wall of unreadable characters, and really struggling.

Now, about the cat, historically, Chinese scholars almost always kept cats, because mice could chew up precious books. So in any proper study room, there’s always a cat patrolling the shelves.

And since Mongolians traditionally kept dogs instead of cats, I like to think this fluffy book guardian would’ve been a new and irresistible creature to her. She’s sitting there, trying her best to decode Confucius… and then this tiny menace jumps on the desk like, “You’re done studying. Pet me.”

More doodles from The Ghost of Yotei! This time it’s all about Atsu’s hairstyle — because I’ve spent so much time looking at her back silhouette in-game that I start to be fond of it.

So, a little doodle about the fashion choice I made for Atsu when playing Ghost of Yotei.

More 13th and 14th-century aph Mongolia! Two redrawn chibi versions and two new ones.Plus some rants below:

So lately I’ve been trying to figure out what APH Mongolia in my head canon would actually look and feel like , and theses drawings are kind of my attempt to capture her before and during her most powerful days.

Because honestly, the general impression of Mongolian history(both in popular culture and history study field) has been one-note for a long time — all warlords, blood, and conquest. Sure, that side existed, and in my head canon, aph Mongolia absolutely has that cold-eyed, eagle-like intensity (as how I described it in my fanfiction: half face buried in shadow, emotions unreadable). But that’s not all she is.

She’s also someone who laughs while riding horses across the steppe, who wears heavy ceremonial robes with casual ease, and who just… exists in that nomadic rhythm.

So… after not drawing for like a whole year, guess what dragged me back? Hetalia Mongolia. Like my previous obsessed characters are not niche enough Lol

So, I’ve been neck-deep in Mongol Empire history and my historical Hetalia fanfiction writing spiral, and apparently that was enough to make me design her at last. (You are welcome to read a bunch of very history-loaded fanfictions I wrote about her on my AO3, but fair warning: it's in Chinese)

More doodle because why not

Finally feeling like drawing again, so here goes some 18th/19th century nyo Japan, because I just can’t get enough of history costume and hairstyle.

More rants underneath, all sorts of nerdy historical costumes stuff: