Augustine

AHHHHHHHHHHH

So! This little baby (in addition to all of my zine work really picking up go follow @lyrebird-zines for more info on that) is the reason why this blog has been so quiet recently! It all started from an ask exchange between me and the most wonderful amazing mun of @askanordic , @mwuuh about Norwegian and Danish vikings in Ireland, and from there we started talking and became friends (yay!) and soon we started talking about NorIre as a ship spawned the idea of doing this collab together!!!!

I’ve always headcanonned that Nations can only receive permanent scars from events that were extremely significant to their history or personhood in a way, and that in addition to this, that they can hide their scars at will as like a form of shape shifting if that makes sense. I’ve always loved the idea of nations having subtle otherworldly abilities like that. Most of the time they keep them hidden, but sometimes in the comfort of their home they prefer to not hide them. Which can lead to triggering of memories for both parties involved. Vanja’s part of the comic is set in the late 9th century during the viking raids of Irish monasteries. That tall tower is called a Round Tower, a building often found in monasteries, the key feature about them is that the door is several meters off the ground and could only be accessed by rope or ladders. There are several documents of these towers being used as shelters by Irish monks against the viking raids (although as in the comic, they sometimes didn’t work.) As for my part of the comic set in the modern day, I wanted to get the idea across that this issue of talking about the past is a long standing discussion between the two of them, especially because Ireland would often prefer biting his own tongue off than speaking up about something that’s been hurting or bothering him, while Norway pretends to not be affected by the past in order to not make Ireland feel like he has to hide his scars or can’t talk to him about bad memories and thus the unstoppable force met the immovable object. They’re getting there, slowly.

I Lowkey attempted after this but freaking whatever