i draw whatever enters my brain

(don’t mind the proper punctuation i just wanted my writing to be a bit more readable oops)

The place where my OCs reside is a purgatory-like place called Grahana, which is the Sanskrit word for ‘eclipse’. Grahana is one of eight realms that make up an afterlife, where each realm is named after the Sanskrit terms for the celestial bodies (partially based on Buddhist and Hindu concepts since they’re common religions in Southeast Asia!).

As the realm closest to the living, it’s considered the lowest rung of the eight realms among the various beings that inhabit these realms, hence earning a name that doesn’t correspond to any of the seven days of the week.

The humble, village-like court is lorded over by a four-armed buffalo spirit named Damla. Grahana’s local culture is generally based on precolonial SEA, so it’s populated by a lot of animal spirits, which, in the eyes of the higher human deities, are considered to be of a lower class. Having existed since time immemorial, the animal spirits come with a more pure viewpoint of the world, including things related to romance.

With no external human influence, the animal spirits in Grahana do not see anything wrong with queer romance or queer identities. You love your friends, and some others you love more, is how they think. Elsewhere though, in a bid to imitate and please their human overlords, the animal spirits take on more conservative beliefs. Something something missionaries, something something colonialism. (as for why the animal spirits have human bodies--for most of them, it's less bootlicking and more the allure of Opposable Thumbs.)

As a result, for the three humans stuck there, two of whom have completely no idea what a Pride Month™ even is, Grahana is the safest place they’ll ever find themselves in.

bonus: fooling around with designs and painting styles. also a lot of old man yaoi

zao zhenyong is the court official helping to oversee various adminstrative affairs in a southeast asian purgatory. he’s been there ever since he died, yet thanks to his stoic exterior, no one can really tell if the five centuries he’s spent have taken its toll on him.

being sent to purgatory usually means unresolved emotions, or being at the wrong end of a local spirit’s wrath (in keika’s case). it’s usually the job of the local court to help people process said unresolved emotions so they can be sent off to the actual afterlife they’re destined to face. however, in order to make the process easier, purgatory is set up such that people who end up there have their memories erased, so they won’t be burdened by their pasts as they sort out just their emotions (their memories are returned when they leave).

this isn’t the case for zhenyong.

sometimes the higher gods beyond purgatory’s borders will grant a blessing to visitors they favour to entice them to “get over it” faster by giving them a taste of what lies beyond. unfortunately for zhenyong, said blessing is to remember everything from his past. retaining the painful memories of being killed by someone he used to trust and never having closure for what happened to his sister and her children after dying in front of them basically makes it impossible for him to rest in peace. ever since his death, he’s stayed on to help the local court out of gratefulness for taking him in, but he’d end up spending that time trying to convince himself he isn’t lonely being the only permanent human resident. burying himself into fluffy gay romance novels certainly helps.

it’s also impossible to talk about zhenyong without mentioning the next human resident to come in, myeonghoon. for anyone who’d been watching them since myeonghoon’s arrival in the 1800s, it’s hard to imagine how their present relationship even came to be. they used to be quite hostile to each other due to perceived personality clashes, and even when their fights dwindled years later, they were still quite cold to each other. now they’re basically inseparable husbands. because he’s the more outgoing one on the surface, everyone assumes that myeonghoon was the first to fall in love. this very much annoys zhenyong, given that he’d been hiding his love for myeonghoon for a full century. an uphill battle thanks to myeonghoon’s ability to read minds by contact, and the fact that it took myeonghoon a century to realise he was allowed to like men.

“keika tatsuya” (as her intended vtuber name goes) is an indonesian trans girl in a southeast asian purgatory who has the power to shapeshift! only, she hasn’t fully mastered it yet, and the most she can do without overexerting herself is to stretch her arms out to reorganise bookshelves.

in the living world, keika was a huge fan of vtubers and japanese pop culture and wanted to become a vtuber herself, drafting up whole designs of her vtubersona, names for her fans and entire lore. she grew up in a rather conservative neighbourhood so the only person who knew keika as a girl was her best friend. eventually, driven by dysphoria, she tries a ritual she read online that could supposedly summon a wish-granting demon. it does summon a demon, but it ends up dragging her into purgatory alive. it does grant her wish of wanting to change her body though, by giving her transformation powers she struggled to control.

being in purgatory ends up being better for her, as the few permanent residents there are more accepting and help her control her powers just enough to settle into a form comfortable for her, specifically the vtuber design she drafted in the past. it’s not completely perfect though, and she gets a job in the local court’s library sorting records to help her get used to the mushy tentacle-arms she got out of her powers. one day, she won’t need the seal to help her control her powers and she can finally match her full megabat-inspired vtuber design.

purgatory also happens to have an internet connection, for some reason, and as keika is the only one who knows how to use the internet (everyone else is either from the 1500s, the 1800s or is a nature spirit who doesn’t concern herself with modern human technology) she’s been abusing her Internet Privileges by streaming on youtube. the only reason no one realises that she’s streaming from the afterlife is because everyone thinks the whole purgatory thing is just a lore-related bit.