#shunga

Yippiee Im so happy with how this piece turned out :D I spent yesterday's whole afternoon researching Shunga art so the style would look acurate :33

In case anyone else is interested in Shunga, I found this gallery full of cool references!

(If you go through them, you may find which ones I used as reference to draw the katanas)

The text above them is poem 22 from Daikōtaigōgū no suke taira no tsunemori-ason ke uta’awase. It reads:

All night long, Yearning for his mate, Does the stag Fail to close his eyes, Belling until the dawn?

The idea to include the poem comes 100% from The Blood-Soaked Road to Paradise on ao3, so go read it for more awesome stag poetry >:)

The kanji at the bottom means "moon" -and more importantly- "Monday", which is what Dilluns means. So i thought it would look cool next to my signature xdd

As for the bg, I included tons of leaves to represent Konoha as a symbol for Madara and Hashirama's "alliance"/relationship :P

The painted flowers are pink sakura blossoms, which have a ton of meanings, but I meant them as symbols of 'the fleeting nature of life' (and the inevitable tragic end :")). They were also symbols of masculinity! So it's totally also about gay sex.

(I lowkey fuked up cuz thats definitely not what sakura tree branches look like xdd, but honestly, people who liked Shunga prolly didnt gaf about the flowers in the bg)

Aaand that's it for the bg elements 🤓🤓🤓

I think Madara's pose looks a little bit confusing, but honestly, hard to understand positions are a very prominent feature of Shunga, so I just rolled with it xDD

Matt gave me the idea of Hashirama commissioning a shit ton of Shunga of him and Madara, and that being the way the village confirms the rumor that they've been having an affair, and I totally fucking adore it x33