#tee hee.

day 15 - dearly departed

i told the aphblr smp server that i was drawing zianna for today n i think i scared the living shit out of everyone until i clarified that it wasnt zianna who was the "dearly departed" lol

anyway. this takes place during the timeskip in ashes, ashes, when a few months have passed and everyone who went into irene's cathedral (dimension) has been declared dead, and zianna has had to bury two empty coffins for her two remaining children.

textless version n some other bits under the cut :3

I LOVE THIS POISON DRINK IT DOWN!

Spotify Link.

i just don't think that this is "portraying nonhumans that look like humans as ontologically evil and irredeemable" except in the eyes of humans themselves. like the short-horned girl says in the earlier image, the demon king himself wanted to coexist with humans. this isn't a "one of the good ones" thing.

much like touhou, it just has the thesis that coexistence between predators and prey is hard. and that you can't make a lion harmless, no matter how much time you spend with it. even if it wants to become harmless (youkai in touhou don't want this, as a rule!) you two are so alien to each other in the way your lives are structured that it might seem impossible.

with this in mind, that post (below, the OP's tags are about frieren) is a motte. it's not really critiquing what it says it's critiquing.

what it's actually critiquing is the idea that there can ever be any sapient thing- any person- in the world that is not exactly like you.

nothing good ill tell ya that much!!

they're the one in the glass chamber in the middle of their city, very overworked and constantly tired and feels like theyre being watched 24/7 (...cuz they kinda are tbh). they dont get much free time or time to make friends with anyone so they're also pretty lonely. no one can really *visit* them like how they do with others, because the whole projections thing is a secret, the iterators made it themselves to be able to interact physically with one another and they dont exactly want to know how their citizens would react to it.

while sig is distracted being the literal worst trying to get wind to help him kill sliver, she accidentally ends up ignoring pebbles. and pebb's main problem in the rot au is the dude literally just wants some goddamn positive attention, and suns shuts him out, sig accidentally abandons him too, he refuses to go to moon bc it makes him feel weak, so he ends up actually forming a friendship with pin! they both like poetry and art, and in the rare times pebbles can sneak over to pin's chamber without getting noticed, they get to stargaze and pin tells him about the myths behind certain constellations and stuff.

pin eventually develops a wittle crush on pebbles, but is too afraid to act on it, mainly because of the rot. pebbles tells them they'd be able to hang out way more often if they just infected themself, it's fine! they wouldn't have to be operating at 100% all the time anymore, they could rest, feel better! and they're going to find a cure, its fine! everything is fine.

unfortunately suns caves to pebbles' request first. and then goes fucking nuts! thankfully pin isn't murdered like sig and moon but they come pretty damn close to it. after everything happens pin gets the code from wind and infects themself because wtf else are they gonna do? at least they'll be able to rest.

and thats why i added deja vu to the playlist :3 its pin's pov: