"All I Ask Is That You Stay With Me Until The End Of The World. It Doesn't Matter If It's A Month, A

"All I ask is that you stay with me until the end of the world. It doesn't matter if it's a month, a week, an hour from now- I want to spend the time I have left on this mortal coil with you, Sunshine."

Teaser image/soft cover for my next Binary Star Hero fanfic (it's taking forever because life and also, I've never written slice-of-life fluff before?). It's an epilogue/after story for the immediate aftermath of my first fic, Syzygy.

(Went with a different inking style because while I like digital sketching just fine, I just can't find a rendering style I'm comfortable with. I need a brush and ink in my hand😭)

I've finished working for the day

But you won't come home anyway

So I'll bring the surprise I've been planning to you

I can't wait to hear what you're going to say...

Oh, my damn. I completely forgot I painted this. It was one of the last pieces of art I made on my old trusty lappy before it fully conked out. I posted on twitter (well back before Apartheid Clyde stuck his sticky fingers into it) but I forgot until I was looking through the files on my old phone's memory card.

If you haven't seen the og PV for "The Tailor Shop on Enbizaka", uh... go watch it and this pic will make a lot more sense.

Non-animated version for your viewing pleasure:

(God, I used to be decent at digital art... what happened to me?)

what's the level of brainrot when you're making dakimakura of the senior citizen blorbo :D

I'm so happy I'm not the only person who appreciates how absolutely fucked up Gunter's relationship with Corrin can lean depending on how much you want to delve into the implications that are VERY MUCH PRESENT in the canon text (he grooms them! From childhood! Maybe not in a sexual manner, but it's literally a grown man coaxing a child to trust him so they'll be loyal to and obey him and not their family! I have been openly declaring this since 2016 and I LOVE it!!)

And he slots so well into the yandere archetype because of it. I mean, come on: he raised this girl from childhood and whatever feelings he had have only gotten more intense as the years went on. The fact that he has that ball on him in their supports means he brought it with him on what they thought was a day trip to the border. Why are you carrying this woman's old, forgotten toys on your person everywhere you go if not because you are obsessed to the point of mental illness, sir?! And you know Gunter is the one who instilled that same level of obsession in Jakob, like "you put her above all else, you protect her above all else"- you will never convince me otherwise because it's not true.

Which, of course, leads to my personal favorite "implication" (if you will) of their relationship, which is that Gunter sees Corrin as a way of reclaiming what was stolen from him: a family. Garon took his wife and child, so now he's going to take Garon's child to make his wife and have a new child with her. Just to make the vengeance even sweeter, using his new family to strike down the killer of his old family (if you don't kill Garon with Gunter!Kana in Conquest, what are you even doing?). Years, possibly decades of stewing in the grief of his loss has made this man absolutely feral about having another child- which is why he keeps adopting every kid who's tossed into the Northern Fortress, but they never quite scratch the right itch. And you can definitely have genuine love and affection mixed in there, but also just imagine Anankos ramping that desire to start a new family up to 11... and then taking matters into his own claws if that doesn't happen~

(Oh wait, I did imagine that, and wrote it into a whole-ass fic like 6 years ago)

honestly i think yet another reason why gunter/corrin absolutely devoured my brain cells is there's a stunning range of "trope hardness" that you could play around with (how vanilla vs dead dove you want the relationship to go basically).

personally i find a lot of "canon" RPG romances are ... far too tame (both story & kink & preference-wise, cue being a die-hard crackshipper for decades before being shocked that nintendo would actually canonize somebody as crunchy as him lol).

but if you want ...

* ~vanilla~ gunter/corrin where it's a cute knight/leige may december courtship (basically the surface-level EN CQ route) focused on the romance versus the sexual angle, there's ample room for that.

* then there's a slightly darker romance where you can start having corrin being aware of the silas gaslighting, the truth of his backstory, kinda threading in Fates' inherent darker implications within the relationship, it's all right there for you to pick and choose from given both JP/EN scripts (and the things we learn in JP-specific peripherals).

* you can also play with the darker dubcon/noncon Revelation-specific possession plus relationship let alone the delicious incest/daddykink² angle with anankos.

* to be slightly crass and further pushing the intentionality, an outright ddlg kink dynamic is totally possible if not outright implied by a few lines in the supports if you like to play in this space lol.

* and then of course, full throttle dead dove northern-fortress 'bad touch'/predatory gunter (some of my favorite fics are this angle ngl)

..... which isn't even going into all of the above flavors in Conquest vs Revelation (two very tonally different games). and then eeeeverything in between if you're like me and like to mix and match depending on mood :3c

but the absolute best part is that his supremely crunchy backstory isn't diluted by the range; gunter's still a remarkably cohesive and compelling character no matter which version you opt for - or hell, if you have a different ship you prefer or even if you don't romance him in general.

we stan the skeeziest knight <3

I still wanna finish this fic- I was working on it for almost 4 years, I just hate Attack on Titan so much after that goddamn ending...! (Wet Pants Eren will haunt me for the rest of my days; I refuse to watch that be animated) I have the ending completely plotted out down to the last lines, there's just one fucking speedbump in my way!

But anyway, if you're ever bored and want to waste several days reading about Erwin Smith's almost two decade-long journey from military cadet to the greatest military asset in Paradis' history (complete with a romantic subplot that burns so slow it takes over 30 chapters for the idiots to say "I love you", the concept of minority races within the Walls having more of an impact on the story than just another thing to make Mikasa special, actual plot relevance given to the state-mandated genocide of a quarter of the population, the struggles of refugees and the poor, and the fact that Paradis is an oligarchal police state where people are routinely executed for wrongthink, the actual struggles of dealing with disabilities in pre-Victorian low fantasy setting y'know, instead of amputation being treated as a cosmetic change, and the grueling misery of maintaining a long-distance relationship prior to the advent of fast and reliable long-distance communication) this is the story for you!

(Seriously, i bought "Wings of Freedom" for this fic because I needed to know what places like Trost and Shiganshina looked like from street level. The game is fun as hell, but i didn't buy it for fun; i bought it for research. This level of brainrot this fic induced in me is unreal.)

man this piece of media i like that's bad and sucks would be so cool and awesome if it wasnt bad and didnt suck. unfortunately,