The Story This Pic Was Drawn For? It's Done. I'll Be Updating Daily.

The story this pic was drawn for? It's done. I'll be updating daily.

"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😭)

So, years ago, I was super into Fire Emblem Heroes. I played that shit religiously, almost from day 1. I loved the idea of it, that characters from older games and the less popular ones from newer games might get new art and voice lines. I played for so long, hoarding my orbs like a dragon, in hopes that characters I liked would get alts, and when the whole resplendent thing happened, that they might at least get skins.

I was sorely mistaken, and I uninstalles the game once fallen!Edelgard made it clear that my hopes for a fallen!Gunter were as misplaced as people in hell hoping for ice water. But before I purged FEH from my heart, I'd drawn respendent alts for my most used units. I posted them on Reddit, but now I'm posting them here (these are the digital color versions- each image started life as a pen and paper illustration that I'll upload when I can find them)

Hel!Gunter is the canon one- I just wanted to try making a masculine fairy design. I DO actually have proper Ljósálfar and Dökkálfar resplendents/alts (just pen drawings, no digital) and a Niðavellir and Joutun design. I might finish/polish them one day.

(You can probably guess the theme for my old default arena/aether raid team~♡)

Look, man- I ain't sitting through a new series just to have proper context for all the cute fanart/fics I've consumed of my new emotional support old man. Just let me play out the scenes of him and my 141762nd OC being cute together in my head.

Nothing worse than being obsessed with an ocs ship you haven't even properly written down yet

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

All of this, 1000%, but especially:

"Just because Erwin is ridden with guilt doesn't mean the cure is death."

"Allowing Erwin to rest is problematic because it can be used for anyone dying."

FUCKING THANK YOU!! The fact that anyone thinks "well, Erwin's depressed and tired of having to make hard calls" is a good justification for letting him die and not the most horrifying thing in a story about people getting turned into canibalistic giants boggles the mind.

(CW: talk of suicide under the break)

Midnight Sun really says "if you're depressed, you should just kill yourself. If you have PTSD, you should kill yourself. Survior's guilt? Kill yourself right fucking now. Nothing will ever get better, it's all downhill from here, happiness is an illusion; the best outcome you can hope for is the sweet release of death. Just throw your dreams in the trash with the rest of your miserable life." Isayama wrote Levi (in this one god awful chapter) as someone who won't even consider the possibilty of Erwin recovering and getting over this depressive slump (y'know, like how Mikasa and Eren did?). You show a moment of weakness and your life is forfeit to this man.

And you can't argue "well, he did it out of compassion because poor Erwin was sooo broken down due to having to be the 'Devil of humanity'." Bull. Shit. Levi obviously never viewed Erwin like that before Floch said it. Are you telling me that Levi-fucking-Ackerman is so mentally weak that his opinion of someone he's known for six years is swayed that hard by an obviously traumatized teenager lashing out, whose name he probably doesn't even know? ...well, seeing as how he uncritically takes the dying words of his megalomanical, serial killer uncle to heart, maybe he is that mentally weak. But still!

If being the commander of the Survey Corps and becoming the "devil of humanity" is suuuuuch a horrible fate that death is preferable... why does Levi then foist that fate onto Hange? Because Levi isn't the one taking up that mantle after Erwin dies. Armin sure as fuck isn't out there making the hard choices (he's not doing anything). It's poor Hange who has to try and fill Erwin's impossibly big shoes, Hange who becomes grim and depressed having to weild humanity's spear against insurmountable odds. What, is that okay because Levi doesn't care about Hange as much as he cares about Erwin (even though Levi interacts with Hange more in canon than he does with Erwin)?

Also, I just think it's funny that Levi paints Erwin with Kenny's "slave" brush because he's still holding onto his childhood dream of finding something outside the Walls because that proves that he has nothing else to live for, while at the same time, he holds Armin up as an example of having long-terms dreams because of *looks at notes* "his childhood dream of finding something outside the Walls". ...huh. Like, seriously; does Levi (like so many fans) assume that once Erwin gets to that basement and finds whatever's in it, that he's just going to retire from the Survey Corps and spend the rest of his life beating off against a wall? And even if he did, so what? Does the poor man not deserve a break after having served in the military for at least 15 years (I'm not pulling that number out of my ass- that is, canonically, the minimal time Erwin has been a Scout)? Erwin Smith has done more for the betterment of Pardis than 99% of the people living there: if he wants Shignshina to be his final mission (and we all know he wouldn't- we know damn well he'd want to see the other people and other countries with his own eyes just like how he had to be the first person to see what was in the basement) then let him retire! Or is the point Isayama is trying to make "the lives of people who can offer nothing to society, either by choice (retirement) or circumstance (mental illness), are inherently worth less"?

TL;DR- if you aren't just blindly happy about Armin surviving (as if Armin has ever been in any danger at any point in the story from beginning to end), Midnight Sun reeeeaaally feels like a giant "Fuck You" to people dealing with depression and trauma. Erwin dying is not the issue- the way he died is the issue.

Do you think it was hypocritical of Levi to tell Eren "Don't let your feelings get in the way" and then five minutes later get sentimental and choose Armin because of, as he later admitted, his own reasons?

Anon, I doubt this was the answer you were expecting, but I don't think Levi would have chosen Armin at all unless it was because Isayama wanted Armin to have a big moment of being passed a mantle...

But answering your question, I don't think it was hypocritical, because despite wanting to chase after Zeke, he stopped to save Armin. Eren brings up Levi hesitating, but the fact that Levi even stopped for Armin and didn't focus on Zeke speaks more to responsibility than emotion to me.

When Mikasa is about to attack Floch, instead of using that moment to retaliate, or kick her off, Levi reacts to save Floch.

Having feelings is one thing. Letting them get in the way is another. They were soldiers. They swore to serve humanity. Levi had years of experience dealing with this, and he knew Eren was just a teenager who cared about his friends.

It's an unpopular opinion, I know, but the whole thing of either Erwin or Armin doesn't do much for me because it advances nothing about Erwin or Armin's character. We already knew Armin was intelligent. Erwin could have died in the suicide charge anyway.

Both Hange and Levi saying Armin wasn't the right choice only further makes me question why the scene even happened. It would have been the same if Armin got the injection and then they found out Erwin was alive too late. Or Erwin just died in the charge.

Armin being chosen didn't say anything new about him, didn't add to his character, didn't add to Erwin's character. It was an emotional episode, but that's about it for me.

Also why Armin survived against all odds makes me dislike that scene even more. I doubt even an Ackerman would survive what he experienced.

And Levi not choosing Erwin has never made sense to me, except that Isayama wanted Armin to take Erwin's place. I've heard all the reasons for Armin over Erwin, and none of them are points I think work, especially when by the time Armin gets the title of commander, it's sort of meaningless.

But getting to the point of Levi letting Erwin die is just against Levi's established character about doing everything for humanity. Levi was adamant that Erwin stay behind because humanity needed him. Just because Erwin was ridden with guilt doesn't mean the cure is death. Levi, no doubt, was exhausted himself. But he would never allow someone to let him die without fulfilling his goal of serving humanity.

Allowing Erwin to rest is problematic because it can be used for anyone dying. They're all exhausted, guilty, and traumatized. This was the first time we saw Erwin be vulnerable. Humans bounce back from a lot. Mikasa bounced back in season 1 when she thought Eren died.

Mikasa. I think it's one of the more powerful themes of the anime. The tenacity of humanity, to always push through despite all the pain and loss.

It would be more powerful for Erwin to have survived, discover his father was right, and then lead Paradis on the nearly impossible mission of defending itself against the world. That would surely make up for all the lives lost in his eyes.

And then someone could have told him that he wasn't a monster, and he wasn't selfish I'm so mad he died thinking so negatively about himself you could have at least let him have hope and believe in himself and then kill him off.

"Are you talking about your nemesis or your lover?"

i just want to bathe in his blood