#RIP Itou and Fringe Queen :(

[annatateson]

More giffable trauma! Shiranui causing problems as usual! I hugely respect this guy's dedication to showing up to an already chaotic situation and adding fuel to the fire :')

I really wanted to draw this scene when I first played it a while back because I feel like there's a lot going on; Miki's sprite poses are way too chill for the amount of screaming at people he (undertandably) does in this part of the game and I wanted to honour Fringe Queen (that's what I'm calling the Guard who gets shot because of VN's excellent tradition of giving nameless characters stupidly long fringes because if you're not fuckable you don't deserve an entire face)'s sacrifice to stop Miki getting murdered by another blue-haired menace :')

I'm going to put the rest of my images under a cut (even though they're way too stupidly big to show up well on tumblr) as well as the bit in the game this is referring to. Also, more rambling because that's how I be!

(I edited this to remove Fringe Queen's awkward arm because I forgot to originally and I thought that it wouldn't bug me but it absolutely did... I also added my little symbol :) )

It almost becomes comical how terrible Miki's night becomes very quickly... Like, his brother is murdered; they get ambushed by the Shinsengumi; their allies turn on them; Shiranui almost kills him while being a dick about it; Shiranui shoots one of his men; two others (including Heisuke) seemingly DIE; he apparently gets covered in blood; his clothes become "TATTERED" (shook); Saito has fucked off (back to the enemy, as it turns out); he obviously doesn't get any sleep before dragging himself to Shinsengumi HQ; he doesn't get to do ANY murdering :( and some PAGE has the AUDACITY to get in his way, CRITICISE HIS OVEREMOTIONAL SWORD TECHNIQUE and then, AND THEN has the cheek, the nerve, the gall, the audacity and the gumption to say, AND I QUOTE, "you have no right to be angry!" XD Jesus, Souma...

Anyway, here's the section of game I based this on:

I wanted to draw this for a while but I had to draw Miki and Itou being sickeningly happy first :'(

The Guards (including Miki) don't have swords because they didn't, apparently, except for this guy, Hattori who fought back and was killed. https://www.japanese-wiki-corpus.org/person/Takeo%20HATTORI.html

I also just read this article and the tea is SCALDING: https://www.japanese-wiki-corpus.org/history/Aburanokoji%20Incident.html

And, of course, Hakuoki is not about historical accuracy and Miki switches to his fighting sprite at some point but he doesn't fight anyone so I went with the "less effort" option, since I suck at drawing swords (sorry Saito).

I added big, glowy lanterns because the Guards have them in the musical and I like things which are round and glowy :D

I made this on a ridiculously big canvas and ran out of memory in SAI so I had to switch to Photoshop and had to draw Shiranui's tattoo without the nice swooshy SAI brush :'( (but at least my brother hasn't been murdered)! <3

OH, ALSO, one other thing I forgot to mention (I have a lot of THOUGHTS while I do my drawings and I have to EXPELL THEM) about this scene that I love! It's Shiranui's response to Miki calling him out for betraying them

It's like he's protective of the new human he's aopted! <3 Don't mess with Harada or Shiranui will come and shoot your face off! He also arrives and says something like, "Hello human! I'm here to play with you!" because he is, in fact, a cat trapped in a demon's body, I guess.