#The Amazing Technicolor Boifriend

[the-iron-orchid]

*gives Asra browner skin and more cake*

my model my rules lmao

[the-iron-orchid]

How's about some brat!Asra with [ volume ] your muse demanding mine speak louder . Jinana deserves some fresh meat today.

[ Acts of Dominance Prompts ]

"Hm? What?" Asra does not pause in the action of sketching, the silver-pointed stylus scratching delicately over the zinc-coated paper resting on the counter before him.

Jinana's voice floats down again from the kitchen above, hir request perfectly understandable in the quiet shop.

"Louder, habibe, I just can't hear you." The scritching of Asra's stylus, also perfectly audible, does not cease. A strange sphinxlike creature is taking shape on the page, crouching over the supine form of a man like a predator, or perhaps a lover. The sphinx and the man both have a rather familiar cast to their features.

He feels rather than sees JInana appear at the stairs, senses hir dark gaze raking over his back. He does not turn as hir light footsteps arrive behind him, though he feels the little hairs rise up on the back of his neck as s/he speaks directly into his ear in that low, controlled purr:

"Don't think I don't know what you're angling for, jaanu." S/he laughs, a husky, thrilling sound. "But you'd best get to those errands first." A light, playful slap arrives on his backside, making him jump. "Brat."

[the-iron-orchid]

Sitting here making Apprentice Jinana's Post-Game Bedroom Playset™ in 3D and realizing that (unlike the Scarab and Lotus or Modern AU timelines) the duvet fabrics wouldn't be completely bugfuck wild - Heron would have had to commission it to fit the big fancy bed he built, or even sew it himself, so he would be the one who chose the fabrics. (He can get up to A Whole Lot in the time Jinana and Julian are on their little Nevivon trip, lmao) So, while undoubtedly colorful, it will be more subdued and coordinated than something Jinana might have chosen or made.

Everything else, however, is still subject to hir whims! It's very easy to imagine Jinana and Asra going after the furniture, baseboards and window frames with pots of colorful paint and a can-do attitude, covering them with bright designs and drawings of bugs. After all, more is always more!

(Later on I imagine some of Muriel's weaving works being added to the decor as well, ugh don't look at me)

I also like to imagine that the kitchen backsplash has been built around a handful of fancy tiles that Asra has brought back from traveling in Zadith, featuring gorgeous handpainted designs.

Nothing of importance here, just prattling about the fake little houses I make for my fake little people <3

[the-iron-orchid]

WIP Wednesday: Asra can be a horny lil sub, as a treat. Until he inevitably Brats lmao

Chronic illness is kicking my ass a bit and so work is going slowly, but hoping to finish up the full version by the weekend :3

[the-iron-orchid]

“Was it that kind of relationship, then?”

“What else could it be?”

(More info and link to full size under the cut!)

Asra can be a h0rny lil sub, as a treat. 😁 Might do a full version later, but right now the project queue is just too long... orz

Quote is from this smutfic 🔞

[ Full Size ]

[the-iron-orchid]

Still a lot of work to do, but absolutely the face of somebody who would swap out pomegranate juice in the blood magic ritual. 😆

Took a little bit of inspiration from @dela-png and their rendition of Asra, and it really helped me break out of the block I was having with the sculpt!

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SMOOCH 💋

As promised, birthday smooches between Jinana and Asra. Now with Bisexual Lighting!

(Click images for big, tunglr resolution is bleh)

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Ok would ANY of them have the AUDACITY to leave their socks on?

(NSFW asks)

Asra. Absolutely Asra. And it's even worse because he's normally a barefoot gremlin, which means he's put the socks on expressly to be contrary and upsetting (or I guess maybe if his feet are just that cold lol)

[the-iron-orchid]

“Who is [Julian] to anyone, but what he needs to be to get what he wants?”

OK but this line m u r d e r s me, because I really feel like this is Asra projecting like mad onto Julian.

Julian does have his little ‘suave sexy rogue’ persona/thot-script that he runs off of, and it serves him fairly well... but it also falls apart under any amount of real pressure. He can’t keep a secret or hide anything for shit. Julian is up to 11, all the damn time. Julian is an exposed nerve of a human being.

But Asra? Asra keeps secrets like it’s his job. He has managed to keep his entire past from someone he’s been in close quarters with for three years. Asra hides himself even from the people who supposedly know him the best - even from the person he loves most in the world. And, of course, Asra is the one who took advantage of Julian’s attraction to him to a) use him for whatever weird blood magic thing he was trying out and b) to alleviate his own boredom and physical needs.

Who is Asra to anyone?

[the-iron-orchid]

Asra for the bingo 👀

Now I will admit that I have. HEAVILY embroidered on Asra in my hcs and in ToC. A large part of that is because the devs left us with half a character by making him the MC's former love interest, because knowing too much about him would inform too much about the MC, who is supposed to be a total tabula rasa. IMO, that did Asra a HUGE disservice, and is a very large part of fandom complaints that Asra is 'bland' or 'boring' (the other part is, of course, racism).

Other thots:

The two poles of the fandom tend to be "Asra is some kind of abuser" and "Asra is a perfect uwu bean who's never done any wrong", and both of these are awful and arguably racist takes.

Asra is a flawed human being like any other, who has done some not-great things under not-great circumstances, because of the very human experience of devastating grief, which he has experienced twice over in his life.

Asra essentially using Julian for physical companionship during a time when he was hurting does not make him an abuser. Asra was open about his (lack of) feelings; Julian clearly knew that this was the case, and was also using Asra. (He literally says "I'll take what I can get" after Asra states flat out he can't give Julian what he really wants from him.) That was a toxic and unhealthy relationship under awful and stressful circumstances, and this is something acknowledged even in canon.

Having them acknowledge this and put in the work to rebuild their friendship (and maybe more) is an important part of character development for them in my view... something they don't get in canon.

I don't ship Asrian on its own (only McAsrian) because of this; imo, they very much benefit from a third party to balance the dynamic.

My most controversial take: People like to complain that Asra is somehow 'not nonbinary enough' because he uses he/they pronouns and appears to be AMAB. He was literally created by a he/they nonbinary person. I have VERY strong feelings about this, as an NB myself with AMAB NB loved ones who constantly struggle IRL with people (who think that NB means AFAB or woman-lite) invalidating their identity.

[the-iron-orchid]

- Nik Ladizinsky (who at the time was also using he/they pronouns) in Minor Arcana: Art of The Arcana

[Image Description: a screenshot from the official artbook of The Arcana.]

“On the subject of gender: Asra is referred to with masculine pronouns, but he does not ascribe to a gender binary. Having experienced beings of all identities, he neither sees the purpose of such a binary, or any meaning behind sorting. On a shifting, highly contextualized spectrum of gender, there’s no one place that he occupies. As a writer, I understand that the idea of communicating gender in this way can be jarring for readers, particularly those that are reading as non-native English speakers. But on a personal level, I share this trait with Asra, so it comes naturally to describe secondary characters in a gender-neutral manner unless the player character is familiar with them and knows otherwise.”

[the-iron-orchid]

Me, hand-beading a hilariously gaudy freeform bug-belt for BJD!Jinana to wear: I bet Asra regularly goes off to Nopal to get high off his ass on peyote with his homies and then makes weird shit just like this. This is why his wardrobe looks like Lisa Frank on acid and his tarot deck is full of furries, he’s just making what he sees while tripping balls. He owns property there because he needs a post-trip crash pad for when he’s coming down. A+, would date

[the-iron-orchid]

Just another Muslim-heritage-coding headcanon for Asra...

He still occasionally uses phrases like Inshallah, Mashallah, and Alhamdulillah, particularly when his emotions are running high.

And when he really, really wants something to go well, he’ll start the task with a whispered Bismillah under his breath.

(Usage notes under the cut - again, I am not Muslim myself, and additions and suggestions are welcome!)

Inshallah means ‘if Allah wills it’ or ‘God willing’, and is used in the same way - to speak of things that one hopes will come to pass, acknowledging that Allah’s will supersedes all else. (It is also used to politely or obliquely refuse a request, and I 100% see Asra being sassy enough to do this...)

Mashallah means ‘Allah has willed it’, and is used to invoke protection from envy and the Evil Eye when someone speaks of their good fortune or is praised - the implication is that this is a thing that God has willed, so nothing else can interfere or take it away. A person can say this for themself, or another may say it for them, but someone will absolutely say it!

Alhamdulillah means “Praise be to Allah” or “Thank God!” It is used when someone has achieved something difficult, or when a difficult situation turns out well. (It is also used when people sneeze, with specific responses outlined in the Qur’an.) Again, the implication is that all praise for good things that happen is due to Allah alone - a way of keeping the ego in check and practicing gratitude.

Bismillah means ‘in the name of Allah’ and acts as a blessing upon the undertaking one starts it with. It is the very first word in the Qur’an.

[the-iron-orchid]

Developing Non-Apprentice Jinana more has given me a lot of Thoughts about the exact nature of the relationship between hir and Asra - it wasn’t toxic, per se, but it also wasn’t exactly healthy. They enabled each others’ avoidant tendencies in the worst way, but they also could not seem to break it off.

It started, as most of Jinana’s relationships at the time did, as being intensely physical. Of course, after a time, Asra’s natural wanderlust manifested itself, and Jinana took this in stride, as usual trying not to let hirself get too invested.

And then he came back... and left. And then he came back again. He could never stay... but he also could never stay away. They settled into a relationship where, when Asra was in Vesuvia, they were together. When he was not, they were each to their own - Jinana is naturally polyamorous anyway, and Asra is sufficiently unconcerned with convention that it makes sense for him to be, as well.

But when he was in Vesuvia, they were together, and the Masquerade was always theirs. And so it went, for five years.

For Jinana’s part, s/he assumed that someone who was gone so often could not possibly be serious, so s/he maintained a facade of emotional distance... but it was also the longest-running romantic relationship of hir life. Asra could sense the box he was in, but had little idea of how to break out, and was too afraid to confess the depth of his own feelings for hir (after years of denying it to himself and everyone else), so the cycle simply continued, right up until their big blowout during the Plague.

Though not in so many words, Jinana essentially told Asra that if s/he hadn’t followed Heron out of Vesuvia after his parents died, s/he was not about to follow him. (He had always known that he would occupy a secondary place to Heron, a parallel position at best.) And so he left once again.

The rest, of course, is history. Jinana’s death during his absence broke Asra in a very fundamental way, to the point that his guilt and pain drove him to commit a massive transgression against the natural order. His interim relationship with Julian was a product of multiple conflicting impulses - from the simple need for physical closeness, to the need to take out what he was feeling on an entirely willing target, to the sadly humorous knowledge that Jinana would have loved this sad masochistic bottom of a man.

Post-resurrection, his mental state was not improved by the knowledge that the Jinana of before would never have allowed him to see hir in such a terrible state, and he wrestled with a great deal of guilt even as he exhausted himself to care for hir. After a solid year of Asra’s struggle to rehabilitate Jinana, Heron returned to Vesuvia, and hir improvement took a very sharp upturn (largely because of having two supportive mentors and because of how well Heron knows hir - but it probably felt to Asra like he’d half-killed himself over the least year, only for Heron to swoop in and make it seem easy).

By the time of the events of the game, however, Asra has discovered that the way he feels about Jinana has changed. While his feelings are deeper than ever, it is no longer the desire to possess, or to be the most important person in hir life. He genuinely wants the best for hir and (once things are on the level with Julian) could not be happier that s/he has found people who will love hir as much as he does. He has become capable of an unconditional love, and that knowledge is as esoteric and experiential as anything occult; it fundamentally changes a person.

While there will always be ups and downs, learning this about himself makes him lose his fear, eventually enabling him to open up to the others and share a strong bond with three of the people he cares about most. He is able to indulge his wandering nature, knowing that not only does he always have a home to return to, but that the people he loves and trusts are caring for each other in his absence.

[the-iron-orchid]

The more I think about it, the more incredibly reckless it was for Asra to bring back what amounts to a humanoid magical warhead with no guarantee that s/he’d have any control over hir own power

Either he was just that fucked up over it at the time (and was extremely lucky that nothing really bad happened), or there was some other condition to the deal he made that essentially put a limiter on hir power in the beginning.

I could absolutely see The Magician being willing to siphon off Jinana’s chaotic magic for the purposes of his own experimentation, but also honoring his deal with Asra and returning it to hir as s/he became able to handle it again.

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So it turns out that I write Asra rather differently from the way the devs do, lmao

That’s probably a good thing

I very frequently see him and his route described as ‘bland’ (typically compared to Julian, which I have other issues with, too long to go into here). But look at this person. Look at the way he dresses. He’s described as doing some extremely flashy magical shit in-canon. You cannot tell me that this bisexual nonbinary Lisa-Frank-lookin disaster-person would not be at least a little more flamboyant in speech, expression and mannerisms ok???