#idk zz

[sad4ppleart]

i'm never gonna finish this anyway so here's scrapped horny arthas art

[gorgynei]

your bullshit is adorable, but not all the time

[worldsquietestjojosfan]

[shionszz]

Solomon devilgram story spoiler!!

Okay.

I have mix feeling about this story.

[dumb-inks]

more style stuff but in the other direction this time :))

[sirenofthegreenbanks]

ok i think you will enjoy this- last night i was thinking about how every time im thinking about the hly/jby dynamic, u have to factor zzs in there too automatically. unavoidable. and then i thought about a couple of specific jby/wuxi scenarios and zzs wound up in there too which is also a very good and fun flavor but now im just like wow. priest was right. guy who is always popping up in the background. who let him in here? idk too late. what a guy

i made smth for u

[geneticcatalyst]

okay. just trolley problem things:

at this point in the novel the tension and the emotional weight is wound up really high and things are really just primed for the impending mess to say important things about the characters in new and interesting ways. i think the main piece is the contrast between zzs' careless attitude in the carriage post Jiang assassination sort of smugly dismissing jby's veiled reservations and the version of him in jby's courtyard in the middle of the night, disheveled and shell shocked because he really hadnt thought this would happen. he was fully confident he could keep ljx in the dark forever, and even then maybe didn't expect ljx to condemn him so thoroughly.

i try really hard when considering jby and zzs to not extrapolate too far beyond the bounds of the characters as presented in the (somewhat notoriously biased) narration. both are presented as and also shown at times to be cold, ruthless, unfeeling etc. that's a starting point. i do think we can look at the whole picture and see the other more human aspects of these characters too, both explicitly stated and not, but if you rush into those hidden emotional depths and forget the rest you get word of honor really woobie really fast and that's SUCH A SHAME to lose sight of these characters who are so fascinating BECAUSE of their worst traits and actions. so I always try to start by explaining their behavior the way they would explain it- in terms of political gain, calculation, masks, power.

the really fun part comes when none of those things are enough to explain anymore, at least not in entirety, and you get to peek at the really raw soft inner shells of the remorseless war criminals <3 i'm getting into the weeds here let's go back to the courtyard.

zzs is in jby's courtyard in the middle of the night and he's visibly a wreck. this is wild because up until this point zzs is rarely visibly Anything. he's in the background, he's going unnoticed, he's this perfectly cool and collected tool of the empire.

but something unthinkable just happened, which was a risk that he was taking blew up in his face. and the first thing he does, maybe the only thing he can do, after trying to contain the problem (ljx), is go to jby.

so, the narrative explanation. jby is an ally but he's also very smart and seemingly good at dealing with people, very politically savvy. zzs has a potential threat to their shared mission which is hly's ascension, if ljx tells everyone how much blood is on the party's hands that's not going to happen. so logically zzs specifically needs his partner in crimes' help to mitigate that threat to their goal. additionally jby knows the situation, he knows ljx well and he also understands the relationship between zzs and ljx. all logical and true and as such it only makes sense that the first thing jby does is say okay hold on let me handle this.

aaa. okay. yeah no despite the fact that it's the middle of the night and theoretically ljx is imprisoned and could probably be kept at least until the morning. he just tells zzs to bring him to ljx. yes this is like mission critical politics, for sure, but i think also he's very driven to resolve things as soon as possible for emotional reasons.

what emotional reasons? well. there's the vividly fresh parallel to ji xiang, whose recent corpse is also in the courtyard. just for extra devastation zzs pulls back the sheet and says "you brought him along to go to the guangs, and you didn't keep him?" and jby says. "i wanted to keep him. but i couldn't." ji xiang was a good servant to jby for a decade, but when he tried to betray jby (and zzs) to su qingluan to save his girlfriend, he got himself killed. ji xiang is nowhere on the level of ljx who is both shidi and the only scrap of normalcy/link to zzs's past, but they're both young innocents who are pulled into the deadly political morass that jby and zzs are wading in by proximity (and crucially by exposing its corruption). jby is privately pretty depressed about the incident and explicitly states to wu xi (as explicit as he gets, anyway) that he hates seeing this happen, but can't do anything to stop it. i think, even so, he wants to do everything possible to try to keep ljx from the same fate.

there's also the question of favors and debts. after all this is over, zzs offers to take jby for a drink in exchange (understatement). jby replies that he owed zzs. now in the current timeline zzs has uncovered jby's estate purchasing property outside the capitol and it's not quite clear but i think zzs correctly surmises that this is some sort of backup plan or escape framework. in another scene that makes me !?!?!!? about them zzs confronts jby about this and jby can do nothing but ask zzs to cut him some slack. and. zzs. does. just shrugs and torches the evidence right there in the candle flame. jby certainly owes him for that. i think that's something of a smaller parallel to first life zzs warning jby about the plot against him. again, scene isn't perfectly clear, but i think zzs meant that conversation as a warning- cover your tracks better, people are watching. that's why he so easily acquiesces to letting jby off the hook. point made, he destroys the evidence to protect his friend, or even to gain a favor in the future. what im saying is that zzs has had jby's back before, in multiple lives, and jby doesn't take that lightly.

(on reread it's also pretty clear also that jby thinks the incident is his fault, having kept ljx at his estate overnight but no later- ljx still managed to slip out early enough to discover the bodies. so jby definitely views this as trying to fix his own mistake here, although zzs never seems to hold it against him. possibly this is what he means when he says he owed zzs, but i think there's a lot more there as well.)

and finally i have to get into a little more esoteric take but it's actually the way the scene really hit me the first time i read it. what came across from the way jby handles the situation was defensiveness. he correctly reads the situation as a threat and he storms into ljx's holding room and scolds him (violently! no relying on charm here) for his childish ideas of righteousness. ljx said that zzs should pay with his life for his crimes and jby says no, you don't understand the context. jby is defending zzs's actions to ljx and trying to get ljx to see zzs in a more understanding if not forgiving light. jby is doing this because 1. it's key to keeping ljx from exposing them and destabilizing the precarious political situation 2. zzs is his friend and he doesn't want to see him harmed 3. zzs and jby are the same. they are wrapped up together in this. they are in this so much deeper than anyone else and are bound together by it. when ji xiang spoke up to reveal their plot to su qingluan, which ljx overheard, he mentions them both in the same breath. jby defending why zzs has done the things he's done is jby defending his own actions. it's personal. he's defensive of zzs but he's really defending the both of them. because they are the same.

[mage-witha-glock]

I can just imagine Benisek trying to get the gossip on Zach and Zorian to figure out how what where and why they randomly became friends over the summer and are now joined at the hip best buds that spend all their time together and apparently commit crime?? ("Kopriva, what??! Zorian? Break the law? You're pulling my leg")

And Zach and Zorian are just trying to play it off like, Yeah it just kinda happened over the course of the time off school and Benisek is just like, That is not possible??? Becoming suck good close friends in a month(?) is not humanly possible?!?

[daswarschonkaputt]

modern au fem!hanwenzhou

okay so like, pretty much all my art is someone else's fault. i stand by this. this is the fault of @antique-forvalaka (henceforth siv). blame or thank her. she just showed up unprovoked and was like, "fem!wkx has a flat ass and fem!zzs is big tiddy tomboy," and i was like, "umm???" what was i meant to do? NOT draw them? it's a modern au because i don't fuck with drawing hanfu.

most of these were drawn when i was too sick to write and lemme tell you i 100% underestimated the effect of a cough on drawing art. the lineart on wkx's piece took me so fucking long. i even had to go back in and redo bits of it. that's why some of it looks wonky but shhhh don't look.

assorted headcanons beneath the cut:

fem!zzs

this was the first one i started drawing, and then i nearly gave up because zzh's face is the fucking worst to draw. like, i even tried tracing a still and it still didn't look like him. okay, thots:

f!zzs has long hair that she takes relatively good care of but she pretty much always just ties up and ignores

she keeps it long because she sometimes does infiltration missions and it's helpful to appear super feminine

she knows how to be pretty and well presented but she literally never gives a shit

left alone she will happily sit in a sports bra and panties and eat ramen

oh yeah when she's lying low after leaving tc she disguises herself as a male vagabond. @luckydragon10 is very attached to f!zzs's fake stubble.

the hoodie look is an adaptation of my favourite zzs look from woh which is the meili look. look i am a simple woman, put the characters in a veiled hat and my brain just goes hrrrrnnnnng.

fem!wkx

oh hello other actor in this drama who is incredibly fucking hard to draw. luckily i had already drawn modern wkx before so i was a bit more used to his face. okay, some more thots:

the first one i drew was the big profile which is labelled in the csp file as tiddies out wkx

in my head f!wkx has a flat ass and flat chest bc siv said so, but she wishes she were curvy like wkx

she's very much styled after a femme fatale, emphasis on the fatal

she's pretty much always immaculately turned out, perfect make-up, perfect clothes, all very expensive

i had to draw her in stockings and garter belt. i just had to. also that lace texture killed me and took me like half of wanda//vision (which i was watching in the background) to get right

part of the reason i even did modern au was because i wanted to draw wkx with a sniper rifle

on that note the sniper rifle is traced from a photo bc i am lazy and at that point was very ill

"oh? so you have chosen death~♡" -- that's her vibe

fave wkx is angery wkx up in the top right corner. i drew her last.

one big regret that i didn't draw her splattered in blood and smirking like lelouch from code geass. i just think that would be neat.

fem!hy

thank u han ying for having a face that i can draw. thank u actor for having distinguishable features for my face blind self. thank u. thots:

this was the last set of these that i drew and i had to think long and hard about what to do for her. i knew i wanted her to be shorter than zzs but curvier than wkx but that was literally it

originally when i started drawing f!hy i gave her short curly hair, like close to a pixie cut, but i couldn't make it look right, so i went back to siv and extracted her suggestion of a side cut or undercut

in my head, hy and zzs run two-man missions all the time, with zzs as front woman and hy as tactical support/getaway driver

siv said to me that she sees wkx playing dress-up with hy bc hy is more receptive to it than zzs and i was like oh yes so that's why there's a little classy hy over on the right

also the more i drew f!hy with her little undercut and sweats i realised she looked like a fuckboi and i was here for it

special shout out to my favourite tac gear item: the throat mic. they're just so sexy. don't come at me.

shout out to fancy dress ass-kicking hy. the backstory here is that wkx put her in a pretty dress for a nice evening out only for it to devolve into a battlefield so hy takes off her heels and just starts blasting.

oh yeah special shout out here bc my brain was just like "play with the colours" so i did and now there is no consistent colouring for this set.

anyway i love hy's little button nose. so cute. love drawing it.

ok i'm done.

standard disclaimers for my art: all of it was drawn in clip studio paint (my beloved). i use pose references using the built-in 3D models and assorted poses i've downloaded from the store. faces are drawn using stills from the show i've founded on google images. when i draw fashion there's a high change it's from runway collections, in this case hy's dress is from the paolo sebastian moonlight serenade collection, specifically this one. and the fancy han ying look is adapted from ashi studio fall/winter 2017, specifically this look.

[deepestbluesky]

new fanbinding! several months ago (please don't ask me to check that, i refuse to acknowledge the passage of time) i made a book for @orchisailsa of her zzs/jby fic Field Research. it was very cute and small! i also forgot to take pictures before i sent it to her 🤦🏻‍♀️ and then this week i was feeling antsy and also in my zzs/jby feelings, so i decided to bind a copy for myself!

the printing this time around: so easy. incredible wow 10/10 would recommend doing a second copy of things when you already know what the fuck you're doing. same with folding and cutting (tho i probably should have trimmed more closely, some of the cuts were uneven but it's fine).

the coptic bind a second time: terrible. it's been so long i forgot how to do it and had to look it up again and then made the same fucking mistakes i've made the other times i've done it!! which like, are not structual issues, it's just that the stitches don't look nice and i still don't think i'm getting them quite right. also the tension of the stitches is weird, idk how to make that better but i'm sure i could with practice.

i thought i was going to have to use a different paper for the cover but it turns out the covers are so small that i only used one of my pieces of it last time, so i had enough to do it the same way including making sure to get a whole nice flower on the front!

overall i'm really happy with how this turned out and very happy to have a copy of this excellent fic :D

[cryptidafter]

someone tell me why I wrote this and what I'm supposed to do with it lol

[luonnonvalinnat]

Back at it again with le panel redraws

[zestyderg]

Dino uses his newfound magic to turn the whale skeleton chasing his friends into an ally instead

Unfortunately a certain someone saw and now he's being kidnapped and harshly interrogated...

[theliltchirurgeon]

double zeta getting me through the day at the flower shop

[steel-coffin]

I can't tell if moonmoon is the stupidest shit in the UC or the coolest, but since it is called moonmoon, I will err on the side of this fucking blows :)

[birbfeeder2artisticboogaloo]

listennn im not saying we should make the boatman song about ying'er

BUT WE SHOULD DEFINITeLY MAKE THE SONG ABOUT YING'ER LIKE