Engawa

watercolours, ink, marker, edit

Rare moment of chill with his soul child.

It's very important to me that I tell you I am SO excited for Hitsugaya's birthday, I have been thinking about it for weeks and have been celebrating for days already. They're very silly celebrations, because I am busy and they all have to be things I was going to be doing already or that serve some additional purpose, and few have any actual thematic connection to, uh, Hitsugaya, but IN MY MIND anything can be Hitsugaya-related, and regardless I'm like, and now I shall do X! In honor of Hitsugaya's birthday! Happy birthday, my fictional guy!!!!! And now Y!!!!!! 🥰 🥰 🥰 🥰 🥰

I'm currently doing IKEA math (how many archive boxes do I need for all this paper, and how much bookshelf, and how much should I be extrapolating for future Written Documents) and part of me was like, lol, I could arrange the whole room like the 10th office, that would NOT be completely bananas of me no it would not be (minus one ugly couch, because the room's not THAT big), but I don't think I can psychologically handle installing floor-to-ceiling KALLAX.

@atamascolily Perhaps you jest, but:

I wrote that onto the calendar *last November* when I bought this planner, when I wrote in all the human birthdays. 😂

Nope, I was completely serious because I KNOW YOU--but I have never been more delighted to be right. Happy Hitsugaya's birthday to all who celebrate!

tbt to that time someone in the Seireitei had a candlemaking side hustle

where the draw was that each candle was meant to evoke different types of reiatsu, as described by the traditionally florid prose of candle/perfume descriptions. There was some press around the candles' potentially homeopathic effects, and though the 12th put a stop to that pretty quickly, some shinigami had standing orders for the candles because some users swore that burning the candles could help augment one's own reiatsu. (One wing of the 3rd Division barracks did burn down, but that's neither here nor there.) You could commission custom blends if you paid for a reiryoku reading, which the candlemakers then used to whip up a candle specialized to you.

Where things got really tricky was when the founder of the Gotei Candle Co. tried to step it up and offer a limited edition Gotei Captain candle set, where each candle was meant to describe/evoke the reiatsu signatures of, well, the Gotei Captains. You can't normally brand things like that without express permission of the Council of 46 (though notably not the Captains' individual permissions, which don't factor into this at all, officially), but the Gotei Candle Co. knows that the SWA gets permission to run their calendars every year, and they thought if they did a Gotei Candle Co. x SWA collab, it would be a real knockout event.

BUT photo calendars are one thing and reiatsu signature candles are another, and when this went to the Council of 46 they found that they DID actually have to consult the Gotei, to determine whether or not the candles constituted a breach of military security. And this had to go to a Captains' Meeting vote. The voting was split across several positions:

In any case, the Council of 46 refused to make a move without evidence-based deliberation from the Gotei, so they had to spend hours and hours sniffing candles as part of the process. And the 12th wanted to run a test so there'd be science-backed proof that the candles did/did not accurately type Captain reiatsu, because they did not believe captains sniffing things constituted actual evidence-based anything. There was some pushback against this, but ultimately the 12th prevailed and the REASON the 12th has all the captains' reiatsu typed--and having this done is now part of any captains onboarding, even post-candle debacle--is because OF THESE DANG CANDLES.

Eventually the Gotei decided, fuck it, these candles are a no-go, I don't care. But then Sasakibe brought up the fact that to deny them outright was technically a violation of the Commercial Clause of 1457, which states that when military procedure infringes on free trade within the Seireitei, it must offer an alternative enterprise as part of the sanction. After all the candle business, having to deal with this hangup was the closest the Gotei has ever come to executing mass ritual suicide in Yamamoto's office. Strange but true. The candles, man.

Anyway, at some point Byakuya leaks this to Shirogane, because He Cannot With This, and Shirogane suggests "okay no candles but what about eyewear tho" and Byakuya brings this to the next Captains' Meeting and Byakuya is, briefly, a HERO to his peers, and Shirogane is a HERO and that's why they let him leave the Gotei entirely and open up a glasses store.

So I gotta ask if you had the Dril tweet in mind when you were writing this, because it was the first thing that popped into my head:

Obviously this isn't Byakuya talking, he can afford as many candles as he wants, but I'm curious which character you think would purchase enough to complain about it on the Soul Society version of Twitter.

WHOAAAAAA the Buddhist connections never even occurred to me, but I would 100% believe it, given the theme of his zanpakutou. Mind blown yet again!

Thanks for such a great response, this will live rent-free in my brain from hereon out!

You may not like it, but this is what peak scientific performance looks like.

Worst Bleach Meme Ever

Not to be pedantic (except yes, I will happily own this pedantry 100%) but something I am really interested in/curious about is like, what are your Bleach AP SC Style Guides? Like, whether it’s a matter of subconscious taste or intentional consistency (or lack thereof):

Feel free to answer/skip whichever questions you like! It’s a meme, do whatever you want lol

What do you mean this is the “worst meme”–this is the best!

Keep reading

Well, I really like writing poetry... in one of my fics, the characters play a period-typical poetry composing game and I wrote poems for every single one of them. As for the original kidou chant (OK? OKC?), it all came down to Rule of Drama-- what is the coolest thing I could possibly have them do in the moment?--and a long-ass, esoteric chant full of quasi-Buddhist references right at the climactic moment where the world is literally collapsing just felt like the best possible way to handle it. It was a lot of fun!

(If anyone reading this is curious: the kido chant in question is in my Bleach/PMMM crossover fic Moebius, and the poetry game is in chapter five of a subsequent installment in the series, Three Worlds.)

OH! Speaking of kido, I also forgot to mention that I am also consistently inconsistent about transliterating certain sounds from Japanese to English--specifically the ō sound. I don’t have an easy way on my computer to type macrons, and have to copy-paste it, and so I generally don’t bother. Instead, I write it out as “ou”--so “Toushirou” instead of “Tōshirō”; “zanpakutou” instead of “zanpakuto” , etc, etc--EXCEPT where it just looks wrong to my eyes. So I always write “kido” instead of “kidou”, even though it really should be “kidō” and “Omaeda” instead of “Oomaeda” even though it really should be “Ōmaeda”. I don’t make any claims to the way I do it being “correct,” and I’m willing to hear arguments for doing it differently, but habits die hard.

Fun fact: the AO3 tag for “kido” is synned to “kid fic”. Because that’s exactly what people meant, right? Probably should be tagged as “Kido (Bleach)” to avoid confusion...

@atamascolily​ YES please share your fire brigade headcanons!!

I bet this is the Seireitei’s entire fire department:

Their Captain Commander can heat himself to 15 million degrees and still, not once, have they considered upgrading the bucket situation.

For scale:

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Actually, Yamamoto is probably why the Seireitei’s fire brigade is non-existent! His command over fire is one reason why his faction ended up winning control in the end--because he is the fire department, far more effective than anyone else. (Historically, the inability to control fires contributed to the eventual downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate, which puts his eventual downfall in a new light.) The Gotei’s firefighting game is so poor, because they historically have not needed it. This may also be why Hitsugaya is a likely candidate for Captain-Commander after Kyouraku--in addition to his incredible strength at such a young age, he can extinguish fires with his water powers

One reason why the Seiretei looks the way it does--especially all the tile on the corridors and roofs--is because those are significantly more fireproof than thatch and wood. It’s not completely fireproof, especially when magic and insanely high temperatures are involved, but it’s a step up from, say, the Rukongai, which probably does still get hit by ordinary fires on the regular, and which probably has a lot more political instability.

The sekiseki stone wall separating around the Seireitei is probably fireproof, so I doubt any fires on the outside impact the shinigami on a day-to-day basis. However, there is probably a strong firefighting community in the Rukongai, which doesn’t get the same level of support or treatment, and that is where I would situate them in a fic.

PS: check out the “Fires in Edo” Wikipedia article for more details about historical Japanese firefighting--fires were so common in Edo that there was even a proverb about it: “Fires and quarrels are the flowers of Edo”.

Worst Bleach Meme Ever

Not to be pedantic (except yes, I will happily own this pedantry 100%) but something I am really interested in/curious about is like, what are your Bleach AP SC Style Guides? Like, whether it’s a matter of subconscious taste or intentional consistency (or lack thereof):

Feel free to answer/skip whichever questions you like! It’s a meme, do whatever you want lol

What do you mean this is the “worst meme”--this is the best!

Now THIS is the kind of question people should be asking!!!

This puts my “Urahara teaches driving lessons” fic in a whole new perspective, LOL.

Loosely inspired by ANAI - go read it!

From a discord convo with @atamascolily, who also wrote a fic about this scenario!

These are amazing and I love them so much!!! <3<3<3<3!!!

(The working title for the fic was “How Many Sailor Moon Jokes Can I Cram Into A Handful of Paragraphs?” and I have no regrets.)

IchiHime visiting Nara sketches. Plus a random fallow doe (well, any spotted doe, really, but fallow was what I had in mind). Because I just really wanted to draw some deer.

Color palette because yes.

Been reminiscing on favorite old muses before all this fanart. It’s been a very hot minute since I last drew a deer; I was a bit out of practice at first :,)

Ukitake meditates in a pond near the ugendou.

As a small bonus (because the composition in the original work is terrible I know), I made a sketch of how it would look in his inner world. It turned out to be something like the "expectation vs reality" meme.

Moths!

Ichigo - Death's Head Hawkmoth | Orihime - Chinese Luna Moth

Uryu - Giant Leopard Moth | Chad - Cecropia Moth