Amulet 

Sketch

day 1: denial

🛐

a light tarot reading, because i'm still fond of what i cooked up here. expect allusions to the ending of aci and general detailing of my intentions throughout. some nuances omitted because i want to see if anyone else catches on to them....

probably the most obvious thing is the card itself, wheel of fortune. generally it suggests change, cycles, some big turning point in your life. with the eye cutout slashing through the sphinx i meant to encapsulate izaya's plan of flipping the wheel over on the game makers and throwing them under an imitation of their own work.

there's a distinction in the meaning of the card when it's upright or reversed. looking inward, the card reads upright towards him and reversed as presented to the onlooker. throughout the chapter there's a lot of emphasis on the lack of sincere connections he has, how no one seemed to reach out genuinely concerned about his absence. his attention drifts to his phone a lot as he works, and he continues to work until the end of the chapter which i'll leave here.

it's hard for me to articulate but i hope you can see how i also wanted to convey izaya's personal development at this point of the fic.

less obvious is the positioning of izaya's finger keeping the lion out of view. i know shizuo is technically an aquarius but that thing looks boring and i'm not partial to the zodiac anyways so to me he's the lion in reference this bit from the first chapter.

you could also read shizuo as the bull hidden beneath izaya's shadow which i was also considering as a nod to a bull charges at the stirring of a cape. regardless it can work both ways in keeping him out of view for this part of the plan.

and this one just fell into place for me but wheel of fortune happens to be the element of fire!! which if you know you know.

there's a lot i tried to work into this composition and i have to thank rosa again for putting up with me and making it look amazing.... collaboration with me is pretty intensive but rewarding to see the initial ideas get visually realized.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

This is a collab I did with my friend @loppiopio when we were fanfic book clubing "A Cheap Imitation" back in 2023 man, good times good times

Linking the fic here in case anyone is curious

uwu

this is a canon scene it’s true i was there

Ahh, so the wonderful @scivious encouraged me to try GIF-making and because I have poor impulse control I had to give it an immediate shot! I intended it to be transparent.. but– The next one will be better, and hopefully higher quality, haha. It was a lot of fun, though! I will definitely give it another shot. ☆

born from a conversation I had with @ciaran​ a while ago but I’ve been thinking about it lately SO:

based on the popularity of that one glib tweet I made once, I think that it’s not that uncommon for people to acknowledge that hua cheng probably would love to sub. less talked about but no less fun is how well I think xie lian would fit into a dominant role

xie lian has for so long been beholden to the whims of Literally Everything causing him misfortune that I feel like he would really enjoy discovering the experience of dominance, specifically with hua cheng. having these continuous little realizations of how much everything he does genuinely affects hua cheng, and how vulnerable another person can be to him, and then being able to take a little it of… lovingly malicious glee in just letting go and doing whatever he wants, even if ‘whatever he wants’ is not being very nice.

xie lian already has a habit of lovingly bullying hua cheng in canon (see: every time hua cheng pretends to be anyone other than himself and xie lian inevitably figures it out long before he lets hua cheng know that he’s figured it out, occasionally for the sole purpose of teasing him), and it would be a natural and likely positive experience for them both to bring that into their intimate life as something they both enjoy… but also as a way for xie lian to experiement with and test out the range of power that he is finding he is delighted to have over hua cheng, especially knowing that hua cheng is on his own an extremely powerful individual that is so emotionally beholden to xie lian that he willingly lays himself out. burn his mansion down again, gege, it was trash anyway!

and meanwhile hua cheng gets to indulge in the complete submission that he genuinely wishes to give xie lian, which xie lian typically has very little desire for because so much of his life has been couched in unequal relationships and having the genuine good will beaten out of him under the guide of “hubris”. hua cheng being delighted at xie lian being comfortable enough to act a little selfish and a little unkind to him because he’s so reassured that hua cheng wants it with full sincerity.

I suddenly missed Drrr so much and rewatched the show. Then, these.

// Shizaya was my very first otp too (*´꒳`*)

yahoo a good ole wip :]!