Next part for MerMay 2022: Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan. This year I allowed him to be a mermaid as well, last year only she got to be one. So I guess he got promoted. XP
And here they are, all together! The finished linearts for my current MerMay projects! (Please ignore missing gills, those will be added later. I always forget about the gills…)
The first one is already coloured and will be posted soon! :D
Little update on the current MerMay project (because it takes forever, surprise surprise, when you work on 4 pieces at the same time and I need to hype myself up about it a little): the linearts for Jiang Yanli/Jin Zixuan and Qingming/Boya are (almost) done now! (Can you tell I had problems drawing certain parts of their bodies…?)
Me: Imma just do some quick sketches to figure out this pose.
Also me: How about we turn every sketch into an actual piece? :D
In other words, I have played myself once again. So now we have XiCheng, NieYao, Xuanli (The Untamed) and QingYa (Yin Yang Master) all waiting to be worked on. Whoops?
((Any preferecenes which you wanna see finished first? Let me know! (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)))
thought: Zixuan has so many kids to Dad, he sometimes unwittingly forgets to turn off Dad Mode and casually Dads people who are not his kids. pretty much every other dad in the previous generation is incredibly shitty so actually it works surprisingly well.
and also sometimes…
Zixuan: I can’t believe I used Dad Voice on sect leader Yao oh god that’s so embarrassing JGY: I can’t believe it WORKED. we should have been doing this for YEARS.
Yanli just wanted to have a cute morning-after with her boyfriend. Yanli did not deserve this. if Yanli’s little brothers don’t stop screaming she is going to rescind their soup privileges for a month.
Came across the template and couldn’t resist The Urge on this nice Saturday. It’s whoever-sees-it’s turn to sort LSZ, LZY into the lines.
We would say… Wen Chao and Wang LingJiao*
*if they weren’t pseudo-ancient-Chinese, hence WLJ could better solidify her position at WC’s side by bearing him a son. Actually curious how in a half year they had together she didn’t end up knocked up. …And what had happened to WC’s official wife during Sunshot Campaign
saw a fic the other day where Yanli was like “my husband’s half-brother is creepy and horrible and I’m never letting him hold my baby” and I was just like ??????? umm ding dong you’re wrong ???? like she wouldn’t see this bundle of deeply familiar traits and traumas and just go “I’m going to take care of that small tired man whether he likes it or not :) :) :)”
I’m having a lot of thoughts and feelings about Jiang Cheng and Jin Ling’s relationship right now. Jin Ling most likely went through a phase where he called Jiang Cheng ‘A-Die’, because when you’re young, your parent is determined by who takes care of you, not blood relation. The first time Jin Ling does it, Jiang Cheng, for a split second, feels happiness and pride, before being overcome with guilt and devastation. Jiang Cheng should have never had to play such a role in Jin Ling’s life in the first place, and he felt he was never going to do as good as a job as Yanli and Zixuan, yet he was what Jin Ling had. He never wanted them to be replaced or forgotten, so from then on, he does everything he can to make sure Jin Ling knows he is not his A-Die. He also hates the fact that Jin Ling mourning his parents is something that he had to almost be taught, and not something that happened naturally, because Jin Ling never got to know his parents enough to even know what he was missing.
Angst aside though, I also like to imagine that as the years go by, being called 'A-Die’ bothers him less and less. He never gave Jin Ling permission to do so, but Jin Ling still slips up from time to time, and eventually (when Jin Ling is in his 20s or something) Jiang Cheng just stops correcting him, since being called 'A-Die’ doesn’t hurt as much as it once did.
I love the idea of Jiang Cheng and Jin Zixuan becoming besties. Like, it starts off with Jin Ling conning them into “helping” with his different school projects, building solar systems, volcanos, etc… until it becomes a routine that whenever Jin Ling has a school project, they spend hours bonding working on it together (90% of the time Jin ling isn’t even there). When there is a lull in the projects Jin Ling gets assigned, jc and jzx feel like they’ve lost their excuse for hanging out, and are both too awkward to reach out. It comes to a head when Yanli gets tired of seeing jzx mope around the house, sighing at the birdhouse he and jc ‘helped’ a-ling build for his woodshop class, and forces him to reach out to jc. She reassures him that 'yes, jc misses you too, he asks if Jin ling has any school projects every time I talk to him’, jzx finds the courage to invite jc out, and a beautiful friendship is born. They go out multiple times a month and text all the time, jc has even called jzx 'xuan-ge’ and wwx has never felt more betrayed
