Fraternal.

potato

round 

probably too late to post this but here

it’s THAT time of the year again

poor things can’t escape from this forest since 2020 smh 😔

yes sir 🫡

Happy Krampusnatch!:D

Made a little 2 page comic based on the Krampus!AU.:)

In wich Gilbert familly is “cursed” to have one of their familly member changing into a Krampus during most of the winter and having to play the role in the region. Gil bro left home to go live with his boyfriend and so hearing that Gil would be alone this year, matthew decide to go surprise his penpal friend (Crush) for the holiday because he is alone too this year.

Sadly when Matthew got there no one was home since Gil was spooking kids in the woods and so he waited by the door and fell asleep. (No worries Gil will make him a warm drink to go with the explanation of why he has hooves and a long tail.XD)

I've been thinking a lot lately about how the main difference between Alfred and Matt is ambition and it's relationship with faith.

Alfred wants the world. He did on some level want the industrial and economic power that propelled him to the status of power. He resisted it, but he longed for the military might that all but forced his inheritance of the slipping British Empire. He longed for it. Maybe more for the respect at first, the ability to look Arthur in the eye as a man and equal, and only reluctantly for the ability to shape the world but he wanted it all the same. And he has faith he'll have it and that he deserves it. He believes with every ounce of himself that his way, his values, his path was the best one. Not only for him but for anyone around him. First the Americas, and then the world. There are doubts that whisper in his ear that sound like the roaring flames of hell and they nag at his conscience but they disapears under the barrage of success that he desired. He is God's chosen country. Icarus flew too close to the sun, and tumbled into the sea on broken wings when sun-warmed wax melted away. But Alfred swallowed the sun itself, took it into his hands and surpassed all other nations when he became that first nuclear power. He has utter faith that the entire world will dance to the tune he chooses.

Matt has little ambition. If he has any, it is only to survive, to avoid being swallowed whole by the competing empires that gave him breath and the brother he's bound too. He was the second son of the British Empire, Arthur's most dependable child. The First Dominion of Empire. Sounds so grand, like he's so in line with Arthur. It should be that he had faith in imperial dreams, in that world upon which the sun did not set upon his family and an ambition to serve it and prop it up in all things. But there is little of it there. He is the abandoned son of the French Empire. He has no faith in loyalty or in safety or love nor in any ambition too it. Except that innate need to survive. And Matt, well he is the North. Here, survival means warmth. Not the fires of nuclear power but of warmth and community and fire. Matthew's utter devotion to his Father and his family is given without so much expectation as hope that it will be returned when the brink is near and he needs help.

Matt looks softer, kinder than his brother, but he has that same sort of sharp ambition to him under it all. It's so much smaller as he has little faith in anything he gives being returned, but his one small need demands he give anyway. The North American brothers are much the same. It's just Alfred is so much louder and less desperate and more honest than Matt.

Ngl I think I’m tentatively now in the “Yao had short hair for most of the 20th century” club 🤔. It’s true this certainly isn’t wholly a novel thought, given the irl politics of Chinese men’s haircuts in line with the end of the Qing dynasty and shift to China becoming a republic. But in the past, I kind of swung between headcanoning that he soon grew it out again by the 30s (if only because he’s kept long hair for thousands of years before and it feels like such a integral part of his character) and that he didn’t until much, much later (90s and onwards?). And I think I kind of like the latter option now, if only to reflect how much of the 20th century involved China cycling through all kinds of different ideologies and crises very tumultuously— just this constant stage of remaking and at times trying very hard to cut ties with the past and his old life and its perceived weaknesses (the whole thing about destroying the “Four Olds” during the cultural revolution even led to the vandalism of Confucius’ tomb amongst other historical sites).

And precisely because keeping long hair was one manifestation of his old self and traditions, I think I like the idea of him finally coming back to it only after much soul searching, and a sort of rebalancing of himself between the old and the new. I don’t think he ever feels absolute equilibrium and the weight of the tumult and tragedies of the past century are still being felt and negotiated, but I think I can see him being comfortable with growing his hair out again by the late 90s or early 2000s. For a nation as old as he is, it’s part and parcel of existence to live many lives and to find yourself changed—but there are always some core threads of his being that he eventually returns to.

Don’t do drugs kids!!