#Auction House Japan

[empty-movement]

Yasha I can't find it for the life of me -- do you have the story of how y'all found/fixed up the full kiss image from the Virtual Star ED? I swear I remember you talking about it.

(I'm so sorry I'm bad at messages and tumblrs and socials)

This is a tweet thread you're looking for, but I'll repost here also in full, because god, Twitter.

#UTENA STORY TIME!

This image circulates pretty readily on account of being beautiful and gay af. However, keen observers notice that only a fraction of it appears to have been used in the closing credit sequence. So how, you ask, do I have this small image of the actual cel???

In 2010, this cel sold on Yahoo! Japan for what was, at the time, a pretty obscene amount. The auction closed at 244,000Y, or about $2,250 US. This is comical amount to an insane Utena fan now, I've seen people pay this for batches of douga. I've tried to pay this for batches of douga.

The image I have in the gallery is from the auction. However. That's not how the story ends... https://togetter.com/li/60425 According to widely circulated but now I think? deleted? tweets by Ikuhara, the faces were never drawn for the ED credits, and the image was finished digitally.

*HOWEVER.* He does confirm that this cel was made in house, not for the ED credits, but for a magazine or some other thing that requested the picture of them kissing from the ending, where there was never a complete image. So the question is....is it 'real?'

The answer is of course hell yes, if it was made in house it's legit, even if it wasn't used for the purpose we thought, imo. Oh, and before you compare it to the ED credits to check, keep in mind that the remaster you're all familiar with itself cleaned up this image:

It's most noticeable on Utena's gem and epaulet, and the curve of the bottom of Anthy's open sleeve, and that in the original, they screwed up the background so that parts of it have the blue sky and other parts do not.

In other words, three 'legit' iterations of this image exist. The OG (that Ikuhara asserts was at least partially digital?), the full size cel that was made in house and sold, and the digitally remastered version that is now the default. And that's the tale of the canon kiss!

Hope that helps and was fun! <3 - Vanna

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

This is my mom's vintage Kermit the Frog watch from the 90s. I cannot for the life of me find a single scrap of information about it anywhere online. The only result that confirms this watch even exists is a long dead listing without a price on an auction house website (apparently you can pay a subscription fee to see the price, but I'm not doing that). This watch isn't listed on the Muppets wiki with the othet pieces of the Kermit Collection, and it doesn't have any manufacturer info on it, just the copyright for the Henson company.

My mom has kept this watch in storage for years, I haven't seen it since the early 2000s, and I misremembered what condition it was in. I knew something was loose inside, and I thought one of the hands had snapped off, but it was actually the border of the mirror Kermit is looking into. I thought it was damaged beyond repair, but that's a super easy fix. Pop the glass off, glue it back into place, pop the back off, put in a new battery, good as new!

I have no clue who made it or when. This is the entire text on the back:

STAINLESS STEEL BACK ↑ JAPAN ⚡377 WATER RESISTANT V-246 HENL6616

KERMIT COLLECTION

TM & © Jim Henson Co.

And the strap just says

©Henson

GENUINE LEATHER

HONG KONG

I assume HENL6616 stands for Henson model 6616, but according to google, bing, and duckduckgo, that code has never been written on the internet before. It's hard to see on the fifth photo, but it's definitely 6616, not 6676.

⚡377 is the battery, an AG4 377

I have no idea what V-236 means. I'll pop it open later tonight and see if there's anything written inside. Hopefully the battery compartment isn't corroded to hell. If not, I could have it up an running in a matter of hours.

Her birthday is in October, and I think this is the perfect gift. Fingers crossed it still works.

[sharpeningtheblade]

WAKIZASHI WITH CARVED DECORATIONS

Blade with oxidation. Bone tsuba and tsuka decorated and carved with effigies of dignitaries. Saya divided in bone sectors (broken and missing parts) carved en suite. Two small bone rings

Japan, End of 19th beginning of 20th Century

length 63,5 cm.

© CZERNY’S INTERNATIONAL AUCTION HOUSE S.r.l.

[memories-of-ancients]

Yamashita style samurai armor, Japan, 18th-19th century

from Czerny's International Auction House

[sexhaver]

hey I have an ungraded Alpha Chaos Orb I got from a blind egg machine in the 90s. how do I get it graded and what's the best move for me with this thing? should I sell it, or is it going to continue to acquire value?

ohhhhh man that's a Spicy Meatball. first step would be getting ahold of a jeweler's loupe and doing some basic at-home checks for whether or not it's fake. the most common is the Green Dot Test where you look at the green dot on the back of the card:

there are also some other tests you can do but the efficacy of those can vary depending on the set the card is from (i.e. sometimes legit cards can still fail); r/mtgfinance is very helpful with walking you through the specifics of these

once you determine it's not an obvious fake, the next step would be getting it graded. the gold standards here are Beckett and PSA. picking which one to use is a subject of great debate; generally PSA is preferred by Pokemon collectors and stores in Japan, whereas Beckett is preferred by MTG whales (i.e. your target audience). PSA is more lenient on specifically the centering of the card though so it might be worth sending it into them depending on how that looks. also before sending the card in to any service, get multiple high-quality scans of the front and back in case a dispute arises. both Beckett and PSA are wayyyy more reputable than that card service i posted about a few days back that just declares their customers' cards fake and then steals them, but when dealing with something this expensive it pays to be cautious. i would also recommend insuring the package you mail it to them in

once you get a grade, you can decide how to proceed from there. Chaos Orb specifically is banned in basically everything so it really only has value as a collectable, which means you can probably just leave it in the plastic "slab" you'll get it back in. on the plus side, it has a LOT of value as a collectable. i don't have a finger on the pulse of alpha card prices but you're looking at multiple thousands of dollars minimum. however, you are going to run into some issues because 1. you're someone with no sale history selling a really rare and expensive card and 2. there are so few Alpha Chaos Orbs floating around that there aren't really enough sales to pin down a market price, but not so few sales that you want to go through an auction house. you definitely do not want to sell to a physical LGS (local game store) because they are not going to beat the best offer you can find online (they mostly have the edge when selling in bulk). your best bets here are probably either ebay or this facebook group, but bear in mind that ebay takes some percentage of the sale (i think 14%?) and tends to side with the buyer unconditionally if a dispute arises. if you take the facebook route, DO NOT ACCEPT OFFERS FROM PEOPLE SLIDING INTO YOUR DMS. THEY ARE LOWBALLING YOU.

im answering this one publicly so people can chime in if they have any other advice they want to share, but in any case, your first step here is to get your hands on a jeweler's loupe

[eyeodyssey]

When it comes to books that act as ephemera for the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s plays, most collectors would seek out items like the retrospective 2-MINUS magazine Ameya Style or the volumes of Theater Book and June that featured contemporary articles about the TGG’s plays. The information included in these books is incredibly valuable as many production stills, descriptions and even whole screenplays were printed in these publications. That isn’t to downplay the importance of other adjacent books though, such as the Suehiro Maruo magazine Only You, which features a digest version of Galatia Teito Monogatari’s screenplay. There are even more magazines that have since been shrouded in obscurity, two of which acted as the direct source of several of the most iconic images affiliated with the Tokyo Grand Guignol. The above image is from the October 25th, 1985 volume of Emma magazine. My knowledge of these publications is pretty much nonexistent outside of the fact that on the auctions I found this (and the next featured book) on, both volumes were listed as “photo magazines” or something like that. They definitely contain pictures, that’s for certain. Either way, this photo was a specially shot production still derived loosely from a scene in the TGG’s first play, Mercuro (1984). Despite the close association, this photo is usually given with the play, there was no scene in the original screenplay where Ameya emerges from Kyusaku Shimada’s torso. It was said on the Twitter account TGG_Lab that this scene was based on a variation of the play that was performed at an event hosted by Peyote Workshop known as End of the Century Live, said version of Mercuro being a loose descendent of the iconic televised performance of the play that was shown on Tokumitsu Kazuo's TV Forum. Both renditions were heavily abridged variants of Mercuro’s most iconic special effects scenes, with the televised version specifically being a crossing of the openings of act one and act two. One thing of note is that near the end of the article on the side, a special teaser is given for the upcoming December 1985 debut of Litchi Hikari Club.

The next photo spread is of a similarly iconic production still, this one being a direct capture of (what was likely) the opening of the first act of Litchi Hikari Club. In said opening scene, an execution is conducted to the tune of the S.P.K. song Culturcide wherein the light club hang a student who crossed their strict rules. This student is apparently different from the one who is blinded by a spotlight later on in the same act. This photo is from the April 11th, 1986 volume of Focus, a magazine that happens to contain a fairly interesting coincidence. In my prior essay regarding the parallels between Litchi Hikari Club and the futurist movement, I mention how Ameya at one point cited an airplane accident as a direct influence for Litchi’s story. According to his recollections, the accident occurred not long after the televised performance of Mercuro, which was in 1985. While I originally had a hunch while writing the essay, I’m fairly certain the airline accident he’s referring to was the Japan Air Lines Flight 123 crash on the 12th of August, 1985. The time frame matches Ameya’s descriptions, and to this day it’s still recalled as being one of the deadliest airline accidents in history. In the same volume of Focus that this image came from, an article is featured a few pages earlier that concerns the accident. A description of Litchi's opening can be read in this excerpt from a lengthy Twitter thread by user Shoru Toji where she gives an in-depth description of the play's 1986 rerun and the subculture around it: I saw Litchi Hikari Club on March 27th, 1986, the first day of its rerun, at a live house called Super Loft KINDO. It was a renovated iron factory in the Tokyo Metropolitan area. The place was previously destroyed by Hanatarash with a live set where he went through the space with a bulldozer. If I recall correctly, the hall was illuminated by fluorescent lights from a high ceiling with exposed steel frames. The walls were painted black. The curtain separating the audience seating from the stage was a set of white sheets, like the kind you’d find in a hospital. There was no announcement when the play was ready to begin. Instead, the fluorescent lights suddenly went out, and a set of speakers in the ceiling emitted hissing noises. The stage was dimmed to the opening queue of Culturcide from the Seppuku Dekompositiones EP, and I thought to myself “This is SPK!”. And with the sounds of synchronized stomping and a ringing flute, the curtains were drawn back to show the scene of a line of students marching through the darkness in single file with lights hoisted over their shoulders. The way the lights aligned in their rows reminded me of spotlights. They marched all about the stage, going right, left, forward and to the back, all at once in an orderly manner. They were taking orders from a man standing on a podium. That man was Tsunekawa in the role of Zera. He stood with an overhead spot bathing him in red light. He pointed in many directions, with the students loyally following each command he made. Eventually, the left side of the stage began to loudly rattle with the starting of a U-shaped quarry conveyor belt. Another student is carted into the stage from the belt, screaming “Please, don’t do it! Please, forgive me!” as he’s suspended upside down from the belt. The light club place their lights in the back of the stage and hang their first victim at the front with a chain.

Sources: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

[peashooter85]

Ornate katana, Japan, Muromachi Period (1392-1573)

from Czerny's International Auction House

[artemlegere-art]

A Japanese Princess Going to Church

Artist: Gyula Tornai (Hungarian, 1861-1928)

Date: 1906

Gyula Tornai was a Hungarian painter, now featured in the Hungarian National Gallery. He was a noted painter in the Orientalist genre.

Tornai was born in Görgö, Hungary (today Spišský Hrhov, Slovakia), in 1861. He received his art education at academies in Vienna, Munich and at Benczúr's Studios in Budapest where he studied under Hans Makart and Gyula Benczúr. His initial paintings were pictures of popular everyday themes such as the Good Fat, Camelian Lady. His style was heavily influenced by Makart (Makartstil or "Makart’s style" in German).

Following his travels to Spain, Algeria and Morocco, he turned to more exotic themes and painted works depicting street life, merchants, musicians and harems. He spent 10 years in Morocco and lived in Tangiers for a year between 1890 and 1891. In 1900, he exhibited pictures in the Exposition Universelle in Paris to great acclaim, winning the bronze medal. In 1904, he sold many of his works to raise money for further travel.

In the Summer of 1905, he travelled to Far-East where he continued his interest in Orientalist themes. During this period he travelled through India and Japan. Shortly after his arrival in Japan, he painted a portrait of the former Prime-Minister, Count Okuma, who became an influential patron. This patronage gave him unprecedented access to many facets of Japanese life and customs that had previously been hidden from Europeans. This allowed him to explore Buddhism and Shintoism in depth. Tornai remained in Japan for 16 months during which time he painted such works as A Japanese Princess Going to Church, Geisha, The Geisha House and the Samurai Warrior amongst other paintings.

In 1907 he was exhibited in Paris and London; in 1909 at Budapest in the Műcsarnok; in 1917 at the National Salon. In 1929, the auction hall organized an exhibition of legacies from his works.

His Oriental works gained him international recognition during his own lifetime. A contemporary source commented that his works from this period, ”the like of which for glory of colour and intense appreciation of the picturesqueness of the east had not been seen before.” His paintings are also noted for their irony, humour and wit. For instance, his painting The Connoisseurs features a group of locals, possibly Berbers, gathered in the artist's studio critically examining a painting of Oriental men. These men were probably the subject of the painting. He also gave viewers glimpses of another world with his depictions of Oriental customs and practices. Several of Tornai's paintings are held in the Hungarian National Gallery.

[rxvera]

i hear you have aizawa headcanons? 👀

OMG I thought you would never ask!! 🥰

First of all, and most obviously, he's an AMAZING dad. Before the Kira case, he showed up for everything, and took as much paternity leave as he could. During the case, he obviously struggles with work-life balance, but he knows his kids come first. I think before the time skip, he had a really hard time missing out. He hated how much he was gone, but he also struggles with the guilt of feeling like he abandoned Ukita, but as he heals his grief, he accepts that he can be there. And soon, he's there at almost every game, performance, concert, play, you name it. If he's not, Eriko is recording it for him. He's also the kind of dad to pack his kids' favorite lunches when he gets the chance. It doesn't matter how unhealthy they are, Aizawa just wants to see them happy. Eriko is a little annoyed when Yumi comes home with Cheeto fingers and a stomach ache though lol.

Speaking of Eriko, I know this is super niche, but I head canon her as Jewish. I know that's super rare in Japan, but as a part-Asian Jew, I love the mix lol. I imagine her making matzo ball ramen and lox sushi! I think Aizawa, while goyische, is super supportive. He's great on Shabbat. On Saturday, he makes breakfast before the kids and Eriko wake up so they can have something warm without needing to use appliances. Although, even after being married for ten years, he still forgets if shrimp is kosher, but he remembers when Eriko gets mad at him for putting his leftover tempura in the fridge ("I accepted a trief husband, but I will not accept a trief house!!!").

Oh and I totally imagine Matsuda making quite a few blunders about this hfkjdfhjdjk. He means well, but it comes out wrong sometimes. Like the first time he learns she's Jewish, he immediately says "Oh so that's why you guys never hosted the Christmas party" and Soichiro is quick to be like "MATSUDA." He definitely accidentally gifts Eriko a pentagram... Twice. He really did his research the second time, but they look so similar!!! He does finally get her a Magen David the third time though lol.

I also think Aizawa is a car guy, like the kind of car guy who can see a single frame of a car go past in a movie and identify the make, model, and, year. He's always browsing those vintage car auction sites and he regularly shows Eriko the old car he desperately needs, and she has to be like "your money needs to go feeding our children and not a 50 year old car" and he's like a little kid when he says "but I waaaaaaaant it," and I definitely think he takes Yumi to cars and coffee with him. He always gets her a pastry and hot chocolate. She always wants to try his coffee and every time she freaks out at how bitter it is, but he has such an emotional moment when he takes her as a teenager and she orders her own coffee, and he's like "my little girl is growing up 🥺."

And, going back in time a little bit, when Eriko is pregnant with Yumi, I don't imagine Aizawa being super open about it since he prefers to keep his work and private life more separate. So, it's not until his wife is like 8 and a half months pregnant that he goes to Soichiro to ask for paternity leave, and Soichiro is like "YOU'RE HAVING A BABY???? YOU'RE MARRIED???" and he gets absolutely peppered with questions and excitement that he has to awkwardly accept from the whole office before he gets his paternity leave approved lol.

That's just a few of my ideas! Let me know if you'd like to hear some more! I'm always up to chat about my Death Note guys!

[my-plastic-life]

I did a thing... actually, I did several things. :D My ani-ME (anime doll version) needed manga in her house, so of course I had to make mini Inuyasha manga! I've done this before, but this time it's different... I didn't do miniature versions of the Viz BIG volumes. Nope, I did all 56 original Japanese volumes. Because ani-ME is in Japan, so she must have the original volumes!!! :D What a task this was - because the volumes are so old, it's hard to find high resolution pictures of them online. And even if you do, many times it's just the front, not the back and definitely not the spine. I found some, but then the front and back cover colors were completely different, some had text and graphics cut off from what was most likely a scanned image, the colors were inconsistent between various websites, some colors were clashing badly due to low quality resolution, etc.

So I literally made a template in Photoshop of the real size of the original manga (obtained via Amazon) and rebuilt EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. from scratch. I was able to find a site with all the original cover photos, and then I found the most high resolution cover I could find to duplicate the pattern that's on all books (colors vary), recreated the logo for each book (the character symbols and the gradients are all different for each volume), redrew the SS Comics logo that's on all books, and I even replicated each individual barcode. Because I'm nothing if not a consistent perfectionist. :D

For the backs, I used the images I found and just copied and pasted the characters and Japanese text, and for the teeny tiny characters I used the brush tool to trace over them. Even though I knew you probably wouldn't be able to see them in such a small scale, no way was I leaving them out! Consistency, darn it! :D

For the spines, I found complete sets on eBay and used a photo of the spines from those auctions as a template. I redid everything on the spine except the character head at the top of each, which is copied and pasted from the eBay files. They're definitely pretty low resolution, but hopefully it's not noticeable at such a small scale.

And the volume numbers? Try as I might, I could NOT find a font that matched them. So I got the most high resolution volumes I could find and made number templates... so each time I needed one of the volume numbers, I'd just use a color overlay on it and plop it where it needed to go on the front and spine.

Then the fun part - resizing them all to 1/6 scale. They're a little over an inch tall right now. And because they're not very thick in the spine, wrapping the covers around foam board to mimic pages wasn't working. So I had to make pages... for 56 volumes LOL. I just took my cover template, sized it down, and made it a blank white with a black stroke so I could see where to cut. I could fit 11 mini pages in one row across a regular sized sheet of printer paper (I used cardstock for extra thickness and stability), and I could fit like six rows on a sheet. I was able to fit 11 pages in one volume to allow the spine room, so 56 volumes x 11 mini pages each = 616 total pages I wound up cutting, then stacking and gluing together. But, of course, that wasn't a perfect fit, as the pages, despite being sanded down to be completely straight and smooth, poked out of the covers. So I had to wrap the covers around the pages, mark where they hit, and use an X-acto knife to trim the pages down before gluing them inside the covers.

But finally, I was done! It was time-consuming, but I love how these little books turned out. They don't open, but that's totally okay. That would be way too much work, and every time I make a book that opens, it never closes again. I did, however, manage to find some pages from the original first volume (in Japanese), so I printed a second volume 1 cover and glued those pages inside. So now ani-ME has an open book she can read too!

So there you have it! My mini, 1/6 scale Japanese volumes of Inuyasha - all 56 of them! I made that bookshelf just for them, but I intentionally left more room in case I want to add more manga later. But of course we had to have Inuyasha manga on the shelf - it's the most important! :D And the poster on the wall is totally a tag from one of my shirts LOL.

Showing off her new bookshelf stocked full of all 56 volumes of the Inuyasha manga:

Relaxing in bed, reading from the beginning:

Why yes, she is reading the Inuyasha manga on an Inuyasha pillow :D

All 56 volumes on the bookshelf:

What do you do with an Inuyasha shirt tag? Make an instant doll poster, of course!

Front covers:

Back covers:

Volume 1 pages (glued in order, right to left):

Size reference (shown with American penny):

[techmomma]

In germany, in the early part of the 20th century, when Jewish families were forces from their homes to either escape abroad or die in concentration camps, they left behind countless valuables. Heirlooms, momentos, mundane objects they bought and treasured, all of which they were forced to leave behind.

Those things were then sold in auction to many, many germans, and now today there are untold numbers of german households that still have the stolen heirlooms of jewish families, some of which can't be repatriated because the entire family, for generations, was killed. Some of which will never be repatriated to living families because all evidence of their theft at auction was destroyed and anyone who could recognize it lives overseas with no idea the heirloom still exists.

Sounds awful, right? Heinous. Hideous. How could any german family with an iota of integrity keep such a blood-stained trophy of genocide?

Guess what.

The same thing happened in America.

We did it to Japanese Americans.

When Japanese Americans were forced into interment camps, they were allowed a single suitcase per person--sometimes per family--to take with them. While the government told them that they would be allowed to return to their homes, this was a "someday" promise, and Japanese Americans knew it was abundantly clear that they were to give up their belongings forever. Belongings they have sometimes taken with them from ancestral homes in Japan, passed down through generations, belongings they'd bought and worked for, heirlooms of spiritual and social pricelessness.

They had to give up houses they would not be able to pay mortgage for, while in the camps. They had to give up apartments they could not pay rent for, while in the camps.

And what did communities do with millions of houses full of beloved family belongings?

You guessed it. Americans put those up for auction. In millions of white american homes are "ancient japanese artifacts" that were stolen from japanese american homes at auction. Whose records have long been lost and those heirlooms will never see their families again, that sit on a mantle with no record that it was originally bought at auction.

There are people who are so, so into Japan, here in America. You know them. Maybe they're reeeeally into anime, maybe they're not. They reeeeally want a katana, they really want "authentic" japanese items to decorate their home with because they really appreciate the culture. And they may have a genuine love and appreciation for it! Maybe you are one of those people. You are trying so so hard to appreciate, not appropriate, the culture.

You go to a shop and see authentic japanese items that are probably a century old. You have a good eye, you can tell these are probably genuine.

There's no ledger for the item. No history of sale. But the shop owner knows it came from Japan because it came from the shop owner's grandfather who bought it at a japanese auction, he says. The owner is noticeably white.

You buy it because you love it and know the general function of the item. And you have now unwittingly bought the family belonging of a displaced Japanese family who will never see it again. Because sure, the grandfather bought it at a japanese auction. A japanese american auction. Something the grandfather knew but the grandchild only heard "japanese auction" and innocently assumed their grandfather meant "an auction in japan."

That is the most benign version of the story. There are more cruel sellers who know well their item came from a japanese american auction and they don't care. As far as they're concerned, they "legally" acquired it, so who cares.

And sometimes there are no records at all because sometimes the buyer came to the auction with a wad of cash, handed it to the auctioneer, and that was that. No documentation made or kept. A handful of cash for an item that a family might have given their souls to get back. Heirlooms passed down for hundreds of years. Knick-knacks made from parent to child six months before they had to give up everything.

And this is so, so incredibly common for japanese items ESPECIALLY here on the west coast. ESPECIALLY in places close to Seattle, Tacoma, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles.

That is the one of the lesser, subtler evils of racism: they can make you complicit decades after the fact, like ripples that only reach the shore long after the rock is dropped.

[nijigasakilove]

Could’ve sworn we had a break this week like pretty much every other show in Japan for the holiday but fuck it, I’ll take it. Limited screenshots because JP twitter hasn’t seen the ep yet so I couldn’t grab many.

Yea you can tell this was definitely supposed to come after the new year since half the episode is a recap lol.

Tatiana’s backstory really broke my heart. Losing your parents in such a tragic way and then being auctioned off like a damn household appliance is awful. I mean imagine buying a person purely to keep negative vibes away from the house.. everyone attending that auction got what they deserved.

Speaking of which, the direction during the scene where blind dude is clearing out the auction house was awesome. The constant switching between Tatiana slurping her feeding tube and the environment being lit up showed how desensitised and ready to die she was. David Prod always do great with those types of scenes. There’s also a great scene earlier in the ep after Fuuko befriends Tatiana.

Couple weeks ago I wasn’t sure which I’d rather go with the union or being auctioned off, and after that flashback, I’ll take my chances with the union.

Untouchable getting unleashed was so awesome. The “recoil” from her ability literally erasing people’s arms was crazy. I love how OP all the abilities in this series are. Makes everyone an important part of the story and every fight interesting

Looking forward to the fight continuing next week. This show has been so under appreciated.

[ohmaosama]

Do you have any "What If" mahoyome moment??

What I write is more from s1 soo-

Like What If : when things go bad

• Chise following Aerial to the fairy world the end literally

• Elias can't stop Chise from breaking the universal rules, what consequences she gonna have to take? *From Ruth arc

• Chise never fight back and let herself drown by shannon, Elias just gonna rampage isn't it

• Silky never met Spriggan, no one cook in the house they fucked up real bad lmao

• Elias never gave Simon the cough drink, I mean it's gotta be not that drink alone but it's the beginning where simon think elias is not a bad person smthng along that

• Chise end up joining the witch

• Stella forget his brother entirely cuz Elias just dgaf

• Joseph got Chise dragon arm

• Chise never got into college just pure cottage life mode

What if : things got different alternatives - or just AU

• Elias never intended Chise to be his bride or the conversation about being his bride never happened, but wait... The whole bride thingy never made Elias more considerate of chise tho... So maybe things would still be the same? Lol but the title would just be "The Ancient Magus".

• Angelica didn’t give Chise the crystal and until the end she never realized that Chise is a Sleigh Beggy, tbh I love the slay vega more cuz slayyyyy I'm sorry

• Joseph got Chise first and use her for his magic battery to do alchemist thingy (yknow what I'm so late for noticing that Joseph is an alchemist not a magus... Idk why I just think he's old ancient so he's gotta be magus right but alas I'm dumb)

• Alcyone escaped from the evil granma and then she raised Philomela on her own happy ending yay

• Yknow what lets go backk to the very beginning. What if Chise got recruited in Japan not from the black shaddy auction in the London. Like we know magus are hard to find now almost extinct at this point, but we just met another magus recently so Japan gotta have at least one or two magus right... Or maybe alchemist, she got magic potential too tho. Like Seth go to Chise first, it's not like she's hard to find or Seth just randomly find this slay vega girly on the shibuya's crossing right? Someone gotta be spying on her. LIKE DUDE SHE'S ABOUT TO JUMP AND SETH MAGICALLY THERE TO STOP HER bro is stalking that big cash money.

[peashooter-in-exile]

Knife with carved bone hilt and scabbard, Japan, late 19th century

from Czerny's International Auction House

[memories-of-ancients]

A wakizashi signed Munehisa, Japan, Muromachi period, 1392-1573

from Czerny's International Auction House

[alonelystargazer]

WIP Wednesday

I haven't done one of these in a while but I'm working on a few projects behind the scenes (albeit very slowly), so I want to share a little bit of what I have so far.

for JJK:

Chapter 2 of my ItaFushi fic: give you more (than words can say)

He follows Nobara around, browsing the various video and crane games set up in the five-story building, going up the escalator to the second floor where they find rows and rows of gachapon machines set up. Since he’s here, he may as well indulge and try his luck. “Look, there it is! Okay, I have ¥2850 left, so I’m gonna keep spending it until I get that damn figure. You,” Nobara points to Megumi, “are you gonna stand there again like an idiot like you did earlier?” Megumi decides to keep the peace and ignore being called an ‘idiot’ again. “I’ve got enough cash to buy out this whole machine, but I don’t really care what I get.” “Did you guys forget I’m here, too?” Yuuji whines with a frown like a sad wet kitten. “You didn’t even wanna come here in the first place. Just pick a machine or stand there quietly and let us play,” Nobara barks back. “You’re usually not this mean, but you’re extra cranky today, Kugisaki,” Yuuji sighs, half of his body’s strength seemingly disappearing as he slumps against a nearby wall.

I also have another idea for an itfs fic set in a no powers AU but I'll share more about it when I start writing the story. For now, I'm still in the outlining process because I plan for it to be another multi-chapter story. Basically, it's set around Christmas time, and Yuujij gets drunk and sad and lonely at a party and decides to write a post card to the address where he used to live, and surprise, a guy named Megumi now lives there and receives the card. Can you imagine what will happen next?

I thought of restructuring my post-canon itfs fic called Foreign Language into something else, but that depends on these final 3 chapters of JJK, so we'll see how it goes, but for now, I'm leaving it alone.

~

for Kagurabachi:

pre-Rakuzaichi Hakuri character study/HakuHiro fic called Safety Net

Tomorrow is a day of great importance for Chihiro. With Shiba-san’s help, he will be able to infiltrate that loathsome auction house where Hakuri’s father is keeping the merchandise and retrieve his precious sword. For years, rumors of the existence of a seventh enchanted blade drifted through the underground world without a shred of proof. That one elusive blade is spoken of by the patrons of the black market like a thing of legend, a literal object of desire, crafted by the fallen hero of Japan, Rokuhira Kunishige. And yet. It is no mystery. Enten is alive because Chihiro breathes his soul into it, senses it from a distance like a lost limb, cherishes it like a parent to a child. Chihiro keeps his father’s legacy close to his heart and away from the type of people who are undeserving of wielding its immense power, away from those who would hold no accountability for their actions if it were to fall in their hands. Therefore, it is the property of Rokuhira. His greatest treasure. But… it is lost, somewhere beyond his reach. All because Chihiro gave it away in exchange for Hakuri’s release.

I also started outlining my HakuHiro Pacific Rim AU fic but that one is going to take me months to write, so I probably won't share anything from it for a while.