#zzs in qi ye

[mtkay13]

Sketch dump thread for the end of the year! Loooootsssss of them LOL

LOL THAT WAS A BUNCH hope you enjoyed

[evilfarmin]

No past lives. Soul is brand new to this earth!

VVV you can open that if you want but it's not required reading just silly analysis VVV

ranked in order of karma points: (Karma points do not take into account this lifetime) most:

Wkx: medium positive karma points (he's very smug about this. look, he was not lying he is a philanthropist axu do you see)(karma points have a 5x multiplier before age 18)

Jby: just about 0 (He would have more karma points because animal lifetimes are supposed to gain you karma points. it is very hard to lose karma points as an animal. unfortunately, jby has some sort of disease that causes him to hemorrhage karma points when he is alive. (stubbornness))

ZZS: deep negative karma points. (it is a miracle that he got human reincarnation this time. his lifetimes patterns are actually human (TANKING points) - animals (clawing his way back up) - human again (karma points crash again) etc. the things that tank zzs's karma points are actually positive karma traits in animals like cat, cougar, tiger, snake,)

wuxi: null karma points. (one does not accrue karma points when they are not on this earth)

[chemical-abscess]

I was driven by lust

[toaster-fire-art]

finals are eating me alive but beiyuan

[ahxiang]

Dawn of Spring Gift Exchange for @fractured-ice​

⤷ TIAN CHUANG LEADER ZHOU ZI SHU (in/sp)

[orchisailsa]

[geneticcatalyst]

okay. just trolley problem things:

at this point in the novel the tension and the emotional weight is wound up really high and things are really just primed for the impending mess to say important things about the characters in new and interesting ways. i think the main piece is the contrast between zzs' careless attitude in the carriage post Jiang assassination sort of smugly dismissing jby's veiled reservations and the version of him in jby's courtyard in the middle of the night, disheveled and shell shocked because he really hadnt thought this would happen. he was fully confident he could keep ljx in the dark forever, and even then maybe didn't expect ljx to condemn him so thoroughly.

i try really hard when considering jby and zzs to not extrapolate too far beyond the bounds of the characters as presented in the (somewhat notoriously biased) narration. both are presented as and also shown at times to be cold, ruthless, unfeeling etc. that's a starting point. i do think we can look at the whole picture and see the other more human aspects of these characters too, both explicitly stated and not, but if you rush into those hidden emotional depths and forget the rest you get word of honor really woobie really fast and that's SUCH A SHAME to lose sight of these characters who are so fascinating BECAUSE of their worst traits and actions. so I always try to start by explaining their behavior the way they would explain it- in terms of political gain, calculation, masks, power.

the really fun part comes when none of those things are enough to explain anymore, at least not in entirety, and you get to peek at the really raw soft inner shells of the remorseless war criminals <3 i'm getting into the weeds here let's go back to the courtyard.

zzs is in jby's courtyard in the middle of the night and he's visibly a wreck. this is wild because up until this point zzs is rarely visibly Anything. he's in the background, he's going unnoticed, he's this perfectly cool and collected tool of the empire.

but something unthinkable just happened, which was a risk that he was taking blew up in his face. and the first thing he does, maybe the only thing he can do, after trying to contain the problem (ljx), is go to jby.

so, the narrative explanation. jby is an ally but he's also very smart and seemingly good at dealing with people, very politically savvy. zzs has a potential threat to their shared mission which is hly's ascension, if ljx tells everyone how much blood is on the party's hands that's not going to happen. so logically zzs specifically needs his partner in crimes' help to mitigate that threat to their goal. additionally jby knows the situation, he knows ljx well and he also understands the relationship between zzs and ljx. all logical and true and as such it only makes sense that the first thing jby does is say okay hold on let me handle this.

aaa. okay. yeah no despite the fact that it's the middle of the night and theoretically ljx is imprisoned and could probably be kept at least until the morning. he just tells zzs to bring him to ljx. yes this is like mission critical politics, for sure, but i think also he's very driven to resolve things as soon as possible for emotional reasons.

what emotional reasons? well. there's the vividly fresh parallel to ji xiang, whose recent corpse is also in the courtyard. just for extra devastation zzs pulls back the sheet and says "you brought him along to go to the guangs, and you didn't keep him?" and jby says. "i wanted to keep him. but i couldn't." ji xiang was a good servant to jby for a decade, but when he tried to betray jby (and zzs) to su qingluan to save his girlfriend, he got himself killed. ji xiang is nowhere on the level of ljx who is both shidi and the only scrap of normalcy/link to zzs's past, but they're both young innocents who are pulled into the deadly political morass that jby and zzs are wading in by proximity (and crucially by exposing its corruption). jby is privately pretty depressed about the incident and explicitly states to wu xi (as explicit as he gets, anyway) that he hates seeing this happen, but can't do anything to stop it. i think, even so, he wants to do everything possible to try to keep ljx from the same fate.

there's also the question of favors and debts. after all this is over, zzs offers to take jby for a drink in exchange (understatement). jby replies that he owed zzs. now in the current timeline zzs has uncovered jby's estate purchasing property outside the capitol and it's not quite clear but i think zzs correctly surmises that this is some sort of backup plan or escape framework. in another scene that makes me !?!?!!? about them zzs confronts jby about this and jby can do nothing but ask zzs to cut him some slack. and. zzs. does. just shrugs and torches the evidence right there in the candle flame. jby certainly owes him for that. i think that's something of a smaller parallel to first life zzs warning jby about the plot against him. again, scene isn't perfectly clear, but i think zzs meant that conversation as a warning- cover your tracks better, people are watching. that's why he so easily acquiesces to letting jby off the hook. point made, he destroys the evidence to protect his friend, or even to gain a favor in the future. what im saying is that zzs has had jby's back before, in multiple lives, and jby doesn't take that lightly.

(on reread it's also pretty clear also that jby thinks the incident is his fault, having kept ljx at his estate overnight but no later- ljx still managed to slip out early enough to discover the bodies. so jby definitely views this as trying to fix his own mistake here, although zzs never seems to hold it against him. possibly this is what he means when he says he owed zzs, but i think there's a lot more there as well.)

and finally i have to get into a little more esoteric take but it's actually the way the scene really hit me the first time i read it. what came across from the way jby handles the situation was defensiveness. he correctly reads the situation as a threat and he storms into ljx's holding room and scolds him (violently! no relying on charm here) for his childish ideas of righteousness. ljx said that zzs should pay with his life for his crimes and jby says no, you don't understand the context. jby is defending zzs's actions to ljx and trying to get ljx to see zzs in a more understanding if not forgiving light. jby is doing this because 1. it's key to keeping ljx from exposing them and destabilizing the precarious political situation 2. zzs is his friend and he doesn't want to see him harmed 3. zzs and jby are the same. they are wrapped up together in this. they are in this so much deeper than anyone else and are bound together by it. when ji xiang spoke up to reveal their plot to su qingluan, which ljx overheard, he mentions them both in the same breath. jby defending why zzs has done the things he's done is jby defending his own actions. it's personal. he's defensive of zzs but he's really defending the both of them. because they are the same.

[intertexts-moving]

theyre cute

[snowyfuxue]

(inspired by @mtkay13 fanart)

[deepestbluesky]

I would like to know what zzs is up to in ch21 of qi ye!

well i can tell you what he's up to! what i cannot do is show you any writing bc this is a doc that is 'quote from relevant canon event' followed by 'copied over chat messages with minna' hahaha

what zzs is up to in ch21 of qi ye is being the only person to look at jby when hly tells them all that he's getting married. and what EYE am up to is trying to figure out how much he's thinking to himself 'ugh, is this going to make things messy. how annoying.' and how much that thought is a cover for worrying about jby's feelings.

[iamnotmereally]

Will continue the tyk reread asap🚶

[mtkay13]

A toast to freedom. more info below!

I'm back......... -sigh- I'm so behind on everything I want to post and ofc i just gotta.... post my latest pieces instead of catching up. Oh well. So the illustrations mostly speak for themselves but I know I can find stuff to say about them, so-- First of all, the right side was drawn first, and it was not supposed to be about the nails nor was it supposed to have a companion piece in the first place. I'll be real: I just wanted to draw ZZS's big chest and make it classical portrait style. But I also ended up sort of horny-bonking myself into adding some substance and storytelling to it and put a nail right there (how convenient), haha. It did give me the idea of making a mirrored image, a year and a half later, of ZZS and six nails in, right before he's about to leave--particularly because it illustrates something I've always been QUITE peculiar about when it comes to designing ZZS, and it's the state of his body. At the start, it struck me how in the book, he's described as being skeletal--and how much priest insists on that. I pretty much immediately started trying to draw TYK ZZS as very skinny, because I felt it would make the nails much more dreadful (on top of being faithful to canon which I'm also a bit prickly about). Somehow, while ZZS being well built otherwise is both mentioned in canon a couple of times and influenced by how he looks in SHL, I later found that pushing it a bit further would increase the contrast with how he looks like in TYK and make the nails' impact on his body and health even more striking. I guess that from there, over the past year, I made him bigger and bigger....... I assume because I found it was interesting? (I mean, I still do, but--) Mainly because I love that such a big dude can nonetheless make himself completely unnoticeable, and this image of a tiny grandma turning around a corner and unfolding herself into a big buff guy.... ALSO HLY's looming shadow being this big threatening guy....... IDK ITS MY JAM (not to mention, again, that it's such a strong contrast with TYK ZZS!) A little note--I think I've mentioned so before, but working in animation, I've gotten the habit of trying to "push things" or exaggerate them to make them a bit bolder and striking/powerful. I definitely feel like it has been an impulse on both ends; in the way I draw the skinnier, skeletal ZZS as well as in the way I draw the healthy, top of his game ZZS. Exaggerating things slightly and pushing them out of the molds is an interesting exercise overall, especially with character design (even if at some point we end up toning those exaggeration down, we can at least keep the more interesting elements developed through exaggeration.) So yeah. I thought the two would work well together, and I tried telling things through their expressions, posture, etc.

[evilfarmin]

Han Ying has blanket permission to snoop because he is ZZS's dumb little woof woof. Window of Heaven is making great advancements in the field by employing the world's first assassin without a brain.

[chemical-abscess]

If there’s at least one person who’s familiar with both fandoms then I can die in peace

[fredoesque]

wait way of topic for this blog but there’s so much ljx/zzs fic now?? i can still remember the days when it was. literally only me

[ahxiang]

still obsessed with the fact that zzs warned jby before killing him and jby was like "oh my god, he cares so deeply for me, that's my bestest friend in the whole world in any lifetime"