#ask meli

[melek90nsfw]

I like it when you draw Pierrot! Continue ✨

Thank you , I will try :) ❤️🎪

[ego-meliorem-esse]

ur welcome!! u pulled thru and did it all :)

i was wondering, could you elaborate on your thoughts of the na bros' mixed heritage? im simply curious, is all.

ahhh thank you for asking this

Trying to unpack my thoughts is like trying to find a missing earring in a crowded pool (I've done that this week. It was hell. I won.)

so let's unpack it:

ALFRED F. JONES:

mixed heritage: native american + british settler + everything else

Alfred is the product of violence, rebellion, and relentless expansion. He was "raised" (if you can call it that) by England but he was born of a land already lived in, already named, already known by its original nations. I like to think of him as someone who carries a complicated physical memory: Algonquin and Iroquois bones in his early body, rhythms from the Mississippi in his bloodstream, but shaped, often forcibly, by English law, Protestant rigidity, and Western expansionism. He's got a British accent buried somewhere deep in his psyche that he suppresses. You can quote me on that! He wears cowboy boots over land that was never really his. The tragedy of Alfred is that he was born of the old world and the new, and denied both for the sake of power (I have many thoughts and none of them are coherent)

There's a reason why he’s so loud, so desperate to define himself. Because he knows what he’s taken. And he knows that parts of him he’ll never get back.

MATTHEW WILLIAMS:

mixed heritage: first nations + french settler + british inheritance

Matthew is a quieter, more painful portrait of colonization. If Alfred is rebellion, Matthew is assimilation. He's still braided with First Nations threads... Depending on where you imagine he manifested. He was born into a land of deep winter and deeper memory, where knowledge is passed in snow and silence (dramatic i know) But France raised him with absence and Catholicism, called him "mon petit garcon," and gave him language but not sovereignty. Then England came and claimed him in the name of order. Matthew has always been seen as belonging to someone else. Rarely as his own.

He's the perfect nation to be forgotten because he was taught to erase himself to make others comfortable. But the land remembers. And so does he.

His mixed heritage manifests not just in looks or accent, but in contradiction: he apologizes in English but dreams in French.

His silence is new world. His bones ache with treaties no one honored.

----

They are patchwork identities, made of stolen land, broken treaties, revolution, survival...... They're nations that were born too fast and made to grow up too soon, and they carry that weight differently. Alfred carries it with denial and distraction. Matthew carries it with grief and grace.

But they both carry it. And in my view? That's what makes them so rich, and so tragic, as characters.

But then again I'm a sucker for the tragic kind. The ones who don't know if they're inheritance or invasion, only that they feel the ghosts of both.

[kaizokuwritings]

Huhuhuhu, I would ship you with Mihawk <3 Someone who can and will protect you but also will support you in your ambitions - even though he grumps

wow! it makes me so happy to be ship with him ꈍᴗꈍ. Mihawk is a good husband material and a faithful person. And he's handsome too. (͡ ° ͜ʖ ͡ °)

with whom do you ship me? 🌸

[ego-meliorem-esse]

I love your portrayal of François and Matthieu.

I think François is a little bipolar himself, meaning that he goes through ups and downs, highs and lows, moments of deeply passionate interest and complete apathy and of course that applies to his "charges" and this case would be Matthieu. It also fits the country history and it makes him quite unreliable in all things.

1732. Early winter. Versailles.

Versailles is dim with winter light, and France is dressed like a painting: powdered, perfumed, entirely unbothered with affairs that held his attention a week prior.

There are ministers in the room. Men with maps and numbers and increasingly sharp questions. The colony is expensive, they say. New France, they call it, as if naming the child will make it easier to love. Or to abandon.

Francois is reclining on a velvet chaise, one leg elegantly folded over the other. He is wearing a coat the color of bleeding grapes and has not listened to half the discussion. His hands are too steady for policy.

They ask about Mathieu.

He doesn’t flinch.

"The boy is quiet," he says, lazily. "He does not require constant performance."

A minister clears his throat. "Has he written?"

Francois shrugs, inspecting the ring on his pinky.

"I assume so. Someone reads my letters. I haven’t had the time." "But he has books. And charcoal. And a governess I had imported from Rouen. Very severe. Excellent posture. The child will survive."

There is a pause.

"I sent him hats," Francois adds. "Beautiful ones."

His smile is the kind that looks like sincerity until you study it too long. He does not mean to be cruel, he simply isn’t interested in being anything else.

Mathieu, after all, is far away. And quiet. And small. Not loud like his brother, not dangerous like England, not obsessive like Spain. Just soft. Just there. A watercolor in the snow. Too gentle to compete with the oil paintings Francois surrounds himself with.

"What would you like me to do?" he asks, finally, bored. "Hover?"

He laughs. The ministers do not. He adjusts his sleeve. He does not ask about the colony again.

--

NO no no i agree. He is extravagant with affection and bankrupt in follow-through. He loves as he exists: in passing. And Mathieu, poor babe, was never loud enough to survive the kind of love Francois gives. Love that arrives in silk and disappears in war :,(

Francois doesn’t mean to forget him. He just forgets to remember.

He was never made to be anyone’s father. Just their first heartbreak.

[ego-meliorem-esse]

i have returned / but not as i left

i have clawed my way out of a hundred deadlines and two degrees and the whimpering end of my youth. the last time i posted here i was still a student. still blurry.

and now finally, FINALLY, i’ve done it.

i finished my degree.

i’m an engineer now.

(say it again, slowly. like it’s holy. because for me it fuckin is.)

but holy hell i missed this place.

this strange, cringe little room full of nations and love and grief wearing period pieces. this archive of characters i love too much to name. the posts i used to write.

and, god, the drawing.

i missed drawing these fuckers. I miss drawing these fuckers for all those who stuble upon my rusty little wooden chest of secrets (my blog).

and i want to be here again.

not perfect. not consistent. but present. Older. Softer. Maybe sharper in places. God forbid.

and if you’ll still have me, i’d like to open the door again.

but god, i missed this place.

i’m back.

i can’t promise consistency. i can’t promise decent art. but i can promise that i’m here with different hands that still remember how to hold a pencil.

thank you if you’re still here.

thank you even if you’re not.

this is the return. the long, slow inhale. the soft sigh of a blog waking up.

--

I'm being dramatic. I just miss the comunity and love/hate anon messages. But yeah im an adult now. Software Engeneer. Build digital stuff. Hexidecimals and shit. Maybe I should start thinking abt my pension hghhhhhhhh

[ego-meliorem-esse]

I love your art and style, its amazing! Sorry for bothering, but I was wondering how India or Spain would look in your style! Thank you :3

So many thoughts on this mf, yet so little time...

As for India, I got a WIP I am fairly happy with, but thought I'd share Antonio before cus it would just take too long to draw both and share lol

I think i've shared some hcs abt Spain but i can't really remember what I said.

Anyway I prefer the cunning and manipulative Antonio without the happy go lucky attitude. Maybe as a facade but even then I got some issues with that.

[ego-meliorem-esse]

Omg pls give some soft na bros playing as kids or something and Arthur being a good dad for once

The boys know each other for a full 72 hours and already they are inseparable.

Matt may be a constant reminder of François to Arthur but even he has to admit that having Matthew around is the best decision he's made in the past 130 years. Just having someone else be on the receiving end of Alfreds shenanigans is giving saving Arthur from endless migraines and worries. Alfred is a wonderful and exceptionally intelligent boy, but having to answer unending questions about anything and everything is a job he doesn't mind sharing with the lads northern brother.

So off they go to the garden to read/draw with the setting sun watching over them <3

[ego-meliorem-esse]

Mathew and Alfred connected freckles to make constellations as kids(either Alfred’s or Arthur’s) they’d use ink, mud, heck maybe blood

Anon your words have charmed me