may I request asahi butainisake w/ palette #9 for the ask game… if you'd like…..!
color palette ask game !
[ID: A digital drawing of Oniwa Asahi from Butai ni Sake. He's looking up at the viewer, holding a hand up to shield his face from the sun. He's smiling warmly, with his hair blowing slightly in the wind. It's rendered with loose, sketchy lines and colors with a thick textured brush, using a limited color palette of dark green, green, olive, yellow, and dark yellow, labelled "9." to the side. The artist's signature "sunnfish" is written near his shoulder. /End ID]
MY DARLING BOOOYYYYY..... my darling asahi ooouuuhhh... i cant dwell on him for too long or else i start crying. thank you for sending him to me
hi :~) would like to request one director's commentary on see the light, if you have anything to say... if not then anything of your choosing
ask me for “director’s commentary” on a particular story, section of a story, or set of lines. or send in a ⭐ and I’ll pick a section!
hiiii :) for the uninitiated, see the light is my shirashiro college roommates fic. it’s got Gender in there. so “if you have anything to say” I’m always saying things even when I should maybe say nothing. since you didn’t highlight a specific passage, I shall be talking about the whole of it, which took me about 1.5k words total. thus the rest is under the cut.
origins
like a lot of my fics, this started as me messing around. back in may 2024 I asked @sunnnfish to guess how many words I had in my then-draft for life committments and since they’d guessed the word to the exact count, I felt compelled to reward them with some tashiro writing. this is how we get blur, which I posted virtually unchanged because I think it’s got its own type of charm compared to see the light.
(fun coincidence! both these fics I just mentioned ended up being birthday gifts—life committments for @dirtbra1n and see the light for @sunnnfish)
anyways, as the progenitor for the whole fic, what happens in blur is key to see the light: tashiro’s crossdressing, and shirahama’s looking at him. that viewpoint of his—the soft-focus feel, the undeniable attraction that is nonetheless denied—got me playing with the idea of shirahama’s “vision” as I expanded on the piece.
themes
see the light structures itself around two things—tashiro, girls—and shirahama’s perception of them.
one of my favorite things about tashiro is the way he’s relatively nonchalant about gender—totally cool with being called gon-chan, and his only objection to dressing as a girl is not wanting to shave his leg hair, which wouldn’t be necessary if he was wearing a kimono like miyano did, and isn’t even necessary to be a girl in the first place. similarly, he seems curious about romantic relationships as a whole, without the gender of it mattering. in love & passion, from sasaki and miyano: first years, when he finds out the old ladies at the bathhouse are yuri fans he’s just appreciative of their passion, and the same is true of how he feels about miyano’s BL interest.
shirahama, I think, is not the same. in ch 42 of sasaki to miyano, he’s conscious of the fact that they maybe shouldn’t openly be referring to miyano’s boyfriend. and he’s concscious of what it might look like to share his umbrella with miyano, in ch 50 of sasaki to miyano. tashiro immediately asks him to share his when he spots him.
those conflicting perspectives, and differing levels of awareness—I wanted to explore that. I knew the last scene had tashiro crossdressing, so making the fic explore #tashirogender was a natural extension, and since that last scene has shirahama looking at him, the way shirahama looks at things has to extend out into the rest of the fic, too. hence, “vision” weaving its way into the piece.
all that said, let’s now look at how this fic works on a scene-by-scene basis. truthfully I’d first thought about going through this fic on a sentence level, but I’m line-by-line annotating another fic right now, and… that takes a lot of work, alright? maybe you can convince me another time :p
scene #1
here’s the main points of this scene:
we establish that shirahama and tashiro are college roommates
shirahama’s got perfect vision
shirahama’s also playing a dating sim.
#1: obviously I need to establish the college roommates context. we need that situation for the last scene, so they’re in the same room and are capable of doing shenanigans like these. we also need it for, uh, the rest of the fic. since it’s important background. shirahama notes that these days people assume that he and tashiro are operating on a higher level of familiarity and closeness (that childhood friends label) and also says he’d be jealous if he thought about how he and tashiro didn’t talk to girls. he means that he’s envious of his single status, of course, but that meaning is going to blur in time.
#2: theme of vision is introduced. shirahama’s going to observe lots of things over the course of this fic, and we need to set up that he has perfect vision, so that we know he’s lying when he talks about seeing clearly. he’s also kind of arrogant about this—it’ll make his later destabilization appear in wonderful contrast.
#3: dating sims bring up the topic of girls and relationships, both of which are important to this fic. a dating sim is also going to come up again, so it’s important that tashiro takes interest, here. he sucks at it for the same reason that shirahama is good—tashiro’s less concerned with all the lines of what is and isn’t proper, in terms of relationship and gender, whereas shirahama is concerned.
scene #2
our main points:
shirahama gripes about couples.
shirahama bleaches tashiro’s hair.
shirahama and tashiro talk about crossdressing.
#1: we once again see that shirahama is romantically unfulfilled and unsuccessful. he’s also weird about miyano’s relationship in a classically shiramiya fashion. shirahama and tashiro still go on group dates, tashiro’s popular with girls, and tashiro also gets compared to the sun. these will all come up later.
#2: this is a great vehicle for showing intimacy and distance. tashiro’s described pretty attractively here, but shirahama blames it on the bleach fumes. he can recognize something’s up with hanzawa and tashiro, which thirdwheels him as much as it confirms how well he knows tashiro. we also bring up shirahama’s vision again, and have him wish he could see less, because he doesn’t want to confront anything difficult. tashiro also gets compared to the sun.
#3: this conversation introduces the question: what’s the difference between tashiro and a girl? girls can be as tall as tashiro, in games or in real life. tashiro conflates the two, here, which shirahama seems dismissive of, even though he’s going to do it in the very next scene. at the end of the scene, tashiro decides keeps his hair long—like a girl—and the feminine “blonde” is employed in this sentence.
scene #3
kind of tough to split this scene into any points. it’s just really about one big thing, which is tashiro bringing home a BL dating sim.
tashiro conflates shirahama’s heterosexual dating sims with a BL dating sim, which prompts shirahama to insist that it’s different, and girls, too are Different, in some way. he’s talking about videogame girls, but also real-life girls. and once tashiro gets shirahama to try the game out, shirahama’s really in it, and doesn’t think about stopping.
scene #4
our final scene. now I get to talk about how everything threads together.
shirahama starts the scene with a lie. what’s blurring here is not his vision—it’s his understanding of the world. he admits that tashiro is Like A Girl, which he’d denied beforehand, and though there’s a heady desire in his description, he’s still deflecting about it with his lie.
tashiro gets another sun-related descriptor, and tashiro calls their apartment home. this is a nice confirmation of the comfortability of their roommate relationship, which is a constant throughout this fic. it is maybe even a type of romance readily available to shirahama, if he only were to look at it.
we get another group date, which we’d already set up as a recurring event. tashiro’s Normal about talking to girls, while shirahama’s jealous, but here it feels like he’s jealous of the girl, not tashiro. the name for the girl tashiro mentions, aya, is taken from voice actress hirano aya. I thought the fact that her last name was “hirano”—famously blond—and that I knew her best for the roles of lucy heartfilia, amane misa, and retz—blondes—made it a fun fit. tashiro just mentions that aya’s hair was dyed, but I specifically intended for it to be blonde, so he’d see her almost like a possible self.
then, while shopping, shirahama implies that tashiro’s his girlfriend, so his neat lines of girls and guys and romance and friendship are really having all of their wires crossed. when he describes tashiro, he’s pretty, but also “blond” in the masculine form, and he’s still got leg hair, and muscles, and a visible adam’s apple. so shirahama’s seeing direct signals of masculinity come into contact with the truth that tashiro’s still Like A Girl to him. everything is blurring. tashiro’s shampoo is his And theirs.
and now we have our conclusion. tashiro says that there’s not really a difference between a guy and a girl, and shirahama agrees, but only in part. to him, tashiro’s his special exception. I don’t think people get over gender essentialism in a day, so I liked this as a good stopping point. shirahama’s views are challenged, but not fully shaken. he’s just now aware that there are other possibilities in life. and now that he’s in it… well, he’s taking it seriously, just like his playthrough of that BL dating sim.
🐑 hello. I have three fic tags for you to conjure a scenario w your beautiful mind. If you wanna. tried to make it a tough one
could be read as romantic or platonic, drunken confession/kiss, open ending
send me a fake fic ask from this post!
kurefan you’re the funniest person alive. I’ve got the fic right here: loveholic
…okay, you’d have to bend your conception of platonic, but it's only implicitly romantic. depending on how you define a drunken confession, I think smokestacks could also be argued for.
but the point of this is to make up a summary for a fake fic, so let's do that. only... this would fit really well with an idea I had for day 5 of the 2025 ssmyhrkg rarepair week. never posted, though, so I think it'll qualify fine for this. clipping off the title bc that’s not the challenge.
ask me a word and I’ll post a wip with it (or write something new!) (I will actually be writing new stuff no matter what)
okay so I Do have grass in a wip. technically. it's a draft of a future scene for this mdzs/tgcf crossover I've got, but. I kind of don't want to spoil it. and I'm nervous abt that fic because it feels too indulgent.
anyways I got more of my hanzashiro wip done and I Would post that but it feels like showing too much of my hand when it. I'm gonna post it before 10/10. so here's more of my kagihira touch exploration thing bc frankly that one is probably Least Likely to see the light of day since the draft is pretty rough rn
“Hirano-san,” Kagiura whines. “You didn’t give me any time to prepare!”
“Prepare for what?” Hirano asks, baffled. “You’re in bed. I’m in bed.” With you, he doesn’t add. “And you kicked the blankets off,” he concludes firmly.
Kagiura makes a wordless noise, and manages to bite out, “Just—um, Hirano-san, it’s the positioning…”
Hirano blinks down at him. He supposes, maybe, that last time he’d done this, Kagiura had said he’d climbed in his bed, not climbed on top of him in his bed. It doesn’t feel like a big deal, only Kagiura’s skin is flushed so bad Hirano wonders if he’s going to start running a fever.
