A warm-up sketch of Char that became Bayo-Char. Chareza? Anyway she’s playing it all cool and then turns around and fucking faceplants because she’s wearing guns for heels.

((To the mun: With the shipping meme now around, you´ve opened a lot of 'non-canon' possibilities for your version of Shin to experience. But now I´m curious about your CANON ships with him, meaning like how do you see him in a relationship? And with whom you think he would get together? Tora, or maybe Hushen?))

((It’s an odd little line to find oneself attempting to draw, isn’t it? Obviously this blog has its basis in canon, but then, by virtue of using the canon as a stepping stone of sorts, it involves a massive interpretive element and has in time started to become rather its own little beast. So of course, when we get right down to it, none of the situations found here are canon in the usual sense of the word.

I feel that, with that in mind, what’s being asked here is really, in spirit, “are there any characters that your version of Shin could in theory get together with organically, without you as the player having to engineer it too much in order for the relationship to come about?’“ which is…fuzzy, to say the least, since more or less everything that I’m doing here is engineered in some way or another simply by virtue of being a continuation, expansion, and ultimately interpretation of what I’ve been given of this character in his original canon. Furthermore, my Shin is at a point, right now, where he wouldn’t be terribly well-equipped to handle or begin a relationship right away, I think. He still has a personal journey to make, and of course the form of that journey would be different depending upon the particular dynamic unfolding between him and some other character, which ultimately comes back to the fact that I would indeed have to engineer the undertaking of that journey in the first place.

In sum, I guess I don’t really have any particular “””canon””” ships with him here on this blog. Instead, I merely have ones that I think would, in the long run, be more likely and/or compelling than others. Basically, there’s not one distinct path that I consider ‘blog truth’ – ultimately it’s all pretty open and it just depends on how the chemistry turns out in the long run. So, maybe the best I can really do on this topic for now is talk briefly about a few possibilities which have already come up here or there–

Firstly, Tora or Hushen–? I won’t lie, some part of me likes the ideas of those! In Tora’s case though, I think that, ultimately, while Tora does seem to have something of an unexpected protective streak toward a particular brand of people who are weaker than him, I think too that what really, deeply gets his blood rushing and his spirit stirring are people who challenge him with the strength of both their bodies and their personalities. Tora likes power, so while I do think that he could have something with a gentler, weaker person, and it even be really good for them both, I also think that he’d generally be drawn to someone who is difficult and imperfect and strong vastly over someone who is accommodating, nurturing, and of middling strength. Perhaps in time that will change, but, for right now, that’s where I see Tora’s whims taking him. As for Hushen, I could very easily see him and Shin developing some kind of special relationship if they came to be around each other again, but somehow I suspect that it would be more like ‘good friends who perhaps occasionally go to bed together’ than it actually being a committed, monogamous relationship in the usual sense. But hey, I’ve been surprised before!

Out of my four Kai OCs, I actually think that, as far as ships are concerned, Talma is the one that Shin would have been the most likely to forge such a connection with, if they had had a chance to know each other properly before Talma slipped into his current state. As I’ve said before, Talma was, like Shin, raised to the position of Supreme Kai very young, and struggled with many of the same sort of faults and anxieties that Shin himself does: 'I think I know what I’m supposed to do, but is it right?’, 'am I allowed to be a person rather than simply a figure? would that be wrong of me?’, and so on; just an overwhelming preoccupation with wanting to be a good Kai in the way that he’s learned all his life, but also having doubt about whether or not being a good Kai is the same as being a good person, and finding that uncertainty extremely troubling. I think that seeing those doubts and concerns mirrored in somebody else would have forced Shin to address those issues in himself to some extent, and perhaps would have encouraged him to begin questioning his own tendency toward passivity far earlier in his life. As an extension of that, I think that that kind of openly, earnestly supportive and mutually understanding relationship with another Kai, so similar to himself, early, would have helped them both develop a stronger sense of self. He and Talma would not only have gotten along on a personal level, but they’d have probably been good for each other.

And already I’m going on at far greater length than I really intended! (What else is new, right?) For the sake of keeping this a readable length, and not getting too wrapped up at the moment in minutiae, I’ll simply say that, as far as ships/dynamics which already have been either brought up in some way or at least discussed a bit between me and other players, I’m very invested in the long-term redemption scenarios that are going down between Shin and both Black and Zamasu (let me live, okay), I’m interested in the prospect of Shin and your gal Mina navigating their changing relationship together, and very recently I’ve been unexpectedly bitten in the ass by the Thing happening between Anat and Shin. That isn’t to say that I’m not interested in the prospects of other dynamics, of course; but these are the ones which have me by the neck at this particular point in time. All that said though I’m very much looking forward to seeing how these developments play out in their own ways, but also seeing what other things may unexpected come up in time as well. I didn’t have any particular shipping plans or expectations when I started this blog, so really even now I’m still open to and excited about what the realm of possibility has to offer!))