i'm obsessed with aki, like it's not even funny. I JUST NEED MORE OF HIM IN MY LIFE LAWD HAVE MERCY. would you happen to have a bit more information on the loml...? if not it's aight big love <33
YOU CAN ALWAYS ASK ME ABOUT HIM i'm so sorry it took so long to reply i have been so everywhere but i have been meaning to find like sketches and stuff i have around of him :)
collated a bunch of old sketches of his family!! aki was originally going to be a part of a big like. chinese-zodiac inspired thing and his family in particular were the snakes (he's got the character in his last name lol) and him and his siblings all got snake characteristics . there is however nothing new under the sun and even though i thought this was cool my friend was like "oh like fruits basket" and i shelved the idea LOL
in the end he just existed in a vaccum, i had nothing to do with him, before i dragged him out of there with the intention to drop him into a simpler slice-of-life story with a bunch of terrible postgrad students. that story mainly revolves around like.. biomed researchers basically?? aki would have been an ex-STEM student who dropped out because he didn't want to do medicine anymore, but kept in touch with his friends from the course (the other cast might eventually also be forced into IFs LOL)
more under the cut!
i eventually completely veered off the zodiac-course and kept his base design and turned those scales into tattoos! he's got more in infamous, but in this universe it's just those snakes winding around his arms!!!! infamous tattoos are kind of not set in stone cause i plan to add more (inspired by the bandmates) and the tattoos are supposed to be based off them!! there was no way he'd stop at just seven's initials, he has a little thing for all of them!!!! bc we're only really two chapters into infamous tho i just want more time to "know" the bandmates and then give more him more tats (i have been reading asks about them and trying to assign stuff LMFMFMFAOOO)
what he has and i consistently draw him w are seven's initials, the snakes (leftover design from the kind of concept he was based off of), lotuses/flowers (could change!! i'm thinking rn that he gets everyone's favorite flower/plant tattooed), wave designs (i'm praying someone's a water sign), and he's also got the opening notes of their first song that they played as a band :)
the original version of him is also based vaguely off a friend i made in uni who did hair/makeup and which i still think is so cool and gave him that !!!! more specifically he sort of dropped out of a good-asian-kid stem course to do this, which freaked his parents out when they realised he was just Leaving to go cut people's hair. aki's pretty great at it, and is lucky enough to work at a good stylist agency <3
kills it at karaoke with his friends in this universe too :) his genuine passion for working as a stylist and love for his job translates into music for infamous, which despite how "i'm-so-cool-and-chill-about-everything" he tries to seem, is his biggest worry. he really really wants to succeed and stick it to his parents, and can't imagine what else he'd ever do. music is all he has and really gets lost in songwriting/singing :)
his stage name akiya is also a reference to the word for abandoned/empty houses in rural areas in japan. they're cheap to buy, but cost a lot to repair and flip. this is a stealth dig at his parents lol but aki passes it off as a portmanteau of his first/last name: he is secretly emo like this </3
also their band name, snakebites, in general is like 1) "what's cool when we are 16 and making this band when we are in high school" and 2) the band's shared birth year being the year of the snake (2001/i'm projecting) (they're still like 25/26 which makes infamous oddly take place in the future for me, 2027ish???) and luckily i don't believe the year it takes place matters to anyone so i'm just going with it <3 don't think about it too hard this is deep lore that only makes sense to me
their fandom name also call themselves snakes, and they lean into this for their promo materials (each member gets a government assigned snake breed) LMFAO !! aki lightly thinks its cringe but it's not hurting anyone, so he just told maya that he thought the name was great LOLLLLL !!! they have a vaguely edgy image because of this (and because ya know. lots of drama surrounding seven leaving) even though they're much more an indie rock band (sounding more like hippo campus, yona yona weekenders, young the giant) with a reputation for being wholesome
there's also a fun game their fans like to play called "using aki's hair, what era of snakebites is this" LOL <3
i hope this was kind of understandable <3 thank you for letting me cry about my boy <3
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Nana, Émile Zola
Finally getting some French lit in. To be completely honest, I've had this book for almost a decade, and I never read it. Well, actually, apparently I tried at some point, because I found some underlined bits very early on -- but it's clear that I gave up. I remember struggling with it back then. I didn't, this time. It's nice to see proof of my improvement, although I'm not sure what specific skill is concerned.
For a quick & anachronistic summary, it's the story of a 19th century escort girl who makes it big in paris.
I was actually surprised by how easy to read this was. I kind of expected very difficult language. It is poetic, but not actually difficult. The text is easy to follow, almost journalistic. Poetic journalism.
I really, really enjoyed Nana. It's a long ride, and what a ride. It reads, at times, like a soap opera, with how she has a roster of desperate men orbiting around her. She really is the sun of her novel -- and it is her novel. I entered this book ignorantly (despite being French and a ~lit student, I'm not actually well-versed in my country's literature) and it kept surprising me. Where I expected a moralizing tale, or at least a pessimistic outlook on the arrogant seductress, I got the unstoppable, inescapable success of Nana. It's almost a power fantasy, although I doubt Zola saw it through this angle. I mean, it does end badly. Spoilers, but she fully dies in a disfiguring manner. And there is this underlying theme of Nana, the beautiful Venus from the lower classes, bringing the rot of the sewers to the silk sheets of the aristocracy. She all but ruins the entire upper class with the raw power of her sex-appeal, and I thought that there was something cosmic about it. By the time she's at her apex, she herself does not have control of her situation. She becomes like an empire, constantly conquering further reaches to maintain peace and prosperity throughout her imperial reign. She devours. And yet she's so incredibly human. She felt to me like a deity unaware of its power, and, in that sense, her death (especially because it's in the full bloom of her youth and legendary status) felt more like a shedding of the mortal form. Admittedly, I also just find it more fun to interpret it that way. I'm reading for fun, after all. Ah, the specter of academic seriousness hangs over me.
I think Nana is an easy entry point into that sort of literature. Yes, it's part of some long-ass series, but no, you don't need to read the previous books (I didn't). It's very self-contained. It's a long, very eventful ride, through Nana's chaotic and glamorous world. It's long but it feels like going downhill on a bike, and like everything's going too fast still. And it's fucking funny.
And for you, tumblr, my beloved, yes, you will find some messy queers in there. I only talked about Nana herself here, but Nana holds a whole ensemble cast of secondary characters, many interesting women (a wealth of them, really), that are really a whole other serving of delights that I just didn't have time to talk about here. But seriously, just about every character, especially the women, is interesting.
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