Long Live the Princess

Long overdue. I am pooped from all the things going on in this painting! Calling this done and hoping I can do better on the next one.

Big thanks to war-studies​ because my plan of doing these post-war paintings was inspired by her fic, Memento Mori. It’s not an exact scene there but the treatment and creative decisions on the Earth Kingdom exile really stuck with me. Especially how demeaning yet inevitable it is for a character’s growth to go from royalty and military high command to doing mundane tasks and being mocked and jeered by peasants (whose parents she killed in the war, anyway, so you can’t blame them entirely). Even the franchise side characters are given a lot more complexity that makes me care enough to want to draw and paint them in challenging scenes. And I am somebody who does not read fanfic because of a lot of negative stereotypes within the genre creating this perception in my head that it’s mostly absurd and juvenile. Memento Mori is one of those works that are value-adding to canon and so intelligently written that I just had to make an exception!

The story is on hiatus as far as I know, but damn, the material is rich. You can read it here if you’d like:archiveofourown.org/works/3152…