#aph barrayar reference

[purpleshift]

urgh I promised in the tags of this post I’d upload my Sunday sketches to Tumblr and here it is! (Even if it’s a lot later than 24 hours after.) Please excuse me while I mentally vomit at the thought of showing off my terrible art (but at least it looks anatomical, right??). Notes under the cut (non-Tumblr links bolded because of blog theme):

some context/notes for the main sketch:

yeah, that is APH fem!Prussia in a different, faux-Victorian dress (thing #1 she doesn’t like (clothing); thing #2 is “not very feminist”/”stay out of the direct war fighting” (she adores the fighting); thing #3 is anti-”mutie” prejudice (being an albino))

also, yeah, her looking that middle-aged is deliberate (but yes, bad art was involved), and Ivan Vorpatril would call her one of those “steely-eyed middle-aged Vor ladies who brooked even less nonsense from him than his mother did” (A Civil Campaign, chapter 8), when he’s not calling her “Aunt Julia”, of course.

Fortunately for Ivan, she wouldn’t be caught dead on the ImpWed committee; the sort of nonsense she wouldn’t put up with is more military/legal than moral; and she does do a good military bellow. 

(”What I wouldn't give to hear a nice, deep, straightforward masculine bellow of `Vorpatril!' . . . From someone other than Countess Vorinnis, that is." (A Civil Campaign, chapter 14))

look I know Barrayar is an Anglo-French-Russian(and Greek) cultural hybrid, but the premise of my AU is that APH Russia was too busy to get stranded on a colony planet and that APH Prussia wasn’t, not being a proper current country and all.(that’s Catherine the Great joke #1: not the first Prussian lady to be in charge of a Russia(n-descended culture))

features you probably can’t see: yes she is wearing a (wedding?) ring - tradition goes that District personifications usually take the name of their comital-palatine family, and she agreed to go along with getting hitched because she’s still ambitious for power and all that (so it’s Lady Julia Marie* Beilschmidt Vorbarra to you, now) 

her husband is a poet, and also gay (but they did consummate the marriage, and audibly (to the gossips outside the chambers) - now that I’ve got that image, I just gotta write that scene)

his name is either Anatoly and/or Arkady

they write a tongue-in-cheek poem where he deliberately misdescribes her appearance (you know, can’t have the public thinking that your planetary personification is a mutie (you know, albino)) and also makes geographic jokes; and this is the entire reasoning behind those names

the image I have of the poem is of female Lithuania?

[Anatolia]

[Arcadia]

(* “Julia Maria” just doesn’t quite sound as good to me, mostly because the endings clash a bit.)

in the background they’re practising two-sword Vorish duelling and a ref has crossed his arms, but I can’t be bothered with that much background detail

it’s not mentioned but every other APH canon character is the gender they’re usually drawn as.

brief context/notes for other sketches (clockwise from top right):

I’m self-taught at art and I don’t know how to use those techniques with sketching shapes?

French cover of Komarr (with Ekaterin’s bonsai skellytum), but drawn from memory as a succulent

Fem!Prussia’s canonical boots, but as knee-highs and with sensible heels, like maybe cavalry boots?

I saw it in some Cordelia fanart (probably fanart), possibly melannen’s Cordelia paper dolls? (fake edit: it was not)

it’s actually only mostly unrelated, it’s loosely based on Crusader Kings II’s portrait frames and Greco-Roman wreaths, but I thought it would be a decorative touch that Prussia/Barrayar would like (apart from the obvious birds*, of course) 

(*: Weimar Prussia is best Prussia, mostly because its status as a good democratic place just sounds so hilariously incongruent with the historical image of Prussia as, y’know, a militaristic absolute monarchy; also the bird, just look at it)

this is one possible design for Sergyar, but I can’t really show off the signature Greekie curly split ends with hair that aggressively curly, even if it is meant to be white-people curly

her name is Sofia Frédérique (if I stick with that spelling anyway) and that’s Catherine the Great joke #2 (in verse proposed backstory: Delia Koudelka (when she was young) didn’t want to share a name/namesake with another kid she knew, Prussia/Barrayar picked Friederike <3 because of course <3 (”but [Sergyar] can pick the spelling”), and maybe they were looking through the Vorbarra family tree (Sonia being a diminutive of Sofia) or a baby name book. They know about the Catherine the Great coincidence, though.)

Worm plague

bonus costuming/heraldry details:

I am a Prussian subject of Vorbarra’s District, d’you know my colours? [something something] [silver] and black before me [...]

I mean, silver’s not that different from white at a distance, right?

I always thought that the Imperial blue and red parade uniform would be more blue than red [x], but okay.

headcanon that sometimes you’ll see Prussia (canon, and in AUs) wearing the silliest hats [x] [was going to insert a picture of canon!Prussia in a Pickelhaube as a second image but I can’t find one on Google Images]

#aph barrayar reference #crossover #crossovers #crossover fanart #fanart #aph prussia #aph fem prussia #aph nyo prussia #my fic #my art #hetalia #hetalia axis powers #vorkosigan saga #my fic meta #I'm not an artist #my fanwork #my fic ideas #I wrote a wall of text