my piece for the @hws-anthology! it's the gang enjoying some spicy street hotpot on a humid summer's evening 🍲
thanks to the mods for their enduring patience, and for pulling this off. i'm happy to have participated in something like this with so many friends and creators i admire 🧡
nedpan vibes in 1600: battered but ambitious castaway meets shogun, aka "behave yourself or get beheaded weird foreigner, i don't trust you but i trust portugal and spain even less and if you're at war with them hmmm...enemy of my frenemy potential there. tell me about foreign affairs will you so i can cross-check portugal’s claims, oh and draw me some maps too… hmmm you know we should have tea in my quarters where you can talk more foreign affairs and we can play shogi just for me to, y'know, pick apart how you think..." (sidenote: i love associating kiku with japanese black pine trees, especially since you see them painted all over the gold-foil screen doors in the shogun's castle/palaces.)
i'm admittedly in the "nations sometimes have very intense relationships with humans who will go on to be important to their history" club and so i think kiku and lady murasaki shikibu (the heian-era author of the tale of genji) should 100% be a thing. no matter what kind of dynamic you see it as, it's like, the basic concept of nations interacting with and/or being muses to some of their greatest and most important authors? fascinating. literature and language is central to the soul of a nation too.