Hanahaki Disease

This art piece is fan art for the character Cyrus from Pokemon Platinum/Pearl/Diamond! He was my first Pokemon villan and when I was younger, I didn’t understand the shenanigans he was baffling on about with the whole “this world is has an incomplete spirit” so and so. I just skipped it at the age. 

However, as time progressed and I saw an increasing amount of artwork of him on Tumblr, a wave of nostalgia hit me hard, not gonna lie. So I read up more about him and fell in love with the character all over again ahaha. 

A huge inspiration for this piece was Velvetcat09 on Tumblr! Please check them out because they came up with idea for Cyrus having Hanahaki Disease!

So what actually is Hanahaki Disease?

Well thank fuck it’s not actually real but rather a fictional disease where the victim violently coughs up flowers from their throats/lungs die to unrequited love. Sounds like a load of faff made up by a lonely teenager on fanfiction.net but the interesting thing is - to remove the disease, you must either:

+ Get the person that you love to love you back so your feelings are returned and the flowers disappear.

+ Or you can surgically remove the flowers and thus your feelings for that person is also removed and you’re cured.

Personally, (although the idea of getting loved back was pretty sweet) the latter really intrigued me! I also believed that it fits Cyrus better to have the flowers surgically removed than to ask for his emotions to be returned because this man absolutely loathe emotions; no way in hell would he go against his vices by asking for affection, that just ain’t him. 

Despite Cyrus because the cold-hearted stone that he is, understand that no matter how hard he tries to, he cannot get rid of all emotions because he’s a human! As a result, there will always be a part of him that will feel some sort of empathy, but he doesn’t show it. Therefore, the idea of having unrequited love for someone, isn’t that far out of Cyrus’ perspective. 

Now for Velvetcat’s post, they made Cyrus have unreturned feelings with Giovanni. Although I don’t ship this pairing massively, the content in this tag (#absolutecontrolshipping) is amazing. 

When originally creating this piece of artwork, my attention revolved around Cyrus as an individual. The piece has different types and colours of flowers, so as a result, I like to think that Cyrus has unreturned feelings for different people in his life: it could be family, to friends and perhaps even a love interest from the past. These unrequited emotions perhaps have lead him to be such a cold person as he is present - it wouldn’t be a surprise, imagine giving your all to your mum and dad, only for them to delegate you to playing mechanics in the corner. It is, after all, canon that Cyrus didn’t go outside to play but just “tinkered with machines” in Sunnyshore City. If his parents did their job properly, would he turn out the way he is now?

Anyway, back to the artwork! In this piece, I used watercolours to produce a very fluid effect: water is often associated with empathy. Additionally, going along with the route of surgically removing the flowers, I drew Cyrus with exposed rib cages where’s the vines of the flowers wrapped around them. This clinginess is exactly what he despised yet it is something that is in him due to his nature of being a creature of social interaction. I tried to make the flowers stand out by outlining them in white, which ultimately gave a very sparkly effect Ahahaha. 

The eyes of Cyrus aren’t shown. It’s partially to do with the fact I ran out of room, but personally, I really wanted to focus on the torso area rather than the face.

And that’s about it! I hope you enjoyed this dissection~ (that wasn’t suppose to be a pun but do what you will).