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Description
More tlk AUs? More TLK AUs.
I was stuck in a rut and procrastinating and I got the urge to draw lions with excessively fluffy manes, so have some absolutely random alternate HCs about Tanabi and Naba, that I'm not gonna write right now, cuz I'm a fool and I browsed fanart for an hour instead of writing the desc for this drawing and now it's past 1 AM.

I'll let y'all whom stumble upon this before I wake up, and write down everything, speculate.
- - - - - -
Edit: *cracks knuckles* fresh from a bad night of sleep, let's go.

- Ok let me start with saying that I like this Tanabi 10 times more than I ever did for the first AU I did, I started with the concept of "what if Simba had a fing with a random lioness in the jungle", which I've been hitching to explore for a while now, and went from there. I was going to give him a more generic design, then I tried giving him some of Niramla's markings aaaand the rest is hystory. A thing I like that I've done with him, is make the top of the mane darker to match with the big darker stripe; he got the fluffyness from both Uru, and from someone in Nirmala's side of the family (all the males we see in the night pride are very fluffy, so I assume it's a common trait).

Story wise he's the result of a brief fling Simba had with Nirmala roughly one month before Nala found him; he was wandering the outskirts of the jungle, when he got close to the tree of life and met her, they hit it off and spent a couple of nights together, neither of them expected it to result in anything, but of course, Nirmala found herself pregnant.
After Tanabi was born, Nirmala tried to find Simba, but by that point he was gone; she just accepted that he was a passing rogue and that's ok, many lionesses have cubs that way. Imagine her shock and horror when the king of the Pridelands came over with his son for the first time to meet the royal family, and it was the very same lion she mated with that one time; she can't avoid him entirely, afterall she's an important member of the night pride, they silently aknowledge each other, and later talk alone and agree to never mention what happened again.
Nirmala, of course, doesn't tell him about Tanabi, nor she tells anyone in her pride who the father is for many seasons; until one day, while Kion was over to spend time with Rani, the adults were away for the hunt and Tanabi was babysitting the cubs, since he was the oldest; Simba arrives at the tree to pick up Kion just moments before the hunting party is back, and he finally meets his other son.
After they meet each other there's no denying that he's the father, and Nirmala finally admits that yes, that night did indeed result in a cub; they talk about it and agree that, being born out of wedlock, Tanabi has no claims to the throne or anything like that, Kion thinks it's super cool that he had a secret older brother.
Tanabi's existence is still somewhat a secret, that everybody knows, Simba tells his family back in the Pridelands (Kion wouldn't shut up about it), techincally only the royals and their close family knows, but rumors go around now and then about it. Eventually after the events of TLK2 Tanabi does visit the Pridelands to meet his extended family, but doesn't stay to live there with them, the tree of life is still his home.

- This is the result of me still not being satisfied with the lack of scrawny-but-fluffy in the above design, so I made another (wasn't planning to) and while I was at it I decided to throw some leopard into the mix and make him a lipard, cuz why not. I had a lot of fun with this one and I love his design; at first he was just going to be another AU Tanabi, then I decided I wanted him to be part of the same AU and named him after another scrapped son of Simba: Naba. So yes, they're in the same alternate universe, guess I'll call it the "Simba is a horndog" AU.

Now listen, Simba went most of his teen and adult life alone in the jungle, so by the time he meets his first female in heat, he does not care that she's not a lioness, but a leopard; his hormones are just about yelling at him to go get a piece of that spotted a$$. Cue the most awkward flirting from a young male you can imagine, that surprisingly works??? So yeah, this happens a couple of weeks before Nirmala too, so this is Simba's first time.
The one-night stand wasn't supposed to result in anything, but sure enough, a litter of 3 comes out a few months later; except there were complications (cuz y'know hybrids), the cubs were all very weak and only one survived, Naba. By the time both the mother and the baby were doing better and went looking for him, Simba was long gone; which means he missed not only his second born (Tanabi) but his first born as well (yes, Naba is a few weeks older).
Naba grows up with his mom in the jungle, near the tree of life; you see, his mom is one of the leopards causing trouble to the night pride and competing for food with them. Growing up his condition gets better but he never quite gets as healty as the average lion or leopard, he's still a scrawny mess.
Years later, after the events of TLK2, during one of the scruffles with the night pride, Kion (now at the end of his teen phase) decides to help in the fight, and Naba's mom is hit with a wave of deja-vu seeing this red-maned, golden-pelted lion, and asks him if he knows about a lion named Simba. Kion confirms, of course he knows him! He's his dad AND the king of the Pridelands! How does she not know about that?
The leopards are chased off and Naba's mom is left with quite a few questions that need answering; so she decides to keep an eye on the pride for when Simba comes to visit... except he doesn't, since he's busy training both Kiara and Kovu now, and it's a good opportunity for Tanabi to go with Kion and visit the Pridelands.
She decides to do away with caution, takes a now nearly adult Naba and trails after the two half-brothers all the way to the Pridelands; to be safe she follows them from relativey big distance, and even loses them a day from the destination (luckily at that point Priderock was withing view, so she didn't get lost).
Upon entering the pridelands, however, Naba and his mom are caught by Vitani's hunting party; the mom was planning on meeting Simba alone, possibly at night and away from prying eyes (what if she got the wrong lion after all?), but at this point she's come too far to give up, so she flat-out tells Vitani that she wants to meet the king, and won't take no for an answer (Naba is cowering behind her in all of this, so he goes relatively unnoticed). Vitani, albeit a bit skeptical, takes them to Simba, who's busy finally introducing Tanabi to the rest of the family; at first he's not sure what is this leopard doing so far away from the jungle, and why does she looks so familiar anyway? Then he sees the poor, scared lipard beside her, and it clicks, it clicks with everyone else too.
At that point Kiara asks what's on everyone's mind "Just how many brothers do I have???" (meanwhile Kion is about to pass out from how hyped he is, he has another older brother? And he's an hybrid too?? So cool!)
In the end Naba and his mom go back with Tanabi to the tree of life and Naba is allowed to stay with the pride on the account of being the future king's half-brother, this also kickstarts a more diplomatic approach to sharing the hunting grounds with the leopards too.

Good
Now that I got this rambling out of my system I can get back to my other art that needs finishing.

edit: changed any instance of the word "leopon" to "lipard", because a leopon is a cross between a female lion and a male leopard, not the other way around.

TLK by disney
art and characters by me, do not copy, trace, repost, reuse ecc without my permission please.

Description
More tlk AUs? More TLK AUs.
I was stuck in a rut and procrastinating and I got the urge to draw lions with excessively fluffy manes, so have some absolutely random alternate HCs about Tanabi and Naba, that I'm not gonna write right now, cuz I'm a fool and I browsed fanart for an hour instead of writing the desc for this drawing and now it's past 1 AM.

I'll let y'all whom stumble upon this before I wake up, and write down everything, speculate.
- - - - - -
Edit: *cracks knuckles* fresh from a bad night of sleep, let's go.

- Ok let me start with saying that I like this Tanabi 10 times more than I ever did for the first AU I did, I started with the concept of "what if Simba had a fing with a random lioness in the jungle", which I've been hitching to explore for a while now, and went from there. I was going to give him a more generic design, then I tried giving him some of Niramla's markings aaaand the rest is hystory. A thing I like that I've done with him, is make the top of the mane darker to match with the big darker stripe; he got the fluffyness from both Uru, and from someone in Nirmala's side of the family (all the males we see in the night pride are very fluffy, so I assume it's a common trait).

Story wise he's the result of a brief fling Simba had with Nirmala roughly one month before Nala found him; he was wandering the outskirts of the jungle, when he got close to the tree of life and met her, they hit it off and spent a couple of nights together, neither of them expected it to result in anything, but of course, Nirmala found herself pregnant.
After Tanabi was born, Nirmala tried to find Simba, but by that point he was gone; she just accepted that he was a passing rogue and that's ok, many lionesses have cubs that way. Imagine her shock and horror when the king of the Pridelands came over with his son for the first time to meet the royal family, and it was the very same lion she mated with that one time; she can't avoid him entirely, afterall she's an important member of the night pride, they silently aknowledge each other, and later talk alone and agree to never mention what happened again.
Nirmala, of course, doesn't tell him about Tanabi, nor she tells anyone in her pride who the father is for many seasons; until one day, while Kion was over to spend time with Rani, the adults were away for the hunt and Tanabi was babysitting the cubs, since he was the oldest; Simba arrives at the tree to pick up Kion just moments before the hunting party is back, and he finally meets his other son.
After they meet each other there's no denying that he's the father, and Nirmala finally admits that yes, that night did indeed result in a cub; they talk about it and agree that, being born out of wedlock, Tanabi has no claims to the throne or anything like that, Kion thinks it's super cool that he had a secret older brother.
Tanabi's existence is still somewhat a secret, that everybody knows, Simba tells his family back in the Pridelands (Kion wouldn't shut up about it), techincally only the royals and their close family knows, but rumors go around now and then about it. Eventually after the events of TLK2 Tanabi does visit the Pridelands to meet his extended family, but doesn't stay to live there with them, the tree of life is still his home.

- This is the result of me still not being satisfied with the lack of scrawny-but-fluffy in the above design, so I made another (wasn't planning to) and while I was at it I decided to throw some leopard into the mix and make him a lipard, cuz why not. I had a lot of fun with this one and I love his design; at first he was just going to be another AU Tanabi, then I decided I wanted him to be part of the same AU and named him after another scrapped son of Simba: Naba. So yes, they're in the same alternate universe, guess I'll call it the "Simba is a horndog" AU.

Now listen, Simba went most of his teen and adult life alone in the jungle, so by the time he meets his first female in heat, he does not care that she's not a lioness, but a leopard; his hormones are just about yelling at him to go get a piece of that spotted a$$. Cue the most awkward flirting from a young male you can imagine, that surprisingly works??? So yeah, this happens a couple of weeks before Nirmala too, so this is Simba's first time.
The one-night stand wasn't supposed to result in anything, but sure enough, a litter of 3 comes out a few months later; except there were complications (cuz y'know hybrids), the cubs were all very weak and only one survived, Naba. By the time both the mother and the baby were doing better and went looking for him, Simba was long gone; which means he missed not only his second born (Tanabi) but his first born as well (yes, Naba is a few weeks older).
Naba grows up with his mom in the jungle, near the tree of life; you see, his mom is one of the leopards causing trouble to the night pride and competing for food with them. Growing up his condition gets better but he never quite gets as healty as the average lion or leopard, he's still a scrawny mess.
Years later, after the events of TLK2, during one of the scruffles with the night pride, Kion (now at the end of his teen phase) decides to help in the fight, and Naba's mom is hit with a wave of deja-vu seeing this red-maned, golden-pelted lion, and asks him if he knows about a lion named Simba. Kion confirms, of course he knows him! He's his dad AND the king of the Pridelands! How does she not know about that?
The leopards are chased off and Naba's mom is left with quite a few questions that need answering; so she decides to keep an eye on the pride for when Simba comes to visit... except he doesn't, since he's busy training both Kiara and Kovu now, and it's a good opportunity for Tanabi to go with Kion and visit the Pridelands.
She decides to do away with caution, takes a now nearly adult Naba and trails after the two half-brothers all the way to the Pridelands; to be safe she follows them from relativey big distance, and even loses them a day from the destination (luckily at that point Priderock was withing view, so she didn't get lost).
Upon entering the pridelands, however, Naba and his mom are caught by Vitani's hunting party; the mom was planning on meeting Simba alone, possibly at night and away from prying eyes (what if she got the wrong lion after all?), but at this point she's come too far to give up, so she flat-out tells Vitani that she wants to meet the king, and won't take no for an answer (Naba is cowering behind her in all of this, so he goes relatively unnoticed). Vitani, albeit a bit skeptical, takes them to Simba, who's busy finally introducing Tanabi to the rest of the family; at first he's not sure what is this leopard doing so far away from the jungle, and why does she looks so familiar anyway? Then he sees the poor, scared lipard beside her, and it clicks, it clicks with everyone else too.
At that point Kiara asks what's on everyone's mind "Just how many brothers do I have???" (meanwhile Kion is about to pass out from how hyped he is, he has another older brother? And he's an hybrid too?? So cool!)
In the end Naba and his mom go back with Tanabi to the tree of life and Naba is allowed to stay with the pride on the account of being the future king's half-brother, this also kickstarts a more diplomatic approach to sharing the hunting grounds with the leopards too.

Good
Now that I got this rambling out of my system I can get back to my other art that needs finishing.

edit: changed any instance of the word "leopon" to "lipard", because a leopon is a cross between a female lion and a male leopard, not the other way around.

TLK by disney
art and characters by me, do not copy, trace, repost, reuse ecc without my permission please.