Mar. 17th, 2021

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Title: Bed Trick

Sumary: Gongyi Xiao has a standing invitation to visit Qing Jing Peak. Luo Binghe has an in at Huan Hua Palace, a subordinate with access to magic that can make two similar-looking men identical, and a feverish desire to see the man who pitilessly threw him into hell.


A/N: This is predicated on the trip to collect the sun and moon dew mushroom occurring several months later than I believe it canonically did (though the timeline is really ambiguous on this point). Basically, in this fic Luo Binghe is already staying at Huan Hua Palace by the time Gongyi Xiao meets Shen Qingqiu and Shang Qinghua, whereas in canon I believe Luo Binghe only later took up residence at Huan Hua, when Shang Qinghua had properly defected and couldn’t tell Shen Qingqiu that Luo Binghe had returned early."

***

At 22k, Bed Trick is either a few thousand words too long or ten thousand words too short. Katy, my partner and long-time beta, has watched s1 of the donghua with me but hasn't read the book, or any fic beyond mine (more out of a partner's interest rather than a particularly fannish impulse towards the text, which she likes but which hasn't happened to hook her thus yet). She's the best structural beta and I know, and so I asked her how to take some of the exposition from the first section and weave it through. She observed that the easiest fix was just to chop the whole first section, in part or entirely, to work a bit harder on my admittedly-pat ending, and to present a fic that was entirely about LBH showing up on Qing Jing Peak in disguise, taking the lay of the land and eventually revealing himself.

Here is where her not having read in the fandom makes us have fairly different opinions, because fic is always in conversation both with the canon text and with other readings. While I hate cutting whole scenes, I think what she's suggesting could indeed work better to make a tight original story. But 'tightness' has its downsides: for muscularity, you trade expansiveness. No one story can or should do everything, but having stuff to establish in a conversation is often a driving reason for writing a piece to begin with (and sometimes these points are what readers will retain and offer their own thoughts on, in later work). In an email, I laid out why I think everything in section one needs to exist, even if not all of it needs to sit exactly where it does:


"1. literally no one has set LBH PoV in this era, and so

2. no one has made any of the, I think, pretty textually obvious connections here regarding *why* he thinks Huan Hua needs taken down and tortures the Palace Master (there will be incidents later that make this more pressing, and of course he hasn't LET himself realise the previous head disciple is his mom), why he's no longer at all interested in marrying the palace mistress--because it's not just that he's gay for Shizun now, it's that the person he is is really different, he's no longer strategically going for that connection or, crucially, impressed by her.

3. no one's ever gone over what he thinks of Gongyi Xiao, a pretty important character he's consistently paralleled with and jealous of SQQ getting along with when SQQ is avoiding LBH's supposed Terrible Vengeance

4. almost no one does anything with LBH, scheming and politics *at all*, like nooooo one has said that given what we know about mobeijun's uncle, there's a REASON mobeijun aligns with him immediately, and reasons hualing does. that decision's not like--out of nowhere, it makes a ton of sense for them, and why has no one ever said ANYTHING about why mobeijun does the abyss shit at all?? it's a p easy explanation

  

A thing I was thinking is, everything up to the section break feels like a chapter to me, which would reshape the whole rest of the fic and take weight off this. But then I'd need at least one more chapter break, and where? Maybe when they go to sleep, and then we're at the next morning?"

(Caveat: I've read just about every Bingqiu on Ao3 in English, and some assorted other pairings, but if there's MoShang that's super political--and there may be!--I wouldn't have seen it. And I feel like the virtuous thing would be to go read some gen or fic for pairings I only slightly care about (like, I'd read a MoShang rec'd to me or by an author I liked or because the summary was super fun, but not otherwise), but to be honest, I've never been Good in that Yuletidey way, and I don't feel like faking it, particularly. You know, time is limited, and unless I need to read a given piece to execute something well, I'd rather read NiF than Liu Qingge doing anything.)


The more stuff you're trying to do without scaffolding in the form of others' having written x and y before you, the harder it is to see how to do it. A later conversation about this resulted in my deciding to shave off the present ending and keep it as an omake or as some part of chapter three. Which of course requires writing a chapter three, which attempts to fix the balance and 'what is this fic about?' issue by staging the deconstruction of Huan Hua, making Gongyi Xiao someone Binghe feels he can give reigns of power he doesn't personally care about to, and accomplishing that. Binghe doesn't need Huan Hua for the reasons BingGe did, and honestly other than accomplishing his goals via it, he's not invested in it. What happens to the sect post-canon is unclear.

Part of the problem was, I didn't want to make and walk through some big, tough choices about post-canon fallout. I also debated whether, as part of this, Binghe would be giving up his Junshang position, and decided against it both because of what I'd done with Mobeijun's position and, more centrally, because it's really narratively unsatisfying: it makes it feel as though the Abyss period was all for nothing. And in a sense, canonically, it was? If LBH isn't a revenger's tragedy protagonist, it is all just a sad waste of time and period of suffering for the character. So I think I want LBH to seriously consider what it would be to just live as a human cultivator again long-term, in this era when that's still somewhat possible for him, and to think through the appeal and why ultimately he's going to choose not to do that. And part of that is about the narrative-making we impose on our own lives, the sunk-costs shit: we want things to have had some point. But tangled up in that psychological perspective is the meta-narrative trajectory of PIDW/SVSSS/the fic itself, which all require the Abyss to have had some lasting, positive consequence: winning the survival game of thrones has to come with some kind of prize, beyond survival itself. (The imperial logics of the empty throne in SVSSS, the meaninglessness of political power, could and probably should be the subject of their own paper.)

It's all very tough because while Mari is interested in this book, the nature of her interest in the fandom is predicted on the layers of reality a transmigration novel involves. Katy's helped me think this through, but she's not read broadly in the fandom and thus isn't bringing that kind of investment--and that's not just a matter of 'did the fic hit different for you?' personal reception, it actively shapes what you're looking for, what interventions in ongoing conversations you value, what you think is refreshing or intriguing versus rote. (Helena is mercifully happy to beta, but she's at the same spot in some ways regarding investment.) Like, imo whether your analytic lens is centred around a given pairing, even, matters a lot? I could not beta fic for a fandom I don't read or write for anything like as well as I could for a fandom I extensively do, and then further, I wouldn't seek advice on a paper from just any Victorianist or SFF scholar because we nominally share a field. If anything, the differences of perspective are likely to become more potentially harmonious or jarring in relation to our proximity. I've almost never worked in a fandom without Kelley, Katy or Molly K in there with me, sharing an evolving essential reading that's important to us, and as much as I like this fandom I do feel like I'm flailing around a bit. But then there aren't active comms, just weird silo'd discords and I guess fic comments at best, so there aren't great ways around that, at present.

Bed Trick, excerpt )

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