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SVSSS FICS VI
Nov. 14th, 2022 11:35 pm Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V.
21. Rachel for Leah
E; 2.5k; "Emperor Luo Binghe understands almost immediately that his fifty-second wife's miraculous recovery from the brink of the death is not what it seems. It takes him longer to work out how lucky he's gotten."
Another one that's more popular than I feel it ought to be, but ah well. This is a Miscellany ficlet I shaved off from that collection for length. Generally, anything 2k+ gets its own post (and, preferably, an external editor) unless there's a compelling reason I don't want to afford it that level of attention.
Some say every little ficlet should have its own post for the sake of clear tagging, et al. Tags aren't particularly important to me. If a collection has one fandom and one pairing, that's more than enough for me as a reader. (If it doesn't, well, I'm not a multi-shipper, and if we're talking cross-ships, then even the pairing work of someone who is isn't that likely to be my bag. Sure it happens, but it's a different approach, and one I rarely harmonise with.) A small fic isn't just a bother for the writer to separate out (and a proposition that asks for a general audience's full attention, which not every project deserves or would benefit from). When posted discretely, it can also annoy two kinds of readers: daily pairing-tag checkers and retrospective people coming back to an author's body of work, having to swim through 200 ficlets to get to the actual Major Works. I don't love when people have 8k chapters of stuff scattered here and there throughout their collection fics, but it's not really my business. I've also seen collections used in interesting ways to handle multi-chaptered projects that the writer is only somewhat committed to.
Collections are an imperfect solution, but don't see a better way of handling what is essentially comment fic/meme fic on Ao3. And I do think ficlets should generally exist--no, they're not the Great Works, but there's a place for the lesser ones. Sometimes people are even, as in this case, confused about which is which. I mean either they are, or I am. Remember how Thomas Hardy thought he was like, a poet or some shit, when no1cur about anything but the novels? Many such cases. (I do think the over-positive reception of this fic shows that people don't read the Miscellany collection much, because "Rachel for Leah" is standard Miscellany fare, and yet it did way better than other collection items.)
All four of this post's fics are from the AU ideas list mentioned in the previous post.
22. Legally 黄发
M; 3.6k; "Oh my god, you guys: a heartbroken Luo Binghe decides to follow his beloved undergraduate advisor to Harvard, by any means necessary. "Here's your chance to make it, / so take it like a man!""
Ahaha so it's kind of fair that relatively few people wanted to read this one, presumably because they haven't seen "Legally Blonde" (the musical). Which is their loss. A fun idea with a splash of fun camp for Binghe, who deserves it. Actually the third "Legally Blonde" fic or fusion I've written, somehow?? FML.
People in this fandom are weirdly unused to fusions, though? They seem kind of surprised by shit Willa Shakespeare would have rolled out on like, her tamest day.
23. Sadie Hawkins
M; 4.9k, ""In a cultivation world where every other innocuous meadow contained enough sex pollen to give the entire population hay-fever, cultivators had been forced to give up on ideals of total purity. While they still valued chastity, realists resigned themselves to fucking in the field due to mischance at least once. And given these circumstances, said cultivators generally felt that one’s first experience with sex might as well be a good one, and occur in a controlled, safe environment. Cultivators also lived long lives: the choice of spouses to share them with was a serious matter, which couldn’t be rushed simply for the sake of being over-nice about virginity. So, upon coming of age, a disciple was encouraged to offer themself up to someone for a ritual first night. The individual they chose could decline the honour, but unless one had a strong extenuating excuse, doing so was considered quite rude (and also resulted in a serious loss of face for the youth in question)."
The governor of Jinlan asks Luo Binghe to claim his reward for saving the city. Luo Binghe only wants the things every rising young cultivator is entitled to."
The other day on Twitter I saw someone saying SV fandom, having been without New Content for a few years, had explored all the core basic ideas of the text. With respect, I don't think that's true at all. There's a lot of textual sections, events and probabilities that have extremely limited coverage. There are, for example, very few modern cultivation AUs. There's also not a lot of mid-novel coverage, where all the tension is: people want to write full AUs, often telling the whole story over again from the top in a way that I don't think uses everyone's energy well, and they want to write post-canon, in the interval after the plot's subsided and we're just doing a domesticity. Or reveal fics and the like (which kind of run against my reading of the novel--the Reveal is something I don't think entirely matters to either of them by the story's end, and for me, that's kind of important--not to say I haven't enjoyed many stories invested in the Reveal as a question, but I'm not predisposed to find them effective).
Anyway, this is not a perfect mid-canon tension realisation. I don't have a great handle on that yet. But it's fic set in an era I really want to read fic from, so hopefully it'll encourage others to think about those possibilities.
24. Home Bodies
M; 1.8k; "Shang Qinghua finally convinces Shen Qingqiu to get, and use, Tantan (China's IP-rip-off answer to Tinder). Luo Binghe is less than thrilled with this development."
This is surprisingly short for a fic I bothered to break out of the collection, but as it felt very complete (in a way Miscellany pieces often don't), I thought I'd bust it loose. I don't think of myself as a sucker for 'didn't know they were dating', but there was a K/S fic along those lines that really worked for me, and I've caught myself trying to replicate the vibe a couple times now.
21. Rachel for Leah
E; 2.5k; "Emperor Luo Binghe understands almost immediately that his fifty-second wife's miraculous recovery from the brink of the death is not what it seems. It takes him longer to work out how lucky he's gotten."
Another one that's more popular than I feel it ought to be, but ah well. This is a Miscellany ficlet I shaved off from that collection for length. Generally, anything 2k+ gets its own post (and, preferably, an external editor) unless there's a compelling reason I don't want to afford it that level of attention.
Some say every little ficlet should have its own post for the sake of clear tagging, et al. Tags aren't particularly important to me. If a collection has one fandom and one pairing, that's more than enough for me as a reader. (If it doesn't, well, I'm not a multi-shipper, and if we're talking cross-ships, then even the pairing work of someone who is isn't that likely to be my bag. Sure it happens, but it's a different approach, and one I rarely harmonise with.) A small fic isn't just a bother for the writer to separate out (and a proposition that asks for a general audience's full attention, which not every project deserves or would benefit from). When posted discretely, it can also annoy two kinds of readers: daily pairing-tag checkers and retrospective people coming back to an author's body of work, having to swim through 200 ficlets to get to the actual Major Works. I don't love when people have 8k chapters of stuff scattered here and there throughout their collection fics, but it's not really my business. I've also seen collections used in interesting ways to handle multi-chaptered projects that the writer is only somewhat committed to.
Collections are an imperfect solution, but don't see a better way of handling what is essentially comment fic/meme fic on Ao3. And I do think ficlets should generally exist--no, they're not the Great Works, but there's a place for the lesser ones. Sometimes people are even, as in this case, confused about which is which. I mean either they are, or I am. Remember how Thomas Hardy thought he was like, a poet or some shit, when no1cur about anything but the novels? Many such cases. (I do think the over-positive reception of this fic shows that people don't read the Miscellany collection much, because "Rachel for Leah" is standard Miscellany fare, and yet it did way better than other collection items.)
All four of this post's fics are from the AU ideas list mentioned in the previous post.
22. Legally 黄发
M; 3.6k; "Oh my god, you guys: a heartbroken Luo Binghe decides to follow his beloved undergraduate advisor to Harvard, by any means necessary. "Here's your chance to make it, / so take it like a man!""
Ahaha so it's kind of fair that relatively few people wanted to read this one, presumably because they haven't seen "Legally Blonde" (the musical). Which is their loss. A fun idea with a splash of fun camp for Binghe, who deserves it. Actually the third "Legally Blonde" fic or fusion I've written, somehow?? FML.
People in this fandom are weirdly unused to fusions, though? They seem kind of surprised by shit Willa Shakespeare would have rolled out on like, her tamest day.
23. Sadie Hawkins
M; 4.9k, ""In a cultivation world where every other innocuous meadow contained enough sex pollen to give the entire population hay-fever, cultivators had been forced to give up on ideals of total purity. While they still valued chastity, realists resigned themselves to fucking in the field due to mischance at least once. And given these circumstances, said cultivators generally felt that one’s first experience with sex might as well be a good one, and occur in a controlled, safe environment. Cultivators also lived long lives: the choice of spouses to share them with was a serious matter, which couldn’t be rushed simply for the sake of being over-nice about virginity. So, upon coming of age, a disciple was encouraged to offer themself up to someone for a ritual first night. The individual they chose could decline the honour, but unless one had a strong extenuating excuse, doing so was considered quite rude (and also resulted in a serious loss of face for the youth in question)."
The governor of Jinlan asks Luo Binghe to claim his reward for saving the city. Luo Binghe only wants the things every rising young cultivator is entitled to."
The other day on Twitter I saw someone saying SV fandom, having been without New Content for a few years, had explored all the core basic ideas of the text. With respect, I don't think that's true at all. There's a lot of textual sections, events and probabilities that have extremely limited coverage. There are, for example, very few modern cultivation AUs. There's also not a lot of mid-novel coverage, where all the tension is: people want to write full AUs, often telling the whole story over again from the top in a way that I don't think uses everyone's energy well, and they want to write post-canon, in the interval after the plot's subsided and we're just doing a domesticity. Or reveal fics and the like (which kind of run against my reading of the novel--the Reveal is something I don't think entirely matters to either of them by the story's end, and for me, that's kind of important--not to say I haven't enjoyed many stories invested in the Reveal as a question, but I'm not predisposed to find them effective).
Anyway, this is not a perfect mid-canon tension realisation. I don't have a great handle on that yet. But it's fic set in an era I really want to read fic from, so hopefully it'll encourage others to think about those possibilities.
24. Home Bodies
M; 1.8k; "Shang Qinghua finally convinces Shen Qingqiu to get, and use, Tantan (China's IP-rip-off answer to Tinder). Luo Binghe is less than thrilled with this development."
This is surprisingly short for a fic I bothered to break out of the collection, but as it felt very complete (in a way Miscellany pieces often don't), I thought I'd bust it loose. I don't think of myself as a sucker for 'didn't know they were dating', but there was a K/S fic along those lines that really worked for me, and I've caught myself trying to replicate the vibe a couple times now.
