SVSSS Fics

[x_los]

I came to Scum Villain not that long ago due to absolutely loving the donghua. The animation budget is terrible, but once you get past that it's a stellar adaptation. Seriously I would write adaptation theory pieces about how great it is. The comedy is on-point, the character work they manage to do just visually, without having access to the book's freedom from censorship, the way they realise the fairly delicate issue of Shen Yuan/Shen Qingqiu's internal monologue versus what people see, the way they handle the character's extreme denial (not just regarding his sexuality, but regarding all his deep emotional investments)—all excellent.

Because the donghua's only through series one, I read through a fan translation I don't love, but which has much to recommend it in terms of its careful footnotes. The mixed modern-high fantasy register must have been a real challenge for the translator, and I'm seriously impressed by the labour involved, I just think a lot (a LOT) about the mechanics of translation teams, copy editing, publishing infrastructures etc re danmei et al. Here's our novel read-along, if anyone wants some meta/discussion.

At the moment I've written four Scum Villain fics. Another one is done (ish) but in a weird beta limbo. They're all Bingqiu—I always go for a big central protagonist pairing, canonicity not required. I'm not even necessarily always interested in slash per se, so long as the requisite relationship focus and complexity is there. This can be a lot harder to find for straight relationships, and it can be nigh impossible to find two female characters given that level of focus and interpersonal problems—and even then I don't just want to read anything that's true of, even as I wouldn't read literally any danmei? Like, I wish my friends a very happy Gideon the Ninth, it just doesn't seem quite right for me given all the subsidiary stuff I like.

There's a mini tradition in this fandom of giving fics 'internet clickbait' titles that I picked up on while reading through, because Shen Yuan's original life and the System structuring his engagement with the world he comes to live in are both really bound up in the materiality of the internet (plus, it's funny).

1. How to Meal Prep - Household Tips, Recipes, and Ideas for a Better-Organised Life!
  
M; 4.5k; "Luo Binghe is seventeen, and on the cusp of great things."

This is a pre-Abyss Binghe character study, basically. There are a good handful of fics diverging from canon before the Abyss, but I feel a lot of the periods of either kinetic or potential energy don't get enough love, in favour of post-canon fluff or AUs. A lot of the fic I'm most drawn to picks one of the periods of tension between the central couple and digs in.

Because the novel is in SQQ's PoV, it's also somewhat rare to have focal Binghe PoV. This is interesting because as a novel, PIDW was all about Binghe's experiences, adventures and clever political and tactical thinking (or at least that happened in and around the sex scenes, and was what drew SQQ into the text). It's more work, but I could stand to see a lot more Binghe PoV plot bullshit, especially as it feels like fandom hasn't necessarily decided on a range of readings for some key moments and decisions of his that we, by virtue of the PoV, don't see.

2. Help! My Boss is a Bitch.

G; 3k; "Shen Yuan was born to be Reviewer 2. Decades after his marriage, Empress Shen Qingqiu is living his best life at the entire demonic civil service's expense."

An outsider PoV on That Thing SQQ Always Does, where he downplays his investment and his own competence while actually doing a ton of work. (See the time he risked his disguise and life to spare Ning Yingying getting smacked in a bar fight she started, because god forbid his precious students ever be even mildly inconvenienced.)

A lot of post-canon fic that touches on LBH's position as demonic emperor is all about dodging wife plots from PIDW. This is, indeed, very funny. But I wanted there to be fic where being 'demonic emperor' involved some of the politics bs from PIDW, just rendered via the new filter of SVSSS (in which SQQ, though he doesn't greatly acknowledge it, is co-protagonist: this is his happy ending, and part of that, for him, seems to involve both meaningful work and close relationships). Plus, one day (far, FAR in the future), Binghe will be emotionally mature enough/have slaked his own Mommy Issues sufficiently that they can have kids. There's A Flower For That, I'm sure.

3. Size Empress

E; 3k; "Pretending to be Shen Qingqiu comes easily to Shen Yuan, who's spent his whole life pretending to be someone he's not."

Arguably, SQQ comes into the story world just terribly, stupidly in love with LBH (the character, so BingGe). In addition to being too repressed (he could drink a Case of the Not Gays/and still be on his feet) and embarrassed (because it's a fucking fictional character! from this Gor novel disaster of a book!) to process any of that, he must now raise sweet teen LBH (who very swiftly falls ridiculously in love with him: a fact SQQ never lets himself understand, let alone begin to even conceptualise possibly acting on).

Stuck raising LBH, SQQ's brain's formidable self-protection hardware probably kicked in to force him deeper into the closet, like Christmas had been cancelled and all those presents needed to be saved for next year/when LBH was 25. So this fic is SQQ's absolutely fevered, plausibly-deniable, filtered-through-PIDW repressed longing. The poor man has not had any sex ever and is so into Binghe he can probably only get off with an officially licensed standee watching him, and his whole collection of those is back in his original world; all that energy has to go somewhere.

4. Git Gud 

E; 8k; "Binghe grinds his sex skillset until he is authorised to re-enter more advanced quest areas on the game map."

This is my favourite thus far. Immediately post-canon, tying up a lot of little narrative loose ends while dwelling on the interesting power-fluctuations of their teaching dynamic, which spill over into their sex lives. I like the sassiness of LBH at the start a lot. I feel like fic that handles his emotional issues post-canon (real) or has him crying constantly (also very, very real) can lose sight of how clever and funny and bitchy LBH is, like what a little brat he can be (especially to amuse SQQ) and what a consummate out-manoeuvrer he is.

This is also a hardcore ode to Ch 75 of the novel, where they take a break from the imminent plot to be more physically comfortable with each other and more flirty and fond than is legal. Like, they're so fucking good together, bless Ch 75 all day long.

Tomorrow I'm going to talk about my quasi-in-beta SVSSS WIP and why it's become such a strugglebus. 

Comments

[merelydovely]

I don't feel prepared to read any of these because I've only seen the first few episodes of the donghua, but maaaaan are these summaries getting me pumped to actually read the fan translation...

[x_los]

Yeah, for my quibbles with it (and the fact that half way through, you have to jump over to another translation because this one's unfinished), I do love this book a lot.

[narie]

I haven't read or engaged with SVSSS at all, but this bit resonated so much:

I always go for a big central protagonist pairing, canonicity not required. I'm not even necessarily always interested in slash per se, so long as the requisite relationship focus and complexity is there. This can be a lot harder to find for straight relationships, and it can be nigh impossible to find two female characters given that level of focus and interpersonal problems

I've loved your MDZS fics for that focus, and I'm thrilled to know that if I ever do get into SVSSS these will be waiting for me too!

[x_los]

I didn't expect to looove it, but I absolutely do?

And yeah I have a lot of sympathy for the people trying to make MianMian/Yanli et al a thing, but for me, that's never gonna hit it, it feels like something I should be trying to like rather than--an extant textual thing that grabs me? It all feels like the part of Room of One's Own where she's discussing the difficulty of constructing the femme-centred novel as a tradition, in re her imagined lab-sharing story.

[narie]

Aaah this is exactly the same for me. I understand the appeal in the abstract, especially given the generalised dearth of awesome alive women in this canon, but the characters are too thin for me to be invested in them. My biggest drive for reading and writing fic is testing the rules of canon and seeing just how much I can weave into what already exists, it's a constant conversation with the original text, and like you were saying, with the fic that had come before. It's so much less engaging to do that with a cast that is a canonical afterthought than with the protagonists.

[x_los]

Yeah, absolutely, and to me it can kind of feel--unsatisfying IN a feminist sense to have these generic narratives of domestic felicity or defiance About Women rather than about particular women as characters? Like oh boy am I interested in what gender does to characters and social worlds, and there's definitely a lack of fannish care given to the more realised Wen Qing versus equivalent men, but the kind of blurry generality of 'do it for girls'--I would never accept that as impetus for an investment in a male character?

[narie]

No, indeed! For me it's always the characters I care about first and foremost; I barely read anything that doesn't have WWX front and centre in fic. I just... cannot stay interested. I want very different things from fanfic and original fic, and chief amongst those is rolling around in the same characters over and over in fanfic. I admire the people that can write 300,000 words staring a minor character, but it is not for me.

Like oh boy am I interested in what gender does to characters and social worlds, and there's definitely a lack of fannish care given to the more realised Wen Qing versus equivalent men,

I would do so much for a genderswap AU that really delves into the meat of this, and the expectations for WWX and LWJ with that, but I also suspect there would be so little relationship to canon if explored thoroughly, precisely because canon lays out very different paths for different genders (to be fair hard to tell how much of that is a Deliberate Choice, and how much of it is the reflection of a slash/danmei world, in which I often find there's hardly any fully realised female characters anyhow).

[harinezumiko]

Ahhh the donghua is so good! It's evident they had some issues during production but it does feel like a lot of love has gone into it. I'm looking forward to sitting down with these fics later, perfect length for me, and those titles are fab!

[x_los]

Yeah, like I don't even care that they hrdly bother animating background chracters' faces if they're going to parallel the leaf and pendant in their hands so well and have LBH look up at him like that when he's eating food.

SVSS

[ann712]

Watched a bit of the donghua and liked the first two episodes. Also read the synopsis of SVSSS. Initially fascinated (cracking premise on so many levels) but after a bit I concluded that this could well turn out to be the longest will they/won’t they kill or fuck each other novel I might encounter and I don’t think I have the energy to tackle it! Might watch more of the donghua though. Will also read your fics because I have just about enough of a handle on the book and the concept to understand and appreciate them.

Re: SVSS

[x_los]

Yeah, getting into the translated novel was a BIG hump for me. Like eventually my desire to have the rest of the donghua, basically, got me here, but MAN did that desire have a lot of resistance to overcome.

You know for a danmei tho, bc they're all extreme serial fiction, at 81 chapters of about 3k words each, SVSSS is considered very *short*.