SVSSS thoughts: Shen Yuan and Class

[x_los]

Thinking about this in fic comments and on locked twitter, so thought I'd post it as a proper meta snippet:

In some ways, SVSSS reads to me like a kind of late-capital/Xi Jinping Thought era Chinese millennial generational angst narrative, where Shen Yuan--at points in the novel, indisputably, and probably also before his death--is drifting, unengaged and even actually depressed in this under-processed way (like, he does NOT know how to think or talk about or even recognise this). I think that's an interesting aspect or use of isekai, and part of the charm of the whole mechanic's enabling him to come into himself and grow up (in terms of his sexuality, but also more broadly). This is not the take I'd have come to if I hadn't read a lot about post Cut-Out Generation music reception, and evolutions in popular attitudes towards purpose, politics and New Money.

I'm also thinking about some key dynamics flagged in this precis for (and this is just one example, as this is kind of a Truism of Sinology) in The Scholar and the State:

"In imperial China, intellectuals devoted years of their lives to passing rigorous examinations in order to obtain a civil service position in the state bureaucracy. This traditional employment of the literati class conferred social power and moral legitimacy, but changing social and political circumstances in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods forced many to seek alternative careers. Politically engaged but excluded from their traditional bureaucratic roles, creative writers authored critiques of state power in the form of fiction written in the vernacular language.

In this study, Liangyan Ge examines the novels Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Scholars, Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as Story of the Stone), and a number of erotic pieces, showing that as the literati class grappled with its own increasing marginalization, its fiction reassessed the assumption that intellectuals’ proper role was to serve state interests and began to imagine possibilities for a new political order."

There's a long, dense tradition of writing about educated men cut adrift from the institutions that can contextualise their lives and make them meaningful, enabling them to turn their abilities towards something bigger than themselves. There's an equally dense and entwined tradition of negotiating this via R/romance and erotica. In some ways Shen Yuan's foundational problem is class. If he'd had a family that would have been satisfied by being an overly-invested high school lit teacher--or if he'd grown up feeling he could be thus satisfied, that would be like, his whole litcrit momfriend soul Answered. Some kind of traditional Scholarly Post would also have given him shape and context? Instead he's drifted into being a bit of a NEET, and he's not necessarily much happier in that than Bing-ge is in being a knives-out comphet4imperialism demonic overlord.

Somewhat relatedly, Shen Yuan might have figured out his sexuality a lot sooner had it not been for the transmigration taking all his spoons. On top of that, Shen Yuan has to frantically represss his inappropriate infatuation with first BingGe (not even real!) and then BingMei (a child!!). By that point, his denial-ridden brain is just burrowing deeper into the closet. He is north of Narnia, by the time he has to yeet Bunhe. It's very funny, honestly, that Shen Yuan's ability to analyse everything about a text/the textual world he's inhabiting flips against him; that same apparatus works to hide key information about himself from Shen Yuan, and it's a tour-de-force performance.

EDIT: Oh also! I posted a bit of meta about Wangxian femslash in my One Where collection, and other than like, two people who did not know how to act, we had this very interesting conversation in the comments.

Comments

[harinezumiko]

Thank you for writing this, very interesting!

[narie]

I enjoyed the discussion and comments on your AO3 post, but I'm too tired to comment there. One thing I found quite interesting, though, is that while I've had the same encounters with plotless domesticity and an unwillingness to actually investigate the trope to its full potential (so much of it is indeed modern AU with not even attempted nods at canonicity beyond names), my experience has not been devoid of porn. Far, far from it. Most WlW I've encountered has been explicitly explicit, and just like I am not a fan of PWP in the absence of cis-swap, I'm also not a fan of it in its presence. And so I've stayed away from WlW cis-swap because 1. I don't care for the trope in general, my interest in fanfic is to explore canon and canon characters more closely than the genre tends to prefer, and 2. I don't particularly want to read porn, actually.

My intuition is that the whole thing stems from (still) a lack of varied wlw portrayals in mainstream media; 20 years ago we were queering straight men and now we're queering queer men, but the rationale remains fundamentally the same. Since I'm a cynic also because fanfic comes with an inbuilt audience that original fic doesn't, it's easier to find readers for it when you have the groundwork laid out for you already.

[x_los]

Yeah I think it's OFTEN porn, but that how that porn works is kind of weirdly constructed, so less functional as pwp, by those metrics? And I think you're right, re: time, accumulated examples, a sense of knowing *how* to write and read this.