WIP Wednesday: Gender Swap 3-Styles

[x_los]

I plan on doing m/f, f/m and f/f Bingqiu swaps (SVSSS), and I hope to get them all written before I post anything so I can put out the f/f first. Thus, hopefully, I won't have to hear the thousandth person offering me Their Thoughts on Yaoi/Genderswap, which are at best not my personal business because it's info on the tastes of someone I don't know from Adam, at worst kinda biphobic and femmephobic, and inevitably just not of much interest to me personally. Very 'don't like, don't read' on this one.

I know the better part of how they all go (dream-kiss plant body male Shen Qingqiu and female Binghe; truly messy water prison f/f), and I really wanna play with the different original novels and fandom dynamics all these combos invoke. Not to mention the SVSSS layer proper--like, what does a female Binghe assume about Su Xiyan? How would this shape the nature of her treatment by and claim on Huan Hua, and what people assume about her and Shen Qingqiu's relationship? To what extent is her power kind of gender-threatening? Is a female Binghe femme, or wearing her demonic imperial grandfather's hyper-masc guan like she's Hatshepsut, or is her presentation shifting and fluid in a way that is itself kind of scary for people? Does she still strategically sa jiao, and how does that hit different? Is she making everyone-but-everyone address her as the Sect Leader's Wife? And how is Shen Qingqiu's extreme repression differently constructed, if Shen Yuan was fairly Aware he was a wife guy for a fictional character who is now his mentee?

***

So this is the start of the 5k I've written on the first one, with a female Shen Qingqiu who's kind of 'gay, and Binghe'. After this, Shang Qinghua assumes he's finally been given a Fangirl of his very own by the System/Universe, only to realise he's trapped in a xianxia with his greatest hatress. Also, Qi Qingqi time, because there is too, too little of her.


Shen Yuan’s friends had used to tease her relentlessly about her whole Proud Immortal Demon Way thing. What kind of self-respecting fujoshi latched onto a text chock full of—which indeed existed solely for the purpose of churning out—oceans of particularly unromantic, vapid het? Possibly the worst examples of the abominable, insulting, misogynist comphet breed? Said friends would all grant Shen Yuan that Luo Binghe was a compelling character—or at least were willing to concede as much after she’d argued them into the ground with copious evidence for upwards of an hour, if only to get her to stop. Shen Yuan herself had to admit that in the world of PIDW, Luo Binghe was a total unicorn. Clever, layered, insanely shippable—but who did you pair him with?

Each and every wife was under-written in her own, special way, and sheer volume of them tended to make picking a favourite a thankless task for your serious shipper. And Shen Yuan was not some fucking amateur. She had not grown up on the internet and read half the web novels going only to be compelled by this ‘and then they held hands under the spread of cherry blossoms’ shojo type of bullshit.

Yue Qingyan was clearly still too hung up on his never-textually-specified-but-obvious-to-the-careful-reader ex, and in a sufficiently interesting way that no one really wanted to fuck with that. For her part, Shen Qingqiu wasn’t an easy-come, easy-go wife-unit, and she had an important relationship with the protagonist. Lou Binghe, however, had tortured her to death in a startlingly unsexuallised way. Even if she was an evil step mother archetype (with free magic sword accessory), she was such a powerful and assured character that if people mentioned the wildly popular novel in any serious critical context, they tended to cite Shen Qingqiu. Really, no one had known Airplane had had an unapologetic villainess like her in him, or that he (and thus she), would be able to circumnavigate the cliches of palace drama as though it was easy.

A few people naturally wanted to take the one compelling female character ever to appear in a stallion novel and throw her from the pickle pot into the harem (arguing that you didn’t necessarily need limbs where she was going) (which, hyper gross, thanks). But if you were into Shen Qingqiu, you tended to be into whatever the fuck was going on with her and Yue Qingyan, or to write that sort of well-intentioned but try-hard Finding Female Voices genfic. All of it reliably whitewashed Shen Jiu in a way that Shen Yuan had never appreciated on artistic or feminist grounds. Like, uwu hinted-at backstory aside, she turned around and child-abused Luo Binghe? It counted? People had sometimes (often) told Shen Yuan that she was somewhat overprotective of the protagonist. Well, someone in this bildungsroman (emphasis on the dung) had to be, and it sure wasn’t going to be Airplane Shooting Towards the Top of the Charts via Whump.

And really, who else was there for Binghe? Mobei Jun was a hot plot device. And like, fair enough, a lot of men did want to fuck their cars. But M4M: Man/Mazda was hardly going to launch a thousand shipfics. Liu Qingge or Gongyi Xiao might have been a thing, but they were, alas, too dead by the time Luo Binghe was properly on the market. Shen Yuan had ended up reading examples of about every pairing written for this inane series, provided one party was Luo Binghe (/Xin Mo had been an Experience), but had never found anyone worthy of her all-time fave.

Which made a transmigrated Shen Yuan, now Shen Qingqiu, particularly glad to have shoved her disciple out of the way of the bursting stomach of a Greater Lust Beetle. ‘Greater’, by the way, apparently meant ‘the size of a fucking full-grown Chow Chow’. She was going to have words with Airplane over this.

Shen Qingqiu’s first reaction was to feel a wave of relief. Now the vagaries of the plot, which she’d thus far striven to protect her poor unwitting white lotus disciple from, wouldn’t force Luo Binghe to give it up to some lacklustre passing Daoist nun (four lines of dialogue total in the whole book, unless you counted things she and her sisters said in unison) (Shen Yuan did not count them). Shen Qingqiu would certainly want to protect a female disciple from a thing like that—why should her Bunhe be entitled to less care? ‘Sexist double standards’? Not on her watch!

A moment too late, it occurred to Shen Qingqiu that for like, the fourth fucking time, she’d forgotten she was significantly less invulnerable than the actual protagonist. (Why was she like this?) In shoving Lou Binghe down, she had, of course, taken a face full of poisonous ichor herself.

Ah. …fuck.

***

Luo Binghe vigorously wielded a wet handkerchief, polishing Shen Qingqiu’s face clean with it like he was trying to get a stubborn rust spot off his beloved Zheng Yang. For what had to be the twelfth time, he asked if his shizun was certain she was fine. Having already assured him of the strength of her cultivation and its attendant power to protect her against such minor inconveniences (largely bullshit: it had earned her a few hours’ leeway, at best), Shen Qingqiu only arched an eyebrow at him.

“Binghe,” she said, firmly.

Like the good boy he was, Binghe stopped fussing and snapped to attention.

“Nothing would help me so much as a hot bath, a change of clothes and a good dinner.” She frowned in annoyance at having to reach up to pat his head. She was fairly tall in this body, but over the years Binghe had gone from chest-high to an inch or two taller than her. Surely he must have finished growing, now? He was twenty. When did boys stop?

Having been given a concrete job to do, Luo Binghe exhaled and forced a smile that became more genuine the longer he held it, the calmer he grew. He smoothed back his shizun’s slightly disordered hair, which he’d mussed in trying to frantically scrub the poisonous bile off her skin (too late, alas, to do more than mitigate the damage).

“The inn, then,” Luo Binghe agreed, extending his hand so that she could use it as leverage to neatly swing up onto Xiu Ya when she set it hovering, without having to gather the hem of her robes to mount. Shen Qingqiu patted his cheek as she did just that. Such a thoughtful, ideal disciple. And still so ready to flush at the slightest praise, verbal or physical! He really was a darling, pre-blackening. And that, Shen Qingqiu thought grimly, was how it was going to stay.