x_los | Entries tagged with fandom

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V and Part VI.

The last of these, for the present.

22. Incident Log for the June, 1927 Seattle-Bound Voyage of the “President McKinley”

E; 2.1k; "Sailors traditionally consider an omega going into heat during a voyage a disastrous omen. To Luo Binghe, however, it's an entirely unexpected opportunity."

These are all Miscellany ficlets that were too big for the collection, so I don't have much to say about them. This one is, yet again, an ABO that weasels out of serving full-on ABO goodness. Maybe I need to actually write out my longer outlined ABO project? If the problem is that I'm worried about poaching a better story’s content, maybe I should just realise that story. Then ensuing ficlets in the same genre could have more breathing room.

I like a 'trapped on a boat together' sort of setting. It'd make a good premise for a slow, tense, atmospheric fic. This isn’t one, because it was surprisingly difficult to find information about this journey. I might well have gone in on the details and opted for a more lingering pace if I'd been able to get more sensory information on this sort of vessel and run.

23. Bounded in a Nutshell, King of Infinite Space

M; 4k; "Luo Binghe intends to sulk in the Endless Abyss until the man who cast him down into it repents.''

Apparently Spanish also has a version of a "Nobody Likes Me, Everybody Hates Me, Guess I'll Go Eat Worms" song—that's what I learned from the comments on this. A mood piece I don't think particularly successful (I don't know that I buy the pacing of the ending turn/resolution), but people enjoyed the throne blow-job and the mood, and that's both what it has to offer and about as much as I can hope for, in terms of readers vibing with a piece.

It got some very good fanart, as well. The person also kindly offered to draw me a cover for a fic in future, but I can't really see myself taking her up on that because I don't quite know how to use that kind of thing. I mean no, I literally don't know how to embed it in a fic, for one, and I don't do promo, but more--I'd have to decide that a given story was worth someone going to all that effort for, and I’d also have to wait after finishing the story for an artist to work on a cover before i could post. That could be what, weeks? And I don't know that I'd know that a fic was good and therefor worth a cover, before people told me.

Idk, I'm in a weird mood this week and wondering whether I should turn fic comments off for a bit on forthcoming projects. There have been some very odd comments in the past months, and dealing with them takes more energy than a run of the mill pleasant response gives me. Usually I decide against this because I don't think I'd write fic if not for comments, so I know that actually what I'd probably be committing to is not writing, when I think like this. But it's odd that in teeny-tiny fandoms, I get the same level of actually committed, engaged comments as I do in this (comparatively) huge fandom. It's largely just the emoji-comments and the batshit comments that swell, with overall fandom size. And you can't eat heart emojis.

24. For A Gu'd Time, Call

E; 4.7k; "They're calling HDF a miracle cure.

Shen Yuan could really use a miracle."

I don't know if people got that the titular joke is about blood gu? I might have made that clearer by foregrounding the use of the gu. This one is weird because I know nothing at all about medicine, but I know a fair amount about weird governmental and corporate bullshit. Someone in the comments said this was like, an SFF dystopia? Buddy. It's. It's pretty 1:1, just plus Heavenly Demon Fluid.

25. Prize of War

E; 5.5k; "Luo Binghe is eleven when he is given to Cang Qiong as a present for the young, new-made lord of Qing Jing.

Luo Binghe is twenty-one when he wins Shen Qingqiu for himself."

This has a problem where the lyrical (over-wrought) atmosphere of the intro isn't harmonising with the jokey end. I should have wrapped that mood around to bookend it or kept this more tonally consistent, but I didn't exactly see how to. So many of these are just 'the baby was lopsided, but I didn't know what to do about it, so I sent it out into the world anyway. Better out than in.' I feel like I'm slipping on an editorial front lately, idk.

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.

Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV.

17. Peerless Melons vs the Patriarchy

E; 38k; "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a stallion protagonist must be in want of a horse girl."

This had a great reception, which I'm pleased with. It seems like it has a lasting place in the fandom. That's particularly pleasant because people have gotten very weird about cis-swaps in the past years; I can't tell you how many 'I normally find this trope disgusting, but you are acceptable' comments my Wangxian one got. (Gee, thanks.)

The weak point of this is very much the discussion of gender in the last chapter, which is somewhat essentialist. It's on-the-nose, flat and not challenging. It feels phoned in. I could do better, and have more interesting things to say there. I was having such a bad flare-up when the beta got back to me with this after a delay; the posting and editing process was done with the very limited energy available to me in the evenings, when the pain lifted sufficiently to permit thought. It's possible that's why I wasn't sufficiently light-handed on this point.

I quite like this 'substantial chapter a day' posting schedule. It felt structured, not overwhelming for readers or strung-out in a way I think lends itself to less attentive and invested reading. I'd definitely re-use that. It doesn't max out the hit count in the same way as longer waits and jillions of micro-chapters can, but I think the resultant experience is significantly better, so fuck it. Also, this allows for readers who prefer complete texts to come back in a week and not have too much FOMO/not simply forget this exists.

18. Binghe and the Great Ass Elevator

E; 12.5k; "For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, Shen Yuan wakes up in an unholy fusion of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and a xianxia.

Luo Binghe makes an ideal children's story protagonist, but children grow up—and the protagonist is only willing to follow the plot so far."

Ahaha what a weird way to come back after a few months' absence. Did you miss me? Well that was a mistake.

Katy's pointed out, and I did know it as well, that I've made a really limited effort to integrate the "Solaris" -infused cosmology bit about Systems with the tonally-clashing core fic, and that I ought to at least have brought the intro around to the end to bookend the thing and give it some more structure. But while I, and a lot of readers apparently, like the System shit, it really should simply have been cut. It's so big that it makes anything that happens within the story feel really frail, contingent and at-risk. It doesn't work with a romance played straight. It's too much like my Who fic "Sweet Cheat Gone", with that tone whiplash Dickens taught me actually was fine--and he's right, it is, but only in a work long enough to sustain multitudes, you know? Like, if I valued this individual story as a whole, if my loyalty sat primarily with the story I was telling, I'd simply nix this weird bit, because I couldn't think of an actually integrated way to handle the material or an appropriate showcase for it. But I didn't, because I hate wasting things to the point of absurdity, so here we are.

I don't know, in general I probably need to cultivate editorial relationships with people whose sense of shape is better than mine, or who have some distance there by virtue of not being me, and have them tell me 'no' sometimes. People don't tell me 'no' much in editorial contexts, and I rely on hearing it a lot. I'm not sufficiently self-disciplined in this respect, I always expect pressure from an external interlocutor there. Like, I really hate my own prose and often it needs sieved like lumpy gravy, but I don't know where that needs to happen or how because it's my own brain-sludge, of course I don't. There's still a considerable distance between where I am and where I want to be, in many respects.

19. Congratulations! You've Won! (Click Here To Claim Your Prize)

M; 7.7k; "Luo Binghe wins his shizun in gladiatorial combat and loses him on the long walk home."

I went on a big, two-stage quest to gather up all the fic thoughts in group chats with Feelie, Jane, Blue and Ataratah, to catalogue them and then to write the ones I had the most 'ownership' of. The admin side of this took many, many hours of work (manually combing over every strand of the Discord chat--without key word lookups, because they simply weren't sensitive enough), and resulted in a Scrivener file and a shared google doc folder with hundreds of entries. That covers all of us. I'm only working with my own content right now, but eventually I hope to look at the Multiples (ideas I couldn't clearly assign to any one or two of us, on a fast pass) and see if any of those are primarily mine/something I want to adopt (and the others can also cover the same territory--we've discussed it and decided to apply a Two Cakes rule).

With notes, I find projects like this easy to execute. The downside is that they can feel rushed, and people do often say things like 'oh, I wish this were longer!' Are they just talking to talk, or are they commenting on a presentation issue? Maybe a bit of both? A lot of the time, people don't actually want the things they ask for--they don't want a sequel, they just want to feel this way again, which a sequel wouldn't accomplish because the novelty is gone and the emotional work is already accomplished. They don't actually want me to write MoShang or LiuShen, which I can't because I don't care (and oh my god, can you ever tell if a writer doesn't feel it), they want someone else who does and could to have my skillset--which is kind of unlikely because writing skill is hugely a precipitate of reading preferences, which develop in an interconnected way, and mine were never going to get me to a MoShang or LiuShen place. (It reminds me, in a grim way, of the PhD advisor who said that the idea I'd come up with was so good, she just wished someone more generally acceptable than me had had it--as though the sort of respectable British-born student she was envisioning would have somehow arrived at the precipitate of my particular experience; it's like saying there's too much sex in Freud--yeah, dawg, it's a fundamental view of the self as predicated on relation to the Other in society? Have fun making milkless chocolate milk over there or whatever the fuck it is you wanna do. (G-D it's tiresome when people don't get Siggy Siggy Siggy/can't you see? What's not to get? Man's generally right. Or at least have a much better quality of problems with him--we could talk about the move to Stages or the abandoned Copernican revolution thing, I have real questions there, but I've nothing to say to 'I didn't actually read this'. Freshman-ass behaviour.)) You can definitely be a good writer and write MoShang--I've seen it happen!--but it's a different specialism. You can't be me or some near equivalent and do it. (Even MXTX couldn't hugely bestir herself on either front.) The upshot is, people often don't know what they want or how to describe it, which makes unsolicited writing advice tough to weigh.

There's a sort of weird ambient pressure from this fandom to only write like four things, but to have each of those be 120k. I tend not to even like fic over about 70k. Not to say that it never happens for me, but honestly there are challenges unique to fandom as a mode that I think are difficult to deal with after your project reaches a certain size (especially under conditions of instalment composition/posting).

Mostly, I think these fics are only worth roughly the real estate I afford them. Readers get the idea. Perhaps the realisation could have been a little richer at 30k, but is that the best use of my time? How much better would the work have been for that extra 24k or whatever? But then maybe I should only be doing projects that I do think are worth 30k--but then how well do I even know what works for people, versus what's a b-side? Everyone likes "Ungovernable" and "Rachel for Lean", and to me they're potato salad at a buffet. You know, 'oh.' You're not mad to see it but you're not like OH MY GOD, IT'S POTATO SALAD!!

I reread this not too long ago to access my suspicion that it was overly-clipped and found myself surprisingly pleased with the style and pace. It felt good in a sort of--unusual for fic kind of way? Like, texturally off for fandom, more pro-fic in feel (which is for the most part a question of mode rather than skill-level). It worked for me, on that read at least.

20. A Sensible Arrangement

E; 12.3k; "After fending off a siege on Huan Hua, Palace Mistress Su Xiyan decides to gather support in the cultivation world and shore up her sect's position by brokering a diplomatic marriage between a cultivator of good standing and her son, Prince Su Binghe. To ensure her highly romantic offspring's cooperation, Su Xiyan allows him a great deal of choice in the question of his bride.

Shen Qingqiu is prepared to enter into a practical, political union. He is unprepared for Binghe."

I can't think of many fics with this kind of set up! It's fun, right? You get free Su Xiyan, Tianlangjun, Zhuzhilang, maybe some Gongyi Xiao--I didn't make a full use of the lot of them, but the premise enables writers to. It's not a full AU that leaves you floundering without coordinates, but it does scramble the elements of canon in play and shifts emphases. This fic is actually going to be the basis for about three other small-medium projects. I don't mind that this one is kind of overly-smooth because it sort of needs to be, to provide me with the pieces I need for these others. Also, eh, why not? Let me have one no-stakes comedy of men-ners.

I was super high on IVF egg collection hormones when I wrote this one. That sucked. What a year, right? 99 problems and a bitch is probably one, I can no longer remember, I've lost all ability to discretely conceptualise the problems and can now merely guesstimate the size of the host.

Part I, Part II and Part III.

~~I'll edit this tomorrow, I'm le tired now. Missiles after nap.~~

13. Ungovernable

M; 8.5k; "Shen Qingqiu is a widowed scholar of modest attainments, presently attached to the household of a provincial official as a sort of governess: a thoroughly unremarkable man, take him for all in all.

Shen Qingqiu is not a very reliable narrator."

This story is considerably more popular than some of its much stronger siblings. That's fine, but kind of puzzling. I don't dislike it, but there's always a fic that does significantly better than I think it ought to, which over time I come to almost resent for illustrating how little I understand what will work for readers. That's always more of a shot in the dark than it ought to be. I guess maybe “Ungovernable” is shaped like the sort of fic people in this fandom are really content to read a 60k version of? The sort written in instalments with OC family members, etc. Not really my thing, as a reader or a writer.

It's points like this where I really feel the gap between fandom origins or 'careers' and resultant expectations and desires for stories. For me, the limitations of wholesale instalment composition and even instalment reading are mostly too severe for me to bother with. I am a far worse reader, in chunks--it kills my memory and investment. I don’t even like episodic television schedules or editing in batches. I'll read a text when it's finished, but something that came out thus often still shows the strains of this production method in a way that's difficult to erase even with editing: a dropped stitch can prove exceedingly hard to retrieve. MXTX recoups some of the fumbles which emerge from the affordances and limitations of her publishing platform via edits, though not all of them. She also usually pre-plans extensively (Dickens also pre-planned, to the point where his chapters are not truly comparable to, for example, Varney's episodic shenanigans: plus, experience made his instalment writing smoother over time.)

For an ABO, the sex is really restrained and de-centred here. I'd like to do a more traditional, whole-hearted ABO for the pairing.

14. Plastromancy

T; 16k; "One night, Luo Binghe notices something odd about the way his blood is pooling on the floor of the woodshed."

A twelve year old Luo Binghe meets his Other Shizun."

This is one of my favourite things I've done in this fandom. I did learn via comments on this that people younger than me primarily think of "Coraline" as a film rather than a book. I don't like Neil Gaiman, but I still think the original was considerably more resonant than the film adaptation. We should celebrate one of perhaps three total occasions on which ol' 'I like my women with a brown bush on their heads, YES every single time' put down his giant phoning it in phone and thought, 'fuck it, I can sustain a story for--what, 200 pages?'. And the spirit of DWJ entered him, as it did when he wrote "Ocean at the End of the Lane", and it was good. (I don't entirely think Gaiman's terminal mehness is entirely his fault, as I've said elsewhere. It’s commercially thrust upon him.)

I don't think I mentioned in the notes that 'plastromancy' is the term for divination with tortoise shells. I certainly didn't know that before 2021. The idea for the title came from a Chinese History Podcast episode on pre-Han dynasties’ use of the method and from my wondering what the button eyes would be made of in a xianxia (and lighting on this).

I got the most unhinged comment on this fic, as well. Someone, dead seriously, castigated me like 'how do you sleep at night, having done this to Shen Jiu?" Like a baby, mate. It's fiction and he's a bit of a cunt.

15. Natural Remedies for PMS Symptoms

E; 7.4k; "Luo Binghe races to Jinlan City to protect her estranged shizun from a deadly epidemic, only to find that she cannot protect either of them from the use Xin Mo has made of her own anger."

This is a weird one because it's really not the substantial femslash I was planning, and still am planning, to write. I just scrambled to execute a reasonably sized project while procrastinating on the subsequent challenge fic. A week after I wrote the last fic my wife's mom died (expected). and my dad died (un) on the same day. We had to go to this island between the UK and France to deal with the one, and then I had to go home to the American South to deal with the other, and that took fucking weeks. (Hah, weeks! To be honest, I still have no idea if my dad left me with any money or just his many, many ongoing lawsuits, and it's been over a year. Classic dad.) And by the time I wrote this fic, I'd just come back from emergency dental surgery in Warsaw. So basically, your humble savant needed a win. And what says winning like gratuitous porn? Having living parents and no 'year-long and counting' ruinous stress breakdown. Nothing.

I'm not sure sure about the emotional through-line in this. Yeah, it enables the porn. So far, so good/giving/game. And yes, canon Binghe is this volatile, confused about what he wants and deeply emotional at this stage of the story. But everything happens so fast in this fic, and we don't have access to the other character’s PoV. I'm not sure I'm selling it, and I don't love the blocking. We go from an emotionally tense moment to Shen Qingqiu touching Binghe intimately, then pulling back so that they can have another conversation, and then going in again. There's exposed peerless melon, then concealed, then exposed again. That's not a very elegant progression, and wastes narrative energy: it's a strange hitch. It's all explicated, but it shouldn't be happening because that should have been caught and smoothed out.

Anyway, at least it’s stated that they’ll both get to come, and there's flows of power rather than a fixed clear 'top'. That's more than you can say of most danmei femswaps at the moment. Sweet ever-loving Jesus, what is with that bizarre allergy to good sex we have going on in these spaces? 'And then everyone was stone, but not in an actual stone way where you enjoy being stone and have desires met thus, but a secret, shittier way--'

16. This is How BingGe Can Still Win

E; ???; "Luo Binghe has employed his cunning, charm and shameless adaptability to seduce hundreds of wives. Shen Yuan's affection is a prize he knows how to win. However long it takes and whatever means Luo Binghe has to employ, Shen Yuan must come to him entirely, wonderfully willingly: that is the whole point.

After all, your soulmate is supposed to love you."

This one! My white whale. So after everything that happened, I totally floundered this challenge fic and only posted an initial chapter. I hate challenges, why did I forget how much I hate them? Never again.

I have 22k of part-written fic and notes, but it's a massive project. Like it's a 60k realisation, easily. And that's daunting, when I have so many other, slighter asks on the docket that also need attention (just far, far less attention). I also might need to know more about Hong Kong in order to write this. I've looked around for books on the city and marked Jan Morris' offering in the library ap. We'll see?

There’s a fundamental problem with the fic, the way there was with that Five/Ainley!Master "Christmas Carol"-ish modern AU I had plotted a decade ago. There, I didn't know what to do to effectively resolve the ethical questions raised by the Master's business empire to his partner's satisfaction. Here, I've hinged a big ethical question of the fic on BingGe not getting to flounce from PIDW to find Twu Wubb, but having to stay and clean up his mess. And my clean up is fine, on paper. People would generally go with it, either because they don't give a shit on that point or because it's just a fic, and they want it to work: they have a proportionate sense of the stakes and the genre. They're reading right. But it wouldn't convince me, and if that's the case we're nowhere, because I’m the one who has to believe the shitting thing for long enough to write it. I keep setting myself what the Blake biography of the writer and politician would characterise as Disraeli novel style challenges, like 'what do you do after you get to Jerusalem?', and then, in true Dizzy fashion, absolutely failing to usefully answer a question I probably should not have structurally asked.

I think what I'd need to do is write everything I can of the story and then work out this last problem at the draft stage. It's too squirmy at the moment, I can't move bits around. And no one's really excited about this one, you know? My friends like it fine, but not more than other offerings--and it asks so much more of me than a comparable ficlet. You don't make canard a la presse when everyone's happy with cheese on toast.

Though arguably, people do like my harder projects more than they like the light stuff? Readers responded better to "Peerless Melons" than to any of the lighter fare since. Or at least it lingered longer? Though it's only 3x more popular by hits than nothingy little "Rachel for Leah", and it was certainly more than 3x more work. Idk, trying to judge not only how people will respond to a piece, but even how they actually have responded to one, devolves into Kremlinology.

PS Incidentally, do you know what you have to do to get ahold of Disraeli novels in print anymore? Because I had to literally buy PM Harold Wilson’s copies at auction. Why did he have these?? Worked out well though, at like £8 a book for the lot. I wasn’t going to get them cheaper elsewhere, and it meant I could stop looking (stick a silver fork in me, I’m done). And sure, they’re shit novels, but they are somewhat important for the period.

( Thoughts on sex in f/f swap fic )

I'm enjoying writing a more horror-inflected fic this week (12.5k into the SVSSS Coraline fusion, and a scene and a half from the end of the draft), and mentioned as much to Katy today. She was kind of surprised I felt comfortable with the genre, because she didn't realise I'd written much of it. That made me think a little about how I kind of have and haven't--which is reminiscent of my highly ambivalent relationship with horror overall.

I guess I'd say I've written very little proper horror, and a ton of horror-adjascent shit: but only if you want to frame it that way. Fandom's 'darkfic' categories et al don't overlap perfectly with those definitions. I've seldom if ever set out to write horror, but it permeates and gives energy to a ton of pieces.

The original short story about ritual canibalism eneded up being published in a horror anthology, but I really don't think it's horror at all. The published, serial-scrubbed D/U vampire fic isn't scary, but very technically counts as horror for genre reasons. In D/U terms, "Bunkmates", the incubus fic (also scrubbed and published) and the Narnia fusion where Uriah wishes everyone in the world dead but he and David both are and aren't.

The Thomas Hardy flavoured Wangxian where LWJ's house is fucked is Shirley Jackson inflected. The case in the gender swap Wangxian is trad horror. The descriptions in "Started from the Bottom" of the necromancy wild hunt might count.

There was a Doctor/Master Who fic I didn't finish, about bad medical ethics and cloning your ex as many times as it takes to make him like you again, that's very straight-up horror if read according to that lens rather than a 'darkfic' model. "Sunshine" took the premise of "Eternal Sunshine" and read it as horror. For Molly, some of the kink meme fics count.

There's a LOT of xenokink 'eldritch horror' shit (tentacles, goosnake, B7 computer sentience, Q fusion) up in here, though I don't personally feel like that's operating as horror per se.

I think the takeaway is that while I personally have a generative but strained relationship with horror, maybe so does fandom overall?

I feel like the term 'headcanon' creates more confusion than it alleviates. Is a headcanon:

1. a fairly durable reading. For example, I think Wei Wuxian is quite a competent and clever character. A fic that wanted to swim upstream against that to tell a given story would have a hard time selling me on its premise and overcoming my built-up resistance to such a reading. I think this is 'true', to the extent things are true of a fictional work. Meta would need to provide substantial evidence to convince me otherwise.

2. a flexible, possible or probable reading. For example, Claudius might or might not be Hamlet's biological father. Shen Yuan might or might not have depression. We can support such readings textually, often to such a degree they approach category 1, but not absolutely confirm or deny them.

3. an idea with limited textual support, that might be true within a given fic project or fun to entertain, but which doesn't amount to a hard or soft reading.

4. something outright contra-indicated by the text, which you nevertheless choose to entertain as part of your idea thereof. ("I know this character is a jackass, but I find it more rewarding to read him as a woobie, and so I do; I know what I'm doing, and this is the choice I've made.")

And then somewhere in there are reconciliations between episodes of a multi-authorial text like a television show that contradicts itself, or multiple canons for a text, etc.

Headcanon, for me, overly-personalises the public act of reading, and makes it hard to discuss or debate anything. I can't really touch your personal conviction that Peter Wimsey loves bowling--it's not really for me? Obviously it's fine that you hold this belief, but I can't engage with it via shared textual evidence or my own impressions: it's Your Head Canon. Unless I go 'oh, so true', there's no way for me to interact with that. I can't really ask, 'oh, why do you think that?', much less go 'oh, I don't see it.'

This gets weird when people insist, for example, that X character who's quite good at Y skill is in fact rubbish at it (because they find that cute, or it falls in line with a larger pre-existing trope, or what have you). Is that an assertion you can point to evidence regarding, or a personal belief? (In which case, why am I hearing about it, really?) And of course this gets Weirder Still when the tropey bent of these headcanons falls along the lines of comfortable pre-existing gendered or radicalised categories (as happens: that's how those pervasive social forces operate). It's hard to call anything couched as a private belief, accountable to no textual fidelity or external standard, into question. And that interrogation needn't be some big, personally-directed call-out, because it largely doesn't matter that wangxianlvr69 thinks such and such a thing--it matters that 1000 people have arrived at the same lazy, kinda inaccurate reading.

To me headcanon feels vague, and like a kind of confusing, defensive and solipsistic reframing of the relationship between text, reading and fanon. (Also it's a lightly gash word. 'Headcanon'. Fuckin Max Headroom up in here.)

I know better than to do this, but I'm gonna do it regardless. Ayyyy.

Cfandom, maybe because of the publication format of cnovels, is really big on posting a wild number of small chapters. The JJWXC standard is something like 3k, but fandom will cheerfully drop to 2k or even 1k. I'm not certain that people in these spaces right now know this practice isn't universal, and, while not unheard of, wasn't that common anywhere until fairly recently. Social mediatisation probably plays a role here.

These semi-regular bitty updates make following the Ao3 saveable tags difficult: which chapter of the 281/?? fic did you last see near the top? It's worse when half the page is comprised of such titles. The number of English language BingQiu fics drops from 2525 to 1794, when Incompletes are removed.

This composition model, in which chapters are released as they're written, lends itself to a partial and restricted beta (if any), incomplete and abandoned projects, and sloppy arc construction. Many a 70k fic I have read would have been actively better for having been composed and edited before its release--the very fact of which would have chopped it to 50k. Composing in this style locks the writer into decisions that are hard to retract (mostly, people don't substantially revise either a WIP or a finished work composed along these lines). You can point to famous Victorian serial novelists as sources of legitimisation for the practice, but they had hard outlines in many cases (we have all Dickens' working notes; he was a meticulous planner with the benefit of a ton of practice), significant experience of long-from writing, an understanding of the whole project upon commission and substantial, talented editorship (in a lot of cases, ie Gaskell and Collins: also Dickens). Also--we only remember the best of these. There were a lot of bad Victorian serial novels.

The current trend of bitty instalments does catch a bigger readership (they keep one at the top of the tag, if nothing else). They may also generate a phenomenological over-investment in a given text: the water-cooler effect of talking about each successive chapter, the sustained engagement. The model also makes it very hard for writers to consider shape, to give a project the absolute gift of proper editing (so often the making of a work), to clarify their points and to effectively change their mind. I believe that you often trade a work's best possible realisation and enduring reputation for its immediate hit count, and even as capital-saturated as fandom is becoming, I can't get behind this Branding approach: you're not getting paid, who do you need to sacrifice the quality of your own work for? Yeah there's dopamine to be had in tiny updates, but there's self-respect to be had in allowing yourself the time and space to git gud. You don't have to replicate the capitalist attention economy processes that hamstring working artists in the gift economy: ur free.

You could argue people only have time to write 3k on and off--all right, fine, then compose and publish a substantial 15k piece in about a month? Sometimes your eyes are bigger than your stomach, and it'd help to ask why this idea needs to be 40k and not 15k, and to conceptualise manageable projects. A lot of these bitty fics have ambitions they lack the technical infrastructure to realise well, and a habit of bitty composition can render you less able to execute substantial designs (people really seemed to struggle with the 2Ha Big Bang, and I think it was probably down to lack of experience with longform composition as such). There's also, 'oh but fandom might have moved on, by the time I'm done!!' I mean--in a month? In six? Maybe so, but a flurry of instantaneous bursts of some complex saga which takes even longer to write than a 50k one-off is subject to some of the same time pressures, and in fact might well exacerbate fandom-drift. If there's a lot of noise and not much signal to get purchase on, people will drift away faster. Really compelling work generates its own audience, and is its own reward. The deep esteem of ten readers means more than 1000 anonymous hits.

And this brings us up to today (Part I, Part II).

9. How To Stop Being Strung Along By A Guy & Get What You Deserve: 5 Steps to a Serious Relationship!

G; 3.6k; “'Madam Meiyin said: “Milord’s fated lover pays very little attention to others. But the moment they come to care about someone, they will care with their entire heart and soul.”'

Shen Yuan transmigrates into Proud Immortal Demon Way with a firmly-tied red string of fate. It takes Luo Binghe roughly two hours to notice this.”

Light (weirdly-popular, relative to the others) soulmate AU where, in the very brief window of vulnerability when Shen Yuan’s freshly-transmigrated and his guard is down, Luo Binghe figures out that the soul in Shen Qingqiu’s body is both different now and tied to his own. This sets up the lead couple as a united team from the start.

10. Anyways, Stan Shen Qingqiu

PG; 5.5k; “Millennial vs Gen Z? Shen Qingqiu wishes. A young transmigrator has a new idol; Shen Qingqiu is very tired.”

This was actually a really early idea I had, back in February (at the start of my push to demonstrate that Shen Qingqiu is competent), and I wrote it recently because I thought it’d be fairly direct to execute:

x_los — 02/03/2021

ok so, 5, 10 years into the marriage or something SQQ runs into a kid who like 3 seconds into being cornered breaks down and confesses they only transmigrated like 3 months ago and have no idea wtf they're doing and SQQ is like ... sigh. all right so. I should say, me too. so how much time has passed? same amount? huh. and people are still reading proud immortal demon way? and the kid is like... what? and SQQ is like that's the novel we're in? and the kid is like... no, it's not. I know FOR SURE bc I edited this fucking novel. cultivators got MENTIONED as a thing on the northern border I was NEVER supposed to run into, this quest was VAGUE AF in the book-- and starts talking about these people SQQ knows exist in the universe, but they're like, NOT from PIDW but he didn't clock their recent rise as weird at all? and the kid is like yeah my book is a totally different genre??? I'm SURE the writer never read this she'd have told me

we've TALKED about the influences

and SQQ is like--this world has grown big enough and stable enough it's hosting multiple plots now AND it's not a multiverse it's like a splinter universe or maybe a genre wtf wtf wtf

and the kid is like yeah so when I was Sent North I heard about Cultivtors and YOU omg you're a BADASS I have heard ALL ABOUT and proceeds to talk about things Shen Yuan did as SQQ--and Yuan is like well that's just the body I stepped into

and the kid is like no you transmigrated AND changed the whole fucking GENRE of the novel???? by being TOO HOT?

and this jingyi ass kid is like I stan you like ANYTHING wooooooow and SQQ is like... can't... process this, anyway

and from this kid's POV which the whole thing is in SQQ is just the most badass thing

superborb — 02/03/2021

HUUUUUH

so like pidw must be an older style of book right, in order to be getting satirized in this way

is the kid now, like 10 yrs on, the transmigration type books are also getting satirized

(which is i guess what's happening nowish?)

x_los — 02/03/2021

like I'm not sure it could just be that this is a stable enough 'branch' that its its own universe now and this is how parallels form

superborb — 02/03/2021

(isekai being a thing since the 90s)

x_los — 02/03/2021

like sqq didn't let himself think bc he was trying to repress the 'these are real people who I affect' during the narrative that everything was sort of BIGGER than SQH could have ever just COME UP WITH, the universe kind of works so that--are they meaningfully in ancient china? bc that's HUGE compared to even the storyline of an emperor, like that's 1,000,000 people cooking and doing banking and trades SQH doesn't understand and having extra-narrative whole interactions and lives so they can then be passed in the market once

or sell a bolt of cloth to someone who eventually makes clothes someone in the market wears

like just the act of the story being THERE involves/necessitates so MUCH universe creation

so you could have it be straight up 'parody of the isekai'

or it could be more like--a branch-seedling got lived in and nourished and now it's its own think and a few more successful stories here

and it'll be a full-fledged Universe like yuan's OG one

11. Living With a Tiger

E; 18k; “Shen Yuan has been engaged to Emperor Luo Binghe from almost the hour of his birth. He grows up knowing his place in the world exactly; he is far less certain of his place in his betrothed's guarded affections.”

This fic came out of nowhere. I had the idea and thought I’d just swiftly jot it out; it is 18k. It’s my first time properly writing BingGe, and my first time with a BingYuan as such (not counting the Miscellany, which does include brief examples of both).

I’ve described it as ‘Jane Austen’s Proud Immortal Demon Way’, and unfortunately for everyone, I don’t think that’s too far off. Post-canon and set in the original universe, this one is highly influenced by Pay No Attention to the Man (https://archiveofourown.org/works/27512308). I was also thinking a fair amount about really Dark Xtreme BingGe fic that constructs the PIDW universe as necessarily an absolutely awful governmental situation. I’m not sure it’s supposed to be one?

Here’s my notes on that from mid-June:

Me: there's a weird thing that happens sometimes in anglo fandom where like--okay so SVSSS, in the original pre-transmigration version, the protagonist got vengeance on his worst enemies and then was an emperor etc etc. Now a lot of the fic has him as like an insane tyrant etc. But I'm actually not at ALL sure he's supposed to be any worse than like. a really GOOD historical emperor, even? I think the fandom is just NOT working with those contexts even a little, bc I'm thinking of even the SUPER well-regarded ming emperor [Yongle] who like tried to have his rival nephew hunted down and erased his reign and killed his tutor's family to TEN degrees to be an extra bitch

like that guy is considered an exemplary emperor?? […] bc you wouldn't quite like--frame for ex a controversial euro monarch with the sort of disinterested baldness you would a 'truly foreign' one

I'm not invested at all in if the original version of this character was idk good at being emperor, but it's REALLY interesting how readily the english fandom slides into like--max edgelord

in a way they never would with Richard Lionheart

I don’t think we know enough about the manner in which BingGe fused the planes to say much about how it plays out, based on the fairly different sequence of events in SVSSS. I kind of suspect that BingGe’s narrative wouldn’t allow him to ‘fail’ as an Emperor in this respect?

12. AQ

E; 15k; “Before he rose to captaincy, Shen Yuan attended a briefing given to all command level officers in Star Fleet that outlined the scope of the Q threat. According to Admiral Picard's report, the omnipotent Q are devious, amoral, unreliable, irresponsible and definitely not to be trusted.

Orphaned stowaway Luo Binghe doesn't even know he is one.”

My most recent one! I didn’t think this was actually that niche, but have since been given to understand that a lot of people are very unfamiliar with even TOS/AOS, let alone TNG. Ah, well. This one hasn’t been widely read vis a vis the others, but seems to be liked where it’s liked. Basically a tribute to all the time I put into reading every P/Q fic Varoneeka ever wrote or promoted, as a child. Strangely, the first time I’ve ever written a Star Trek fusion!

Only undertaken because Phnelt poisoned my brain with the idea by saying BingQiu had P/Q energy. Thanks, Phnelt. :/

As with “Anyways, Stan”, this one got praised for a level of intellectual rigour I honestly don’t think I fully committed to. It makes me think maybe I should Go Harder in these, because I’m never that like, satisfied with the engagement with the questions raised. It works well enough for the story, like it’s relatively convincing in situ in that it enables the story to work without throwing me out by being insultingly stupid, but considered in terms of SF world building *as such*, it’s a bit phatic and pat. Like, I don’t find either boundary-pushing or satisfying on those fronts, and if that’s what people are looking to find, maybe I could or should work harder there.

Idk, maybe I’m cheaping out. And as Proust says, “For what other lifetime was he reserving the moment when he would at last say seriously what he thought of things, formulate opinions that he did not have to put between quotation marks, and no longer indulge with punctilious politeness in occupations [that] he declared at the time to be ridiculous?” Like, if not fic, what am I going to ‘really’ write? When do I plan on ‘really’ trying the difficult thing of bringing all of myself up to the plate and swinging, hard as I can? If never, why live? But then also, do these work well enough on different craft axes, to the point that more here would be tedious, burdensome—maybe I should write more original fiction for a bit, perhaps that would work me harder, or differently.

Quasi-Fic:

- SVSSS Miscellany

E; 28k; chatfics

Some of these are complete little fics under or around 2k (more than that and I’d hive them off and seek a beta), some of them are fairly articulated ideas I don’t want to invest energy in writing and some are fragments.

When I started using this DW again I made a post on the four SVSSS fics I’d written so far, and so I thought I’d do it again now that I have eight more (and two additional quasi-fics). I’ll do half today, and the rest tomorrow. I might to the same for my MDZS stuff, later on.

5. Without a Clue

E; 16k; “Immediately before the Immortal Alliance Conference, Luo Binghe learns (via the magic of library science) that he alone can cure Shen Qingqiu's debilitating condition. When Binghe properly understands what that remedy will actually entail, he is even keener to be of use to his shizun.”

I did cross-post this one on here, but none of the subsequent fics.

My Luo Binghe PoV agenda in action! We know from their conversation in and about the Holy Mausoleum that both Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu read the hell out of Qing Jing Peak’s library. In this fic I wanted that labour, referenced off-hand (like much of the information we get about these characters’ actual work), to have a kind of follow-through and payoff.

From fic to fic, I don’t consistently consider Luo Binghe’s demonic heritage to be something he could carefully play off, as he does here. In this story, though, I like the mechanics of his revealing it to the Peak Lords in a way precisely calculated to engineer their acceptance of the fact. (And ‘calculated’ is the word for it—this is a White Lotus BingMei with the same skill at manipulating people and situations as BingGe.) Showing a plausible scenario where this plot point is managed in a way that doesn’t necessitate Luo Binghe’s expulsion from cultivational society opens up interesting narrative possibilities.

6. NIGHTMARE, attacked by Southern Succubi!! - Ming Fan Qing Jing Mission Road Trip (collab feat. Luo Binghe)

E; 9k; “Ming Fan thought that Luo Binghe had taken everything from him—but then Ming Fan never had been very imaginative.”

A post-canon fuck-or-die with Luo Binghe and Ming Fan. This one’s very niche—there are only four fics in English that touch Míng Fān/Luò Bīnghé (though this is fundamentally and conceptually still a BingQiu fic). I’m not surprised this one is comparatively unpopular, but I felt like a lot of the stuff herein needed said.

The outsider PoV lets Leo Binghe be simultaneously the character we know and are sympathetic towards and a truly unnerving figure Ming Fan resents and doesn’t understand. SVSSS gives Luo Binghe all kinds of restitution and closure with Shen Qingqiu, but very little with his peers, including Ming Fan (who, in another life, Luo Binghe took brutal and baroque revenge on, and still has good reasons to despise in revised second timeline). I think fandom could do more with how legitimately scary Luo Binghe can be.

There could also be more fic about the unreconciled questions and comingled obligation, sincere admiration and betrayal that arise from Shen Yuan’s transmigration, which disrupts the original canon’s fated death-spiral. This isn’t just reducible to Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe’s psychodrama, it’s a bigger social issue for the people around them. I’d love fic about Luo Binghe during the years Shen Qingqiu is dead, dedicatedly attempting to resurrect his shizun while consolidating an empire, and the weird parallel arc of Ning Yingying and Ming Fan trying to manage their shared, deceased master’s Peak. (But not, hopefully, written in that kind of odd ‘chastising’ tone fic takes up sometimes, which seems to think blame canon for telling one story in a given emotional register at the expense of others, when that’s often a very sensible narrative choice.)

What failsafes did Shen Yuan have time to leave his disciples with before he killed himself ahead of schedule? To what extent have Ning Yingying and Ming Fan been picking up Luo Binghe’s slack in his absence, during Shen Qingqiu’s incapacitating mourning period? I’m not interested personally in a pure gen fic treatment of this, but I feel like you could get rich pairing fic out of it, and that it’s an odd lacunae in the fandom.

7. Wrong Genre Savvy

PG; 5k; “Shen Yuan does not enter the Hunger Games with any expectation whatever of surviving them.”

This was a quite quick idea, based on some observations I made on Twitter (Phnelt had a different and interesting take on it), that got out of hand. It’s not beta’d and polished; if I’d properly written it I might have leaned more into the period when Shen Qingqiu is back in the Capitol as a Victor and the weird tension between he and Luo Binghe in that space (to a degree, the fic rests on the sex work implications of being a Victor, which Finnick lightly touches on in the original books).

This canon is a great mesh with Scum Villain because they both circle questions of genre, being observed, not knowing your own feelings due to external circumstances involving stress and performativity, class and the militarisation of childhood (a big, recurring motif in xianxia and YA both). I like the way this set-up enables a quite conditional but meaningful betrayal between the lead couple, which isn’t a failure of love or of nerve but an awful situational necessity.

I didn’t flesh this story out enough to milk the conceit’s full emotional impact, but then I also don’t know that I can see much more being conceptually done with a fusion between these specific canons. (Though of course I’m open to being proved wrong!)

8. The Favourite

E; 13k; “Demonic Emperor Luo Binghe's reputation precedes him. It's just not very accurate.”

In this fic, Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe have been married for about the length of time the book itself spanned. They’ve grown into the relationship and are a joyful adult couple, comfortable with one another and talking about having kids in the next few years.

I never quite buy fics wherein Shen Qingqiu, who’s obsessed with Luo Binghe and, as Shen Yuan, read about his political and martial adventures with avid dedication and attention, hangs back, totally disinterested in what his husband gets up to. There’s a fair amount go fic where Shen Qingqiu is just sort of an accessory, there to experience jealousy while people try to Wife Plot up his husband. Shen Qingqiu is a fairly active character, though? He can’t even be idle while nursing Luo Binghe through a qi deviation in an Extra; he also takes on a job teaching school in a village for the duration. No one sane gets a teaching job for fun? Like his husband, Shen Qingqiu only looks normal (rather than Terminally Caremad) from quite specific, limited angles. Thus this post-canon story is lightly case-ficish, which I want more of for the two of them.

It was built around the ‘chief consort’ role-play, because that felt sexy and fun. I do think Shen Qingqiu has built up an erotic fascination with this aspect of his husband (and is simultaneously somewhat anxious about it).

Quasi-Fic:

- SVSSS Meta

R; 12k

The collected meta from this DW, cleaned up a bit.

Didn't get the post I wanted to together today, so here's a WIP I'm a bit stuck on.

( Cam Boy AU )

Almost 3k, this is a WIP draft of an SVSSS/Coraline fusion (Bingqiu). Kind of a weird one.

( Coraline )

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.

( Excerpt )

Decided to just do a quick pwp SVSSS Bingqiu post-canon thing.

SET UP: post canon demon emperor binghe getting out to like the FRINGES on one of the PIDW politics plots and they're like and of course this must be the first wife, of your harem--and binghe goes to CORRECT THEM!! and sqq is like oh yeah mmhm it's me, the empress. just favourite wife, nothing to see here.

by this point they've been married a BIT and Binghe is chill enough/knows to just go along with it when sqq has a plan, and alone sqq is like--they understand wives as political power, like a lot of tribes, and if they figure out later they misunderstood the situation then that's on them, let's not look weak/stir up trouble with a lean entourage? we could take this guy but why when we could just--firm up this alliance and get out

and so there's a dinner and a lot of questions where the people have misunderstood and think that like Hualing (a wife in PIDW, in SVSSS just an employee) is still a wife and are casually asking about her and SQQ, master of bullshit, is like oh yeah she's a firecracker but *I'm* in charge of the household

and LBH is a bit amused but after they have very PIDW influenced sex where sqq is like Iiiiiii am the favourite wife tho right binghe? like you'd ditch the others for ME right?

because SQQ was (without Getting It) insanely into like, Original Binghe and was always privately like--they're not good enough for *binghe*, and like has not fully like, grappled with his OTT Edgelord Binghe with Harem!! kink and how he kind of wants to be like the special mary sue wife/the one who Turns him/kind of doted on in those terms, the ridiculous spoilt bitch shit

***

( Excerpt )

Title: Wei Wuxian's Discreet Dating Service: Hot Rogue Cultivators In Your Area!
Rating: PG
Beta: Verity, Superborb, Aralias
Word Count: 3.5k
Relationships: Jiāng Chéng | Jiāng Wǎnyín & Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn, Lán Yuàn | Lán Sīzhuī & Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn, background Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn
Characters: Jiang Cheng | Jiang Wanyin, Wei Ying | Wei Wuxian, Lan Yuan | Lan Sizhui
Tags: Post-Canon, Matchmaking, Yunmeng Shuangjie Reconciliation, Character Study
Summary: Wei Wuxian and Jiang Wanyin are only sort of speaking. This doesn’t prevent Wei Wuxian from interfering in Jiang Wanyin’s life. Just because you're estranged doesn't mean you don't want your palpably miserable baby brother to be happy! And you know what's made Wei Wuxian very, very happy? Marriage.

Title: Jiang Cheng the Virgin
Rating: PG
Summary: Jiang Wanyin receives the gift of life. It does not come with a receipt.
Beta: Mongrelmind
Word Count: 2.5k
Relationships: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn, Jiāng Chéng | Jiāng Wǎnyín & Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn
Characters: Wei Ying | Wei Wuxian, Lan Zhan | Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng | Jiang Wanyin, Ouyang Zizhen,
Tags: Yunmeng Shuangjie Reconciliation, Mpreg, Accidental Baby Acquisition, Crack

Title: Without a Clue
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Immediately before the Immortal Alliance Conference, Luo Binghe learns (via the magic of library science) that he alone can cure Shen Qingqiu's debilitating condition. When Binghe properly understands what that remedy will actually entail, he is even keener to be of use to his shizun.
Beta: Vorvayne
Word Count: 16k

Someone did a nice podfic of Gentle Antidote, my Yuletide Wimsey fic.

Someone asked if I was going to continue my cis-het swap Wangxian series, and because I'd just seen someone else on Twitter complain about how I hadn't this week, I wrote a rather TL;DR answer, as I've been thinking about that. It's substantive enough that I thought maybe I ought to bring it back to meta cave:

I'd really like to, eventually! It's interesting because in slightly older fandoms (and still, in smaller fandoms), this form of gender swap fic has been very common for a long time. What you do with it ranges from, you know, sloppy to great. But a lot of younger tumblr-bred fandom isn't used to cis-het swap, so it can strike them as a really active, almost hostile gesture. There are a lot of comments even here re 'I hate this trope, but you did it okay'. People didn't mean to be rude, I know, but it is weird and kind of rude, given that: I wrote 20k of it, so I evidently have some time for it! [A/N: Further, who are you disclaiming to? What personal brand do you think you're protecting? I don't even know you, so?]

And to me, this particular reticence doesn't make a lot of sense considering how actively contemporary fandom engages in a lot of other gender play (ABO, forms of feminisation, etc). It can strike me as weird (frankly, as dubious) to, in that whole schema, draw the line at Actual Woman. I feel like wlw swap almost 'gets away with it' because people can't formulate an argument to address their still-extant discomfort. But given that (as I discovered after posting this) a lot of people are WILDLY ill-at-ease with cis-het swap as a concept at the moment, it does give me pause, even though I personally find this form of gender-exploration really interesting.

Because I could write 3k for me, but fandom is largely communal and about readerships. The outlined next bit of this is a substantial 40kish plot fic. So, given my time and people's interest, are the necessary hours better spent on something other than a trope people dislike, for reasons they're further constructing as political? (A claim I think is being rather too easily made, but.) A lot of people flat-out won't read it (and you know, it's anyone's right to not like a trope), and a lot of people who do will rush in to tell me they disdain it, but I am okay, and frankly I don't need that.

It's not like I'm Here to Do Numbers, with my absolute disinterest in having fandom social media and monetisation, etc. etc. But also I can't say that I don't care that this is my least popular substantial project, because no one wants to spend time telling a joke that doesn't land.

So I may come back to this: there's an outline and 3k written on the next part. But it'll really depend on how I feel about the fandom and other projects and negotiating All That.

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x_los

September 2023

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Entries tagged with fandom

SVSSS FICS VII

SVSSS FICS VI

SVSSS Fics V

SVSSS Fics IV

A Note on FemSwap Fic

October Fic

Things that Unreasonably Annoy Me About Contemporary Fandom, 2

Things that Unreasonably Annoy Me About Contemporary Fandom, 1

SVSSS Fics III

SVSSS FICS II

Fic Meme from Twitter

WIP: Wither Thou Ho-est: Cam Boy Shen Yuan

WIP Wednesday: Coraline

WIP Wednesday: Gender Swap 3-Styles

WIP Wednesday

Wei Wuxian's Discreet Dating Service: Hot Rogue Cultivators In Your Area!

Jiang Cheng the Virgin

Fic: Without a Clue

Gentle Antidote Podfic

Some Thoughts on Cis Het Swap

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