x_los | Entries tagged with svsss

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.

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 )

Shen Qingqiu constantly downplays his own role in the novel’s events and his own competencies. Despite knowing that Shen Qingqiu is lying outrageously about plot-important things like his sexuality (lying to himself, as much as to other characters and the narrative), readers sometimes miss how closely the narrative adheres to his PoV for much of the text. Further, they believe that’s the only think Shen Qingqiu’s deluded about. Don't trust the man who brought you “I am for sure straight, no question” if he tells you rice is white. Surprise, it's brown rice today. Shen Qingqiu’s tendency to habitually undersell himself leads to readings (and fic) that portray him as lazy or hapless; this is Shen Qingqiu’s self-assessment, and could hardly be less textually evident.

“But Erin, you just have a competence kink!” Of course I do. But like always, I also have carefully sourced textual evidence!

The easiest example of this pattern to illustrate is, I think, the ‘Sun and Moon Dew Flower Seed’ section (https://faelicy.tumblr.com/post/612157187532439552/chapter-30-the-snake-man-of-the-dew-lake). Shen Qingqiu, Gongyi Xiao and Shang Qinghua go on a mini-quest. Gongyi Xiao is young, but bar Luo Binghe, Gongyi Xiao is the acknowledged outstanding cultivator of the rising generation. I believe we’re supposed to read him as possessing substantial natural talent. Gongyi Xiao will have been training for roughly eight years. As a young gentleman and the head disciple of the wealthiest sect, his background was very likely privileged and included substantial preparation for his eventual role: it might be more accurate to say he’s been training all his life for this.

Shen Qingqiu has landed in a body with strong cultivation and read the book, but comparatively, he lacks training and experience. If we presume Gongyi Xiao is of an age with Binghe, and that Shen Yuan died at about twenty, then Shen Qingqiu is roughly six years older than Gongyi Xiao. Shen Qingqiu has only been cultivating since his transmigration, so (since this incident occurs not long after the Immortal Alliance Conference) for about three years. During this time, Shen Qingqiu has also been responsible for managing a peak, overseeing and personally training Luo Binghe and his other students, etc. He has not been a student, expected and facilitated to focus chiefly on his own personal development.

Shen Qingqiu takes lead in the caves. He illuminates the path for their party, figures out that the terrain prevents easy sword draws, responds to this issue by using talismans instead, and then manages to draw his sword by working with rather than against the limited space. He does all this while poor Gongyi Xiao falls behind and bangs his funny bone on a rock. Shen Qingqiu's in-the-moment decisions and preparation enable him to deal with these impediments, not Shen Jiu’s cultivation or body.

Further into the cave system, Shen Qingqiu grasps how the flower they’re seeking works, wades through the pool to obtain it it, and then casts a talisman-based diversion to locate and stun their opponent. Presumably he's importing a modern concept of dynamite fishing. Arguably, he’s leap-frogging on account of having access to modern knowledge that others don’t. But Shang Qinghua has access to the same material. Further, he and Gongyi Xiao have grown up in this faux-medieval setting, and grown up with cultivation. Accordingly they ought to know this environment, and thus respond to what it throws out, much better than Shen Qingqiu.

While Shen Qingqiu is thus occupied, Gongyi Xiao tries to spear the snake pursuing them (Zhuzhilang, hello!), fails and then has to yoyo his sword back. Shen Qingqiu figures out that the snake is harmless, tells them to spare it and gives the snake what it actually wanted all along: one of the magic ‘shrooms. Gongyi Xiao just flips the snake over. That’s his whole contribution.

Very interestingly, however, Shen Qingqiu downplays having purposefully dropped the mushroom in the narrative to the extent that in the moment, it’s not clear what’s happened. We only realise that this occurred many, many chapters later. Part of this oblique treatment arrises from MXTX trying to conserve narrative tension, but another part derives from Shen Qingqiu’s habitual vagueness about his own actions—a character trait that MXTX frequently relies on, in him, to stage the book’s plot turns.

Another line in Chapter 30 tells us, in Shen Qingqiu’s PoV, that Luo Binghe always knows what Shen Qingqiu wants to do on a mission and anticipates him. This suggests that they think compatibly and work together well. Canonically, Luo Binghe is not simply lucky, he’s clever and skilled, excellent at dealing with random plot bullshit. That’s his whole character and reason for existing. If Shen Qingqiu is on Luo Binghe’s wavelength and they find collaboration easy, it indicates that Shen Yuan's decisions and competencies are basically of a piece with Luo Binghe's, minus Luo Binghe’s demon blood and protagonist halo power ups. Shen Qingqiu’s own power ups would then be limited foreknowledge, and the double-edged sword of access to the System. For pure initiative, cunning and success rate, the 'can beat Shen Qingqiu in a fight' list is short, and 'better at night hunting without halo-reliance' list is shorter. And he's proficient in the arts (is that knowledge somehow located in Shen Jiu, or is it Shen Yaun?). Formative trauma-bonding aside, no wonder Luo Binghe is obsessed. Who in this universe is a more rewarding partner for him?

In Chapter 30, we see that Shen Qingqiu isn't 'just' genre savvy. In and of himself, he’s highly capable. Aspects of his performance here, like his body's trained reaction time, are based on his corporeal inheritance from Shen Jiu. But every good ‘cultivator’ decision here is pure Shen Yuan, and he has significantly less experience than Gongyi Xiao (who is, again, the brightest talent in the rising generation, Luo Binghe excepted). The actual results speak: Shen Qingqiu is better at this shit than he implies by a significant margin. He spends this sequence rolling his eyes at this hapless kid (who is significantly more experienced than he himself actually is), so you don’t notice he’s a badass. It’s telling that after this, Gongyi Xiao is convinced that Shen Qingqiu is a good cultivator, teacher and man, and is highly reluctant to believe ill of him (even when everyone Gongyi Xiao knows and trusts starts talking shit about Shen Qingqiu). Shen Qingqiu sometimes get stuck in paralysing loops of thought, but does manage to break out of them (provided they’re not about something really tricky, like ‘how my own dick works’), only to throw himself on any passing sword while saying “it’s no big deal guys, I’m like, really self-serving, so this doesn't cou—”

Cut to: Luo Binghe, radiating annoyance like a Karen at the back of a customer service line.

‘Lazy’ also feels like something Shen Qingqiu says of himself rather than something the text bears out. At every opportunity Shen Qingqiu gets to be idle or to skive out of the narrative, he does: the exact opposite. but On the page, Shen Qingqiu casually, retrospectively admits that he’s read Qing Jing Peak's entire library. After the fact, we discover that he’s done a lot of martial training with Bai Zhan. He takes my students from well-drilled nervous wrecks to confident, chill youths. Severely chronically ill and depressed, Shen Qingqiu heads to the epicentre of a plague. Without-a-cure makes this choice particularly risky for him, given that cultivation is in some respects disease-resistance, and his has a bad habit of flickering out. But here he is, and having heard as much, here’s Luo ‘what the fuck are you doing here?’ Binghe.

Liu Qingge is a good tank in Jinlan City, but he sucks ass at dealing with the locals and figuring out the problem. (Liu Qingge out here no masking in public like I WILL SIMPLY EAT CORONA!! bruv. Bossman. You will not.) All the ‘soft skills’ stuff Shen Qingqiu does here is very valuable.

After escaping the Water Prison, Shen Qingqiu breaks his cover and risks his actual life because: Ning Yingying might get a hangnail from punching Little Palace Mistress? Then Shen Qingqiu no sooner wakes up from his dirt nap than he comes to the aid of a captured adult Liu Mingyan (by himself, without backup), frees all the would-be sword sacrifices, and kicks Sha Hualing's ass (admittedly using the power boost from his ‘shroom body). He only gets captured himself due to Luo Binghe’s protagonist halo and his own gay panic: an undefeatable combo, for this walk-in closet of a man.

Luo Binghe’s entire plan to capture snakenapped Plantzun is based on knowing Shen Qingqiu is Like This. He relies on Shen Qingqiu slipping away from his captor (and he does, beautifully). He expects that Shen Qingqiu will hear that his sect is in danger, and run back to intervene. Sure enough, Luo Binghe only has to sit there 'come to Daddy' foot-tapping for maybe 3 days before Shen Qingqiu hops into his open arms. This whole plot arc hinges on Shen Qingqiu being a massive liar, and on Luo Binghe’s “sure, Jan.”

Shen Yuan didn't have a Niche to slide into in the real world, and was potentially frustrated about that. But even as a reader, he does the most. He does not seem to come with an off-switch. Cucumber is a voluble, 'expert-ranked' super anti-fan, who's left so many comments he’s earned that forum banner. He’s so dedicated that after spending a couple decades in this world, Shen Qingqiu remembers exactly who Peerless Cucumber is. Can we trust that Shen Yuan was doing ‘nothing’ with his old life, having see his ‘nothing’ here? Given that his “I’m fine” is “I basically didn't eat for three years, except for some snacks once, just to punk Shang Qinghua.” The room is on fire, small dog. Additionally, if Shen Yuan died somewhere between eighteen and twenty five in real life—that’s a really transitional period. He was a wee babby. Who even knows what direction his life was going in?

A huge chunk of what we know about Shen Qingqiu, we learn via a ‘gradual reveal’ retcon recolouring mechanism MXTX seems particularly attached to. This is how we come to know the bulk of what we know about Luo Binghe’s disciple period, for example. We never hear, at the time, that Shen Qingqiu sword-drilled anyone, but later we learn Luo Binghe used to trip a lot. At some point you have to pause and go, “wait were you doing a full teaching load? And reading through the library? And going out on these missions you you mention with Binghe? …are you an adjunct, Shen Qingqiu? Nod if you are being held against your will. Blink twice if you are not eligible for tenure.” We’re similarly reliant on others to tell us about Shen Qingqiu’s post-Abyss depression.

In this vein, it’s also worth mentioning that Shen Qingqiu is very, very into competence on Binghe. When Binghe is coming into himself at the Immortal Alliance Conference, he takes a moment to fanboy. There’s a weird, tiny exchange where Binghe smiles in the Jinlan public confrontation scene, and Shen Qingqiu can't help smiling back. It's an odd ’I like you so much'/'definitely do me' moment, where Shen Qingqiu seems really seems into Binghe As Manipulator of these Changing Circumstances. Shen Qingqiu's even really kind of rapturous when he's shit-scared of Binghe, when he's rhapsodising about what an amazing actor BingGe is, and how he can convince anyone of anything. He’s like Richard III courting Anne on xianxia speed. It’s evil, and sexy, and oh nooooo, he could definitely engineer my downfall—

I could see Shen Qingqiu as having been deeply into BingGe's competence, and rapt every time BingGe does a badass plan, but then like... why is the stage for my BingGe so shit? Why is Poirot being asked to solve the mystery of ‘who stole the cookies from the cookie jar?’ Maybe Shen Qingqiu thought this vengeance arc was the hottest thing he'd ever seen (repressed). Now he's got to live it, and he's stuck going “…is it hot? or is this just terror? if I could process my thoughts and feel my own feelings, I might know!” Competence porn can kill.

A lot of ‘Shen Yuan and Shen Jiu inhabit the Shen Qingqiu body together' fic is a somewhat apologist about Shen Jiu’s role in child abuse, and tends to feature a Shen Jiu who’s swayed by his time cohabiting with Shen Yuan (and his knowledge that Shen Yuan didn’t choose to be here or to do this to him, and has no other safe harbour to turn to). Yet canonically, Shen Jiu's biggest problem is that even though he knows better from personal experience, like many people in similar situations, Shen Jiu ultimately abuses helpless, blameless people who occupy his own former position of weakness. Yue Qingyuan can't spit out an explanation to exculpate himself, but equally, Shen Jiu can't simply demand one; he's unwilling to extend that kind of faith in anyone's good intentions. Narratively I do get why you’d make a tsundere Big Brother out of Shen Jiu for a fic, but this seems to me to do some violence to the crux of his issues: especially when it concerns his own survival, Shen Jiu no longer believes in anyone's good intentions, nor does he even care when they manifestly have them. Canonically, Shen Jiu’s not willing or able to break cycles of screwing over relatively defenceless people.

And what constitutes a ‘threat’, so Shen Jiu, is far, far too broadly defined. His strong self-protective instincts have turned maladaptive, because Shen Jiu’s key problem is that he never feels secure. He seems mired in anxiety to the point that I don’t know whether he can conceptualise Being Happy. He's never conscious of his own power and how he uses it to re-enact his own trauma by revisiting said trauma on others. Even at their most destructive, and even while they understand themselves as public figures with authority vested in them, Shen Jiu and Luo BingGe both see themselves as starving, terrified children striking out defensively. While Shen Jiu’s ‘Shen Qingqiu’ cultured gentleman mask is immaculate, is his bamboo cottage aesthetically sparse as a personal choice, as part of his pose or because there’s a thinness to Shen Jiu’s embodiment of the part he’s chosen to play?

The central tragedy of Shen Jiu’s life, then, is that he remains (still, always) deeply invested in Yue Qingyan. Shen Jiu is arrested in a position of love and resentment, even as he’s so stuck in the cycle of trauma, bitterness and abuse that he’s now perpetuating that cycle himself (which connects Qiu gongzi, Shen Jiu, Luo Binghe/Ge and his victims in a lineage none of them want to be a part of). Yue Qingyan is equally fixed. Yue Qingyan and Shen Jiu sit in the background of the novel like insects stuck in amber, unable to free themselves from one another except through death. The situation would be easier for them if they didn't want each other and could walk away, but the awful thing is, they care about one another more than anything.

Shen Jiu sees himself as, and would indeed like to be, strictly mercenary. But from first to last, Yue Qingyan’s life is always more important to Shen Jiu than his own. Shen Jiu is probably exasperated with himself for wanting men at all, and for wanting Yue Qingyan in particular, after his bad experiences with Qiu gongzi and with Yue Qingyan (who Shen Jiu believes abandoned and discarded him). The pertinent novel extra speaks of Shen Jiu’s repulsion towards men, which seems like one aspect of this internalised rat-king of issues (a sort of parallel to Shen Yuan’s homofugue state). Shen Jiu doesn't trust Yue Qingyan anymore, and yet he trusts no one more. Shen Jiu wants to be given reason to trust Yue Qingyan again, and doesn't want that. He wants Yue Qingyan, and is repulsed by and afraid of wanting him, or men, or anything, because wanting is exploitable weakness. Staying at Qing Jing and living as a Peak Lord is a good gig, and so continuing to do so should be a mercenary, correct decision for Shen Jiu: why care that doing so involves Yue Qingyan, who he acts as though he feels nothing for now? (Shen Jiu inexorably cares.)

As time goes on, Yue Qingyan’s failure to come clean (predicated on adolescent shame and the recent memory of a period of intense mental and physical strain and isolation) metastasises into a bigger and more complex problem. Simply explaining the situation wouldn’t fix the fact that Shen Jiu is becoming, or has become, a rather horrible person, as well as/commingled with being a traumatised person. How can Yue Qingyan say “I love you, baby, it'll all be cool!” when he doesn't approve of half of Shen Jiu’s actions anymore, and when shit that made so much sense as the response of a threatened child has become the operating system that an incredibly powerful thirty-something man is running on? Yue Qingyan can’t simply say “I didn’t mean it” and expect that to fix Shen Jiu; he also can't like speak past his own trauma.

In part, Shen Jiu hates Luo Binghe because it'd take another street rat to see, a la My Fair Lady, that his pronunciation is Too Good. Shen Jiu is jealous of Luo Binghe’s potential and believes, or at least tells himself, that Luo Binghe has had an easier time of life, but Shen Jiu has also built his whole persona to withstand scrutiny from people born above his own station, who don't know enough to recognise a certain kind of mistake. Shen Jiu certainly has old habits he's missed; he likely never wastes ink like these rich kids he hates and is stuck raising casually do, etc. etc. Luo Binghe is thus the one person in Shen Jiu’s orbit with a good chance of seeing Shen Jiu, which Shen Jiu cannot permit (because again, if it breathes, it’s a threat to Shen Jiu!!).

In SVSSS and CQL, being from a rough background does not make a character ’salt of the earth’ empathetic. Instead, it tends to give a character long-term damage. Privileged people have their own blind spots, but in some ways it's easier for them to be good. Being Good, learning and growing, comes easier to Shen Yuan than Shen Jiu. There's something sad and real in that, sort of akin to the critique Uriah Heep offers David Copperfield in the “Explosion” confrontation scene that picks apart the hugely popular Victorian novel motif of the upper-class ‘good orphan’ slumming it and yet remaining pure, readily identifiable as a diamond in the rough.

CW: sexual assault

So the Old Palace Master either suspects or knows that Luo Binghe is Su Xiyan’s kid. (Arguably he could also be unsure whether Su Xiyan and Luo Binghe are related, or whether they just look very alike, match up temporally and are both powerful cultivators by random chance.) But the Old Palace Master also knows that Su Xiyan was possibly impregnated by demon dream daddy, because he himself asked her to honeytrap Tianlangjun.

So, does the Old Palace Master think he was wrong about her child’s parentage? Luo Binghe wasn’t killed by an abortifacient that targeted demonic elements, ergo Su Xiyan must thus have actually been carrying an unknown human man’s child. Does Luo Binghe’s looking fully human lend weight to this belief? Does the Old Palace Master consider it possible that the abortifacient eliminated only the child’s demonic blood? Possibly the Old Palace Master believes Luo Binghe doesn’t know he’s half-demon. Or he could suspect that Binghe does know, and believe that he’s holding that information over Binghe’s head.

This is unpleasant, but it would make sense for the Old Palace Master to tell Binghe, and even to believe, that he’s Binghe’s secret father. After all, he had a thing for his head disciple (a vicious reversal of Luo Binghe’s own romance, and thus a commentary on what that situation looks like gone wrong). The Old Palace Master held Su Xiyan in a dungeon for what seems to have been almost the duration of her term: no one else remarks on having seen her pregnant before she mysteriously disappeared. He ordered Su Xiyan to use her sexuality to his own political advantage, isolated and caged her (in the Water-Prison, which adds another layer of parallels between her situation and the next generation’s romance, staged on the same literal ground), and presumably cut off her cultivation to do so. He then force-fed her the abortifacient that killed her. I’m thus not convinced that the Old Palace Master never did anything else violating and untoward to Su Xiyan: sexual assault hardly seems beyond him. (And for that matter, questions of parentage aside, it seems possible that the Old Palace Master at least sexually harassed Luo Binghe.) As her master and a powerful sect leader with little concern for her rights, he could also have engineered a situation wherein Su Xiyan was consenting, but situationally disempowered.

If the Old Palace Master did sexually assault Su Xiyan, and she subsequently gave birth to a seemingly human son, the Old Palace Master might well believe the child must be his own. Possibly the abortifacient had nothing to do with Tianlangjun, and the Old Palace Master just wanted to cover his own ass as the presumptive father: a child would have been living proof of accusations he mistreated his disciple. Arguably the Old Palace Master wouldn’t pressure Luo Binghe to marry the Little Palace Mistress if he believed Binghe to be his son, but how sincere is that pressure, and how much of it is coming from him? Besides, what can we say about the moral bottom-line of a man able to justify Su Xiyan’s murder?

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: 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

I read SVSSS's Shen Jiu extras yesterday (the last ones I hadn't read), and I found myself oddly annoyed by the way Liu Qingge gets this whole do-over relationship with a 'Shen Qingqiu' who no longer knows to resent his screaming privilege and what a thoughtless dick he was as a teen. Shen Jiu was also, obviously, a huge dick, but less Public School in it.

The mechanics of Binghe's similar do-over are really different. He's Jiu's apprentice, not a peer. As a child, Binghe isn't at all in the wrong, and the toxicity of that relationship is entirely on Shen Jiu. With the Qingge-Qingqiu bad blood, they're both at fault. For Qingge, then, part of the 'charm' of Shen 'secure attachment style' Yuan is his somewhat-unwitting violation of Shen Jiu's reasonable boundaries and distaste: 'all along 'Shen Jiu' was Actually Soft; now he Admits he likes me.' How annoyed would you be if you got swapped out of your body, and someone you had legit beef with (you'd been a dick too, but they just suuuucked) made moves on new-you, thinking they'd Overcome your Resistance, and part of their idea of new-you and the attraction was predicated on real-you? Like your posh, dumbass, most-hated office colleague? There's a forgiveness and reconciliation here; Yuan is able to start fresh. But in itself, that insubstantive or misdirected amelioration is really unsatisfying in terms of past wounds (MXTX yet again pointing out the irreducible quality of lingering trauma and how hard it makes meaningful repair, I guess).

I feel like a lot of these social dynamics Hit Different if, for a second, you entertain a reading of xianxia settings as academia and apply that knowledge. To Shen Yuan, it's fresh, unexpected and even a bit cute or whatever that Qingge is a big manbaby at 30something. Shen Yuan doesn't have to deal with him that much, and he's too busy to think much about it. But imagine how annoying that must be for Jiu, who's always had to know what sex was as a threat. When we meet him at twelve, another kid in the gang he's scrapping with suggests Shen Jiu will get picked up as a brothel worker. Qi ge laughs it off, asking where he heard that kind of talk. The kid... obviously heard it because it's ambient, a real threat? (And that is kind of what happens to Jiu, who gets sold as a slave to someone who, if he doesn't sexually torture him, at least physically tortures him, and who feels very confident just assigning Jiu's sexuality to his sister like a present. The gender-age dynamics between those two make that not clearly legible as assault, but the 'marriage' itself kind of is structured as assault.) Shen Jiu is an awful teacher in part because he feels he's scrabbling at his place. Man-child Qingge has eeeeverything and he's also! an absolutely shit teacher! just very, very bad at most parts of the job he tripped and fell into by being Super Good at Stabbing! Considered as a colleague, who wouldn't want to shank him?

Day late, but here we are. ROUGH, at the moment.

"“But why have you brought us all here, Binghe?” he asked, taking a sip of tea, and then struggling not to spit it out when Binghe enthusiastically answered that thanks to his newly-discovered heritage, he believed he might have found the solution to ‘Without A Cure’. Shen Qingqiu listened with mounting horror when both Mu Qingfang and Yue Qingyuan actively encouraged him to accept Luo Binghe’s ‘help’.

Binghe looked deeply crestfallen at Shen Qingqiu’s immediate, emphatic refusal.

“Shizun,” he whined piteously. “The seal has to break sometime, and the process itself could hardly be less invasive!”

Shen Qingqiu fought to keep from sputtering at that. Says you, stallion protagonist!

“All we have to do,” Binghe coaxed him, “is a simple qi transfer, like you did for me when I was injured, remember? The text says we only have to cultivate together.”

“Does my disciple assume his master ignorant of the contents of his own library? I have always known this method existed,” Shen Qingqiu snapped, closing his fan with a flick of his wrist and smacking the guard down on his knee. “I simply didn’t know any fully-awakened heavenly demons, and now that I might, it changes nothing!”

Binghe flushed under the reprimand. “But Shizun—”

“Because you,” Shen Qingqiu interrupted him, “are just a child, and a medicinal qi transfer is not what ‘dual cultivation’ means!”

At that point, Yue Qingyuan did spit out his tea, and was forced to mop himself with a handkerchief. Mu Qingfeng muttered ‘ah’ to himself.

Luo Binghe blinked at him, confused. “It’s not?”

Shen Qingqiu buried his face in his hands, and only when neither of the other adults in the room stepped in to save him (thanks a lot, brothers) did he throw himself off the parapet.

“Dual cultivation,” he said slowly, “is a form of spiritual energy transfer that is intimate in nature. Sexually intimate,” he stressed before Binghe could belabour the point by observing that, as master and personal disciple, they could surely be considered close."

3.6k and counting x_x

Has anyone worked on transmigration novels as a trans poetics? I was thinking about this because I read a fairly good SVSSS fic (with an awful Author’s Note) that was very insistent that a post-canon Shen Qingqiu né Shen Yuan simply was Shen Yuan. His character and his sense of his ‘true body’ were exactly those of Shen Yuan from the first page of the novel.

I found that contention surprisingly difficult to get on with. First, Shen Qingqiu (2.0) has a character arc over the course of SVSSS which I was uncomfortable with the wholesale abandonment of. Second, Shen Yuan died at an uncertain age, but one at which he’s still referred to as a ‘boy’. (Fandom extrapolates dehabilitating illness onto Shen Yuan’s original body without a great deal of evidence—a choice that merits its own whole discrete conversation.) Let’s vaguely guess that Shen Yuan died at anywhere from seventeen to twenty-five. Shen Yuan makes a reference to having gotten into university, though from the context I’m not certain that he’s being serious. If he’s in earnest, he could have only just gotten in or he could have have fully matriculated: anything’s equally likely.

Shen Yuan lives for at least thirteen years as Shen Qingqiu. If you like, you can discount the five-year plant body death period.

He:

1. arrives when Luo Binghe is around fourteen,

2. raises Binghe until he’s nearly eighteen,

3. mopes for three years,

4. does plot business for an unclear period of time after his boyfriend’s back (but not for that long),

5. dies for five years,

6. comes back to life as a plant man, fucks around, finds out, and then chills in the Stockholm Syndrome Replica Bamboo House for ?? (a time),

7. does plot business involving the rezzing of the Shen Qingqiu body,

8. dies again (to lose both Shizun-rezs looks like carelessness!), and

9. comes back.

Donghua Shen Yuan is around longer, spending three years cultivating in isolation.

However you slice it, that’s this man’s whole adult life. Thirteen years on, even if their life was wholly uneventful, no one is who they were at nineteen. Shen Yuan may well have lived almost as long as Shen Qinqiu as his first lifespan lasted. The fic’s decision to dump Shen Qingqiu back in his long forcibly-abandoned OG body as though that body is very natural and indeed the singular true embodiment, more correct for the character than the body he’s spent his adulthood in, thus feels off, and even somewhat violating. It’s a thorough refusal of the constructed, circumstantial, lived nature of the adult body and self.

These considerations made me think about how MXTX uses her recurring trope of false bodies. This essay will only cover the first two novels and their adaptations, as while I know that there are several assumed bodies in TGCF, I haven’t read it. (I only tried to watch the incomprehensible donghua.) I can’t speak to how this device would engage with trans poetics, it not being my area of expertise, but I think MXTX’s leitmotif of physical malleability accomplishes more than the light opera ‘baby swap’ sort of plot-shenanigans it certainly enables. (excaliburedpan notes that a lot of Western thinking on transmigration must of course come from collective exposure to things like the Narnia mythos, taken up in criticism like Gaiman’s “The Problem of Susan” and Diana Wynne Jones’ fiction (as in Dalemark, or Howl’s perambulations between the world of magic and a mundane Wales).)

( Scroll Saver )

I posted this in the corner of an Ao3 fic just now, but thought I'd also bring it over to meta and say a bit more here about Lan Wangji's North and South fixation.

***

MXTX characters by their favourite 19th century Britlit:

Lan Xichen: Something by George Eliot.

Jin Guangyao: Possibly Woman in White, for Count Fosco and bitter illegitimate sibling power imbalances. If not, Jane Eyre.

Xue Yang: Absolutely some Decadents trash.

Jiang Wanyin: If Chengxian, Wuthering Heights. If not, maybe Nicholas Nickleby.

Lan Wangji: North and South.

Wei Wuxian: David Copperfield. (David Copperfield spends the whole novel not realising how deeply ,deeply gay he is, Wei Wuxian is just like ‘god, why is this so relatable?’)

Nie Huaisang: If pre-brother death, Emma. If post-brother death, I kind of want to say Daniel Deronda.

Nie Mingjue: He Knew He Was Right (I'm sorry, I can't not).

Jiang Yanli: Sense and Sensibility.

Wen Qing: I initially thought Carmilla, but then decided this was cheap. Lesbian Vibe is not her whole personality. Mongrelmind suggested she could be into weird fin-de-siècle sexy-scary shit. I got annoyed that I’d said Brit Lit, because I sort of wanted to give her that wild, queer, unfinished Dostoevsky novel that’s from a female point of view.

Madam Lan: Tess of the D'Urbervilles, alas. (She can take it, she's Hardy.)

Lan Sizhui: A Princess and the Goblin or Secret Garden kind of kid (he does keep discovering weird asshole cousins tucked away random places).

Jingyi: Claims every book he ever read either sucks entirely or Changed Him.

Jin Ling, holding up a check-out line best seller: Hey Jingyi, is this the worst literature humans have ever conceived of, just a war crime, or a profoundly beautiful work, which has reshaped my entire—

SVSSS bonus round:

Shen Yuan: hate-reading The Monk

Luo Binghe: Persuasion. (That's Bingmei, for Bingge it's Dorian Grey or Vathek.)

***

Modern Lit Major Lan Wangji is the only person born after 1880 to have jacked it to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. Singeli marked “the inherent horniness of class differences and repression”; this is but the start.

- ‘She kept the brick from hitting him because it was Right, and made him question his business ethics? She’s just so inherently noble, I would also attempt to marry her at that juncture—’

- ‘He trusted her about the Strange Man AND WAS PROVED CORRECT, amazing. All along, she was saving her brother!’

- The part in the book where Thornton obsesses about Margaret Hale’s tea-serving hands gives Lan Wangji the Horny Kindle Grip.

This is a man who has not only jerked it to the miniseries (perfectly understandable), but also, in a particularly weak moment, to the PDF. He’s gone out in the Halestorm, you know?

MXTX does something interesting in both SVSSS and MDZS with love and criticism.

Shen Yuan is ultimately PIDW’s ‘best fan’. He transmigrates because he’s necessary to the successful realisation of the story, because his mode of black powder fandom is reliant on loving that story (or at least its characters and the world, if not the plot) and wanting it to be better. Shen Yuan's fixation on details, which surpasses Airplane’s creative, mechanical approach to making pulp fiction (which, after all, has always served a different purpose: Airplane has not had leisure to love his work), is about remembering and holding a mirror to the text to ensure its self-consistency. Shen Yuan’s ability to creatively interpret based on knowledge of characters comes through at the end of the novel (after he emerges from years, or even decades, of reality-obscuring denial predicated on his personal issues) in his successful reading of why exactly Binghe was angry about their separation during the temple confrontation with the cultivation world and, still more importantly, his logical reasoning regarding the death of Su Xiyan. Shen Qingqiu reading Binghe and wanting the best from him is very tied to these frameworks of criticism and appreciation.

From the Skinner arc, where he relied entirely on a mechanical easy mode, genre-savvy and exploitation of the nature of his predicament as a transmigrator, Shen Yuan has grown into someone capable of much more advanced detective work based on reading this world as real, employing a Watsonian rather than Doylist approach. SVSSS sometimes ‘punishes’ Shen Yuan for a hateration predicated on his not engaging with the material realities of publishing, which have governed what readers want from this text and thus some of the things he finds most frustrating about it (in being granted Shen Yuan's PoV, MXTX affords the SVSSS reader the pleasure of being a 'good' critic). But Shen Yuan is also co-recognised with Airplane, by virtue of their shared transmigration, as an essential part of the ‘solution’ of the Case of PIDW/Luo Binghe. No work exists without being read, and further, no work can be ‘great’ without being in some fashion loved.

If we look at MDZS’s model of demonic cultivation as hubris (and functionally, as something similar to SVSSS’s Xin Mo (which is itself, in a different sense, similar to Shen Yuan's system)), it becomes important that Lan Wangji was the one person critical of the practice when he and Wei Wuxian were at the height of their child-soldiering. His criticism is founded on both the blasphemy of the acts and the danger they pose to Wei Wuxian and others. Wei Wuxian later acknowledges the value of Lan Wangji’s consistent concern, though it manifests in Lan Wangji's seemingly contradictory or paradoxical commitment to standing against Wei Wuxian when the world praises him and with him when the world despises him. This criticism is realised quite differently in the fairly divergent moral paradigms of MDZS and CQL: MDZS’s Lan Wangji is ultimately interested in protecting and supporting Wei Wuxian, right or wrong, whereas it’s ultimately important to CQL's Lan Wangji that Wei Wuxian (stripped of the hubris arc, for reasons I’d like to discuss more in a comparison of the mechanics of the texts) is right. CQL's Wei Wuxian reframes his Lan Wangji’s sense of justice, coming to serve as Lan Wangji's moral arbiter outside of any established code or consensus. In fact if anything, in shifting the story's second-act focus from demonic cultivation to a refugee crisis, CQL shifts the criticism function of the romantic relationship to Wei Wuxian.

Both texts present models of love as criticism, wherein a lover will push their partner towards becoming their 'best self' (or at least towards making healthier choices for themselves and those around them). This criticism also involves a more structural/meta resistance to the impetus of Watsonian social forces and/or Doylist plot or market imperatives.

(NOTE: I've seen and read everything mentioned but I've only partly read a bad translation of MDZS, so I can't swear outright to my conclusions on those points.)

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.

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Entries tagged with svsss

SVSSS FICS VII

SVSSS FICS VI

SVSSS Fics V

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SVSSS Fics III

SVSSS FICS II

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

WIP Wednesday: Coraline

Shen Qingqiu's Competencies

Original Bads: Shen Jiu's Whole Deal

Old Palace Master Meta

WIP Wednesday: Gender Swap 3-Styles

WIP Wednesday

Fic: Without a Clue

Liu Qingge and Shen Jiu

WIP Wednesday

Ch-ch-ch-changes!: Body-Swapping in MXTX's SVSSS, MDZS and their Adaptations

Lan Wangji Likes North and South More than is Reasonable

Taking You Apart: Narrative, the Love Object and Reading in MXTX

SVSSS thoughts: Shen Yuan and Class

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