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TGCF + tfln part 2 [part 1]

Now with 100% more bullshittery

Excalibah by bleedman

Also I talk a lot about how embarrassing it is to be in angry love with Wei Wuxian, but when they first have to recite the Wen laws, and he activities little shit mode to be like “I’ll read the Wen laws :)” and then recites the precepts of the Lan Clan—if I was Lan Wangji coming fresh off my clan’s recent massacre, I’d also be so so so in love with him. That’s sexy and deeply romantic on both a personal and a geopolitical level. That’s the best kind of complex and sexy. I’m actually insane about this relationship. We say this a lot on this ole website but biting and biting and ripping and tearing for real, dude, for real.

SeriRei Week 2020 extremely late day 2: touch

sfkdghksjlf I have dumb bitch disease, I thought I already posted this. I’m not going to do all of the prompts but uhhhhh I can’t NOT draw at least some of them

also I FINALLY found a website with some good free textures and now I’m going to use them for everything

You know what I can't get enough of? Speculation about what the fictional novel Proud Immortal Demon Way says about its fictional author. Because it would be completely possible to make a story like this without that connection. I'm not sure I've read any other transmigration story where the author was a character, so just that addition adds a lot of interesting texture to the situation even without getting deep in the author's head, but it's so interesting how deep I can speculate in so many directions if I think about getting in his head.

And oh man, I could talk for AGES about how Shang Qinghua and his iconic protagonist reflect each other, but a lot of people have written about that already! Including in the medium of fic, which is my favorite way to consume that kind of crunch. So let's talk about familial neglect and mistreatment and the author's favorite character.

Honestly, when I look at how iconic this ship is, I'm astonished there aren't more hit novels where the author gets yeeted into their own book and has to navigate platonic or romantic relationships with their own characters. A lot of the parallels between Shang Qinghua and Luo Binghe are about them being alike in ugly and vulnerable ways, ways I don't think either of them likes about themselves, and regarding aspects of their personalities that I don't think they'd be happy discussing period. Like, Binghe very much hates himself, that's right there on the page. And Shang Qinghua is a ridiculous character, he's very funny, but he's also not stupid. He's very aware of who he is and what he is, and makes a decision to behave the ways he does. I'm typing this up because I was scrolling through an old chat looking for something and tripped across a conversation about shang qinghua and fawn trauma response.

He knows he does this thing! He has an easy opening to turbokill Mobei-jun while he's unconscious and decides to go the route of begging for his life and trying to ingratiate himself after Mobei-jun wakes up instead, which is a much trickier process. He says it himself, that Mobei-jun is his ideal, that he embodies everything Shang Qinghua wants to be, that etc. And that's hilarious and all, especially in light of the eventual romance and the clownery it takes to get there, but in classic svsss fashion, it also becomes a lot sadder when you add up all the pieces and see everything Shang Qinghua hates about himself.

In some ways he's an even more avoidant narrator than Shen Qingqiu, he deflects and jokes like a motherfucker, so it really is a matter of assembling all the pieces and seeing where there are gaps. But what really underscored the connection for me was Mobei-jun's reaction to parental neglect. Because that's what pushed Shang Qinghua into being an author in the first place, his parents divorced and remarried and kinda just.... forgot about him.

Mobei-jun's dad doesn't exactly do that, but he is operating without a mom in the picture, and rather than remarrying, he just chooses to ignore the thing where his shitty brother is persistently trying to kill his son. That really sucks! But Mobei-jun never shows the smallest hint of weakness or vulnerability over this, even when it would have really helped to use his words, like 'hi my uncle is coming to kill me and i trust you to protect me.' He's everything cool, aloof, arrogant, proud, all a bunch of adjectives that really do not apply to Shang Qinghua. Mobei-jun honestly looks like a boring character if you just stick to the main story, because he's so self-contained and controlled. Compare and contrast to Shang Qinghua, who accidentally outs himself as a transmigrator like two minutes after showing up and proceeds to be hilarious for the rest of the book.

(Brief aside to say that I don't think Mobei-jun is necessarily a happier or healthier person for all of this, lmao. The conversation that fawn reaction thing came from was talking about freeze (tee hee) versus fawn in response to threats or stressful situations. But that goes along with the svsss theme of people used to engaging with this universe as a fictional property coming to terms with the depth and complexity of other people's emotions and not just seeing them as simplistic not-real characters in a book)

(Additionally, this makes the ship hilarious as a take on 'opposites attract,' but also it gives me actual Emotions that Shang Qinghua's ideal who he wishes he could be, purely incidentally, he is able to value and love Shang Qinghua in a way that Shang Qinghua can't and doesn't seem to totally understand)

And what's very interesting here. Is that Shang Qinghua made these two characters, Luo Binghe and Mobei-jun. His protagonist ultimately reflects a lot of his own vulnerabilities and insecurities (secretly and quietly in pidw, much more.... overtly in svsss), and Mobei-jun corrects for his vulnerabilities and insecurities. He's the person Shang Qinghua wishes he could be, which is basically... the opposite of Shang Qinghua, to an almost comical degree. And he then gives Mobei-jun the VERY BEST plot armor he can devise. It's hard for a male character to exist near a stallion protagonist without getting swept up in rivalries/suspicions/etc and getting killed by the protagonist, but he makes sure that his favorite character is safe from these things. He's protecting the character he wishes he could be from the character whose faults most reflect his own. That is very sweet and weird and sad, and that's very reflective of the svsss experience, I think.

Airplane Bro doodle

june 2020

a force that can’t be heard / coming in louder than words

closeups under the cut

Seguir leyendo

If SVSSS was a AO3 fic it would be very difficult to tag for because, as one example, it doesn't have necrophilia but it does have a guy using a corpse as his emotional support body pillow for 5 years in a tragic display of devotion that makes everyone around him deeply uncomfortable

And there really isn't an adequate tag for that

An old wip :-) I really loved the Pesterquest art from Roxy’s route.