Binghe Fights Sqh And He Gives No Indication At Being Powerful Or With Martial Ability. He Realises His

It’s about a month after their cosmic eldritch horror equivalent of a wedding that Hob finds out Dream has taken his name.

Of all places it’s in the New Inn the first time he notices.

“Coffee for you, professor, and a pack of sunflower seeds for you, Mr Gadling,” says the waitress.

Hob frowns.

“Sunflower seeds? I don’t think I-”

“I did,” Dream says, taking the package from the waitress to pocket it away. “Matthew’s become fond of it as of late,” he adds as an explanation.

“So that’s where half my trail mix disappeared,” Hob chuckles, giving a smile and an appreciative nod to the waitress before she left. It still takes Hob two more minutes for realization to dawn on him. “Wait did she just call you ‘Mr Gadling’?”

Dream stays suspiciously silent.

“And here I thought after ten years spending here the better half of my week they’d remember my face,” Hob muses.

“She does know your face,” Dream says, his lips pressed together tight.

“Then why— oh.” Hob’s eyebrows raise nearly to his hairline. And here he thought getting used to being called ‘your highness’ would be the strangest part of his marriage nomenclature-wise.

“It’s my name by the right of our union,” Dream says defensively. “Nonetheless if you’d rather not have humans call me that name-”

“No, no it’s fine,” Hob says (‘more than fine, actually’ a part of him thinks that forever stays that highwayman, unrepentantly greedy, who called Death a fool). “That is, if you don’t mind,” he adds (because in five hundred years he did have character growth).

“I don’t,” Dream says and that would be it.

Except now Hob starts noticing it everywhere.

The colleague asking him during a break how the new Mr Gadling fares, the little old lady from his neighborhood bringing some cookies for Mr Gadling because ‘he’s thin like a waif, the poor sweetheart’, even the postman delivering an ancient scroll ‘for Mr Gadling, he’s your husband, professor, isn’t he? Congratulations again, sir.’.

Eventually, it’s the incident with Mervyn that makes Hob snap.

“Um, Mr Gadling,” he says, making both Hob and Dream turn towards him. “That is you, Lord Morpheus, not you, professor. Lucienne wants to have a word with you if you have a minute to spare, your majesty.”

“Tell her I shall join her soon in the library,” Dream says, popping a joint into place with a gesture of his hand on a half formed creation Hob suspects will be a nightmare.

“Does it not bother you?” Hob asks once Mervyn left their quarters, a place that looked exactly like Hob’s flat except for the balcony that overlooked the sea (he found he did miss that sometime in his waking hours).

“A great number of things bother me. You need to be more specific, husband,” Dream says.

Hob huffs with fond exasperation.

“That they call you by my name.”

Dream’s dark eyebrows are knitted with confusion.

“Whyever would that bother me? You are mine and I am yours, after all, mind, body and soul. It’s only fitting my name to reflect that.”

“But- but you’re a king! A god!”

“I’m not a god, I’m Endless,” Dream interjects.

“Semantics,” Hob waves dismissively.

At that Dream turns towards Hob bodily, his eyes, preternaturally bright, intent on him.

“Semantics parse meaning of the universe. Words hold power, Hob Gadling, more than dreamt of in your philosophy. Never make the mistake of dismissing their significance.”

“I wouldn’t,” Hob counters, crossing his arms on his chest. “You, on the other hand, seem rather liberal in that respect as of late.”

Dream only raises an eyebrow and takes a single step towards Hob, feline, graceful and positively predatory.

“In what sense?” he asks, the depth of his voice sending a thrill down Hob’s spine (Hob’s a simple man and his husband is gorgeous, he can’t help it, even after such long time).

Hob gulps, his adam’s apple bobbing.

“You’re a king. You’re Endless. And yet you don’t mind everyone knowing you by a simple commoner’s name.”

Dream pouts.

“You are not simple,” he says, defiantly. “And one might say you haven’t been a commoner even before our union, Sir Robert Gadlen.”

Hob winces.

“You’ll never let me live that down, will you?”

“Maybe in another hundred years. Or two,” Dream amends, a smile curling on his lips and suddenly he’s standing close, so close Hob could count his lashes. “Through centuries I’ve been called many names. I am Dream by my nature, a King by virtue of my lineage and I was worshipped by many names humans created for me. But I am your husband, Robert Gadling by my choice only. I chose you and you chose me. If words and names define a man I’d rather let my affection for you define me than anything else in this vast universe.”

Hob stays silent for a while, his throat too tight to utter as much as a single word.

“Very well, Mr Gadling,” he rasps eventually and though words have never been Hob’s strength, judging by his husband’s smile he understands - after all, he knows Hob’s heart, he knows his dreams. “Lucky that I’m a professor, isn’t it?” Hob clears his throat and rubs his eye (something must have gotten into it). “Would be all terribly confusing if both of us were good ol’ simple ‘Mr Gadling’, right?”

Featherlight, Dream presses a kiss to his husband’s brow.

“It would be indeed,” he murmurs in Hob’s ear. “Lucky that I married up.”

Hob shakes with laughter.

Lucienne, ever sensible, knocks three hours later on the door leading to the royal quarters.

On the fifth knock Dream swans out in Hob’s tartan print house robe, his lips swollen red and his hair disheveled.

“Apologies for disturbing you sir in your— extracurriculars,” Lucien says dryly. “But there’s a matter that demands your attention, Lord Morpheus.”

“Mr Gadling.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s Mr Gadling now, Lucienne,” Dream says, fixing the sash on the robe.

Lucienne suppresses a smile and gives him a subservient bow.

“Of course it is.”

What the fuck one of you 6 just liked a post I made I thought you lot were bots and I was safe doing whatever on this account.

Why what where. how. How did you find me. who r u.....

Uploaded this one to twitter yesterday now its here because i can

Hello....just want to say thank you so much for your posts, especially, about SVSSS....Can I tell you something? I just started reading MXTX works last year, and since then, start searching many meta analytical posts about them....And most of them favored MDZS and in second place TGCF.... Not many of them made SVSSS their no #1 favorite....And then I found your tumblr.....

Thanks so much for sharing your writings, they're amzing....💐🥰🤩

Can I ask your opinion on something? One of the person (that I found) who also loves SVSSS, said that they hate SV Binghe because he seems more "pathetic" compared to PIDW Binghe (which they loved)? They said, SV Binghe seems more whinny and childish, etc....I don't really agree but don't know how to said that....

Wat do you think about that thought above? Is there still a bit PIDW Binghe inside the SV Binghe?

Also do you agree that Tianlang Jun and Zhuzhi Lang are a few of the best villain characters from MXTX works?

Sorry for this super long ask, and kinda stupid questions from me at the end....

svsss supremacy yeah scum villain truly is the neglected eldest child… but there are a bunch of really great blogs here that post primarily scum villain content! @/piosplayhouse has an ask with a collection of links on their page with art, fic, meta, etc. from various folks and it’s a really great resource to check out some of the amazing creators in our little corner here :)

so, here’s the thing about comparing sv!luo binghe vs pidw!luo binghe. i think they have one major difference, and it’s rooted in how they express their anger and dissatisfaction with the world.

pidw!binghe, after being pushed into the abyss by shen qingqiu, learns to externalise all his anger. think, “the world has never shown me any kindness and therefore the world itself is fundamentally flawed, in order to survive i must take what i am owed,” in the sense of strength and power and influence. pidw!luo binghe becomes saintly ruler and demon emperor because it’s his way of exacting revenge, because he thinks that it’s the world’s penance to him after putting him through so much suffering for so long. there’s no end goal in it—no shizun to win back, no peaceful disciple days to return to—and so he becomes this bottomless well of want and anger, which exacerbates the problem. “any slight will be repaid a hundredfold,” indeed, because he’s never experienced satisfaction, and will never know when to stop. his want is aimless and cold and destructive, without direction to temper it. what is there to be sticky to when he doesn’t want anything directly?

scum villain luo binghe, who received three years of kindness from the man who later on pushed him into the endless abyss, learns this from it: “there is something fundamentally wrong with me, therefore i must make the world my own to become better, to justify my existence, to regain even a glimpse of that kindness i received.” any time we see luo binghe’s anger, it’s predominantly internalised—he hates himself so deeply because even when he received kindness, there was something to take it away. he interprets the common theme in these losses to be himself, his own faults and failings as a living being. but he only wants one thing, and he wants it so desperately that it nearly eats him alive. in some ways, he’s pathetic and sticky because of this—he knows exactly what he wants, and that he’ll do anything to get it, and once he has it he won’t feel the need to go out and get more power or influence. so long as luo binghe has shen qingqiu at his side, the rest of the world can go fuck itself. it was all only ever a way of increasing his value in shen qingqiu’s eyes, to make him regret tossing luo binghe aside and take him back.

but pidw!binghe and sv!binghe share the dna of their personalities otherwise—powerful, decisive, unhinged, manipulative blackened protagonists with generally questionable methods of getting what it is they want or need. both binghes are capable of human stick-ifying someone. both binghes learn to view the world as strictly transactional: nothing ever freely given, only ever earned or taken by force. shen qingqiu is a sacred figure for them both in that he’s pivotal to luo binghe’s worldview, and where his anger is aimed to cut. internal, external. himself, the entire world. and, i would say, both binghes are sticky and pathetic—he was, after all, originally written by shang qinghua as a thinly veiled fantasy proxy of himself, and shang qinghua is notoriously both sticky and pathetic. you can make all the arguments you like, but i think something many writers can agree on is the excising of our own traits and implanting them into our characters, seeing those traits get either amplified or frozen over depending on the events that happen to them. pidw!binghe is never safe to be sticky and pathetic, and because of that he never wants anything enough to be that way. sv!binghe was safe and sticky for three years, and so does everything in his power to return to that.

(additionally: there’s an excellent twitter thread posted by @/zykamiliah that really cuts to the heart of luo binghe’s “childish and whiny” behavior and the gist is that it’s an act. it’s an act to make himself palatable enough to love, it’s an act to make shen qingqiu comfortable giving him affection. it’s an act, borne out of traits that he just amplifies because he’s scared he won’t be loveable otherwise.)

all this is to say that there are, of course, so many differences between pidw!binghe and sv!binghe. i know they’re listed out in the bingge vs bingmei extra (which i won’t have until november, sigh), but “sticky and pathetic” is actually a trait i think they share, only it manifests differently based on their experiences, is either amplified to increase his chances of receiving affection or crushed deep into him to ensure he doesn’t lose what he’s taken for himself.

(also you pose an EXCELLENT question regarding tianlang jun and zhuzhi-lang that i really do love but this is so long already so i’ll answer that in another post and link this one)

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

HELP!! I transmitigated into my own novel and developed Complex Feelings for the SCUM VILLIAN!!! 

“What do you mean he’s faking it? Geralt gets headaches, you should know! Lambert, he’s your brother!”

“Oh, believe me, I know my brother, Buttercup. Pretty boy has you wrapped around his finger. He’s just pretending so you’d be like…this. All touchy-feely and cuddly.”

The air shifts when Lambert must be gesturing wildly at Jaskier and Geralt’s general direction, where the witcher is resting his head on the bard’s thigh. The argument is muffled by the hand Jaskier presses on Geralt’s ear protectively.

It’s too comfortable to move, with Jaskier’s lap as the pillow and his doublet draped over Geralt’s shoulder. The fainting couch he’s lying on practically becomes a cocoon—one that is warm and nice and made from a bard’s love, but Geralt can only get it if he has a headache. Which he conveniently does, recently.

So Geralt duly keeps his eyes closed. He’s supposed to be resting for the pain, after all.

“His senses are heightened,” Jaskier protects, his voice low and careful. “You’ve seen him get overwhelmed by all the smells and noises. Don’t you at least have sympathy for a fellow witcher?”

“My senses are heightened too, and I can tell he’s a shit actor. He’s not even asleep!”

“Shh!” The hand that covers Geralt’s ear tightens. “You’re going to wake him!”

“Ugh, how do I tell you this, you can’t wake someone pretending!”

“Get out.”

Jaskier’s whisper remains low, but the determination seeps into those two words. Even without looking, Geralt can imagine the frown on the bard’s face easily. Oh, Jaskier is getting angry.

“You are not listening, he’s—"

“Out, Lambert.”

Properly angry. Even the younger wolf does not have a retort for the finality in Jaskier’s order. With a few muttered curses about gullible bards, Lambert’s footsteps retreat into the hallway. A door slams shut behind him, and Jaskier flinches even though it’s far away.

Geralt hums unhappily at how much Jaskier has tensed, so he hugs the thighs under his head closer. Gentle hands fuss all over him, tucking in the corners of the doublet and stroking his arm, shoulder, hair. He’s so toasty he could melt right here.

A good person would never take advantage of Jaskier’s affections like this, Geralt knows. Shame he’s not a good person.

Now he can bask in the presence of his bard without interruption. Geralt keeps his face neutral and relaxed, but the triumph makes him almost giddy at the knowledge that Jaskier will take his side every time—

“You know I know, right?”

Jaskier’s whisper comes from above, still soft and gentle and full of love. And perhaps, a hint of amusement.

Geralt freezes like a statue. His breathing stops for a long, long time. It’s a good thing witchers don’t need to breathe that much; it’s bad that his face is also heating up rather quickly in the process.

“Alright, then,” Jaskier says after a moment. His deft fingers trace Geralt’s jawline and give it a little pat. “Sleep tight, witcher mine.”

There is the sound of fabric rustling when Jaskier tries to find a good place to rest his head on the fainting couch. His snores come soon after.

Geralt blinks open his eyes after a while, not daring to move a muscle with Jaskier under him, still a vital part of the nice cocoon. Gradually, the toastiness is bordering on being too hot. He wonders if he’s able to panic while staying completely still, because it certainly fucking feels like it. There’s even sweat on his forehead now.

He does end up developing a headache, and it’s probably well-deserved.

Lambert must never find out.

does jiang cheng have a choice?

antis hate Jiang Cheng for ‘abandoning’ Wei Wuxian, but did he realistically have any other options available? 

for my money, the non-negotiable goals for Jiang Cheng in this situation are

keep Wei Wuxian alive and not in the custody of another clan

ease the pressure from the other clans to take responsibility for/act against Wei Wuxian 

maintain the Jiang clan’s autonomy and standing amongst the clans

and the non-negotiable goals for Wei Wuxian in this situation are

keep Jiang Cheng and the Jiang clan safe, alive, and out of the direct control of other clans (especially the Jin) 

undermine Jiang Cheng’s authority as clan leader as little as possible 

keep the Wen safe, alive, and free (ish– at least as free as they are now) 

continue trying to save Wen Ning/keep him ‘alive’ once he’s revived 

do not reveal to anyone that he has lost his golden core 

do not give anyone the Yin Tiger Tally 

Wei Wuxian returning to the Jiang is off the table because he won’t leave the Wen. Wei Wuxian AND the Wen somehow coming into the custody of the Jiang isn’t possible because Jiang Cheng doesn’t have that much clout, and it’s hard to believe that Wei Wuxian would accept a situation that would necessarily have to look a lot like imprisonment for the Wen if the other clans were going to accept it. so already, the only way for Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian to both achieve some of their key goals is for Wei Wuxian to stay in the Burial Mounds with the Wen somehow– which means the only goals remaining to both of them are ensuring that the Jiang clan doesn’t get punished for that, or placed in a situation where they’re forced to act violently against Wei Wuxian/the Burial Mounds/the Wen (and yes, obviously it comes to that eventually anyway, but a lot changes first). and canon is explicitly clear that the other clans are absolutely not about to let the Jiang off the hook for what Wei Wuxian is doing. they want and need him to turn on Wei Wuxian, and if he won’t, they don’t really care about dragging this decimated, teenager-led clan down with Wei Wuxian. 

the Jiang clan has nothing at this point, barely even a home. even if the other clans were open to reaching a compromise in terms of the Wei Wuxian situation, who on earth is going to believe him if he says, I’ve got the Wei Wuxian situation handled, I’m going to leave him in the Burial Mounds and keep an eye on him, he’s my problem not yours? 

and that’s the final, essential element– Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian are not in a fair fight. the other clans are actively pushing them towards conflict, and won’t accept any outcome besides a complete break, or a complete capitulation by Wei Wuxian. 

maybe I’m just not feeling creative today, but I genuinely can’t come up with a single other solution beyond the one that the two of them find and implement in canon– a fake schism and staged fight. 

still thinking about that one Little Prince quote -- you are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed -- and about bingqiu.

Shen Jiu thought (paraphrased) that he could abuse Luo Binghe at will and not face any consequences for it. he found out in A Big Way that he was wrong. but at the same time, Shen Yuan made the same mistake in the opposite direction. he thought he could love Luo Binghe the way he wanted to love him -- to protect him, spoil him, treat him kindly, the way he always wanted Luo Binghe to be treated and never was in the canon -- and then, when the time came, simply sever that relationship. pretend it had never existed. both in his assumption that the story would continue on its canon track (it didn't,) and in his forming of the backup mushroom bodies (fake his death and leave, forever, and let things end there.)

and he also found out in A Big Way that he was wrong!

Happy new year!!! This was supposed to be for Christmas but life got in the way.. Wishing everyone a year of growth and happiness for 2023!