some The Untamed fic and vid recs, mostly Jiang Cheng centric

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The Goosekeeper Game, Nie Huaisang/Jiang Cheng in a noir AU, interactive fiction. I've never read interactive fiction fanfic before, and it is really interesting. I've seen so many different takes on Jiang Cheng in the fandom and in this game you get to pick your take: how consumed by guilt vs. obsessed with revenge do you think he is? How intellectually honest? How willing to repress his memories? To accept responsibility for his actions? I've gotten four out of the six endings and in each of them he finds a different way forward, but there's no uncomplicatedly happy ending. Which is I think true to the spirit of canon.

A Myth of Devotion. Wei Wuxian/Jiang Cheng, E, very many warnings. Yiling Patriarch!WWX takes Jiang Cheng with him to the burial mounds in a nonconsensual way, terrible things happen, for some reason I keep rereading this because I like to suffer.

everyone lives (and that's all I ever wanted). Mostly Jiang Cheng being mad about the golden core transfer, in an AU in which more people live. I really enjoyed the background JYL/NHS, I think they'd be great together.

Maybe In Another Ferry Purple Parallel World, I Deserve You. Instead of dying, Wei Wuxian dimension-hops to find a universe in which he and Jiang Cheng can get along. Sad but hopeful, JC/WWX shippy.

School Daze. Nie Huaisang/everyone but Jiang Cheng in particular. E, very porny. I enjoyed this take on young!NHS and how he's frivolous and savvy at once.

vids:

children's work, Nie Huaisang & Nie Mingjue. Uses a lot of material from the Fatal Journey spinoff movie, which I liked a lot and has great character moments for them.

Hard to Love, Jiang Cheng & Jin Ling, which somehow turned out to be one of my favorite relationships of the show, and this is a good vid for crying about it.

Be as You Are, Jiang Cheng gen, but I especially liked it for the very positive take on his relationship with his mother.

Wait for it, Jiang Cheng & Wei Wuxian and a painfully relevant song. I've been watching this one over and over.

Comments

[scytale]

I watched "children's work" because it's one of my favorite songs, and even without all the context it's heartbreaking. :( I love the clip choices (especially fro "and if I kept quiet/I could hear all the voices in your head" ;_;)

And interactive fiction fanfic with different endings sounds very cool! :D

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I've heard of interactive fanfics before but this is my first time reading one, so I'm not sure if they are all this clever or if it's particularly this one, but it's a hugely interesting way to write fanfic about a divisive character.

Nie Huaisang and Nie Mingjue are such interesting characters, but Nie Huaisang in particular it's hard to explain too much without major spoilers. But basically, they are heirs to a sect where their cultivation method will kill you young but makes you extremely strong. Nie Mingjue uses it and is the strongest fighter in the show, Nie Huaisang pretty much refuses. It takes until pretty much the last episode until you find out what Nie Huaisang is doing instead. Also, despite their differences over this (and other things) they love each other a lot, in ways that greatly impact the plot of the show.

[scytale]

Oh! Thank you for the explanation! That changes the meaning of the wistfulness around growing up and the lines about "I learned to paint my face / to clean my kill". I love the way it reinterprets the song.

Their relationship sounds very sad and very good.

...And also I think I've misosmosed The Untamed, I thought it was all about Flute Necromancer Guy, Guy in White Who Speaks in Very Formal Archaic, and Jiang Cheng. I didn't realize that there were more sects involved!

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Yeah, it's a very well done and very fascinating relationship and also very sad. Nie Mingjue has a decisive role in winning the war but you see what it does to him, and you also see what it does to Nie Huaisang to choose not to fight the way his brother does.

I'm really not surprised that The Untamed is such a huge fandom, it has a lot of very interesting characters and relationships, and most of them can be interpreted in different ways. So it's possible to find more or less whatever character and relationship tropes interest you. A lot of the characters have complex story arcs and you can see how very many of them could have the story told from their perspective and it would be a very different (but still very good) story.

But yeah, there are four main sects (not counting necromancy and wandering cultivators) and there are very interesting characters in all of them. If you want to get a sense of how big the world is, you can poke around the wiki:
https://modao-zushi.fandom.com/wiki/Grandmaster_of_Demonic_Cultivation_Wiki

The relationship between flute-playing necromancer and his stoic monk boyfriend is nicely done, but there's so much else going on that interests me more so I haven't really focused on it.

ETA: Here's another Nie brothers vid that I like a lot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZQBkmnH_Oc

[scytale]

Oh, thank you for the explanation and the second rec!

The video gave me chills.. Nie Mingjue seems like a very tragic character in that video -- I keep getting the feeling of someone who is so devoted to some ideal (his sect? honor?) that he ends up hurting himself and a bunch of other people along the way.

I haven't been watching anything for a while, but this sounds like a good next show for when I get back to watching things.

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Nie Mingjue is the general who leads the Sunshot Campaign to stop the Wens who are on a killing rampage. (They'd just killed most of Jiang Cheng's and Wei Wuxian's family and destroyed Lan Wangji's home.) So he definitely uses his fighting powers for good, but it still does the damage it does. Meanwhile Nie Huaisang doesn't fight in the Sunshot Campaign at all, but he also ends up damaged in a different way. Nie Mingjue reminds me a lot of Hakouoki and the way being a warrior eats the characters up from the inside, but Nie Huaisang doesn't get to opt out of wartime trauma either just because he chooses not to be a fighter.

If you're not into tv there's also the novel, but I keep being thrown out of the novel because Jiang Cheng is so much more of an asshole in it.