fics! (mostly by other people, one by me)
Jan. 22nd, 2021 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waterscrollGuardian
glymr is writing the post-canon Ye Zun slow-burn fixit of my dreams, in which he very slowly learns to live in the world and eat things other than people. It's going in a Ye Zun/Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan direction but it's going to be a long journey. Third Time Pays for All. WIP.
china_shop wrote a phenomenal early-season casefic with a heartwrenching pair of sisters from different worlds. This isn't a premise I've seen before and I love it. Won't Be Falling.
starandrea wrote a lovely subversion of the arranged marriage trope for Ye Zun and Zhao Yunlan, Fire, Rain, Reasons to Choose, and also a very nice Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan fixit in Dixing, Infinite Staircase.
extrapenguin wrote an extremely fun Ye Zun/Zhao Yunlan AU, in which Zhao Yunlan finds Ye Zun before Shen Wei, and they live happily ever after with lots of food. In Two Nights and a Day.
The Untamed
The Immortal Wen Qing by Nillegible. A Wen Qing Lives AU with a fantastic premise and an excellent use of the self-fulfilling prophecy trope. No pairings.
on the verge of surpassing by jelendra. Lan Xichen/Jin Guangyao. One reason I love this pairing is that it makes Lan Xichen potentially a lot more morally ambiguous than he looks, and this fic uses his dreams to push him to the breaking point to see what he might be willing to do for love.
Nothing in Return by Rurtle. Post-canon, Wei Wuxian's relationship with Lan Wangji falls apart and Wei Wuxian is stuck in regrets and pining over Jiang Cheng. The author promises a WWX/JC happy ending but for now they're barely talking and the WWX angst is beautifully angsty. WIP.
The disappearance of Jiang Wanyin by koburi. Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji or Jiang Cheng/Lan Wangji, depending on how you look at it. After Wei Wuxian's death, his golden core starts to take over Jiang Cheng. Lan Wangji is into it. I had a much more optimistic interpretation of the fic than the author did, but I thought it was a beautifully creative take on the consequences of Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng trying so hard to die for each other.
the beast that slumbers within your soul by Cross_d_a. Baoshan Sanren & Jiang Cheng in an AU in which she really does find him on that mountain. Has some great and beautifully epic Baoshan Sanren/Lan Yi backstory. WIP.
And a thing I wrote:
Second Disciple, the story of the rebuilding of Yunmeng Jiang, and of its Sect Leader and First Disciple, as told by a disciple who used to be a merchant of purple cloth. Vaguely JC/WWX shippy, may be more so in the second chapter. WIP.
I keep thinking about how JC goes offscreen for three months after losing everything and comes back with a very loyal group of new disciples. And then they fight in the Sunshot campaign and are killed in large numbers, and then there are *still* enough of them to restart the sect when the war is over. Obviously there are other ways it could have gone from what I went with here, JC could've gotten help from his Meishan Yu aunties, or even from the Jins, or there could be more disciples who survived. But I liked the idea of him more or less collecting people from the marketplace, who followed him for reasons of their own. In canon it can be hard to take JC's moral responsibilities to his disciples seriously, since we don't ever get to know them as people, so I thought it would be interesting to write the perspective of one of them.
It's obviously a biased perspective, the narrator is extremely loyal to JC and there are things she doesn't know, for example about the Wen refugees. But I think that's typical of the canon, people have better knowledge of their own suffering than that of others and make decisions accordingly, and the story looks very different depending on the person telling it.
I have very mixed feelings about this story, and some anxiety about writing in this particular fandom, so it may be some time until I write the second half. Or not, if I get inspiration. I didn't think I was going to write in this fandom at all, but my Jiang Cheng related feelings keep getting to me.
glymr is writing the post-canon Ye Zun slow-burn fixit of my dreams, in which he very slowly learns to live in the world and eat things other than people. It's going in a Ye Zun/Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan direction but it's going to be a long journey. Third Time Pays for All. WIP.china_shop wrote a phenomenal early-season casefic with a heartwrenching pair of sisters from different worlds. This isn't a premise I've seen before and I love it. Won't Be Falling.starandrea wrote a lovely subversion of the arranged marriage trope for Ye Zun and Zhao Yunlan, Fire, Rain, Reasons to Choose, and also a very nice Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan fixit in Dixing, Infinite Staircase.extrapenguin wrote an extremely fun Ye Zun/Zhao Yunlan AU, in which Zhao Yunlan finds Ye Zun before Shen Wei, and they live happily ever after with lots of food. In Two Nights and a Day.The Untamed
The Immortal Wen Qing by Nillegible. A Wen Qing Lives AU with a fantastic premise and an excellent use of the self-fulfilling prophecy trope. No pairings.
on the verge of surpassing by jelendra. Lan Xichen/Jin Guangyao. One reason I love this pairing is that it makes Lan Xichen potentially a lot more morally ambiguous than he looks, and this fic uses his dreams to push him to the breaking point to see what he might be willing to do for love.
Nothing in Return by Rurtle. Post-canon, Wei Wuxian's relationship with Lan Wangji falls apart and Wei Wuxian is stuck in regrets and pining over Jiang Cheng. The author promises a WWX/JC happy ending but for now they're barely talking and the WWX angst is beautifully angsty. WIP.
The disappearance of Jiang Wanyin by koburi. Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji or Jiang Cheng/Lan Wangji, depending on how you look at it. After Wei Wuxian's death, his golden core starts to take over Jiang Cheng. Lan Wangji is into it. I had a much more optimistic interpretation of the fic than the author did, but I thought it was a beautifully creative take on the consequences of Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng trying so hard to die for each other.
the beast that slumbers within your soul by Cross_d_a. Baoshan Sanren & Jiang Cheng in an AU in which she really does find him on that mountain. Has some great and beautifully epic Baoshan Sanren/Lan Yi backstory. WIP.
And a thing I wrote:
Second Disciple, the story of the rebuilding of Yunmeng Jiang, and of its Sect Leader and First Disciple, as told by a disciple who used to be a merchant of purple cloth. Vaguely JC/WWX shippy, may be more so in the second chapter. WIP.
I keep thinking about how JC goes offscreen for three months after losing everything and comes back with a very loyal group of new disciples. And then they fight in the Sunshot campaign and are killed in large numbers, and then there are *still* enough of them to restart the sect when the war is over. Obviously there are other ways it could have gone from what I went with here, JC could've gotten help from his Meishan Yu aunties, or even from the Jins, or there could be more disciples who survived. But I liked the idea of him more or less collecting people from the marketplace, who followed him for reasons of their own. In canon it can be hard to take JC's moral responsibilities to his disciples seriously, since we don't ever get to know them as people, so I thought it would be interesting to write the perspective of one of them.
It's obviously a biased perspective, the narrator is extremely loyal to JC and there are things she doesn't know, for example about the Wen refugees. But I think that's typical of the canon, people have better knowledge of their own suffering than that of others and make decisions accordingly, and the story looks very different depending on the person telling it.
I have very mixed feelings about this story, and some anxiety about writing in this particular fandom, so it may be some time until I write the second half. Or not, if I get inspiration. I didn't think I was going to write in this fandom at all, but my Jiang Cheng related feelings keep getting to me.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-22 06:15 pm (UTC)But I think that's typical of the canon, people have better knowledge of their own suffering than that of others and make decisions accordingly, and the story looks very different depending on the person telling it.
Yes, and the way the story elevates loyalty to one's own sect.
If you don't mind sharing, I'd be curious to know what your mixed feelings about the story are. Does it have to do with the bias and unreliable narrator?
no subject
Date: 2021-01-22 07:20 pm (UTC)Mostly that I am doing substantial worldbuilding outside of what we see in canon, although I'm trying to be as vague as possible about as much as possible, I'm still worried that I don't understand the genre or cultural context well enough to do this kind of worldbuilding without making an ass of myself. Is what I wrote a plausible way of rebuilding a sect? Could a new sect member think about herself the way that this narrator does? Does it even make sense for her to continue to identify with her family's trade after becoming a cultivator? Were there even merchants who specialized in purple? I don't know, and I might be writing something very wrongheaded. I felt the same way about the couple of paragraphs about sect rebuilding in the other fic.
(I feel like the usual way to deal with this for writers who aren't genre-savvy is by writing modern AUs, or by focusing just on what we see directly, but my strongest feeling about Jiang Cheng is a desire to fill in the gaps in his story, and in particular his role as sect leader, so that's what I feel most driven to write.)
I found myself getting annoyed with the narrator sometimes for not knowing or thinking about anything or anyone outside the Jiangs, but I think she's not unusual that way, and would have to have a strong sense of Jiang identity in order to go through those battles as a newbie and still stay with the Jiangs to the end. But I think she's the right narrator for the point of the story, which is that Wei Wuxian isn't the only one to be willing to sacrifice everything for Jiang Cheng and his dreams, and from the point of view of these Jiang disciples Jiang Cheng's ongoing loyalty and love for Wei Wuxian might look like a betrayal of what they were willing to sacrifice. The plan for the second chapter was to have her come to terms with Jiang Cheng's ongoing feelings for Wei Wuxian after Wei Wuxian's return.
ETA: Oh and about the recs, I don't think any of them have spoilers beyond where you are now except for Nothing in Return, which is post-canon. But you might want to stay away from the LXC/JGY one as well, it doesn't technically have spoilers but I think it relies on knowledge of what happens in that relationship past where you are.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-23 12:28 am (UTC)2 - And also the other recs! ♥.♥ I found "The Disappearance of Jiang Wanyin" so thought-provoking I checked to see if the author had a transformative works statement that allowed remixes or sequels (no). What a concept!
3 - I also feel hesitation re: world-building for a world based on a culture, history, and community I'm not a part of. (The book "Writing the Other" was recommended to me multiple times at the Arisia sci fi and fantasy con this past weekend. I haven't checked it out yet, but it sounds potentially helpful.)
Edited for poor organization!
no subject
Date: 2021-01-24 02:56 am (UTC)Yeah, I found that fic fascinating. It doesn't seem to have attracted as many readers as I think it deserves, so thank you for promoting it.
Glad you liked the recs! And thank you for the book rec.