lady-hachimitsu

[lady-hachimitsu]

quite fun to imagine fairy circles less as "trickster gods kidnapping humans from the human realm" and more as "fae scientists capture-tag-and-releasing humans back into the wild, hoping to one day understand the behavior of this bizarre feral gremlin species that keeps getting lost and wandering into the Fae's backyard"

[lady-hachimitsu]

[lady-hachimitsu]

Pays back hurts a thousand times over

Pays back kindness in kind

Obsessively devoted to one person

Who found them when they were nothing

And gave them meaning, a reason to live, and a name

If Qi-ge had successfully broken Shen Jiu out at that night and taken him to Cang Qiong with him Shen Jiu would have been Yue Qingyuan's very own Zhuzhi Lang

One with a bit more of an obvious bite and less apparently subservient

But that scene where Zhuzhi Lang is prepared to cut his own throat on Shen Qingqiu's blade then to be used as a hostage?

A Shen Jiu who was never left behind by Yue Qingyuan absolutely would have done the same

[lady-hachimitsu]

I think one big reason why we don't consider the stars as important as before (not even pop-astrology anymore cares about the stars or the sky on itself, just the signs deprived of context) is because of light pollution.

For most of human history the sky looked between 1-3, 4 at most. And then all of a sudden with electrification it was gone (I'm lucky if I get 6 in my small city). The first time I saw the Milky Way fully as a kid was a spiritual experience, I was almost scared on how BRIGHT it was, it felt like someone was looking back at me. You don't get that at all with modern light pollution.

When most people talk about stargazing nowadays they think about watching about a couple of bright dots. The stars are really, really not like that. The unpolluted night sky is a festival of fireworks. There is nothing like it.

[lady-hachimitsu]

Wait wait wait... if Xie Lian represents the flower and Hua Cheng symbolizes butterflies... and butterflies are drawn to flowers for their nectar, aiding in pollination...

Did everyone know this!? Did everyone realize the symbolism of this, and I was just clueless this whole time!? I was just like, ohh pretty silver butterfly and never considered there was a deeper meaning

[lady-hachimitsu]

Given that MBJ is canonically handsome and arrogant, SQH was a horny teenager during the inn sequence, and the whole dual cultivation = good for improving health and spiritual power thing that might actually be more fanon than canon but is pretty ubiquitous ...I am genuinely surprised there aren't more Moshang first meeting AUs where MBJ 'you are obviously into me and i need to heal, get on'.

[lady-hachimitsu]

Shen Jiu's obvious motivation in telling Yue Qi that his legs are broken are to get YQ to fucking leave already before he gets caught, idiot, but I think it also has a parallels to an interesting behavior in children: when a kid is hurt in a way that they don't understand, find hard to articulate, or they know isn't seen as "bad enough" to cause this level of distress, they will sometimes lie and say that something more obvious and readily pitiable has happened to them to get someone else, usually an adult, to care/understand/sympathize. It's a plea for someone to acknowledge that they're suffering. 

I feel like part of the reason SJ told YQ that is because he needed some way to convey how much he was suffering. On a surface level, SJ is "just" badly beaten and bruised, something that has probably happened to both SJ and YQ before. But ofc that's not all there is to it: QJL dehumanizes SJ and takes obvious joy in his suffering, treating him like a plaything. It's frightening and disquieting in a way that SJ himself probably minimizes or feels weak for being affected by, so how could he possibly tell Yue Qi? How could he explain how bad his life was going to be under QJL's boot? Just telling YQ he was beaten couldn't convey how hurt and scared he was. 

Can't you see I'm in pain, Qi-ge? You can't forget that. You have to hurry.

[lady-hachimitsu]

SV fic where every Cang Qiong peak lord is actually a transmigrator, but such different varieties that Shen Yuan and Airplane are still the only ones who identify one another as such, and they think everyone else is actually the character they represent and everyone else is convinced they're the only transmigrator.

Yue Qingyuan transmigrated into his character's early childhood, but the twist there is that he was a child of a similar age when he transmigrated, and is fully convinced that he had found a magical portal to another world, somehow failed the test of heroism, and is now stuck in a crapsack dystopia that he failed to fix by not being a good enough portal hero. The idea of transmigrators possessing others bodies never occurs to him because he doesn't realize that he himself changed bodies at any point, he just thinks he got a fantasy world makeover that made his hair longer and swapped out his clothes (he was, like, eight years old at the time).

Liu Qingge also transmigrated into his character pretty early on, but in his case he didn't come originally from our world, he came from a wuxia story's world. He was a swordsman and martial artist there, too. He has no notion of any kind of plot or system, he just thinks that he managed to kick enough ass to ascend to the next life and next tier of learning to kick ass, which now involves more flying around and energy blasts and such.

Mu Qingfang is in one of those "doctor from the future goes to an old-timey/magical world and applies advanced knowledge to max out their doctor skills" type stories. He is from our world but from like, the 1920's-ish, and he never read PIDW or any isekai at all. No one ever catches on to him because anything weird he does just seems like Airplane's anachronistic writing or is no more or else inscrutable to the other characters than the rest of his medical knowledge seems to be. He has some suspicions about Shen Qingqiu being a transmigrator like him, but in his own case he gained all of the original Mu Qingfang's memories when he transmigrated so it could also just be amnesia, and he doesn't want to broach the subject if he's wrong. Also he figures it's not necessarily his business, he's just interested because transmigration is a fascinating medical mystery.

Qi Qingqi, on the other hand, had plenty of familiarity with isekai and such as a concept, but she transmigrated as a teenage girl and is pretty sure she's in her own girl's adventure story. But she's desperately trying to avoid any semblance of plot because the girls in those stories always end up married to guys by the end and she's not into dudes. Consequently she's a little worried that some of the troubles embroiling everyone else are a result of her running away to Girl Warrior Peak and not ever meeting like a handsome prince or anything along those lines. It's well after bingqiu becomes a thing that she realizes she's in a danmei instead, and then she's just convinced that she gay'd up the universe (you're welcome) and starts to relax a bit.

And etc, etc, Wei Qingwei and the rest are all living different tropes and angles of a transmigration experience.

[lady-hachimitsu]

Interesting tidbit: I wanted to see if there was a place in the story where Wei Wuxian ever calls Jiang Cheng “shidi,” and there is! When Wei Wuxian is first brought back to Lotus Pier by Jiang Fengmian and is consequently locked out of Jiang Cheng’s room, he refers to Jiang Cheng as “shidi” as he begs to be let in. Jiang Cheng rejects being called this, everything else from that night happens, and Wei Wuxian goes on to only ever refer to Jiang Cheng by name.

Other characters call Jiang Cheng Wei Wuxian’s shidi, but it’s almost in this… derogatory way? Like Jiang Cheng being the shidi was something he needed to overcome by triumphing over Wei Wuxian, and not something he was simply because Wei Wuxian was first disciple. Which is different from when people call Wei Wuxian Jiang Yanli’s shidi, where it is used to neutrally point out the relationship between the two. The most notable examples of this are when Jin Zixun uses it as a means to connect Wei Wuxian’s actions to the Jiang as a whole during the Phoenix Mountain hunt—which Jiang Yanli promptly shuts down by saying that she actually views Wei Wuxian as her didi, instead—and when the narration uses it to explain the genuine affection Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian had for each other. On the other side, Jin Guangyao uses the term shidi to taunt Jiang Cheng during the Guanyin Temple scene to rub it in his face that choosing to betray his martial ties and abandon the affection and loyalty it should have inspired is what led to Jiang Cheng’s current embarrassment.

Anyways, just a random thought. Carry on!

[lady-hachimitsu]

au where shen yuan transmigrated into liu qingge instead and he dedicates his time to training the bai zhan peak kids and spoiling them and taking them on his geek out about monsters trips night hunts to teach them instead of dropping in every 4 months to beat them up and then dip

and system restrictions are less with a ‚paragraph mention‘ character, so he‘s vibing until the shen jiu kills him quest

its like

shen yuan: These are CHILDREN they just need guidance and love and a good education and to have the space to be the best they can be, youre all mean to your disciples- anyways we‘re all going on a research mission to learn about monsters

the other peak lords: who tf is that

[lady-hachimitsu]

[lady-hachimitsu]

it surprises me that the 'gift', the animal that liu qingge brought for shen qingqiu in canon was not, in fact, some sort of hidden beauty (male or female), temporarily transformed into an animal.

i mean, it would fit the theme, right? like that time sqq accidentally seduced zhuzhi-lang. or liu qingge or luo binghe or basically how his super-powered wife beam seduced his entire harem.

i was honestly half expecting the little beast to be a chekhov's gun and one day transform into a fairy/dragon/demon/ancient immortal and sweep shen qingqiu off his feet...

[lady-hachimitsu]

the wildest thing about lan wangji is the way he’s immediately enraged at his own feelings for wei wuxian. because we’ve seen wei wuxian fall in love slowly and surely, right? he goes from a quick interest to an oblivious attraction to liking lan wangji then being infatuated after his return to life, then to straight-up loving the guy intensely. we watch him develop his sexual and romantic attraction equally.

but lan wangji’s different. from the very first second he’s desperately smitten — all it took was one sly smile and he was going through the four stages of love: the desire to marry, kiss, bed and die with him. and he’s so goddamn outraged, because how dare this troublemaker trespass into his house and steal his heart so easily??

he was so conflicted that he didn’t see any other alternative if not to unsheathe his sword and fight the hell out of that idiot. feelings?? for a rebellious teenager?? right in front of my clan’s three thousand rules??? not today, devil.

[lady-hachimitsu]

[lady-hachimitsu]

Writing advice from my uni teachers:

If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.

Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.

Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.

Before you write your novel, write a page of anything from your characters POV so you can get their voice right. Do this for every main character introduced.

[lady-hachimitsu]

In the spirit of encouraging people to comment on fanfics while also making it easier to do so, I feel obliged to share a browser extension for ao3 that has quite literally revolutionized the comment game for me.

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

Comments are what keep writers going, and as both a writer and a reader, I think it's such an easy way of showing support and enthusiasm.

[lady-hachimitsu]

🌺

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