#but hey good tragedy can be really cathartic!! i want to cry but have learnt something by the end of it

[wombathos]

what I’m still looking for more of in jin guangyao-centric fic (and if I just haven’t been reading the right jgy fic please lmk) is stuff that just hammers in the sheer tragedy of his whole life and like, doubles down on it. yes I want fix-its yes I want missing scenes and character studies and and and (and I’ve read a lot of great stuff!!), but what imho there is simply not enough of is both canon-compliant and canon-divergent stuff that just whacks the reader over the head with how every choice made leads to misery, how every facet of jgy’s character that was shaped to be that way by the society he lives in leads to a painful outcome, the catch 22 of his entire existence that is basically impossible to escape. I’m thinking time loops, I’m thinking meta kinda whacky stuff where jgy is forced to confront his role in a narrative where he ultimately cannot escape being cast as a villain, I’m thinking time-travel fix-its except it’s not a fix-it where jgy makes entirely different choices and still ends up utterly miserable. and dead. oh yeah I’m also thinking lxc being put through this same hell but from an outside perspective, where he gets the chance to ‘fix things’ and just fails and fails and fails because this son of a prostitute taught by society to be obsessed with status cannot stop chasing what will end up destroying him, how he is pushed down on a self-destructive path simply by existing... I want lxc to keep trying and trying to save jgy but just be gradually crushed by the sheer inevitability of it all. aborted redemption arcs, or actual redemption arcs where somebody just immediately executes him at the end of it because people like that can’t just be forgiven. let jgy be a better person and make less horrible choices but it to still not be enough to save him - or even worse(?), where he dies in obscurity, having never risen that high but also not falling so low. jgy hovering around/travelling through time as a ghost, hearing everything said about him and revisiting every choice that led him to where he ended up. AUs where everything is different except that jgy’s path still leads to an unaltered terrible ending - and every choice that led him there is crystal clear and horribly inevitable. the illusion that things might turn out differently this time that’s ultimately snatched away. yeah that’s right I want pain, I want tragedy, I just want to take that note of hopelessness in the canonical story and dig into it, make it really last. anyway yes that’s where I’m at these days

#physical pain is all well and good but you know what really makes my heart sing? that's right baby it's the good old emotional torture #ofc I could write this but that'd require my brain to let me choose what to work on rather than spitting out 10000 words at random intervals #jin guangyao #the untamed #leela watches the untamed #mdzs #leela reads mdzs #actually also #lan xichen #xiyao #txt #i'm usually a huge fix it kinda gal given the survival rate of faves but i think eight months of quarantine have fried my brain for good #but hey good tragedy can be really cathartic!! i want to cry but have learnt something by the end of it #see i can not call him jiggy; the post needs to be depressing enough for it to happen but it is possible #demonic cultivation for pros