hi! i always love your MDZS/CQL takes; can i ask what are the questions you think CQL is asking, as compared to MDZS?
I haven't actually revisited either canon in ages, which is making me nervous. what questions the novel is interested in can be pretty contentious all on its own! @mikkeneko has an excellent answer in the notes here which I reccomend to everyone. My own thoughts are honestly pretty scattered- I keep on deleting things and going hm, that's not quite right.
So, for the obvious-to-me example, people reasonably zero in on the creation of innocent doctors/radish farmers who Wen Ruohan is holding hostage. In CQL it's easy to infer that Wen Qing and Wen Ning are maybe the only cultivators and almost certainly the only combatants among the Wen remnants, and their status is much more ambiguous in the novel, which I personally think is asking, essentially, "and so what? were they wrong to run, when they had a chance? Do they deserve what Jin Guangshan will do to them if they go back? Aren't they just people, actually?" Whereas the question that CQL is asking is more to the effect of "What does Wen Qing owe these people, when she is their only defence? What is she entitled to do to save them, at other people's expense? If she fucks up that moral calculus, what then? Does it matter if she's personally fond of some of the outsiders who are going to get hurt? If one of them saved her brother? Later, this question will flip to what Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, and the parallel to Jiang Cheng's situation in particular is, I think, genuinely pretty fun. You're giving up the Wen as soldiers who've laid down their arms in exchange for Wen Qing also grappling with leadership and the question of how many horrors she can stand to look the other way on to protect her own people. one reason I keep deleting so much is that a lot cql's changes were motivated at least in part by censorship, which I think we mostly share a general and justified distaste for! but I also think that within the bounds of that censorship the creative team put a lot of work into actually doing something interesting with those changes. Or, for another example- nieyao! There's a much greater emphasis on the nmj-jgy relationship, it's unambiguously very close and they are clearly extremely important to one another, and I think that's because the cql team has a lot to say about love, trust, power, and the ways those things interact, and that reflects back on all of the other relationships in play, including Wangxian. Almost every time, when CQL chooses change a relationship they make the characters in question closer- that's true for Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji, for Wen Qing and the Yunmeng contingent, for Zixuan and Mianmian, and Huaisang and Meng Yao. It's even true for Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, who have a close and trusting relationship in first life! CQL puts a much greater emphasis on "all right, so you care, what next?" How do you choose someone and then choose to be good to them? What if there's a massive power disparity between you? What if you seriously disagree about your priorities and morals? How do you trust someone who's betrayed you? When is it a stupid choice to trust at all? How do you have faith that you know someone well enough for that trust to be meaningful?
for legal reasons i would like to specify that it's not that mdzs isn't interested in these problems. i do remember wangxian's literal trust fall. cql is asking these questions all the time about everyone. also for legal purposes i'm not suggesting that cql lwj and jc love each other. but! they establish a three month wartime partnership looking for wwx and then jc immediately drops him on wwx's say-so despite apparently having a positive enough opinion of him to tell wwx he thinks they should make up twice. lan wangji will later tell wwx he thinks he should loop jc in on the second flautist! these are people trying to navigate some kind of relationship/shared interest/community, as opposed to a hateful void. cql wants to say hey, how do you go about this? while I'm here and rambling cql also puts a lot of emphasis on wwx's connection to yunmeng and changes things up so instead of feeling alienated right before he leaves our last glimpse of him there is happily picking lotuses and playing with a kid! in both stories the narrative is asking who do you protect? who do you leave behind? can you ever get it back? but the angles are very different.
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SPOILERS FOR ELATION 1 IN SWARM SIMULATED UNIVERSE!!
FINALLY AFTER 2 WEEKS OF GRINDING I FINALLY GOT THE ELATION ENCOUNTER!!! RAAH THE THINGS I DO FOR LORE-
^ HOLY SHIT IT'S. THEM!!!!
Picking the second option gives a more cute answer :]]
Anyways, cough, Ahavili crumbs anyone? 👀👀
Also don't mind the next screenshot showing the first option-
^ I can't decide if this is a 4th wall break or not ajdkajsh- Is Aha referring to SimUni as the "game", or are they referring to HSR the game? Maybe I'm overthinking this, but the fact they mentioned "account" just sticks out to me for some reason 👀
^ Huh, I wonder what Aha has to do with Ena... I tried looking through the Ena encounter and I still can't really wrap around why Aha would want to help them
^ Hoh, HOHOHOHHHAJAHAH
"Fake Akivili" you say? 👁👁 OOOO SHIVERS HAHAHAHAHS
Alright, the jig is up let's talk then!
SCREWLLUM BBGIRL ILY TY FOR THINKING OF MY SAFETY BUT PLEASE LET ME TALK TO THEM MORE NOOOOOOOOOO
We immediately get the "Cosmic big lotto" and "interastral big lotto" curios after this 👀
The rest of Herta's dialogue for anyone curious :
The first domain of the next plane is affected by Aha's "Disrupt" effect!
Drats... You'll have to pay attention later. Oh well, just think of it as humoring them, I suppose.
Anyways, THIS WAS SO FUN!!! HOLY SHIT I REMEMBER SMILING EXCITEDLY JUST REAIDNG THROUGH THIS LIKE AKSJMXKAB THE SILLY!!!!
Again, this reinforces just how self aware Aha is as an Aeon that it's ingrained into who they are. Their mere simulation is capable of ignoring and manipulating genius society code! For all I know, they might have already known they're in HSR The Game.
They're up to something devious, and I can't wait to be at the other end of the punchline!
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I think of all the approximate categories of animal, fish are unbeatable in terms of how much it would suck ass to be one. you’re basically the most edible creature on god’s earth and literally everything else wants in on that. like yeah everything eats everything but at least if you’re a bird that lives in the sky you mainly just have to worry about being eaten by other things that are in the sky, but fish? other fish are only the beginning of your problems. not only does everything in the ocean that’s bigger than you want to eat you, so do most things on land given half a chance. there are things in the sky that evolved specifically to come all the way down just to eat you. and you don’t even have arms to punch any of them with you just kinda have to sit there going :o as you’re carried away into the beyond. you have no limbs at all, in fact, so if you ever leave the water you can’t even get back to it like, if something that’s not supposed to be in the water gets in the water it can at least try to swim to shore and get out, but fish are just like “guess I’ll die.” pour one out for fish. they did not ask for this.
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The first chapter of my novella-length Dylan/Ryan slow burn paranormal romance piece is up! It starts out heavy but I keep lots of comedic elements going throughout and it will be real fluffy later. All the counselors will eventually get at least one chapter with plenty of Kaitlyn alongside the boys.
Summary: When Dylan Lenivy died, he hadn’t expected to be met with Heaven or Hell—he’d never really believed in all that—or Elysium or Valhalla or any of those pretty-sounding immortal afterworlds. He liked the idea of reincarnation, but wasn’t sure he bought into that entirely either. What he had expected, however, was to catch a fucking break. In his final excruciating moments, especially, Dylan was kind of looking forward to oblivion—to sinking into the waters of the river Lethe, forgetting about everything that came before, and having that eternal rest people liked to talk about. But for Dylan, nothing’s ever quite so simple. What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger, if the camp’s oft-repeated motto can be believed, but what if what does kill you doesn’t quite manage to make you dead? Not, y’know, dead-dead, anyway.
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