#sqh is very good at understanding audiences

[mxtxfanatic]

@wife-beam I didn’t want to add on to that post because apparently OP doesn’t like being told that sj was never meant to be redeemed in the original outline… but on to your tags!

Airplane did predict that sj would become a popular character to readers if he added in the backstory. This is the exchange:

Shen Qingqiu rested his forehead on his hand and sucked in a deep breath. “Towards the Sky-bro, ‘Great Master,’ ‘Great Master’ Airplane—were you not held enough as a child or something, huh? Huh? The original backstory for ‘Shen Qingqiu’ that you mentioned was a sicko abusing him in his childhood? Do you really love writing miserable and tragic pasts that much?”

“Tragic characters are more popular,” said Shang Qinghua.

“Bullshit! He got two comment floods yelling for his castration, and you’re telling me that’s being popular?”

“Wasn’t that because I axed the backstory?” Shang Qinghua presented his logical counterargument. “Wasn’t Bing-ge tragic? Wasn’t he popular?”

He even uses Bingge’s popularity amongst his readers as an example. The reason why he took the backstory out was because he had already shown the original sqq to be so awful that by the time he got around to inserting hints of his backstory and moments where he wasn’t just needlessly cruel, fans were unhappy because it came across as attempting to make them sympathize with the child abuser. So he scrapped it and just committed to the scum villain trope of one-dimensional villain who is evil just because. This is his explanation:

Shang Qinghua embarked on an impassioned explanation of his artistic concept. “I had a lot of ideas for the character of Shen Qingqiu. I had hoped to portray him as a well-rounded, three-dimensional character; he’s scum, he’s wretched, but he has reason to be scum, as well as a not-scummy side. But the readers didn’t really buy it. As soon as I inserted signs of his development, they started griping in the reviews. So, I saw the winds weren’t blowing the right way and immediately turned him into a tropey and wretched asshole.

So while his intent wasn’t ever that sj would be a good guy in the narrative or eventually redeemed, he accurately predicted the way fandom tends to react to well-rounded villains: by either woobifying them and erasing their flaws as all a quirk of their “tragic backstory” or by attacking the writer as attempting to redeem a deplorable character by making them feel bad for him.

#svsss #human reads svsss #human metas mxtx #funny how I have quotes NOW lol #but I just wante to explain why I said that in my tags #sqh is very good at understanding audiences #especially his own #i feel like there may be one more quote floating around but I can’t find it #this is all in vol 3 of the official btw