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tossawary · 3 years

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Chapter 19: “Weddings and Funerals” of “pride is not the word I’m looking for” random favorite lines with commentary because I’m doing a re-read. Not a full list or full commentary.

When Shang Qinghua told Mobei-Jun that he didn’t need Shen Qingqiu assassinated, it wasn’t because he thought everything would somehow work out if he just sat back and didn’t do anything. It definitely wasn’t because he was planning a so-called “perfect murder” and didn’t want the demon lord messing up his plans. The Problem of Shen Qingqiu has always been a lot more complicated than “just get rid of the guy potentially making my nephew’s life a living hell”. That’s why it’s a real problem!

AN: Shang Qinghua’s thought process: “Can this problem be solved by:

A) Waiting for the problem to go away?

B) Murder?

C) None of the above?

If the answer is C...

Fuck, it’s a real problem.”

Shang Qinghua thinks that might actually be possible, though he’d have to do some research and smack his head until his Author God memories hopped into line. He thinks that the youth-restoration procedure would probably do the job, but he also thinks that Shen Qingqiu would probably rather be dead than be physically sixteen again or something (super fucking understandable) and have to start the cultivation process over from scratch (ah, that would be so annoying and embarrassing).

AN: Given that I actually invented a de-aging potion for this fic (if one that’s difficult to put together), the AU of “Original Shen Qingqiu is physically 16 again” has been rattling around inside my head ever since I wrote these lines. Shen Qingqiu was like, “Wait, let me picture how unbearably overprotective Yue Qingyuan would be... hmm... no, I’ll just stay like this.”

Luo Jiahui seems a little anxious about the empty spaces at the table, but she fills the space as best she can by chattering about assorted restaurant business. At least until she abruptly takes a deep breath and says, “Hua-Ge, I have something to tell you.”

Shang Qinghua freezes in the middle of taking a drink. His unhelpful brain immediately races to guess the worst possible conversational subjects. His sister-in-law has somehow figured out that he’s a transmigrator?! His sister-in-law has decided that her son is not going to the Demon Realm under any circumstances?! His sister-in-law knows Binghe better than he does and has realized that the young protagonist is being abused after all?! Oh, fuck, what is it?

“I’m getting married!” Luo Jiahui announces, breathlessly.

“Oh,” Shang Qinghua says, heart rate going at the speed of sound. “Wait, what?”

AN: This chapter is why I didn’t go into the details of LJH/LQG in the last chapter, immediately post-timeskip. I wanted to blindside everyone with an “Oh, it’s THAT serious?!” moment. The last chapter established that “SQH is handling things”, then this chapter establishes that, as the plot goes on, “SQH is only barely handling things”. Which helps prep the following breakdown with the System World Update in chapters 20-22.

“You didn’t have any time for yourself,” Shang Qinghua agrees, following this conversation of very obvious things that he already knew so far. He didn’t have any time for himself back then either, between organizing a conference and finding a cure on top of the usual day-in-day-out of the sect. “You did a really good job looking after them all by yourself!”

“They don’t always agree with that,” Luo Jiahui says, smiling but self-deprecating.

“Aha, well, they’re young.”

The disagreements of what was best for the children is why Shang Qinghua really had to get Fanli (who didn’t see herself as a child) out of the house by any means necessary. He was at a bit of a loss at how else to help. She was never part of Proud Immortal Demon Way! Not even as a fragment of backstory mentioned in passing! Shang Qinghua struggles to compensate for these extra people who were never characters sometimes.

“Qingge was very understanding,” Luo Jiahui says. “But… well… then Fanli was gone and I had the restaurant keeping me busy, but that was all my own choice… and what good was waiting really doing us? It didn’t have to be everything or nothing. So… we talked… about what we wanted and what- what we were afraid of… and we decided to go forward slowly.”

AN: I said in the Author’s Notes on AO3 that I was going to use Jiage to shame Moshang and Qijiu, and I meant it. TALK TO EACH OTHER!!! Shang Qinghua, you need to talk to Mobei-Jun about what you want! Shang Qinghua, you can’t keep putting things on hold because of the plot!

No offense to either his sister-in-law or his junior martial brother, but aren’t love stories supposed to be a little more… fiery?

“When I was younger, I thought that falling in love was supposed to be all excitement and passion and not being able to live without someone even for a second,” Luo Jiahui admits, a little wistfully. “I thought that it was supposed to be thinking about them all the time, not being able to stay away from each other, and needing to know what they’d been doing every second they were away. It was like becoming a completely different person. I thought that being in love was about one of us getting horribly jealous every time we even talked to someone else, doing things I didn’t really understand and changing myself just to keep him happy, and keeping secrets and sneaking around just to keep things from exploding. Because love is not being able to help yourself like that, right?”

Shang Qinghua can’t really manage to speak right now.

It’s like someone has cut his fucking throat.

Which is fine!

“But that ended really badly for me,” Luo Jiahui says, with a nervous huff at her own understatement. “It was very exciting, but looking back, being in that kind of love was also very frightening sometimes… and it was a little lonely too… being in love with someone I couldn’t really talk to or trust.”

AN: This is more specifically vagueing SVSSS Bingqiu than Moshang, but it’s also shaming Moshang too. Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky wrote some extremely messed-up romances and he would have said, “Yes! It’s all super messed-up! That’s kind of the point!” But it also means that the man can’t really conceptualize (at least at first) or articulate the kind of relationship he would actually be happy to have with Mobei-Jun, especially when his relationship with Mobei-Jun had such violent beginnings

The first person he tells himself is, weirdly enough, Qi Qingqi. Liu Qingge apparently already told both Liu Mingyan and Luo Fanli before he left, so Shang Qinghua heads over to see how the girls are handling it. (Also, he wants to pump Liu Mingyan for information on her mother’s opinions on weddings and marriage, in a really pathetic attempt to ready himself for the rumble.) He makes her agree to keep the information to herself before telling and she does, like a bro!

And then he tells and she laughs in his fucking face! Eventually, she realizes that he’s looking for sympathy, he’s not just here to let her enjoy his suffering, as a form of payment after everything he and Liu Qingge have inflicted on her. Then she laughs at him again, even louder.

Sure, he’d laugh too if he was in her shoes! But not to her face! Rude!

AN: Qi Qingqi also pointed while laughing, I think. It’s funny because it’s not her dealing with Liu Family shit this time.

Shang Qinghua expected, this time last year, to be laser-focused on the plot! His attention was not going to stray even a little bit, he promised himself; he was going to be 110% dedicated to making sure that everyone he tripped into caring about made it through the least shitty version of Proud Immortal Demon Way possible. He was going to be a machine of a transmigrator! No distractions! All he wanted was for his family to make it through the quickest, least shitty bare bones of a plot! And he was going to achieve, damn it!

Instead, he finds himself planning his sister-in-law’s wedding and it eats up time he didn’t fucking know he had to give. Immortal Alliance Conference, eat your fucking heart out! Cang Qiong Mountain Sect? Did he work there? Nope, he’s never heard of the place! He’s the Peak Lord of wedding planning now!

AN: This is me telling myself I’m going to get my life 100% together and then getting into a new video game and baking cookies instead. Or ditching my housecleaning plans to hang out with friends at a moment’s notice.

At the wedding itself, Fanli tells her sister’s father-in-law that Binghe is also very into birds and Shang Qinghua’s nephew spends a good chunk of the rest of the celebrations (and his precious time away from Qing Jing Peak) held hostage by his own politeness, listening to his new grandfather earnestly tell him about the various migration habits of demonic birds.

Well! Better him than Shang Qinghua, honestly!

AN: Inspired by that time we went on vacation and one of my brothers got mistaken by one of our travelling companions for a budding serious birdwatcher instead of someone who just thinks they’re neat - and also likes to point at them and intentionally call them by the wrong name.

Also, LQG’s Dad in this fic and SY would probably get along super well.

LQG and his dad in this universe have gone out on month-long camping trips to in which they pretty much don’t talk the entire time. They stalk monsters through the wilderness and have a great time.

Shang Qinghua is too busy keeping an eye on Luo Fanli and being not talked to by Liu Mingyan, who is eighteen-ish years old now he thinks and still deeply embarrassed by the fact that he told her off for her real person fiction. (He doesn’t want to discourage her passion for writing! She’s pretty good for a kid! It’s pretty cute! Everyone needs their escapist hobbies! He just doesn’t want identifying information about his family being spread around freely, even if the characterizations of the couple are… uh… wildly reimagined, and he doesn't want to have to spend his very valuable time keeping a lookout for more illicit fiction.) It’s difficult to read her expression through the ever-present veil, but… yeah, she’s still pissed off at him.

Ugh, teenagers.

Binghe is not allowed to bring several hundred nieces-in-law into Shang Qinghua's life. Just... no. Fuck, no.

He doesn’t even get a date to commiserate about this with.

It’s a very small wedding, family only (Luo Jiahui’s shitty parents don’t count and her older brother was forced to decline the invitation), so that Luo Jiahui and Liu Qingge can keep their privacy. Madam Liu huffed about it - the battles in talking her down were both great and terrible - but her son stood his ground! Sure, people might whine someday about not being invited, but the great thing about Liu Qingge is that they can more or less just say, “Well, we couldn’t stop him from doing whatever he wanted!” And people just have to take that unless they want to claim they could take on the Bai Zhan Peak War God!

AN: Trying to imagine the AU in which SQH brought MBJ as his date to this wedding. SQH would’ve liked to be able to bring MBJ as a date, but alas, they are not dating and the groom would probably try to kill the man.

Shang Qinghua is not expecting, soon after returning from his sister-in-law’s happy and long-awaited wedding, to be solemnly informed that Shen Qingqiu’s health has only really deteriorated these past months. Wow, that’s a huge downer.

Also, he already knew that? He’s been getting Mu Qingfang all the right supplies to treat their shixiong. He didn’t actually abandon his duties to the sect for a family wedding. He knew that Shen Qingqiu had fallen sufficiently ill to need tending on Qian Cao Peak in the past month and he considered it, well, convenient timing in regards to Binghe’s permission to attend his mother’s wedding not being randomly revoked. Cold-hearted, maybe! But he had lots of other things to worry about at the time, like informing Mobei-Jun that his sister-in-law was getting married and so he’d be regrettably absent to attend the wedding.

Then he’s told that Shen Qingqiu is not expected to improve this time.

“Oh, shit, they really think he’s dying,” Shang Qinghua realizes.

This really wasn’t in Proud Immortal Demon Way.

AN: I seriously contemplated cutting this chapter in half because of this mood switch. Like, I went in intending on writing a serious mood switch, but in practice, wow. It felt like a lot more in practice.

“Our sect leader asks about the boy and his progress,” Shen Qingqiu rasps, his voice turning more and more accusing. “He’s so very concerned about the boy. We can’t have such a beloved child crying to his devoted family that he’s been mistreated or neglected, can we? How flattering these assumptions are. It makes a man wonder what exactly people think he’s going to do to the boy.”

Shang Qinghua might have an itemized list somewhere, honestly.

“Ah, I can’t speak for anyone else,” Shang Qinghua says finally. “But please don’t take it personally, Shen-Shixiong. I don’t really trust anyone. Anything can happen behind a locked door, you know?”

Some honest cynicism can go over well with the man.

Shen Qingqiu laughs bitterly now.

AN: It can be fun in media where Character A is like, “Ahhh, I hope no one discovers my secret!” And Character B is like, “So, about this extremely obvious thing that you’re doing...!”

Shen Qingqiu is as honest and open as he is throughout this scene because he honestly thinks that he’s dying. He’s determined to be blithe about it.

Shang Qinghua at least gets to see Mu Qingfang’s face journey as Shen Qingqiu accuses their sect leader of letting him think that he’d left him to die. As Shen Qingqiu yells about being treated like an unwanted ghost, as a potential blackmailer, as an embarrassing disappointment, as a petty troublemaker, as a spoiled child, as a problem to be solved, and as the last blemish on Yue Qingyuan’s reputation - anything but as someone worthy of being trusted with Yue Qingyuan’s problems and of being treated like an equal friend.

Yue Qingyuan tries to explain that he didn’t think Shen Qingqiu wanted to hear his excuses, and Shen Qingqiu shoots back that he would rather fucking die than beg the man he’d thought had forgotten about him to explain when exactly he became not worth rescuing as soon as possible.

Yue Qingyuan tries to explain that he didn’t want Shen Qingqiu’s pity or to force the man to be grateful that he’d tried.

Shen Qingqiu tells the man to go fuck himself. How could it not hurt for someone he loved to hurt him and then just… move past the hurt like the pain wasn’t who they were?

“All the world could revile me… reject me… leave me to die… and I would pay their hatred no heed! What do they truly know of what I am? Of who I am?” Shen Qingqiu demands. “But if Qi-Ge could throw me away… decide that I just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore now that he’d had a taste of a better life… then I really must be wretched beyond all things at the root! If he believed it, then… then it had to be true.”

AN: Because I just wrote a Qijiu confrontation over this exact thing, like, a few days before, I thought that I could get away with writing out this entire confrontation in full. I think it works better if the audience has to imagine some of it. And because SQH is the POV character, it felt right that he not be in the room and not be a full witness to this scene. He doesn’t get to see everything.

#tossawary svsss #pride is not the word #tossawary commentary

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tossawary · 3 years

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Some random favorite lines (with commentary) of Chapter 22: “The World Moved” of “pride is not the word I’m looking for” because I’m doing a re-read. Not a full list or full commentary.

AN: I had no idea what to name this chapter at first. I try not to make my chapter titles spoiler-y. This one seemed to nicely invoke the idea of aftershocks, given the blow-ups with both Yue Qingyuan and Mobei-Jun.

Shang Qinghua is standing in the gardens outside of Qian Cao Peak’s main healing halls, just outside the main healing halls. He has no idea how he got here.

This is fucked up for a number of reasons.

Shang Qinghua isn’t the sort of person who ends up in strange locations without remembering how he got there. Sometimes he ends up in strange locations without remembering why he went there, sure; sometimes he ends up in strange locations because a hectic day-in-day-out emergency took him on a slippery path with too many stops to keep straight, sure. But he’s not really a “black out somewhere and wake up somewhere else” kind of bro. He’s, at worst, a “fall asleep in the sitting room and wake up fuzzily in the bedroom, ah, must have woken up at some point” kind of person.

AN: Someone asked me if there was any MBJ involvement in “wake up fuzzily in the bedroom” and... yeah, that’s kind of what I was going for. I have a great and terrible weakness for soft Moshang moments.

“Yue-Shibo wishes to see you at once,” she says.

“Cool.”

“...Pardon?”

“Oh, ah, I mean, sure. I’ll be there,” Shang Qinghua says, clearing his throat, then clearing his throat again, and getting to his feet. Standing feels like a real accomplishment right now. “Where is he now?”

AN: Shang Qinghua is having a Time. He is having a Time right now. Everyone is lucky that Shang Qinghua didn’t just fall back entirely into curse words and slang. Shang Qinghua as a character to me gives off the vibe of someone who can essentially just say things like, “Oh, lmao, bro.”

Shang Qinghua registers the sect leader’s orders to his underlings kind of distantly, caught up in staring at the unconscious other transmigrator.

【 CHARACTER PROFILE UPDATED: Shen Yuan.】

He’s not alone anymore.

Holy shit, he really doesn’t know how to feel about this.

AN: Can you... imagine... spending like 40+ years on another planet, essentially, which has never heard of your world and is missing a great deal of features from your world and can’t be talked about at all... and then another person from your world shows up? No one else in this world can understand what you’re going through, mostly because you can’t talk about it to anyone else.

Wild.

“There wasn- there might not have been a later!” Shang Qinghua cries in frustration, knowing just how close they came to there not being a later. “What ‘perfect time’ is there for these kinds of things? It was never not going to hurt him or you! But living like this is worse! You had nothing stopping you from saying anything you wanted! You have no one telling you how to live your life! Controlling what you can or can’t say! At any time, you could have decided you didn’t want to live this way anymore and that you didn’t want to cause the person you care about any more pain because you were too ashamed to admit your mistakes!”

Shang Qinghua has no idea how much sway the System has over people’s behaviors here, honestly, but he’s thinking not much if any! At least before it pulled another update on him! The System apparently couldn’t make Shen Qingqiu act like a total scum villain to the protagonist if the man decided he wanted to be more than that - and apparently he did! Just like the System couldn’t make Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky behave like the original Shang Qinghua!

It had to trick him into “putting the story back on track”!

What fucking excuse does Yue Qingyuan have for any of this?

AN: Shang Qinghua is aaaaangry. He didn’t want to get involved in any of this. He’s so envious of Yue Qingyuan’s comparative freedom here. Definitely one of those “I didn’t even KNOW how fucking angry I was about this” moments.

“Oh, what are you going to do?” Shang Qinghua demands of the man. “Fire me?”

Yue Qingyuan is clearly super unimpressed by this comeback.

Shang Qinghua can’t totally believe he just said it.

AN: SVSSS Shang Qinghua didn’t get fired somehow.

Shang Qinghua is so angry he can barely breathe with it. It comes out in the upending of a chair, the overturning of an end table, and then a dish shattering against a wall when the first two aren’t satisfying enough. It turns out that seeing the broken ceramic on the floor isn’t satisfying either! It doesn’t change anything!

Except now the dish is broken. It is so, so much easier to break something than to make anything and Shang Qinghua is ready to scream over it.

Millions of words! Years of his life! Years of both lives!

Shang Qinghua collapses onto the nearest upright piece of furniture in his sitting room and puts his head in his hands again. “Is the System finally getting rid of me?” he thinks, feeling like he’s going to break into a million pieces next maybe. Might just throw himself against the wall next! See how it goes! “Bro, is this it? Have you had enough of my bullshit? Enough of me changing the story? Are you replacing ME not because I’m too unstable to exist in this world too?”

They’re not good thoughts.

AN: This breakdown was SO overdue.

“Shang Qinghua, I am not going to hurt you,” the man grits out.

He doesn’t take another step forward, but the anger in the air sends Shang Qinghua another step backwards anyway! What a statement! What a promise! He laughs, unwillingly and unconvincingly.

“I know, my king, I know!” he lies. “It’s just- it’s- I’ve been having- well, you have before.”

AN: The key to Moshang in the Airplane Extras is the inevitable outburst and the fact that Airplane just straight-up leaves Mobei-Jun after everything and he’s not wrong to do it. They’re so messed up. I love them.

“My king, I… I need to be alone right now,” Shang Qinghua says hoarsely. “Please go away.”

Mobei-Jun still doesn't move.

"Please," Shang Qinghua repeats.

AN: I can’t remember what chapter this was or who I said it to, but I said to someone at some point that the key to SQH’s heart is listening to him.

“I made some pretty bad mistakes today,” Shang Qinghua confesses to her.

“That’s okay,” Luo Jiahui says easily.

“Oh?”

“We’ll fix them.”

“Ah, really? That’s a relief,” Shang Qinghua says. “I’m so glad I have you.”

His voice breaks on the last word. He can’t hide that.

AN: How much SQH means that last statement hurts in the best way.

This is… this is manageable. It’s just two new missions and another transmigrator. And then maybe another mission after that. He can handle new and weird missions. He can handle this Peerless Cucumber kid.

This is still his world, isn’t it? Even if it’s not his story anymore, he lives here!

He changed everything once! He can change it again if he has to! If the System wants him dead, it’ll have to catch him first! And he can do a little grovelling to fix everything he messed up today all by himself. Dignity? What dignity? Pride? What pride? Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky sold those things in another life! Yue Qingyuan and Mobei-Jun will have no choice but to forgive him for everything he said under stress just to get him to shut the fuck up!

Everything is going to be fine.

AN: SQH is like: “Okay, I can do this! I can do this! Just got to keep moving! I can do this if I keep moving! If I stop moving, I die, so keep moving!”

LJH and LQG: “Please go see a doctor for stress.”

#tossawary svsss #pride is not the word #tossawary commentary

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