Only sorta asking about your WIP list - how did you come up with your pool noodle pairing?
OH BOY I’M SO GLAD YOU ASKED.
OK kids buckle up! This is the story of how i met your mother came up with the rarepair that’s currently eating my entire brain.
It all started when I was browsing the Liu Sang tag, as you do, and saw this post by @thewindsofsong And I thought that idea was pretty cool. But while I was already ride or die for Liu Sang, I think maybe I saw that before I finished Sha Hai and attached myself to Zhang Rishan like an octopus with abandonment issues.
So then, maybe a couple weeks after that? There was the Lifestyle Mag Style Gala 2021. And who should walk the red carpet ONE RIGHT AFTER THE OTHER but (a very blonde) Zhang Ming’en and Liu Chang.
So I had a little bit of a flail over that while I was watching the livestream of the event. And my brain started working. And I started wondering if maybe they knew each other? Because they’d both been in Sha Hai, but I think maybe only had one single scene together and not even any real interaction just like, a wide shot of Wu Xie’s crew vs the Wangs. But Liu Chang is friends with Waer who had a LOT of scenes with Zhang Ming’en so maybe they’d at least MET before once or twice? Maybe they’d hung out on set behind the scenes or something? I mean it was like, seriously, a whole thought process that took up most of my 40 minute drive home from work one day.
So my “have the actors met” pondering made me remember that post I mentioned above, which led to “ok, but what if Liu Sang and Zhang Rishan met” pondering. And how they’re both snarky and Done With Everyone(tm) and have similar childhood trauma regarding family and similar trust issues with the people around them and how all that stuff might make them get on like a house on fire (no pun intended) if they ever met. But how could that happen?
Well my brain picked out that scene in Sha Hai, where Zhang Rishan tries (and fails, spoiler alert) to open the Nine Orifices box, and I wondered how that might have gone if Liu Sang had been in that room, and HEARD him fail. Thus the first inspiration for Pyre was born. And then it snowballed, and now this ship is all I think about and I’m making it everyone else’s problem.
Also, I fully acknowledge I look like this when I talk about how RiSang came to be:
