Heyyyy! Dunno if u r still on ur 7 hour flight wait. If u r, based on ur latest reblog post, i would be so interested in hearing your thoughts on (1) ship: huaqing and (2) character: Jiang Cheng. Feel free to answer or not. No pressure 100% . Hope your flight safe and less boring w this question asjdfjgkldl.
we're ignoring that this is from 2 months ago when i was on a different continent!!
(1) Huaqing
I had zero thoughts about this (except for my general cattiness about ships where people just replace the characters' personalities and dynamic with the main pairing's in order for them to work) until @veliseraptor sent me a prompt about them and then i sort of lost my shit. I think a couple of things that get me about them are that they have these moments where if you inverted the colors, their relationship could have turned out totally differently: they're both skilled with a saber, they're both picked out especially by Xie Lian (compare Feng Xin who was assigned to Xie Lian), they both are outsiders to the privileged, polished existence that Xie Lian and, to a lesser extent, Feng Xin grew up in. There is a world in which Hua Cheng doesn't run away after the parade and he gets adopted into the Clown Trio and learns from Mu Qing (I wrote half this fic on Twitter before i deleted my account :') ...i think i still have it saved somewhere).
That isn't the world we see in canon (which already opens up a lot of fun questions), but even in canon, there's a history there—of Hua Cheng hating Mu Qing especially, of their oppositional orbit around Xie Lian, of the fact that Hua Cheng could have ruined Mu Qing (and Feng Xin) too if Mu Qing had only taken up the same challenge as the other 33 gods. Any time you have history that you don't get to see onscreen (or only get to see parts of), imo, it creates a frame with an open warp where you get to start weaving in your own ideas for the missing pieces, which is exactly where the best ground for fanfic is
(2) JC
my boy! my angry youngest sibling forced to grow up too fast struggling with a spiraling older brother boy!!! yeah! I mean, there's a reason that I spent the first month of being obsessed with The Untamed being like "they're just like me fr" even though it's about ancient Chinese cultivators and i am. not that!
idk if there's much i can say about my feelings about JC that isn't already in the fics i've written (and the many additional wips stuck in my folders), but I think the ultimate thing that always gets me is just. god. he loves his brother so much. there is no story without that love. there is no wangxian. there is no jin rulan. there is nothing without that love. And he is so angry at his brother. and it's fair and it's not and he did all he could and he didn't do enough and there is no flagellation you can throw at him that he hasn't taken to his own back and he was a child and it doesn't matter. but he loves his brother and he has been so angry for so long
