i see you tag things as "chuan" a lot, what's that mean?
*kicks down the door* HELLO
the short answer is it's a ship name.
the long answer. oh boy strap in. anyone remember ship manifestos? we're doing one right now
so back in 2003-2006 there was a cartoon called Xiaolin Showdown that aired on the Kids WB (as well as Cartoon Network for a brief time) about a group of kids trying to collect magic macguffins before the bad guys did. Fun little show, it's not streaming anywhere but you can find it Around if you know what I mean.
my hyperfixation on this thing turns 15 this november oh god
ANYWAY
so in season 2 episode 11 we meet these two guys named Master Monk Guan:
and Chase Young, who ends up being one of the main antagonists of the show:
(that's his magic soup that makes him look like a twink)
Originally the show's backstory for them was that they'd fought many years ago and Chase had won the fight, taking Guan's spear that he basically built his whole identity around, and left Guan bereft of purpose as a result (and this was done in a really nicely-animated sequence in a realistic style that never showed up again. go off i guess)
i could make a joke about chase gripping guan's spear here but i will refrain
anyway they fight, guan wins, chase goes on to become a major recurring character and guan mostly fucks off for the rest of the show, except for a handful of appearances in season 3
the lizard is chase btw. that's what he looks like when he doesn't drink enough twink soup
but ANYWAY where it gets compelling is that in season 3, they tweaked their backstories. originally they just dropped a line about Chase having once been a good guy, but in season 3 they updated that to "actually he and Guan were close friends until he betrayed Guan for twink soup and turned evil"
pictured: two guys being dudes
in the finale one of the main characters travels back in time to ancient China and gets to meet Chase before he turned evil, along with Guan who has hair for some reason.
and dashi. dashi's the bald guy and i am very normal about him.
then there's a whole alternate timeline where Guan's the one who turned evil while Chase stayed good, with some FASCINATING implications like how the world is WAY worse off when Guan's the bad guy, and how Guan's monster form is way more monstrous than Chase's. he's not a sexy lizard he's like a giant crab thing.
but yeah so basically it's your friends-to-enemies-to-lovers type shit. it's one of those ships that's just, full divorced energy, hand in unlovable hand, all that. sometimes you need a ship that's just toxic doomed exes, yn? and there's so much to explore with them, they're mirror images, they were best friends, they're evenly matched in skill, they loved each other, they were part of a trio and their leader is gone (and his disappearance is never explained in the show but it's commonly accepted fanon that chase murdered him)
and I got into this show when I was a teenager, pretty quickly discovered that I didn't care for the fandom's most popular ships, and then found a chase/guan fanfiction by @avi17 that grabbed me HARD and did not let me go. and they've just kind of remained as one of the ships ever for me.
anyway they're still a pretty obscure pairing within the (mostly dead) fandom but I have two friends who also ship it and we just kind of pass posts back and forth and tag them with chuan for the express purpose of making the other two yell
here's some fic recs:
and in the end, I'd do it all again and Anabranch by @thexgrayxlady (the latter is focused more on Dashi than on Chase and Guan but it's a personal fave)
Dry Spell by @agenderchaseyoung which is currently unfinished but really fun
i could prattle on about these assholes for hours but I'm gonna cut it here for now. but yeah they are my sopping wet pathetic immortal men locked in an endless cycle of violence and mutual pining
