i wanted to click the ask button and i accidentally unfollowed you. easily one of the most webbed sites i've ever! ANYWAY i have yet to catch up w/ your 2022 yi city whumptobers;;, but what kind of torment is the most fun/interesting to inflict on each of the yi city squad member? lol this sounds bad but i mean, for xy it's obviously delicious to bite into his issues w/ his body, its weaknesses and the way it's not just 'what makes a xue yang' but also, if not primarily, a tool/weapon. but there's definitely more! and then there's xxc and sl, and a-qing...? i feel they're a very diverse buffet lol
this is a tasty tasty one and I'm sorry it took me so long to get to it ahhhh
going to take this one person at a time!!! for organizational reasons. I love thinking about this kind of thing because for me a lot of it is like. "what would this character hate most, on a level of 'what experience would most undermine their sense of self/emphasize their specific neuroses" and that's a fun way of exploring character.
whump! it's not just about the satisfaction of beating up characters, it's also about the flaying away of emotional shields to reveal the squishy internal bits of your faves. or something like that.
xue yang: you've definitely hit on a big one in your ask, which is, yeah...physical incapacitation that he can't in some way power through, that somehow does render his body...not in his own power, not usable, not capable of what he wants it to do. it's supposed to! it should do whatever he tells it to do! it's not supposed to fail him!
I've talked a lot about the way xue yang sees his body as, in some ways, his enemy, in a way I don't think he's wholly aware of. his body is a problem because his body can take damage, can hurt, and those are things that xue yang would really, really like to avoid happening to him, ever (again), and while yeah, that happening is the fault of the person who hurts him, on some level he feels betrayed by his own body for allowing it. it's not doing its job.
xiao xingchen: for xiao xingchen it's psychological for sure. he can bear a lot of physical pain, I think! he can take that, it's expected, physical violence is a part of the life he chose when he came down the mountain.
what I think he expected less was the psychic damage he can take, and I don't think he can bear it as well (I mean, we know he doesn't). it hits him harder and he's less prepared.
but also. hurting other people and making sure xiao xingchen knows it's because of him. xue yang hit that one right on the head several times (with song lan, with the fake night hunts, with song lan again), and used it to nail xiao xingchen right into his coffin.
song lan: oooh this was an interesting one to think about and made me realize that I have not spent a lot of time making song lan suffer anything but emotional damage, though I have made him suffer a fair amount of emotional damage.
I think with song lan...hmm. I don't know how to articulate this exactly but what gets to him I think is things that undermine his sense of self and his certainty. I think of song lan as someone who doesn't just like stability and routine but in some ways relies on it; it keeps him steady and grounds him. so losing that, or having it yanked out from under him, really throws him off balance.
I'm thinking about how song lan would handle being in a psychological horror narrative and I feel like it would really fuck him up in a way above and beyond anyone else on this list, is kind of what I'm saying? if that makes sense. the...unreliability of his surroundings, and more than that of his own head, his ability to make sense of the world and ground/center himself in some kind of certainty...I think song lan would go downhill fast.
a-qing: I think what it comes down to with a-qing as far as "what's the best way to make her hurt worst" is anything that would render her incapable of defending herself, but more specifically vulnerable in a way that she couldn't even play for sympathy (as is one of her tricks; playing weaker than she is so people underestimate her or even are generous with her).
so like...actually what xue yang does to her on this level is pretty brutal not just on the surface level of, you know, physical agony but also on the level of...by blinding her and removing her ability to speak, and then making her a ghost or...whatever she is in cql, he renders her something that people will perceive as monstrous, and therefore she can't ask for help, can't seek out support, can't communicate what she wants to communicate in order to get what she needs.
what I guess I'm getting at here is the removal of her self-sufficiency. a-qing is someone who is resourceful and clever and very good at getting out of tight spots, and who has had to fend for herself for a lot of her life. removing that in some way, undermining that, is the thing that's most going to get to her - something that makes her for real and inescapably the small, relatively weak girl with nobody to help or protect her that she pretends to be.
