cashew | Can't sleep, too hot, brain over thinking (Reply)

Need to be in bed, but too hot so brain is occupied with Jing Yuan and how it's hard to find a half-way decent fic.

So, there's a few fanon peeves that's really starting to get to me:

Constant giving female genitalia to male characters to avoid writing gay sex. Like, geebus, this is a space faring civilization, lube is a thing they've invented.
This insistence on JY being a child and being treated as one by the Quintet. It's really annoying because while it's not necessarily against canon, there's plenty of hints that JY was an adult by the time he joined up with the Quintet, not the least of which being his character story Part III clearly stating: "他的应变急智和实用主义手段屡屡让上级们难忘又头疼。最终，受到前任罗浮剑首的邀请，景元加入其所部为之效力，开启了「云上五骁」传奇之路。" — He has already established himself in the Cloud Knights and it was only after he made a name for himself that he then got invited to join the Quintet.
Literally no one trying to write any hurt-comfort despite Dan Feng possessing healing abilities and JY being a front-line soldier. Seriously, where the fuck are my hurt-comfort fics?
The majority seem to take the stance that Jing Liu would just let Dan Feng do whatever to her disciple. Given her rather hardass stance and fandom's insistence on making JY a child, I find this immensely unbelievable.
No one seems to want to explore the politics. Despite the majority of the angst Dan Feng experienced being the result of said politics. FFS.
Literally no one is able to write an actual military campaign fic. Like...zero people seem interested in trying to imagine how the military campaign might've been carried out by the Cloud Knights given that's like the majority of the Quintet's interaction. Logistics. Supply lines. Geography. Tactics. There's so much to work with here and no one is interested in how each of the Quintet contributed to a functioning military. I'm seriously confused, because there's so many examples to copy from yet everyone is stuck on love-triangle drama.
But seriously, making JY a child during the Quintet days is crippling the fandom's ability to write remotely interesting fic. No wonder Adventurine/Dr. Ratio is getting more stuff written about them.

Based on the wiki browsing, my interpretation of the Quintet era is that the formation of Quintet might not be an official miliary unit. Also, it sounds like they met as adults. (Possibly JY was a young adult at the time.) Mental age wise, obviously Jing Liu was the oldest, followed probably by Bai Heng, who seems to be the closest to Jing Liu based on her character story. Then it's Ying Xing, who is mentally old while physically young. Finally, bring up the rear, it's Dan Feng and Jing Yuan, who sounded like they had a similar level of mental maturity, although obviously not the same physical maturity.

In my head, it seems reasonable to think of Jing Liu as the one leading the charge on the front line. Jing Yuan seemed to serve as a flank guard (English translates this as "wing") based on Imbibitor Lunae's memories. Meanwhile, Bai Heng, with her piloting skills, probably either served as scout or supply drop, more likely as supply drop given memories of her from other characters always involves her riding on a skiff and shooting arrows as she goes. Ying Xing obviously served as the weapons maker and seemingly researcher of random info given his enabling of Dan Feng's very bad ideas. Finally, Dan Feng himself sounded like a combat medic, where his main role is actually to heal the injured while bringing in the magic nukes when there's time and space.

Obviously, one major question is how battles went down when there's giant war mechas and guns mixed in with cold weapons such as swords and glaives. How I resolve that in my head is that fleet-on-fleet combat is actually kind of rare to avoid getting tossed into the vaccum of space and dying. So maybe a series of smaller skirmishes happened on the regular against invading forces and I doubt ships like Luofu had actual "battlegrounds", so there's probably a lot of urban warfare happening. Which means, despite the visuals of the game, the actual tactics are a lot more concerned with logistics and focused on how to keep the civilians from harm while trying to flush out the enemies.

As such, large scale fights probably involved coordination between multiple units across different areas on the fleet, and thus in the mess of things, probably relying on physical messsengers as well as their communication devices because...well, urban warfare. Using cold weapons to damage the enemy rather than relying on bombs and such probably kept the damage to infrastructure manageable.

In terms of logistical problems that needed to be solved, things like counter-intelligence, encryption, setting up communication infrastructure, shipping lanes, travel routes between multiple battle fronts are just a few of the daily headaches that need to be resolved on the fly as the battle state shifts. Keeping track of how many people have been assgined to which sector and if that's enough to deal with the incoming attack is probably enough to keep an entire division occupied. Personally, I think Jing Yuan got slapped on the flank guard role probably because he's also juggling the logistics on top of the actual fighting. Presumably he's mostly working on shuffling personnel and only breaking out into a fight when his unit's location is under attack.

Now what this means is that in reality, the Quintet were probably not fighting side by side all that often and most of the time were engaged with their own tasks during a military campaign and probably only got to hang out with each other after the campaign ended. And I'm going to imagine the cause of the tragedy began with Dan Feng being sent to help Jing Liu's unit, but rather than staying at the back and doing his medic duties, he decided fuck it, he's going into battle for...whatever, because a momentary lapse of judgement since his friend is in a dangerous situation or something. Anyway, now you've got a medic on the front lines, things are looking bad, so Bai Heng, the only one with the mobility, jumps in and sacrifices herself to get the other two out of trouble.

I'm also headcanonning that at this point, Jing Yuan has been promoted to general and whatever orders he was barking out was probably ignored by his Quintet friends. Thus...the only one who wasn't responsible for the tragedy (plus the victim, of course - per Blade's own words). Dan Feng, after the fact, tries to fix his mistake by taking the worst possible option with Ying Xing's help. Dan Feng's guilt is easy to explain, but as for why Ying Xing feels responsible, I'm guessing the "black sun" that Bai Heng used as a last resort might've had something to do with him.

...and that leads us to the final tragedy.

So fic wise, I'd like to see some of this pre-tragedy battle stuff. BUT NO ONE ELSE IS. *sigh*