Fic rec plus some random thoughts
Wednesday, September 25th, 2024 17:48![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cashew【景恒丨景枫】《龙裔体液的一百种用法》《龙精篇》（一） | 《龙漦篇》（二）
Medical uses for dragon-y bodily fluids. Technically hurt-comfort(?).
Pros:
Writing is pretty good.
WAFF.
Jealous of previous incarnation is always a good.
Socially awkward Dan Feng doesn't happen enough.
Cons:
- No real emotional stakes.
While I've been wrangling with my own interpretation of WTF patch 2.5 means for interpreting timeline and scale and relative age when it comes to the Quintet, I'm going through older material and noticing that the most popular fics tend to put characters through a bunch of pointless melodramatic angst (as if Jing Yuan and Dan Feng aren't angsty enough in the canon).
On Dan Feng
I've noticed that some of the most popular depictions of Dan Feng (by most popular I mean the fics that get the most likes/kudos during the height of the ship popularity) turns Dan Feng into this angsty Burdened by Fate type of character. There's an excessive amount of sympathy for the guy usually coming in two flavors:
Dan Feng inherits the memories of the past incarnations of Imbibitor Lunae, so now he suffers from some kind of identity crisis and the burden of thousands of years of memories (albeit fragmented) causes him to lose all his human emotions and is now unable to return any feelings of a romantic nature. The "he's too old for this silly romance nonsense" trope. At best he graciously returns physical affection to appease the young, romantic Jing Yuan, but emotionally he's dead on the inside.
Dan Feng is basically a child predator. But he's resisting the urge for Jing Yuan's own good, see. Because he's so immensely self-sacrificing. There's nothing wrong with him lusting after an essentially pre-pubescent boy. Nope.
I hope I don't have to explain why both versions suck. Either way, it ends up with Jing Yuan either being victimized (if Dan Feng doesn't hold it in) or being left alone to deal with the tragedy of Sedition of Imbibitor Lunae with no emotional support, but the narrative's sympathy is all with Dan Feng. I've noticed there's ZERO fics calling Dan Feng out for killing 4000+ (at a conservative estimate) people with his bullshit. It's always a vague "oh, but FAAAAATE" or "oh, but he's so SAAAAD"...but no consideration for the traumatic emotional pain he inflicted on both his friends and his tribesmen. Like...wow. I guess Dan Feng's angst means we should forgive him?
WTF?
I'm genuinely baffled why these types of fics get the most love from fandom.
On Jing Yuan
Meanwhile, the most popular depictions of Jing Yuan tend to be...uh...brain dead. Do we even like the same character? I get that fandom have collectively decided that Jing Yuan is the youngest, but even if I accept that premise (which I hate, but patch 2.5 is making this practically canon), shouldn't the implication be that Jing Yuan is a kid whose maturity goes beyond his age, which is why he's able to become friends with people significantly older than him?
In a world where Jing Yuan is the youngest of the five and nonetheless is able to talk to Dan Feng and Yingxing as equals, doesn't that speak to Jing Yuan experiencing a childhood that forced him to grow up much faster than kids his age? Why do we never see Jing Yuan's older friends express a bit of regret that their youngest friend seemed to have skipped over the carefree naïveté of childhood and went straight into wearing the social mask of an adult?
Rather than dealing with how Jing Yuan, a child, would have become equals with people much older than him, fanfic would rather heap tons and tons of angst onto him via unrequited love. Because never mind the actual trauma of losing everyone important to him and having to clean up after the mess his friend and possible secret crush created. No, clearly the real tragedy of Jing Yuan is he never got to confess or get his romantic feelings reciprocated.
Or the fic depicts Jing Yuan as too young and stupid to realize all the emotional pitfalls of romance, gets hurt in the process and has to live with a broken heart forever. And then maybe, maaaaaybe he gets some scraps because Dan Heng remembers something so I guess all's well that ends well? Never mind that Jing Yuan's emotional development is mixed up with Dan Feng and has nothing to do with Dan Heng. Or that Jing Yuan ought to be immensely aware of the social barriers to any type of romance between him, a professional soldier, and Dan Feng, the supreme leader of a tribe of dragon people.
Like, I genuinely question how much the shippers of 凤求凤 actually even like Jing Yuan at this point. I get the distinct impression that DH/DF is the more loved character, while Jing Yuan is just the unfortunate added baggage...
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no subject
Date: 2024-09-25 16:48 (UTC)Like, as an example, Aventurine is definitely the more popular character of the CP with Ratio, but most angst fics will end up torturing him (physically or emotionally or both). And when going OOC, it's usually Aventurine who gets turned into a psycho / serial killer / semi-functional emotional wreck.
Or, going outside of HSR, most BG romance novels I've read are written by women, and you'd think both writers and readers would identify more with the female main character. But, a great majority of them, when needing to torture someone in the story for angst, will end up torturing the woman - physically, emotionally, socially. *shrug*
EDIT: Oh hey, and remember MCU fics and the woobie!Tony trope? Especially where it comes to Steve/Tony fics post-Civil-War? Yeah.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-26 00:59 (UTC)Sure, torturing a character that one likes is a common thing, because that's where the sympathies are. I understand the urge to want to show people how your favorite is suffering because you feel like they've been wronged somehow. Especially in the MCU example where Tony fans are convinced that Tony was right and Steve was in the wrong. So a huge chunk of the woobie!Tony fic is written with for the purpose of getting Steve to apologize and ask for forgiveness.
Or in the example of romance novels:
I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that the majority of these types of stories end up making the dude/romantic interest apologize. Because the audience sympathies are supposed to be with the woman and thus the emotional satisfaction comes from the guy finally getting his comeuppance (either through having to grovel for forgiveness or through the girl falling in love with someone else who treats her better). Or the person causing the torture is the Bad Guy, so the audience will feel emotional satisfaction when the Bad Guy finally gets felled by the hero coming in to save the heroine.
But in the case of torturing Jing Yuan, I've noticed a strong strain of apologia for Dan Feng/Dan Heng. The reason Jing Yuan is the one to suffer unrequited romance (because no one seems to think he was ever physically hurt for some reason) is usually the result of him being either a) not old enough to understand that Dan Feng can't see him as anything more than a kid or b) too caught up in the past and neglected Dan Heng's emotions so now he has to be stuck in Luofu pining while Dan Heng gets to be free.
And when it comes to physically hurting Jing Yuan, it's pretty much because Dan Feng is a child predator and hurts him during sex, but the writing is more concerned with Dan Feng's sadness than the physical abuse Jing Yuan is going through. Because Jing Yuan's "innocent seduction" makes Dan Feng soooo jealous, so he's actually hurting him out of love. Also no one's worried about Jing Yuan's physical well-being after getting his various orifices ripped apart, because he'll recover or something. As if being able to physically recover somehow makes the physical abuse not traumatic.
(Again, I'm restricting this to the most popular fics. Obviously there are Jing Yuan fans who torture him because they're sympathetic to Jing Yuan's suffering, but those types of fics aren't nearly as popular.)
no subject
Date: 2024-09-26 01:50 (UTC)You'd think so, but it doesn't work out that way, or at least, they fail to get that across well. There's a lot of stories where women get tortured because there's this underlying attitude that it's "normal". Feels a lot more like internalized misogyny than anything else a lot of the time.
> the writing is more concerned with Dan Feng's sadness than the physical abuse Jing Yuan is going through
Like, this particular dynamic is one I've seen in toxic BG stories. Any amount of physical/emotional/social abuse suffered by the female lead gets ignored or considered forgivable, while focus is given to the male lead and their disproportionately small amount of emotional suffering.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-26 01:58 (UTC)Yeah, that sounds about right. And that pretty much aligns with "doesn't like the character". In this case, they don't like the women because, well, misogyny. And they'd rather focus on the "dude".
Translated into BL fic, the "girl" character is basically cast as the bottom and the feeling is the writers don't like them much. Or if they do like them, it's as a tool to justify the "boy" character's suffering.
Basically toxic het romance ruining BL fics.