cashew | Sunday, June 30th, 2024

So. I spent way too many hours awake and now my circadian cycle is all F'ed up. Meanwhile, thanks to tanithryudo, I spent almost all of the 13 hour flight (plus the 5+ hours of commute to the flight and back home) reading an imperial ton of dog shit (and dog blood) BL fic.

Don't ask about the dog blood, if you know you know.

Anyway.

I can't say I've found satisfying fic as of yet (and I'm not willing to look at English language fic right now), but there's a few that kind of sticks out from the sea of 🤮 and id fic, so uh...here we go? (Also, if you're wondering about the tag, see official screencaps. Cannot tell if ship is canon or just queer baiting.)

( Blablablah, yapping about fanon and headcanons )

And finally, a few observations after reading some really weird stuff...

Fandom really likes making Jing Yuan a bottom. Somehow, even when he's the alpha in an ABO fic, he still managed to be bottoming. I'm not sure why fandom is so intent on making him taking it up the butt so hard.
I also see that fandom has latched onto the squamates have hemipenes thing. Is a kink I approve of.
On the other hand, the feminization of obviously masculine presenting characters is...no. I get the most recent thing is make characters intersexed because that's the current hot button issue, but given it's used as a kink and rarely an exploration of actual gender identity...just no.
Dan Heng/Dan Feng fans definitely drives most of the ship fic, so wanting more Jing Yuan focus is rough.
Blade/Jing Yuan is uh...actually I would like to see more of this, if only because the two of them are the only ones who actually share any parts of their past. Like, I get that Blade barely remembers, but it seems like he hasn't completely lost all of his memories, so there's room for some heart-to-heart and exploration of the past through this ship.
OK, I get we know pretty much nothing about Bai Heng, but I'd like to see how a ship between her and Jing Yuan would've gone down. She sounds like a cool big sister type who would've been a sweet first-love kind of thing. There are few het ships that I would be interested in seeing, this is one of them.
Finally, am seriously tired of authors writing Jing Yuan being a kid for a good chunk of the High-Cloud Quintet era. Like, seriously, I'd rather the team got together after Jing Yuan has became an adult so he's treated as an adult by the team members rather than as a child (with exception to Jing Liu, of course). The infantilization of Jing Yuan is really annoying.