Fic - a lose-lose situation

As usual it’s a post giving context for my latest fic (aka rambling about my ideas and how writing is hard)

Where did this come from?

Why does Feng Xin dislike Mu Qing so much even when they are ~17 and nothing has happened in the story yet? This is a fun question which in shipfics usually gets explained by him finding Mu Qing too attractive somehow. That is boring to read about. It’s practically dodging the question altogether! Also, I personally can’t imagine attraction working like that.

Anyway, the fic formed in my head while I was thinking about that question and about sympathetic answers to it, although I didn’t put in all my ideas.

Here is a funny Feng Xin quote from Chapter 26 of the Seven Seas translation

After a pause, he still decided to comment. “I bet he thinks I’m always picking on him because I know about this gold foil business. But really, I just don’t like people like him. A grown man overthinking so much of this and that; he must’ve suspected you told me a long time ago. Not even concubines in a harem have minds as convoluted as his. It’s so annoying!”

“I don’t bully him because I think he’s actually done something wrong, I just bully him because I dislike his personality, which is better somehow” Look at this fucking dickhead LMAO.

The earlier reason for the fic is that I saw a writing prompt for “clean sheets” and, while trying to think of something other than “clean sheets=comfy sleepy time” got really amused by the idea of Mu Qing having to deal with evidence of Feng Xin and Xie Lian being in a physical relationship. No more comfy! MAXIMAL DISCOMFORT

The writing experience

Writing ~17 year old Feng Xin POV is a special hell which I hope I never have to go through again. It’s funny at first but oh my god I miss getting to process anything internally!!! Usually the fun thing about repressed characters is their wacky internal logic, but I couldn’t indulge in this with Mr. I’m so simple and straightforward. Instead I had to kind of just skip ahead every time things got too complicated and I could feel the thoughts building up at the back of my head like a stack of unwashed plates or something.

It was meant to be a quick unserious fic but thanks to life stuff it took me a MONTH, so long that I gained self awareness about the weird premise(s) and started to dislike it. But I had already written it, posting was free real estate so here we are…

At least I am happy that I edited it so hard. I deleted an entire middle scene! I reordered things! I’ve only started being able to play with structure recently and I’ve found it’s a lot more satisfying than to just claw my way from A to B. Kind of the equivalent of coming up with a particular composition when drawing, but harder because there is no equivalent to the visual composition rules I’ve learned over the years (or is there? Can tvtropes be this?)

The other good news is that, although FengQing is still tragically not very sexy to me, I am figuring out how to enjoy writing about them having sex. I don’t know how much it came across but Mu Qing was operating on like 5 different levels of kink here, meanwhile Feng Xin just discovered being rough in bed and his mind got blown. That idea was so amusing to me, it was the main thing that stopped me from just doing another fade to black like in the first scene…..actually, the fact I considered having all the sex be fade to black in a porn logic fic is the proof of how dumb the concept was from the beginning…..alright blog post over pack it up