Fic - the last bite

Context post again for my latest fic

I try not to use these posts to bash my own writing too much but I have to get off my chest that this one is not up to my standards and I would not have published it if I didn’t think that publishing was also an important part of the learning experience of writing a chapter fic. It suffers from my classic problem of not having been started with a serious attitude (even though I was and am sincere about the story. Just, as a piece of writing craft I didn’t take it seriously I guess) as well as issues arising from being written over such a long time.

BUT IT’S OKAY BECAUSE I HAD THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Where did this fic come from

This fic exists because you cannot throw a stone on ao3 without hitting a fengqing postcanon reconciliation and get together fic and none of them ever left me satisfied. Fengqing don’t NEED to reconcile. The grudges they have are much more founded in their issues with themselves than with each other.

Have you noticed the arc of their relationship in canon is not about directly reconciling but about discovering new things and getting to know each other better. My faves were a miscommunication plot? This is unbelievable.

(This is why it really ticks me off when fic authors claim that Mu Qing confessed that he wanted to be friends with both Xie Lian and Feng Xin at the end of the books or that he reconciled with both of them. HE DID NOT DO THAT. He confessed to Xie Lian only, Feng Xin was eavesdropping!!! Go reread the conversation after FX shows up and they never talk about their own relationship or feelings for each other! they just go back to being mean and rude instantly)

To put it another way, why couldn’t they have reconciled during the 800 years gap? They clearly care about each other and have opportunities to interact, and 800 years is enough time to try different things. If there was a solution, they would’ve found it, which proves that there was none. Instead, they had beef all the way until Xie Lian returned because their beef comes from not reconciling with Xie Lian.

But they already seem to have reconciled with Xie Lian as much as they could by the end of canon. And y’know they show up together in the epilogue and hang out and have cute banter together (why did I get emotional typing that). So… starting from the basic fanfictional premise of “they’re into each other” can they just get together postcanon with no issues whatsoever? I mean PROBABLY but I hate get togethers. So my first thought was, ok, what if they were already together?

At this point the first chapter of the fic appeared in my head and made me so worried about their break up that I needed to figure out how they would get back together EVER, so that was my motivation to write the whole thing. Like, they’ve been stuck together by circumstance for 800 years and now the happy ending arrives, they have a free choice of whether to stay together, what’s gonna happen?

What was it like writing

It’s not the first TGCF fic I started writing, but it’s near enough. Thinking through a fic which takes place over such a long timespan was very exploratory and gave me a foundation for the rest of my fic ideas and fannish thoughts.

Finishing a long term project for the first time also felt good. I had to really figure out how to make that happen, it was not just a question of effort and discipline. Sometimes when you procrastinate that thing you wanted to do for months, it’s because you subconsciously know there is a problem with it that still needs to be fixed…

In this case, it was adding all the fun stuff with XL. I knew he needed to be in the fic but it took me a long time to acknowledge that he needed a big role (of course he did! this is a fic about Mu Qing!) It was always meant to be one story which you suddenly realise is a different story halfway, but I leaned a lot harder into that in the end and stopped shying away from making it even slightly complicated… (I think that sudden change is also why I got my first ever hate comments. Exciting. perhaps next time I write something long, I’ll put more thought into managing reader expectations.)

I am still haunted by the fact that the premise of this fic is basically ‘there are literally no other problems in the entire world postcanon, only mu qing’s problems’ because it means I didn’t get to dig into anyone else’s postcanon character much… I’m so biased only my blorbo gets his feelings considered :( at the same time, it was baby’s first longer fic and I probably would have died if it got any more complex. I just accept it as a thought experiment with simple premises. It is a mess but there are lots of fun moments.

extra notes because I did my 14 months so I get to have an extra long blog post about it

1. Why is there so much food?

My outline started completely character based and I needed to add some kind of real life physical element. I picked food just because I like food and it’s something that naturally attracts emotional significance. There is a little canon bit of Mu Qing rejecting food (…drink) which I wish I could say inspired me, but actually I found it after:

Fu Yao, on the other hand, never touched the tea Xie Lian had pushed in his direction and had been languidly cleaning his fingers with a white handkerchief this entire time.

In the feast at Puqi Shrine at the end of the story, you also see Fengqing picking up their bowls of chicken noodles to eat together, but quickly putting them down after discovering the ghost chefs' wacky cooking methods. Did they get a bite in? Well, in this fic, the answer is no.

2. Mu Qing’s cultivation

Originally, I was going to claim that ‘don’t do sex and drugs kids’ was just something Mei Nianqing said to stop all his rich spoilt students from getting servant girls pregnant. But a while later I had to sigh and admit that the cultivation restrictions in TGCF are so important that I couldn’t disrespect them like that.

At the same time, this is another place where I wanted to do something different than many of the fics I read which either made Mu Qing breaking his cultivation with sex into a nonissue with the power of love and handwaving, and/or had a very…. christian vibe to them which I didn’t find fitting for his character.

Anyway, the route I went down was very much having my cake and eating it i.e. Mu Qing gets to fuck, it’s still damaging his cultivation but it’s not all or nothing. I really enjoyed getting to use sex as just another aspect of ‘oh no, my connections to other people are destroying me’ and all that. I guess the binary nature of losing one’s virginity in the eyes of society is the last thing I’m disrespecting.

With all that said, it’s like two sentences in the fic. I probably could’ve included it in more places. Regardless it was one of the biggest bonuses from writing that I finally found myself a way in to this topic, and now I have other ideas for it too.

3. further ideas

My favourite is the sequel about Xie Lian humiliating Mu Qing more under the pretext of friendship. like ‘we’re SUCH good friends I’m going to subject you to some really weird shit’ especially his cooking. When it happened in ch 5 in the original fic that was real humiliation but they could do it as a kink thing after. I think they would both get a lot out of this (and so would Hua Cheng) (my favourite part).

I also have ideas for a closer look at banishment era fengqing and for feng xin’s pov of their ‘reconciliation’ after they ascended, but they’re basically just ideas for how to fit as much angst into a pwp as possible…