Ming fan is best fan

specifically about the dead villains. And dead people in general. Like, ghosts exist in svsss, don’t they?

and we’re talking about a bunch of spiteful individuals most of which have at least one giant regret. Hm.

so unbeknownst to lbh, og shang qinghua, su xiyan, shen jiu, ming fan and one or two oc disciples become ghosts.

Og Shang Qinghua is a chain smoker and I will die on this hill. When he dies, he possesses the pipe. He uses the smoke to make some illusion of a body (which is his own but as an illusion). He can do some kind of xianxia telekinesis, which together with his snakeoil salesman history is how he manages to mostly pretend he’s human. He opens a shady shop somewhere. Bonus points if he deals in artifacts and intel.

Su Xiyan becomes a river ghost who looks over her son in his first few years of life. She’s disappointed at what he becomes but not enough to be mad because she does love him. She can’t leave the river but she can drown people in it. Someone nicknames her “the Lady of the Red River” because someone was badmouthing tlj on a boat. You can guess what she did to them.

Shen Jiu is a ghost with a seemingly normal body… if you ignore his limbs. His limbs are somewhat see-through and a glowy green. He also has chain accessories all over his body. He’s pretty but very much not a friendly ghost. He still Xiu Ya, but it’s cracked, and the only thing holding it together is his qi.

Ming Fan, and I am copying this idea, is kind of an ant queen? His body is hollow and only everything you can see from the outside regenerates, but the inside is filled with the fire ants that ate him. He controls them now but he doesn’t like them - they’re gross. And scary. He’s getting used to it, though. He grew up to be handsome, so when you look at him, you just see a pale pretty guy with black and green robes but then he points his finger at some demon and says “eat that” and a bunch of ants break through his skin (they’re not allowed to go through his mouth/ears/nose because he’s traumatised) and eat that demon and you’re just. Kinda terrified.

So, PIDW Ming Fan somehow ends up in SVSSS. He and the other Ming Fan hit it off, and everyone starts seeing them as siblings. They just sit there in their corner, drink tea, trash-talk people and look scarily identical. And SVSSS Ming Fan looks at PIDW Ming Fan’s (who they decided is the older one because that’s what he acts like) poems expressing the overwhelming desire to brutally murder everyone that’s ever slandered, tortured or in any way hurt his shizun ever as well as the helplessness that comes from not being able to do that and pretends his new Ge is a sane, non-traumatised human being.

At some point PIDW Ming Fan gets into a fight with Binghe. He also doesn’t like Shen Yuan because to him, just looking at how he acts is a three-day trip to uncanny valley. Every single cell in PIDW Ming Fan is screaming that’s not his shizun.

Shen Qingqiu: one of my disciples is gay. Actually maybe it’s two. But one of them is probably Ming Fan

And then Ming Fan’s like, “No no no. I’m not gay. I’m bi. We’re all bi.” And then he points to Luo Binghe all “now, that one over there… that’s a different story.”

Shen Qingqiu: “You mean he’s straight?”

for angst fans, anyway.

Shipping sqh, esp the og is by definition is an angsty affair because underneath all the chaos and stress and fluff and crack there’s always the fact that sqh’s first priority is and always will be himself. If there’s no way to get out of this alive for him, he’ll jump ship, and that’s understandable.

okay so. Shen Jiu is, officially, a normal teacher at a random college with two adoptive kids (Ming Fan and Ning Yingying) and one younger brother he’s extremely overprotective over.

Turns out he used to be an exorcist. Turns out he used to be a *vicious* one. Turns out some demon would like to get revenge. Turns out some demon is a prince.

Anyway, Luo Binghe waltzes up to that college like he owns the place, fully prepared to turn it into a battlefield and… what? His teacher’s nice? His teacher gave him a handshake? He calls him A-He now? “Please call me Yuan”? Apparently, the exorcist has a brother. A pretty one. And of course Lbh straightup jumps to seducing the pretty one. What better revenge on the guy you hate than to marry his brother?

Thing is, Ming Fan is immediately suspicious. Shen Jiu partially adopted him because he showed some talent in becoming an exorcist, even if he decided to retire and not tell his kids about his former job so his family could lead normal lives. And Both Ming Fan and Ning Yingying copied their A-die’s way of dealing with Uncle Yuan: extreme overprotectiveness and suspicion towards anything romance-shaped. Especially men. Especially men radiating evil red energy.

Shen Jiu’s currently on a trip or smth, maybe on honeymoon with Liu Qingge, anyway he’s not available and the kids think it’s their job to protect their uncle.

Ning Yingying is a lot more easy-going and a lot less suspicious of everyone and everything that moves, so it doesn’t take long for Lbh to convince her that he may be weirdly pretty and his existence gives people goosebumps but that’s normal! He’s just a chill guy! Ming Fan is harder to convince, but lbh is getting there. He remembers mf as the kid always trailing behind sj when sj was off-duty, but he doesn’t really care about him. So Mf is about to be convinced when he sees lbh kill someone without even moving his hands. Like, with a floating sword/shadow spear or something.

so of course he decides to pretend he’s not suspicious about the obviously suspicious and dangerous murder flirting with his uncle (who is by the way his age, so, he’s gross, and jail, jail for a thousand years, how dare he) and also investigate every single millimetre of his past. And thus begins a cat-and-mouse game where the cat is not aware that it is being chased by a mouse.

ming Fan, despite not knowing about the exorcist business, manages to uncover larger and larger parts of it and get closer to his answer. He also gets more and more convinced that lbh belongs in jail, not just for flirting with a man old enough to be his father, but also for, well, being a murderer.

he thinks lbh is part of some gangster family or mafia.

Meanwhile, lbh is too busy being a stupid teen in love (he’s 20+) to notice someone’s sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. But his cousin/father does notice and starts trying to protect his cousin/son.

So ming fan and tlj meet. And it’s. Terrible. Terrifying. Ming Fan thinks tlj is a mind reader. Tlj thinks mf is just funny enough to not get murdered today. (It could be zzl but he wouldn’t spare mf so it’d turn into a whodunnit with nyy and sj as the leads)

so instead of killing the possible threat, he starts watching it. Everytime ming fan gets a new lead, that stupid old man’s there, sitting in front of him, smugly, being all “well? Found anything, detective?”

at the same time, ming fan IS finding something. He just doesn’t like what he’s finding. What started as a simple background check on a possible psychopath trying to seduce his uncle turned into a wild goose chase and he’s starting to realise that he’s in over his head. He needs an adult. An adulter adult that him. Except that the only currently available adults are a) being actively seduced by the problem or b) the problem’s insufferable father.

And he still doesn’t give up.

Ming Fan goes through all his memories involving Sj (which he found out has something to do with all this) and remembers that he used to always be complaining about this group named Huan Hua. Something about greedy old wretches and their grubby little hands. He’s desperate for any lead since his have been running into dead ends. So he starts digging. Apparently, it’s an exorcist union. Again, Ming Fan does not like the picture his investigation’s painting.

So he does the only sensible thing. He hacks into Huan Hua’s archives. which is something tlj has been trying for ages because of his traitor ex wife. At least he thinks she’s a traitor.

And then begins the craziest, most traumatic “what do you know that I don’t” Ming Fan has ever went through. They blackmail each other. Ming Fan finally knows the whole picture but he’s also sure Huan Hua erased parts of the history so he doesn’t actually have the whole picture. Tianlang-jun wants to know about Sxy. Ming Fan just wants to protect his family.

svsss soulmates au where there are different kinds of soulmates. Some have tattoos of the first sentence the sm ever tells them, some have moving tattoos of their soulmates true nature, some have plain ol boring strings. Ming Fan has a tattoo. It’s a very ominous sentence along the lines of “Are you here to laugh at an old man, little cultivator?”

It implies a lot of things about his soulmate he’d rather not know. It makes Ming Fan prepare a whole lecture about why you shouldn’t greet people rudely or say ominous things the first time you see them because it could lead to their own family beginning to think their son’s gonna marry a demon one day. It’s also the reason his parents send him to Cang Qiong.

so the plot happens, and everything’s fine, and Ming Fan, as the head disciple, is assigned a mission to go get tlj’s soul back into his real body because the plant one collapsed and his soul was kinda just floating around over it until Mu Qingfang put it in a bottle.

so Ming Fan takes the bottle to the mountain, and puts it into the old body. He goes to check on tlj the next day or so because he was told the soul was in shock and would need some time to regain consciousness.

so when he’s in that cave, guess what tlj says. Guess what’s the first thing leaving that man’s lips directed at ming fan.

so the kid freezes. Forgets his entire lecture.

ming fan takes a step back. Then another. And another.

he starts pacing, frowning, muttering to himself with some curse words he learned from either Xiang Fei or shen yuan mixed into his nonsensical rambling.

he stops at some point, stares tlj directly in the eyes from a safe distance away and goes, “Are you fucking serious?”

I need y’all to hear me out here. I fell down the rarepair rabbit hole and this is where I ended up: tlj and mf. And I mean, Ming Fan. Little mini Shen Jiu Ming Fan. And Binghe’s dad.

Yes, I absolutely do mean this. I am dead serious. This is not a “haha funny pair lbh’s ex bully is making out with lbh’s dad ahaha” ship. I mean it could be, but then there’s the angst potential.

Like. Imagine. Ming Fan is this scrappy, somewhat ordinary-looking kid (he grows out of the baby fat and gorgeous tho trust me bro just look at the official art in the book that stuff is too pretty) with a distant family, a distant shizun/dad-figure and maybe 3 crushes (I go with Nyy, Gyx/Yyx and lbh because I like the idea of mf being emotionally useless and mistaking a fucking crush for abyss-deep hatred) which all quietly failed when they ran off and got married to someone not named Ming Fan. He probably has abandonment and neglect issues huge enough to pass as mountains. He always feels like he’s not good enough because he’s surrounded by prodigies, fucking heaven-sent geniuses and immortals but at the same time he feels like he has to take care of everyone and everything because if not him, then who? His shizun works two jobs, one of which empress, and he was absent for years, mf definitely took over one or two peak lord duties. All the disciples are younger than him, he’s their dashixiong, they rely on him. He can’t trust Bai Zhan because Qing Jing peak hates Bai Zhan. He’s got a difficult personality so he has a hard time making friends. His family is slowly aging towards the day he’ll be standing at their graves, not looking a single day older than 27 or 30 while his siblings and parents are six feet under. He’s on his own. And he gets good at it. He starts lying to people about his workload, he starts hiding his insecurities, his troubles, his qi deviations, everything. He’s the perfect, if a little grumpy, head disciple. And he’s so fucking young.

Enter Tlj. He takes one look at this kid and decides he does not give a shit. Man has issues. He isn’t looking for a boyfriend, he just wants quiet after all that bullshit he went through. And mf’s just an ordinary cultivator, maybe a bit more hardworking than usual, but what about it? Not enough for tlj to care. So, tlj breaks into the qing jing library and just. Refuses to leave. Because of the yaoi slop that shen yuan’s been hiding in there. (Yes Shen Yuan’s a fujo in this one. It’s not gay if he’s not the one doing it. It’s either him or Nyy.)

and ming fan is in that library trying to learn, trying to do his documents and definitely NOT prepared for some fuckass demon to waltz in and start reading smut five meters away in the corner. And bringing snacks into the library. SNACKS. IN THE HOLY QING JING LIBRARY. Ming Fan’s retreat. The one place on Qing Jing he can still work at (he got kicked out of his office for working himself into passing out. Shen Yuan does not know this because he’s busy being married).

so they kinda start talking and mf is just annoyed and tired and every time he’s polite you just KNOW it’s insincere. He has mastered the ways of obviously insincere politeness to a degree even Shen Jiu would be proud of. tlj is just kinda amused. Like he starts out seeing mf as this weird, kinda funny kid, but not really as a person, more as some weird funny animal to pass time watching. and then Ming Fan starts being stupid. And hiding all the shit he does for the people around him. And he gets him a special corner in the library he can eat snacks at without the librarian trying to kill him for dirtying her sacred space. And he has qi deviations. And some fucker is trying to flirt with him and mf pretends he doesn’t know because that fucker is the crush of some friend/shimei/shidi of his. And he tries to do everything alone. And he never asks for help. And holy shit tlj is CONCERNED.

like, not romantically. Definitely not. He’s not betraying xiyan like that. But it can’t hurt to drag one stupid disciple on mandatory holiday… right?

anyway ming fan latches onto that tiny bit of concern like it’s a lifeline. Like? Positive attention?? Someone is considering him a priority??? And he lets him trash talk about everyone and everything? And he agrees that Huan Hua is the worst place ever and, aside from gyx, should be thrown into a bug nest for being peacocks and stupid and trying to hurt shizun and that entire fake trial and imprisonment thing they pulled? He is starving for that. All of that.

Flash forward, they are both screaming in their heads while tlj is flirting and mf is slowly learning how to flirt back in a way that makes the other guy shut up. Both are just yelling WHY YOU WHY THE FUCK IS IT THAT GUY IT COULD HAVE BEEN ANYONE LITERALLY FUCKING ANYONE WHY HIM. this is worse for tlj because of the sxy thing.

Ming Fan is so insecure and he feels like tlj’s out of his league so he doesn’t even try to take it seriously and tlj stares at mf desperately trying to tell himself that he is not falling for some random, stupid kid with a martyr complex. And beats himself up for “betraying” sxy. Again.

And they go on some kind of epic holiday quest all the while. They can have their bi crisis on the road, preferably while mf’s trying to paint something to sell for travelling funds. That sounds like the perfect time to be having an emotional crisis.