ask meme for ling wen perhaps…
Ahhh tysm for the ask!! 💖💖 Ling Wen my beloved... She's my #1 blorbo
off the top of your head: notes for characterization? what are the most essential traits of this character to you (personality traits, important connections/dynamics, voice)?
Her extremely hard-to-break composure and politeness, her constant awareness of how she's perceived by others, her unwillingness to show weakness or anything she sees as weakness, her dry sense of humor, her intelligence and cleverness, her love for her friends, her refusal to admit out loud that she cares about anyone because in her mind that would make her look too soft and feminine, her complicated relationship to gender, her practicality, her ambition and her pride in herself and her work and status and accomplishments, her sense of self-worth and her strong conviction that she doesn't deserve to be mistreated.
adjacently—do you think fandom does the above traits justice? why or why not?
Well... there are certainly some fanworks that do! There's some great Ling Wen stuff out there. But most of what I see about her is either pretty surface level, or uses her as a background character while the focus is on other characters (fair, she is a side character in canon), or else it's posts about how cool it is that she's evil or like.. posts where she's mean to Pei Ming because OP hates Pei Ming and wants to dunk on him. Also a lot of people don't seem to understand that she has a sense of humor and a personality and is not just the Tired Serious Mom Character who rolls her eyes while picking up after the silly messy boys. Unsurprisingly ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
throw this character at any other character of your choice to bounce off each other as outsider pov to each other— regardless of timeline or logistics (crossovers allowed if you're interesting about it). why this combination? what insights would they have on each other?
I think it's really fun to have her meet Su Xiyan from SVSSS... I think Ling Wen would see her younger self in Su Xiyan and project things onto her as a result. I mean, Su Xiyan is also an ambitious young woman who was taken under the wing of an abusive paternalistic male authority figure (who's fixated on her!) in a heavily misogynistic environment and is striving for a high-status social role that's generally denied to women. They are both seen as cold and ruthless by others as well. They both get imprisoned and abused. We don't know much about Su Xiyan's personality since almost everything we see of her is filtered through other characters' perceptions and opinions of her, but it seems like she's similarly disillusioned towards society. Su Xiyan wouldn't trust Ling Wen or want anything to do with her at first, but I think they could get along eventually... My pet scenario for them is Ling Wen rescuing Su Xiyan from the Water Prison and saving her life and nursing her back to health.
how do you think you would react to this character in real life and vice versa? would you prefer be a million miles out of range, be amicable classmates, or fall desperately in love?
I don't think we would get along very well... I'm not cool enough to pass the vibe check and her friends are scary.
ideal flavor of rotating for this character? crack them open and dissect them— do you want them tormented, pining, or being loved + comforted? do you have any specific scenarios you like to think about?
I love putting her in situations... all kinds of situations... I love whumping her and then having her be taken care of by her friends, I love putting her in situations where she's scared and vulnerable and helpless, I love exploring what it would take to make her break down. I want her to break down and cry and be comforted by her friends. I want her to have sexual trauma and deal with it in messy ways. I want her to clumsily try to comfort someone and accidentally make things worse and get frustrated. I love de-aging her to a teenager with only her teenage self's memories and then handing her to an unaware and clueless Pei Ming so he'll do or say something stupid that scares her... I've written two fics like this so far. I also love more lighthearted scenarios where she has adventures with her friends and gets into hijinks! And I like writing porn of her too. And I want her to be loved and cherished and cared for and comforted!! The fact that she hates being vulnerable and sees vulnerability as weakness and is determined not to need help or comfort makes it all the more fun.
weave a web of dynamics through the cast for this character: which dynamics are you most interested in? both canonically and through extrapolation/speculation— which dynamics are the richest to you, and why?
Her friendship with Pei Ming is sooo fun and so important to me... He's a womanizer with a super misogynistic view of women, but he's best friends with Ling Wen and treats her like one of the guys and teases her a lot in a friendly way, but also is constantly flirting with her, seemingly without meaning anything by it. He has a pet name for her that nobody else uses. He had no idea that Jing Wen was abusing her but was totally up for helping her burn down Jing Wen's temples anyway, no questions asked. Ling Wen teases him a lot too. I love the little scene where he gets corpse poisoning from grabbing a bone he assumed was from a woman's skeleton and Ling Wen is like "Can you keep your hands to yourself for once? Can you??" and her "Ol' Pei! What a man!" line and their banter in the cave when Jing Wen captures them and just all of their interactions that we get to see. I love that people in-universe think they're lovers and how offended they are by the idea. The fact that they're friends implies some interesting things about Ling Wen in particular and her views on certain topics... but I'll get into that in a later question.
We don't get to see as much of her friendship with Shi Wudu sadly but it's very important to me too. She cares about him enough that even very early on in their friendship she was willing to risk everything in order to help him with the fate switch. Some people seem to think that he manipulated or forced her to help him but that doesn't track in my opinion. We know Ling Wen cares about Shi Wudu a lot, she was extremely worried about him during the Blackwater arc and she hangs out with him and along with Pei Ming she was one of the only people to attend his funeral. And we know how she feels about people who mistreat her! She would not be friends with him if he mistreated her. And Shi Wudu cares about her a lot too. I haven't read anything from the revised version except for the bits with Shi Wudu during Ling Wen's backstory (and some of the surrounding stuff) but I like those bits because they validate my headcanon that Shi Wudu knew about Jing Wen's mistreatment of Ling Wen and wanted to help her... but revised version aside, they are friends and he hangs out with her a lot. I love the bit where he teases her when she's accused of being Cuocuo's father... I wish we got to see more of their interactions but I guess that's what fanfic is for.
Her relationship with Jing Wen is also super interesting to me... He clearly hates her immensely by the time we see him but he also still has a paternalistic sense of ownership of her, which extends to him being fixated on her friendship with Pei Ming (which he sees as them being lovers). This fixation reaches the point of what reads to me as possessive jealousy? It seems Jing Wen thinks he should have control over Ling Wen's sexuality. This ties into the abusive paternalistic attitude he has towards her, but it also feels even more sinister than that when combined with some of the other things he says and does. I mean, he grabs her by the hair and talks about her being raped in jail and accuses her of sleeping with heavenly officials in order to get where she is now, and she mentions that when she was working under him he would force her to work late and then accuse her of harassing him... I think despite her "words murder without form" line (which depending how you read it could imply he might not have been especially physically violent towards her when she worked under him - or at least didn't try to physically kill her, which I think is more the point of the line), it's pretty likely he sexually abused her. She was quite young (it sounds like she was a teenager when he made her a junior official) and very vulnerable and he had pretty much total power over her in a super misogynistic all-male environment where she had nowhere to go for help and wouldn't be believed or listened to anyway.
do you have particular niche takes on this character? defend those takes. (openly controversial takes are permitted, but also: hyper-specific headcanons which you believe in and no one else has considered enough to disagree with yet. pick a hill to die on.)
She is not evil. I don't know how this is a controversial take but somehow it is. I think the fact that she outsmarts the main characters and uses deception to escape (plus the Brocade Immortal legend) makes people see her as a tricky femme fatale type almost?? and that plus the fact that she sides with Jun Wu later makes people see her as evil, but like. She is not a martial god, she can't fight "honorably" because without the Brocade Immortal she's not able to fight martial gods! She has to use her smarts in order to have a chance! And she has No reason to side with the main characters after everything they've done. They got her best friend killed and then arrested her on suspicion that she might have killed One guy like 800 years ago, and she doesn't have reason to believe that they can win against Jun Wu, so why would she side with them!
Her views on sexual assault are not very progressive. She is best friends with Pei Ming and finds jokes about his predatory behavior funny and even makes jokes about it herself. I do think she's been a victim of sexual violence herself, but that doesn't mean she has a progressive view of what counts as sexual assault or that she wouldn't side with her probably-a-rapist best friend against his victims if it came down to it. Cognitive dissonance, babey!
I cannot see her ever being in a relationship with Yushi Huang I'm sorry. They have so little in common and I don't think they would even like each other if they had to interact very much. Their personalities don't mesh. People just pair them off because they're seen as the two most shippable female characters out of the extremely meager selection of female characters in the novel. Also if for some reason Ling Wen did get involved with Yushi Huang, neither of them would be doing it to dunk on Pei Ming or make him jealous or whatever oh my god those posts piss me off so bad. Ling Wen likes Pei Ming and Yushi Huang is indifferent to Pei Ming, they aren't going to dunk on him in whatever mean weird ~feminist lesbian Win™~ way people seem to be projecting onto them.
I know I'm not the only one with this opinion but Ling Wen should be the next Heavenly Emperor. She's better suited to it than anyone else! And "oh she already has enough to deal with, she's so Tired™, she doesn't need more on her plate by being the emperor" is a cop-out analysis. How would her being the emperor be worse than the situation she's in at the end of canon!!
On a related note: Ling Wen is not everyone's servant oh my god. She's the top civil god!! That's a coveted and influential position!! Yes a lot of the other heavenly officials treat her badly and look down on her and devalue her palace and her work but that doesn't mean she's actually beneath them, let alone their servant. Any of the other civil gods would kill for her position! She's disrespected because of misogyny, not because she's actually in some lowly position. AND SHE GETS PAID she's earning money she's earning a lot of money!! I also think the way Xie Lian goes to her directly with every single problem he ever has is not meant to reflect the way every other god behaves, I think on a meta level it's for plot convenience (she is kind of a tutorial character who is there to dispense information to the reader and such) and in-universe it reflects Xie Lian's lack of awareness of etiquette and disregard for social norms in general.
Somehow this got really long and turned into a Ling Wen essay/rant 😭 It was really fun to write though, thank you for the ask!
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