don't forget: you're here forever

was thinking about them and how they are both equally this format & realized I'd never seen anyone draw them like this

Shi Qingxuan: the sign at the beach bar that said: "A tan makes you look better naked. So does a cocktail. Your choice!"

He Xuan: a guy floating on a large flamingo shaped inflatable with a bag of chips in one hand

Feng Xin and Mu Qing: two guys came to the beach and immediately and efficiently dug a deep hole in the sand, jumped in and began to argue whilst drinking beer.

Hua Cheng and Xie Lian: a woman was complaining to her partner that she was hungry and he went to the beach bar and got every single snack they had for sale, plus two fancy looking cocktails and a seashell necklace.

Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe: a guy caught a bunch of still living snails in their shells and offered to pluck them out so his partner could collect the shells and make herself bracelets - much to the woman's horror, who insisted he put them back.

Liu Qingge and Shen Qingqiu: a guy collecting seagull feathers for his partner who got so annoyed doing it that he yelled to his partner that he might as well hunt a whole seagull

Lan Xichen: very sunburnt lady who, upon being applied sunscreen to help, said that "the sunburn is the least of my suffering right now".

Lan Wangji and Lan Sizhui: father showing his son different species of seashells on the shore and having to comfort his crying upon answering why the seashells had no living creature inside anymore

Jiang Cheng and Jin Ling: son was building a sandcastle and proudly asked his father to take a photo of it, to which father said "do you really want to remember this?"

Lan Qiren: man reading Sun Tzu while occasionally sipping from a flask, wearing a pair of flamingo patterned shorts

Jiang Cheng: man who saw a jellyfish in the water, picked it up barehanded and chucked it as far as he could in the sea

Lan Jingyi: kid who caught a fish and asked if he can gut it and eat it now because he hated the hotel breakfast

Shen Jiu and Liu Qingge: couple argued loudly on the beach at 7 am while applying sunscreen on one another very carefully and sharing a kiss before continuining to argue

Wen Ning: guy laid on the shore with hands on his chest like a dead person and his son put a bunch of seaweed on his chest

Shi Qingxuan: woman who wanted to tan topless and upon her friend telling her there are kids around, she said "good, it will remind them of their childhood".

Shi Wudu and Pei Ming: lady sipping champagne from a crystal glass next to man drinking beer from a huge plastic cup he rinsed with seawater

Liu Mingyan: lady watching Heated Rivalry on full volume right next to me

Shen Jiu: lady whose kids were being rowdy and noisy and she lowered her sunglasses a bit and they immediately shut up

And I think it comes down to the fact that this... isn't really about my opinion of him. Regardless of whether he did either of these things two facts remain true 1) I like him as a character and 2) he's done some truly horrible things. Including child murder!! Those Tingshan He kids are still super dead! I don't need him to be innocent of these few specific crimes to like him, because its not like he'll suddenly become my unproblematic innocent fave. It's actually quite central to my enjoyment of him as a character that he's a man pushed to his utter limits, someone who does horrible things within circumstances so bad that even as they condemn him no other character can give him a clear answer on what else he should have done except just... die.

No, my insistence that Qin Su killed herself is all about her. In the precious little spotlight the narrative gives her, she's defined by how little agency she gets to have in anything. Everyone who knows the truth of her parentage decides to leave her out of it. She doesn't get to know the truth about husband, so she doesn't get to weigh a sham incest mariage against being a disgraced unwed mother (It's a choice with no great options, but it's a choice she should've gotten a fucking say in!) she doesn't get to know the truth about her son, so doesn't get a choice in whether she wants to bear him. He's killed regardless, years later, and she doesn't get a say in that either. And when she asks her husband after finally finding out some of the truth hidden from her he refuses to give her a clear answer (pro tip, jiggy: "he NEEDED to die, I totally didn't kill him tho" is about the most suspicious answer you could give)

Part of my MDZS as butterflies AU. Wei Wuxian is a Burney's Longwing and Wen Ning is a Snow Apollo. Butterflies under cut.

here is a map of the path of the eclipse (from timeanddate)

Because I think it really centers one of the key narrative tensions around the characters' life choices, and the question of the very definition of 'crime.' And how it's a contextualized process, rather than a hardcoded binary of actions that are okay and actions that aren't.

It maybe wasn't good to do that to Wen Xu's corpse, but it was war after all, so it's also not a big deal and the cultivators involved don't carry any lasting culpability, even though it wasn't even useful to the war effort to do that.

There's no need to figure out who it was exactly, and attach a stigma to them for vengeful corpse desecration.

But Jin Guangyao having done the very same thing to Nie Mingjue that Nie Mingjue did and allowed to be done to Wen Xu--well that's bad, right? Because it's not war, now. Because it's politics and personal relationships, and the rules for those are different. It's different.

And Jin Guangyao is like, is it though? No. That's bullshit you all tell yourselves. Lines drawn in water, to make sure you're always in the right and anyone else who resorts to violence is wrong.

The rules aren't ever different. Some of us are always at war.

Which is simultaneously the mindset that makes him a dangerous untrustworthy person who makes everyone around him less safe, and He Has A Point Tho.

All of which juxtaposes really interestingly with Wei Wuxian, who in the two phases of his Terrifying Necromancer era did exactly the same things under what were, to him, about the same circumstances (i.e. people he loved had been killed on a pretext that he'd started it, by people who self-professedly weren't going to stop until they'd taken everything he had left) but when it was war he was a hero (albeit controversial), and when it wasn't war anymore he was a criminal, unforgivable, had to be put down.