#anonymice

:D one of my baby babies!! sorry in advance, I feel like I could talk abt this for ages lmao

The initial idea came up because @veliseraptor sent me a prompt and i was like HUH. haven't thought about that. Prior to this, I'd only ever seen huaqing AUs that...kind of just made Mu Qing into Xie Lian?? which is a personal pet peeve (different characters do different things! even if Mu Qing DID catch Hua Cheng [which frankly would be out of character!!], he would react and behave differently than XL did afterward and, importantly!!, the ENTIRE PLOT would be different. anyway.) and I had a hard time at first thinking about how Hua Cheng/Mu Qing could even work—from both sides. Hua Cheng's hate and Mu Qing's pride (oh god i could've done Bad Pride & Prejudice) are both really core to their characters, AND their weirdness about XL is also. important. To Me.

so I guess ultimately it became a meditation about all that? but with the knowledge that I wanted to head towards a...romantic(?) relationship and so needed to have some sort of incident that forced them out of the way they usually looked at each other. So: Mount Tong'lu! and with that, I wanted it to feel awful and vulnerable for both of them—Mu Qing feeling like he's being pinned between "get killed" or "make out with HC" and HC being out of control and feeling like MQ took advantage of that/"stole" what he wouldn't have offered to him. I think in both cases they feel hurt and ashamed which is! not a great place to start a relationship but does provide a crack in the shields of hate + pride.

and the sequel!! that i have 2k of as i desperately try to recall wtf I had planned for it. At this point, I think the sequel is essentially figuring out how the next stage of this relationship goes: they've gone from pure hate and fear -> weird allies -> Sparring Partners™ and now are trying to figure out: What Are We, Mu Qing's relationship with his cultivation (at the moment: horny and scared about it and angry about being scared), and both of them wrt Xie Lian. I've said before but imo (and certainly at the end of TMFAM) one of the interesting things abt HuaQing is that they *aren't* each other's Most Important #1 Person/Thing in life, and I don't really want to change that just so they can get together AND bc I do actually think MQ's cultivation is important to him (and he remains part of my Ace-ish Xianle Quartet headcanons), it is harder to just make them hate sex it out. and I do think like...grudgingly they do also kind of like each other? but in the way two cats like each other at first

y'know. I haven't actually ever finished watching '98 but I think you're right?? in my memory, it was just like....Strongly Alluded to but not addressed outright??

we're ignoring that this is from 2 months ago when i was on a different continent!!

(1) Huaqing

I had zero thoughts about this (except for my general cattiness about ships where people just replace the characters' personalities and dynamic with the main pairing's in order for them to work) until @veliseraptor sent me a prompt about them and then i sort of lost my shit. I think a couple of things that get me about them are that they have these moments where if you inverted the colors, their relationship could have turned out totally differently: they're both skilled with a saber, they're both picked out especially by Xie Lian (compare Feng Xin who was assigned to Xie Lian), they both are outsiders to the privileged, polished existence that Xie Lian and, to a lesser extent, Feng Xin grew up in. There is a world in which Hua Cheng doesn't run away after the parade and he gets adopted into the Clown Trio and learns from Mu Qing (I wrote half this fic on Twitter before i deleted my account :') ...i think i still have it saved somewhere).

That isn't the world we see in canon (which already opens up a lot of fun questions), but even in canon, there's a history there—of Hua Cheng hating Mu Qing especially, of their oppositional orbit around Xie Lian, of the fact that Hua Cheng could have ruined Mu Qing (and Feng Xin) too if Mu Qing had only taken up the same challenge as the other 33 gods. Any time you have history that you don't get to see onscreen (or only get to see parts of), imo, it creates a frame with an open warp where you get to start weaving in your own ideas for the missing pieces, which is exactly where the best ground for fanfic is

(2) JC

my boy! my angry youngest sibling forced to grow up too fast struggling with a spiraling older brother boy!!! yeah! I mean, there's a reason that I spent the first month of being obsessed with The Untamed being like "they're just like me fr" even though it's about ancient Chinese cultivators and i am. not that!

in honor of closing my asks, i am finally answering months' old questions. yikes