#someone elses...

ive been really getting into danmei since i've been gone, particularly scum villain.

now, i don't mean to tread into the fandom community in this socmed when i've barely interacted with yall, but i honestly wish to let a some thoughts out. though i would like to preface this that this is absolutely NOT at all critical of any character or any character's fans. i'm just sharing some personal opinions and preferences.

so my favorite character so far in the books has been shen jiu and of course, ive spent an appropriate amount of time reading fics about him. one common trope in some fics is when he and shen yuan are depicted as twins (aka the shen twins). i have no qualms with this trope and i, in fact, rather enjoy the many ways fanfic authors can write sj and sy interacting. i do also like and feel a sense of justification when sy or Anyone for that matter can see sj's bigger picture/his side of the story. so what are my qualms?

i dont know if anyone else feels the same way but i dislike when sy essentially replaces sj in the qiu household. sometimes, a fanfic kinda ends up taking sj's whole narrative... and giving it to sy. whether sy becomes sj's twin early in the story and takes his place as the main victim of the qiu family that owns them or sy... transmigrates into xiao jiu... it just irks me.

dont get me wrong, there are exceptionally written fics where sy transmigrates into xiao jiu and essentially forms his identity as shen jiu or even stays himself but is still a changed man or fics where sy is xiao jiu's twin and they have a balanced dynamic and form their own seperate, but still intertwined, narratives. i also understand that if i dont like a fic i can just click away + there are no rules for fanfic (anything goes, every universe can exist, etc etc.) but it does, still irk me. again, personally.

see, a lot of sj's core character and flaws stem from the abuse and emotional turmoil in his youth. it may have been horrible and i certainly do not wish for him to go through such pain, but it still formed him into the character many of us love. his trauma and experiences are his alone and his to overcome. it just feels weird to give his struggles and then the accomplishments he clawed for to someone else. an outsider even. qi-ge, the qius, wu yanzi; these feel so integral to sj. if someone were to write about this specific timeline of the story, i cant help but feel like sj should be front and center (biased).

(to give another example: its like, say, you replace xie lian in the ruoye formation scene with someone else)

if one were to make sy transmigrate into xiao jiu or him becoming xiao jiu's twin, he has to be an active person in the story, different from xiao jiu. he cant react like an outsider because i do not think it is possible for someone to be so unchanged when faced with what happened within the qiu household. especially if he is experiencing it firsthand. he cannot stay the exact same person because it has to warp him in some way for it to be a good narrative. similar to how it changed xiao jiu into the demonic cultivator shen jiu into the scum villain shen qingqiu.

other characters also cannot treat sy exactly how they treat xiao jiu. they are, at their core, different people. so other character have to treat them differently from one another. like im not saying qjl would not abuse sy, he definitely would still treat sy like shit. im saying maybe his attitude or personality towards sy would be slightly different than how he canonically is with sj. like if it was all copy and paste then the scum villain universe wouldnt have deviated sm from the pidw universe.