Meng Yao (Jin Guangyao) is a complicated and somewhat contentious character in canon. Arguably, his tragic ending was brought on by himself, because he was unable to let go of his grievances. But his grievances were super legit!
(There is a dedicated troll who replies to any fic with an even mildly sympathetic view of Meng Yao with just a torrent of spite directed at the character, who uh. Is fictional.)
But he’s also a character who rose from the bottom of society to become the leader of people who would never really acknowledge him as their peers, who arguably made the world a better place by his actions, and who was never given a fair chance but took his chance anyway and made it count.
So stories where he gets to be happy are important to me, although they are usually AUs, because the world of canon does not have a lot of room for him. Canon was never really going to give him more than a grudging space, and Meng Yao does not forgive grudges. So here are some happier worlds.
ariaste’sMeng Yao vs. the Board of the Homeowner’s Association could perhaps be best described as “Meng Yao settles into a life of kinky roleplay as a suburbanite (Meng Yao may actually be a suburbanite, no one tell him)” It is very funny, very sexy, and very bitchy.
Stratisphyre’sscorpion, before the frog, in which Meng Yao is sent by his father to spy out the secret of the dragons. This is a… vaguely Game of Thrones-esque? universe, perhaps, although with less peritonitis. Do you want to see Meng Yao slowly come to the realization he’s found a place that values him? Here u go.
nirejseki’sGood Help, a closer to canon universe, in which Meng Yao gets a chance to dazzle Nie Mingjue with his brains, in a setting where his viciousness is shown to advantage, rather than against Nie Mingjue’s principles.
Okay, so if you want to pipe a bunch of emails from mutt to urlextract, so that you can, for example, grep through them for work and pipe that to fanficfare, you want :set pipe_decode or set pipe_decode=yes in your .muttrc
It turned out all I needed to be able to read books again is to be away from the internet for 10 days. Some of the ones I enjoyed most were the K.J. Charles books, which I cannot meaningful discuss singly, because I read them in an enormous lump. The two series, though, were “(The Will Darling Adventures)[https://app.thestorygraph.com/series/17491]” and “(The Lilywhite Boys)[https://app.thestorygraph.com/series/16735].” I found the Lilywhite Boys pretty enjoyable, but not exceptional; it’s a fun romp with jewel thieves. I particularly enjoyed a female character I would describe as “sexy librarian except not sexy.” I am still living with The Will Darling Adventures in my head, though. It’s about two men who were traumatised by both the war and their social situation, and the various ways that those things interfere with them conducting a relationship. I was impressed by the way the relationship develops over the course of three books, so that it always felt like their relationship was evolving and they were facing new problems and not rehashing old ones. The structure of the thing was really obviously building to a confrontation with a particular abuser in book 3, but it felt very satisfying, and not obvious or trite. I also read The Unconquerable Sun, by Kate Elliott, which was supposed to be a gender-swapped Alexander the Great, in Space, which is to say, I assume it is, but I’m not that conversant in Alexander the Great, so I read it as purely original fiction. I enjoyed it and want book 2. I read De Bodard’s In the Vanquisher’s Palace, which was densely textured, and well written, but didn’t grab me in particular. Probably it’s me.
Got up in my Nirvana in Fire feelings and started rewatching it, and it’s a very interesting show to rewatch, partly because of how dense it is and how much I missed the first time, and partly because I now have a slightly bigger wuxia/costume drama vocabulary, and am catching stuff I missed the first time.
(Also just a slightly larger mandarin vocabulary, which doesn’t help as much as it might when half the characters are named “Jing” something, but.)
Like the fact you can definitely tell who’s a wuxia character and who’s a palace drama character by their hair, and MCS just puts his hair up and switches genres like “Hi, I’m a political operator now.”
(Which is a relief, because the wig budget really doesn’t show to advantage when his hair is down.)
You don’t have to grasp even a tenth of this to follow the show, and I know because the first time around I definitely did not, but it’s fun to rewatch and see how much was there from the beginning.
I’ve made this guide to browsing and using dreamwidth on a mobile device, but have not yet confirmed that it works with free accounts. Can anyone with a free account confirm or deny for me?
So I have gotten into the weeds of gauge, such that I now have a favourite cast-on for swatching.
(If you are a person who finds you need at least fifteen rows to recover from whatever happened with your cast-on and have your tension come to its equilibrium: Special Cast On for Swatching. If you do not understand how a person could have this happen, you’re probably fine.)
I have become obsessed with finding a way to make my stockinette stitch match my knitting in the round and have knit an upsetting number of swatches and watched quite a few youtubes trying to figure it out. I did this mostly on some acrylic yarn I mostly use whenever a patterns says “with waste yarn…” The yarn is acrylic, I think, or at least it certainly melts rather than burns, so this is not blocked.
I meant to post this here for More Joy Day but then uh, you know, what is time?
But is the most joyful thing I have written in yonks.
A Lucky Snow First Falling (6224 words) by Betty Chapters: 1/1 Fandom:陈情令 | The Untamed (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn Characters: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī, Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Western Canada, Canadian Shack Summary:
Lan Zhan, on the other hand, is a delicate flower from Shanghai, yet he wakes up every morning to go jogging around the campus in a tracksuit that Wei Ying is sure he would find sexy if he was ever awake to observe it. In contrast, while Wei Ying is technically the more winter-savvy, he beat Nie Huaisang at fourteen days without leaving the hodge-podge of tunnels and walkways connecting the university’s sprawl, even if it was only because Huaisang’s professor wouldn’t answer his email last week.
My inspiration for this fic was twofold: the extremely specific experience of being a kid in western canada where you get in a car and drive for twenty to fourty minutes to do anything, and the winter of it all, but also the giddy feeling of being so in love that you are basically out of your mind on absolutely horse-doses of endorphins your brain is pumping out. Like. Those chemicals cannot be otherwise obtained without using crack, I’m pretty sure. (I haven’t tried it, but.)
I wrote this in two days for pinch-hit, although I kind of want to fiddle with it still, I’m very pleased with the *feel* of it.
I love the sewn bind-off’s look, but apparently I am incapable of binding off a project without wanting to go back and fix something two days later, and it is very tedious to pick out.
gumbie_cat recommended combination knitting as a solution to my knit/purl tension problems, and I have to get more profficient at it to regularize my stitches but at the moment I think… maybe? It’s possible that I’m actually purling tighter than I knit, using this technique.
Really miss having a tiny dog to knit for, going through scarf and cowl patterns to see if there is one with interestingly grotty cables I could make into a hot water bottle cover.
So in a confluence of events, Anno Pestis was the year I started to become sensitive to wool against my neck. This is probably my punishment for feeling smug about my ability to wear wool. I spent a long time in denial, and then an even longer time admitting it, but trying to power through it (…??? this is bad and dumb, don’t do it) and finally I have come to acceptance, in a journy that I sure will be repeated many times in my life.
One of the causalities of this is a some favourite sweaters. One of them, this one, I had even tweeted about before, which may make it unique among my sweaters? It’s not a particularly beautiful sweater, but I liked the warmth of it, and it’s weekend-at-the-cabin sturdiness, and one might even say rustic-ness. It’s also a very useful garment, that one can throw on over whatever one is already wearing when one is cold. Which I kept on doing, long after it became evident that doing so would mean six hours of itchy neck.
Another plague indexed event is a friend’s adoption of a dog. His name is Moose, and he is a Jack Russel/Chihuahua cross, two breeds I would not have recommended, but she did not consult me, and the heart wants what it wants. One reason I would not have recommended anything that rhymes with ’-huahua’ is our winters, which are quite severe for at least six weeks. Those big chihuahua ears function to radiate heat back into the sky, which is the opposite of what one wants, hereabouts, and honestly any dog under thirty pounds or with a particularly thin coat is at real risk of injury if it accidentally gets forgotten outside for more than a few minutes. (Moose is trying heroically to get himself out of that weight category, but is really suffering under the constraints of what he was born with.)
(Many cat population control initiatives will cut a notch in the tip of feral cats’ ears once they have been spayed so that it is easy to tell they have already been trapped. In most parts of Canada this does not work because many ferals have damage to the edges of their ears from frostbite, such that it looks like they’ve been in a large number of fights.)
Anyway, I am dog-sitting Moose, and we are in the coldest weeks of the year. Obviously, the solution to this is to knit him teeny dumb sweaters. But what if there was a cheat? What if I could cut up a sweater, save myself from the temptation of wearing it, and consigning myself to itchery, and do a good deed (arguable, dog is not that into it., but.)
My genius idea was that because of sweater shaping, I could use the wedge shaped bits at the tops of some of the panels to create the funnel shape that a dog has in front, and save myself all that knitting, as well as preserve the patterned bits. The sweater itself has seen a lot of wear and less than careful washing, so it is moderately felted, and I thought I could maybe just cut it to shape.
I started this fic a couple months ago and stalled out on the first scene, and then banged the rest out more or less in two days right before christmas. Stulti was v. helpful in giving it enough structure to feel story-shaped.
By The River-side (3867 words) by Betty Chapters: 1/1 Fandom:陈情令 | The Untamed (TV),魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn, Jīn Líng | Jīn Rúlán, Jiāng Chéng | Jiāng Wǎnyín, Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī Additional Tags: Twin Prides of Yúnmèng Feels Summary:
The youngest shidis, however, weren’t sharing a room with Jiang Cheng, who could swim like a tadpole.
“What’s a tadpole?” asked Wei Ying.
“It’s a frog,” said Jiang Cheng. “Don’t you know anything?”
I thought I was writing “vignettes around the device of frogs” but 9/10ths of comments are “this story made me cry!” which. Uh.
Guys, I dunno, feelings?? I am not sure I did a very good job summarizing it. Sometimes, in Yunmeng, we don’t talk about our feelings, we just invest them in symbolic objects, okay?
I really enjoy stories that bring a specificity to their AUs, and one of the areas that is often done is in the choice of character profession. All of these stories use the profession of the character to explore something about the relationship with those around them and their world, and/or to drive the plot. All of these were richly textured enough to feel real to me (a person who has not… worked any of these jobs.)
These stories differ in length, tone, and rating, although they are all wwx/lwj. (Sorry, this only now occurs to me. If you can think of one w/ a different ship or none at all that fits this description, lmk!)
When you think “Wei Wuxian, mortician,” it just makes sense, doesn’t it? Brings WWX’s canonical relationship with death into a non-magial, modern setting.
If you, like me, feel about pro-wrestling a sort of “no, thank you,” I urge you to try this anyway. This story gets into the weeds of pro-wrestling in a way that is engaging, and full of affection for the sport(?).
A richly textured story of painting conservation, in which Wei Wuxian’s interactions with the art world mirror his canon interactions with the jianghu. A long fic that takes you on the whole journey and will give you feelings.
This is maybe the most marginal in terms of adherence to my theme, but I love it, and it’s going in! You don’t get to see Wei Wuxian do much bat-research, but his job as a bat-researcher sets the stage and gives the story a shape and theme.
Is witch’s familiar an occupation? This fic argues that it is! There are some bits of descriptive language in this that I absolutely loved. Usually a fic leaves behind in me a vague feeling, maybe some scenes and character dynamics, but the bit “spines of books pile up in vertebral turret” has stayed with me ever since reading this.
Very few jobs give you the perfect storm of moral high ground, manic energy, and being a huge dick to people on the regular that Wei Wuxian finds so satisfying about trauma surgery. However, they don’t call it trauma for its psychological wellness. A year of q2 36 hour call would be unbearable if Lan Wangji weren’t the other fellow that he shares a call bed with.
A “What If All The Cultivators Were Surgeons?” AU.
Stripper is an occupation that is presented here as very much about the workplace and the politics and logistics thereof. Also, I too have panicked and talked about squid facts.
The author is fairly open about working in the field, but even if they weren’t, it would be very obvious from the details of the story that they not only have experience working as a librarian, but also Opinions. Much like LWJ definitely would.
If anyone needs moral support for yuletide, I am not signed up and available for beta and hand-holding. Comments screened in case you want to take me up.
(I am not actually concerned about doing it right or wrong, in this particular case)
An informal tumblr survey of the reasons people are into Xenokink revealed that I am extremely an outlier, because, while I wouldn’t say it’s a thing I’m into per se, when I’m into it, I’m into it because the aliens do sex weird. And I think it’s because of ace reasons: make sex weird! Acknowledge that sex is weird! It’s weird!
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gumbie_cat recommended combination knitting as a solution to my knit/purl tension problems, and I have to get more profficient at it to regularize my stitches but at the moment I think… maybe? It’s possible that I’m actually purling tighter than I knit, using this technique.