#saw this post and immediately thought of nhs

[cryiling]

#saw this post and immediately thought of nhs #mdzs #the untamed #cql #incorrect mdzs #mo dao zu shi #mdzs meme #the untamed text post meme #the untamed textpost meme #x text post #x text posts #nie huaisang #funny #twitter #tweet #memes

[lgbtlunaverse]

It seems the dash has been talking about the Lan Xichen - Nie Huaisang post-canon dynamics and it's gotten me thinking about how discussion around post-canon Lan Xichen's absolutely horrendous mental state often center around the question of "who is Lan Xichen angry at and who does he feel guilty about" which, at its worst, seperates into 2 camps where according to one side he feels guilty about not protecting jgy and hates the Nies and, on the other side he has completely flipped on jgy and despises him now while being filled with regret towards both nmj and nhs.

And I dislike both of these takes not just because it often feels like people projecting their own Blorbo opinions onto Lan Xichen which is never a fun time but also because that central question is flawed to begin with. It treats anger and guilt like opposing emotions that can't coexist or, if they do, have to compete until one wins and cancels the other out.

And that's not how that... works.

To be clear, the reason why Lan Xichen is so supremely fucked up at the end of the story is that he believes on some level he fucked over everyone in this situation. And, even more importantly, that even with hindsight he can't actually think of what he should have done instead. Every attempt to do better by one seems to involve fucking over the others even more because these people were in conflict with each other and choosing one would mean standing against another

And none of this would actually stop him from feeling angry at any of them. It's not "who is he angry at and who does he feel guilty about" it's: "he is angry at everyone and feels an immediate and bone deep guilt for daring to think badly of them."

Speaking from personal experience here, but feeling like you're not allowed to be angry at someone because you wronged them really doesn't stop the feeling, it just maks you feel like shit for feeling it. And this is all worsened by the fact that what he's in seclusion for is, at the end of the day, a moral question of what he, Lan Xichen, did wrong and every single emotion serves as further proof of the ways he's failed them.

Is he angry at Jin Guangyao, for killing his oldest friend, using Lan xichen's trust in him to do it, and then lying to him about it and countless other things for a decade when Lan Xichen thought of him as the person he trusted the most in the entire world? Yeah. That's a thing people get angry about! Except Jin Guangyao also saved his life and protected and helped him more times than he can count and never ever hurt him and can Lan Xichen say the same? No. He had to clean A-Yao's blood off Shouyue, he has to be haunted by the fact that if he just hadn't listened to Huaisang- hadn't been just like everyone else, in the end, and believed a lie about Jin Guangyao just to think the worst of him- then Jin Guangyao might still be alive.

Is he angry at Huaisang? For orchestrating the death of his best friend? For making him do it? For knowing what the real cause behind Nie Mingjue's death was and never telling him until he found out in the absolute worst way? Absolutely. But didn't Huaisang hide it from him for a reason? Wasn't it his clan's techniques and his personal faith in Jin Guangyao that cost Huaisang his brother? How dare he demand that Huaisang let him in on the secret of his brother's murderer when Lan Xichen is here wondering about how he should have protected that murderer better!

And I do even think he's angry at Nie Mingjue, sometimes I think it's pretty normal to be angry at your friend for kicking your other friend down the stairs and threatening to kill him, even when you know his mind is being poisoned. And years later the last thing he ever saw of Nie Mingjue was Nie Mingjue's thoughtless corpse coming to kill him before Jin Guangyao pushed him away and then proceeded to graphocally snap Jin Guangyao's neck in front of him. And if what he wants to do is protect Jin Guangyao, shouldn't he be mad at Mingjue? Didn't this whole mess start because Jin Guangyao was afraid Nie Mingjue was going to kill him?

Except holy shit, can you imagine? Lan Xichen feels like he personally has Nie Mingjue's blood on his hands. Your oldest friend is killed in front of you and you happily believe it's an accident for 11 years and now you think you have the right to be mad at him? You watched him get worse as he was being poisoned and attributed it to his illness and not to the techniques stolen from your library with the token you give his murderer. Does he think Nie Mingjue knew who he was in that moment and wanted to kill him? That he blamed Lan Xichen for his death? (For the record, I don't. I don't agree with most of what Lan Xichen thinks about himself, but I've been in a self-blame spiral and I know how it feels)

But what was he supposed to do then? Choose Mingjue's side and let A-Yao die? That's also unacceptable. But so is letting Jin Guangyao get away with it. Every single outcome is unacceptable. And really, if Jin Guangyao felt like he had to kill Nie Mingjue to save himself, when it was Lan Xichen who was supposed to keep the peace between them, isn't that another mark of his failure? That he couldn't protect Jin Guangyao well enough that he felt he had to do something so horrible?

But that's not an answer! He's supposed to know what he should have done different, and all he can come up with is "what you were already doing, but without failing this time" He can't pick a side because that means betrayal, but he's already tried not picking a side and it ended like this! There is no right answer, which can only leave him with the idea that he was simply doomed to hurt the people he loved from the start. No wonder the guy looks like shit when we see him post-canon. They put him in a real life trolley problem and gave him the lever as a souvenir.

#mdzs #mdzs meta #lan xichen #nie huaisang #jin guangyao #meng yao #nie mingjue #personally i LOVE high stakes ethical dilemma tragedies where there's not a clear right or wrong #and i can enjoy them without picking a side because it's fiction to me and i can admire the complex web of love hurt and betrayal from afar #but this is lan xichen's actual life. he HAS to have an answer to this question in a way I don't #but there isn't one

[acequinz]

Saw the post that was like JGY losing his mind over wwx not knowing lwj was crazy for him and then immediately after saw post about NHS being the biggest WangXian shipper cause he did end up being the reason these two United and kissed.

And then thought of modern au NHS and JGY who absolutely hate each other but come together because they ship WangXian and the idiots just won't get their shit together.....

#i wonder if this fic already exists? #i hope it does #if someone knows it please share #what's the ship name of nhs x jgy #sangyao #??? #wangxian #mdzs

[dazoru]

Rant about a persistent injury under the cut

If you've been following me for pretty much any amount of time then you've probably seen me post about an injury I've had since October. I say injury - it's more that I randomly collapsed in agony and my knee hasn't been the same since. I couldn't walk immediately after the injury for some weeks and was using crutches to get around.

I went to A&E the day I fell and then spent two months off work (in total) due to it, then I returned to work and was fine for 3 weeks before it started painfully popping at random times and leaving me feeling unstable and like it's going to give way. I went back to the GP and got reffered to a specialist, and then days later I was sent home from work due to the popping, pain and instability. I went to the GP again, and then another doctor told me they thought it was a sprain despite the fact it'd been over a month since the injury. I got written off work again and told to rest it, which I did.

Then, weeks later I was still in pain and called for another sick note, but another doctor told me that I had to find out a way to go back to work because my referral to see a specialist could take a year. They also told me they couldn't speed up my referrel unless I fall and become totally unable to fucking walk again.

Now, I've returned to work again on shorter shifts, and surprising nobody, the pain is happening again!

I'm exactly the same as I was weeks ago. I've now had to call a non emergency NHS line and was told to go to an urgent care centre today which I did, and for the first time I spoke to a woman who actually took me seriously. She said she thinks it's a meniscus tear or a cartilage issue, or a chronic issue I have with that knee (since I had trouble with it when I was a teen and even saw a surgeon about, but then the issue stopped for years and has now come back again).

When I told her the last time I saw my GP they told me it was a sprain she made a face and shook her head.

She also said it will likely continue to happen because my knee is rubbing together when I walk and so the pain and the instability will keep coming back since it'll keep getting re-injured. She said that me working, since my job involves a lot of walking, is not helping and is making it worse, and that she can't recommend I wear a support because she doesn't want me to cover it in any way since she doesn't know if it's an injury or a chronic pain issue.

She was really nice and sympathetic but she has no power to speed up my referral, she just told me I need to keep calling them and telling them I'm not coping, so I need to keep hounding my GP about it until they take me seriously so now I need to phone them tomorrow and tell them that hey! It's me again! For the 465758th time! And I'm still fucked!

#This is long and is mostly me venting my anger about all this lol

[captnjacksparrow]

Sparrow, suddenly I thought about this. I actually quite like Hinata on part 1 but on Shippuden she became limpy disgrace, and it's such a whipslash for me. Interesting, by the end of Part 1 Hinata had massive popularity and I recall Kishimoto once said that he didn't expect Hinata to be popular. So I had this thought, perhaps Hinata is naturally a harmless Naruto supporter like Gaara and Shikamaru, but since she's a woman and somehow loved by dudebros as their waifu, higher-ups start to push Hinata to be Naruto's main love interest and made Kishimoto angry LOL. That's why Kishimoto wrote Hinata in Shippuden like that. He's probably like "sure you will get your boring hetero ship but my Naruto will not be happy on her side"

I also thought just like you and my earlier posts were based on these thoughts... I explicitly wrote that Hinata got popular and that’s why Kishimoto went for her.

But then I got this Question, "He made Sakura to be an absolute Asshole towards Naruto... Okay. As a story teller, he definitely knew the rules of Basic Story Telling 101 that if you make one character to be an ass towards the most likeable character in the show... Then people would inevitably hate the bully. This is just a basic knowledge, pure common sense. Mission Accomplished. Done. But doesn't he also know that if he create a character who supports/stan Naruto, a girl at that... Will be eventually shipped with Naruto by the Audience??? Like why would he make her seemingly likeable in part 1 but only to flip the bird in the part 2????"

Only after careful introspection I got it... 

[[The following may look borderline N/arusaku... But It’s not... Just know that I hate N/aruSaku just as much as SS/NH ]]

Now the context from these panels are very evident... It shows how Naruto was being ignored by everyone in the Village.

And how he tries to get the attention by making pranks (throwing that noodle cup on that guy)...

And It is very deliberate of the Author to show that Hinata has been watching Naruto from her childhood just like Sasuke... and yet she never made any attempts to go acknowledge or become friends with him.

Atleast with Iruka, he needed a push from Hiruzen.... After realizing that Naruto was also suffering just like him... Iruka immediately reached him out in Chapter 1 and rest of them is a History.

And what did Hinata do??? 

Absolutely nothing. 

She knew Naruto was suffering and yet she didn’t do anything other than stalking him. 

Okay, Let’s just excuse the fact that she was also a child and hence she was shy.

Look at the contrast between Sakura and Hinata. Sakura is an asshole which is a known fact and yet she was showing her unanimous support for her teammate Naruto outloud...

Whereas Hinata was seen hesitating/shy not because she was in a dilemma as to whether to support Kiba or Naruto... but because she was afraid that Kiba will be mad for supporting Naruto. She is neither loyal to her teammates nor Naruto...

Another supportive act from Sakura whereas Hinata was left with Naruto-kun’s bubbles.

Hinata feeling the pain of Naruto... Love of the century😍😍😍

Whereas Sakura kept on motivating Naruto...

The point is... Sakura, despite being a bully towards Naruto, she could able to encourage/help out Naruto openly whereas the girl who 'supposedly' loved Naruto does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

One or two panels maybe a coincidence... But not more than 2... And we have some more... Which I’ve talked about it here as to how the Author used NS to spite NH at every given chance... This thing started from Chunin Exams onwards, and it was we, who never realized these meaning because we were only looking at the surface level kind act of Hinata. But as her story progressed we saw her true colors. 

Meaning, Hinata openly started to support Naruto only when it’s convenient. Like, She acknowledged him only after everyone around her (Shikamaru, Sakura, Kakashi, Asuma, Kurenai, Ino, Choji) started to acknowledge him... This is not called Goodness. It’s called being Opportunistic. Hinata was always an Opportunistic supporter of Naruto. And nothing more.

So, it’s not like Kishimoto got angry because the Publication pushed him to... He always knew that he was writing a Gay love story and these two girls were always a Gay shields to begin with... Since there was a need to go for a sequel and he has to establish an Hetero Ending, that’s when he started to go full-on mockery with Hinata... 

#sasunaru #narusasu #sns #nsn #anti hinata #anti-hinata #anti nh

[meowthiroth]

tangentially related to that one reblog earlier, goddd now I'm just thinking back about that time doug's weird nft business partner kept trying to follow me on twitter for some reason

he hadn't liked any of my posts or interacted with me otherwise beforehand, so I had NO idea how he even found me at first. but his bio said he was doug's business manager & they were mutuals, so I guess he was legit?? which honestly made me uneasy because 1) im a heavily left-leaning trans dude, a type of person doug REALLY doesn't seem to like considering how openly he shittalks them on his own twitter, and 2) I was NOT SHY about how much I HATED nfts and would retweet posts making fun of nft bros all the time. so I was like, absolutely sure that me being present on this guy's timeline was a disaster waiting to happen.

tbh the first time he followed me I kinda thought it was a fluke. like maybe he saw something I posted and hit follow on accident. he had followed like a few hundred people already so it was possible he just didn't notice. So I figured he probably wouldn't notice if I just hit "remove follower" on him either. Didn't seem like it at first.

But then a couple days later, he REfollowed me. didn't say anything to me about it, but the fact he apparently NOTICED and refollowed meant it WASN'T a mistake & that kinda shook me a little. I almost immediately removed him again, still hesitant to outright block because I knew twitter actually shows people if you block them & I didn't wanna risk him siccing doug on me or something. hoped since he was following so many people he wouldn't notice I went missing again.

His second refollow didn't even take a full day. And at that point I was getting kinda freaked out. Like, what the fuck? why does this guy wanna follow me so bad?? does he want something from me??

But this time, he had tipped his hand a little, because on top of refollowing he also liked an old piece of neverhood art I'd posted. And I realized THAT was how he kept finding me— he must've been searching keywords related to Doug's creations (stuff like earthworm jim, neverhood, and armikrog) and following people who had posted about them. And since I had posted a few pieces of neverhood/armikrog related art before, he must have been finding me again & again through those. So this time, not only did I remove him, I also searched back through my own account and basically nuked EVERY POST I'd ever made mentioning Doug or any of his IPs. and the guy didn't refollow anymore, so I guess that must've done the trick! :)

but yeah anyways that was partially why I took down all of my old NH/Armikrog art on twitter 😅

#kinda sucked bc i was still proud of a lot of the art i drew at that time #but like. i did NOT want nft weirdos/doug stans thinking i was ok to follow bc of it #either way that whole situation was so surreal #like. i just think klaymen funney pls leave me alone i dont want doug to fucking eat me #ace screams into the void #vent// #long post

[crippledasinfuckyou]

I saw your post about glasses not being free and I actually know why they aren't anymore (I don't agree with them being paid for but I thought this was interesting) (also this is quite long btw so dont worry if you dont have the spoons to read + reply quickly i understand not having enough spoons)

basically when the NHS was first set up everything was free. but after a few years they started running out of money and instead of raising taxes they made certain parts so that you had to pay for them. Dentistry and Optician stuff were two of the things, and I think some major surgeries, as well as if they don't consider the surgery necessary for your survival (eg. I have a condition that means it is extremely painful to walk on my right foot, but I most likely will have to pay for the operation that has a small chance of fixing it because a. it's not considered necessary since I can still walk without it and b. the waiting lists are so long it would be quicker for me to get a private one)

it can be summed up as "capitalism" and also the fact that immediately post-WW2 the Welfare State was put into place and a large majority of the government supported it, but in the 1960s/70s the Conservative governments started to be more vocal about having less of a Welfare State and less funding was directed towards the NHS. mostly because many members of the Conservative party profited from the use of private hospitals.

so yeah that's why. it's ableist, classist, and totally typical of the uk government

thats so weird wtf. youd think of ALL things eye health would very much be on the list of vital things ���

#england explain #asked and answered

[robininthelabyrinth]

I saw you mention this in one of your posts and this sounds like a swell idea! Something where JGY figures out that NHS is The Scary One before he touches a hair on NMJ’s head. :D

on ao3

When his father said that someone ought to get rid of Nie Mingjue, that he was in their way, that he would never stop, Jin Guangyao’s first thought was about the Song of Clarity that Lan Xichen was teaching him – and the Song of Turmoil, that he’d taught himself in one of his secret visits to the Lan sect library. He’d long ago noticed the similarities between the two tunes, one to help and the other to harm; it wasn’t similar enough to fool anyone skilled in music, of course, much less in musical cultivation, but Nie Mingjue rather infamously wasn’t.

His second thought was: let’s wait and see.

Perhaps it was only that it had been a very long day, and Jin Guangyao was tired, feeling unusually surly and dissatisfied. But it occurred to him that it wouldn’t do his father any harm to have to actually ask for something from him, rather than merely hint at it and have Jin Guangyao run to do it for him before he even finished the sentence – a rather unpleasant comparison had been made between Jin Guangyao and a poodle earlier that day, and he was still sore.

So yes.

Let’s wait and see.

-

Waiting was not, it seemed, paying off.

His father’s hinting had grown all the more intense, although he had not yet actually asked, and as for Nie Mingjue...

Nie Mingjue had promised to try to trust him again, Jin Guangyao thought to himself with a sigh, but most days it seemed that the only thing he trusted was that Jin Guangyao was up to something.

He scolded and he scowled and he questioned, always looking for loopholes and tricks hidden behind every word and gesture, never giving him the benefit of the doubt on a single thing. Jin Guangyao thought nostalgically back to the days when Nie Mingjue would simply present him with a problem that needed taking care of and tell him to deal with it as he saw fit, trusting not only in his competence in dealing with it but also in his judgment of how things ought to be resolved.

They said that trust was like a priceless porcelain vase: once shattered, it would never be whole again, even if it was repaired.

Jin Guangyao supposed that he deserved it for letting himself get caught like that.  An amateur’s mistake, but you only needed one of those to ruin everything.

But if it couldn’t be fixed…

He was just contemplating the Song of Turmoil again as he walked through the halls of the Unclean Realm when Nie Huaisang unexpectedly tackled him around the waist, making him Jin Guangyao stagger back and nearly fall – poor cultivator or no, Nie Huaisang had some heft to him, and plenty of muscle from years of running from his brother’s attempts to make him train.

“You have to help me, san-ge!” Nie Huaisang said, eyes wide and pathetic in such a patently unauthentic way that Jin Guangyao had an immediate stabbing feeling of empathy, an affliction he almost never suffered from. What a little scoundrel you are, he thought, not without fondness. “Da-ge’s on my case again. Scolding and scowling and trying to catch me in some sort of trick – and I would never play a trick on him, never - not in a million years -”

It occurred to Jin Guangyao that perhaps Nie Mingjue really did treat him as a younger brother, and it was only that he’d incorrectly assumed that he’d be treated as being somewhat more capable than the man’s actual younger brother.

Who was, he conceded, probably equally untrustworthy when it came to the likelihood of playing tricks on his too-earnest older brother, even if the tricks Nie Huaisang generally played were significantly lower in both quality and importance than his own…

“Huaisang! Where are you – ah, Meng Yao. What are you doing here?” Nie Mingjue asked, blinking at him. “Anything urgent?”

“Ah – no?” Jin Guangyao said. “I came to play for you, da-ge, you remember – er-ge said –”

“Right, of course,” Nie Mingjue said, in the tones of a man who had completely forgotten. “Could I borrow you for something else while you’re here? Perhaps Huaisang will learn better if it’s not just me.”

“Of course, da-ge,” Jin Guangyao said. It was always better to do someone a favor than the other way around, to better use it later, and Nie Mingjue almost never asked him for anything. “What are you trying to teach him?”

“How to run a sect,” Nie Mingjue said, lifting Nie Huaisang by the waist. “No, Huaisang,” he added when the younger man whined. “You do not get a choice.”

With that said, he lifted the younger man above his head – Nie Huaisang, as mentioned, was not light, but Nie Mingjue didn’t seem to notice – and walked back towards his office.

Jin Guangyao followed, torn between wondering if this was the reason that the ceilings in the Unclean Realm were all so high and being unable to keep himself from doing the math: Nie Huaisang weighed more than Jin Guangyao did, being both heavier and thicker around the middle, so if it was Jin Guangyao that Nie Mingjue was holding, it could be estimated that he could hold him up for at least an hour, and even longer if he was braced against something convenient such as a wall –

He shook his head to rid himself of the useless thoughts. He would need all his cunning about him if he was going to embark on the difficult mission of trying to get Nie Huaisang to actually learn something, especially something as boring as sect management.

Questions of assassination were, comparatively, much easier.

-

The problem, Jin Guangyao discovered, was not, as he’d suspected, in keeping Nie Huaisang’s attention.

It was in everything else.

“ – and the sect leader is now requesting assistance,” Nie Mingjue concluded his summary of the situation behind the letter that they had received, laying out both the actual content of the letter, the implications behind it, and the background necessary to make a decision so efficiently that Jin Guangyao lost his head for a moment and imagined what life would be like if he could hire Nie Mingjue as his deputy. His life would be so much easier. “How do you respond?”

Nie Huaisang heaved a sigh. “That’s obvious!”

It was. The request was far more than this particular sect really deserved, given its past behavior (rather despicable) and the moderately high chance that they were simply trying to get the Nie sect to pay for benefits that would later go to themselves or, at best, the Jiang sect, but granting the request would not seriously damage the Nie sect’s coffers and would lay the groundwork for a better relationship in the future –

“We write a letter that heavily hints about what we know that the sect leader did in the past, expressing our concern and indicating that we received the information from the Jiang sect in a moment of indiscretion,” Nie Huaisang said happily. “He’ll be so distraught at the thought of potential blackmail from them that he’ll beg us for assistance, and we’ll be able to extract additional benefits before finally agreeing to –”

“No, Huaisang,” Nie Mingjue said, even as Jin Guangyao boggled at the sheer wretched cleverness of the idea. It would work perfectly to isolate the other party through their own paranoia, leaving them feeling that they had no other way out but to throw themselves on the Nie sect’s mercy – there wasn’t a limit to what could be extracted that way. “If he’s so untrustworthy as all that, we don’t actually want him, do we? He’ll just betray us next time he can. No, we write to him the way we would anyone who wasn’t our dependent and lay out our terms, free and clear; if he wants better ones, he knows what to do.”

“People don’t have to be trustworthy to be useful, da-ge,” Nie Huaisang whined, and the infantile tone of his voice very nearly disguised the fact that he was saying something incredibly insightful. Not at all something Jin Guangyao would have expected to come out of the mouth of one of the Nie sect, much less Nie Huaisang, the most useless of them all. “They don’t even have to know they’re being used to be useful! I can think of at least three ways we could use –”

“The answer is no. Besides, I thought you liked Sect Leader Jiang?”

“Yes, but he’s far too direct to be dealing with someone like this – think of it as us ridding him of a pest! We could –”

“Huaisang.”

Nie Huaisang sighed.

-

“ – but if you would only consider what we could achieve with just a little bit of bribery –”

“Huaisang.”

“But it’s such a small amount! I could do it with my own pocket money!”

“Huaisang.”

“Ugh, fine, have it your way, we’ll just ask, I guess…”

-

“Oh, wow, that’s a tough one. Uh…murder?”

“Huaisang!”

“What?! It was a reasonable guess!”

“It was not a reasonable guess!”

“We wouldn’t let anyone know that we were the ones that – I’m making it worse, aren’t I?”

“Yes, Huaisang. You’re making it worse.”

-

“I’m guessing the answer isn’t going to be blackmail?”

“That’s correct.”

“And not it’s bribery, either.”

“No.”

“Definitely not beating him up…”

“Huaisang, are you trying to get the answer by process of elimination?”

“It’s a valid strategy to figure out the answers to test questions!”

“This isn’t a test question, it’s real life!”

“No, it’s a test, because if it was real life, I could use blackmail.”

-

“…you know what,” Nie Huaisang said after a couple of moments of serious contemplation. “I actually have no idea what I’d do in that situation. San-ge? Can I have an assist?”

Jin Guangyao had managed, over the past shichen or so, to get ahold of himself. He shrugged apologetically. “I must admit that I’m at a loss myself. It seems like an especially tricky situation.”

The situation in question involved the crimes of an extremely well-connected individual, with interests from all over the cultivation world deep in his pockets; he would be a difficult man to cross. Moreover, he was well known for his perfidy, rendering blackmail useless, and well-off enough to make bribes pointless; mere intimidation was also out, given his connections – he’d already gone through a “trial”, if it could be described as such, and he’d only used it to cleanse himself. In such a situation, Jin Guangyao would probably hang back out of caution, seeking further information and hoping that an appropriate situation would appear that he could take advantage, but Nie Mingjue had specified that there was a time limit involved…

Nie Mingjue groaned. “You’re both overthinking it: for once, murder is the right answer.”

“Wait, it is?” Jin Guangyao asked, staring at him blankly. “I mean - what exactly do you mean, murder?”

“The man slaughtered children in broad daylight! The evidence is unquestionable and undeniable; he should be executed immediately.”

“But – his connections –”

“That’s why there’s a time limit,” Nie Mingjue said, rolling his eyes on both of them. “If you do it quickly enough, it gets attributed to the hair-trigger Nie temper going out of control and everyone treats it like a casualty in the face of a force of nature – the same way you’d shrug off the death of someone who got in the way of a hurricane or tsunami.”

“Oh,” Nie Huaisang said. “I see.”

Jin Guangyao envied him: he most certainly did not see. Since when was outright murder a possible weapon in the Nie sect’s diplomatic arsenal?

“Speaking of which, I’ve already delayed long enough, trying to teach you something,” Nie Mingjue added. “Huaisang, can you host Meng Yao for dinner? I’ll be back later this evening.”

“Of course, da-ge! Count on me!”

Nie Mingjue nodded at them both and strode out without another word.

“…where is he going?” Jin Guangyao asked.

“Presumably to go murder someone,” Nie Huaisang said, as if it were obvious, and then laughed, presumably at Jin Guangyao’s expression. “He always makes me practice with real questions, you know, though he does save them up if he can.”

“That wasn’t what I was surprised about,” Jin Guangyao admitted, because he’d already figured out – possibly for the first time – that Nie Huaisang almost certainly already knew what he was like under the smile. “It’s just…murder? Really? Da-ge?”

“Da-ge’s righteous, not kind,” Nie Huaisang said with a shrug. “Leave questions of mercy to the Lan sect! Here we believe that showing excess mercy to evildoers is itself committing a harm to their victims…ah, well, let’s not talk about it, shall we? If we do, I’ll just get another headache from trying to figure out the line between what I’m allowed to do and what I’m not allowed to do.”

“You know perfectly well what you’re allowed to do,” Jin Guangyao said, deliberately keeping his voice light rather than accusing. “You just want your brother to be a bit more open-minded.”

“He won’t be.” Nie Huaisang’s voice was fond. “He’s willing to pull those sorts of tricks when he has to – our exculpated murderer is an excellent example – but he’s never going to understand why anyone would pull a nasty trick if they had another choice…it’s just the way he is.”

He laughed, taking out his fan – a new one, Jin Guangyao observed – and lightly nudged Jin Guangyao in the side even as he hid his smile behind it.

“It’s fine, though,” he said. “Isn’t that why he has people like us?”

“Yes,” Jin Guangyao said, following Nie Huaisang to the dinner table, thoughts running through his mind. The Song of Turmoil – it would still work, more than likely, because Nie Mingjue would let him play it for him and him alone, and even Nie Huaisang needed clay to build bricks. But if he did it, and Nie Huaisang ever found out…

He thought that he might not like being Nie Huaisang’s opponent. 

He wasn’t sure which one of them would win and which would lose, of course, and he rather thought he’d bet on himself, but in all honesty he wouldn’t like to try. 

“In fact,” he said casually, “Huaisang, if you don’t mind, I have another situation that I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on.”

“Not another one,” Nie Huaisang whined, but his eyes narrowed in blatant curiosity. “But all right, all right, just one more. Only for you, san-ge, and only because I like you so much.”

Jin Guangyao smiled. “I appreciate it. Now, for the situation: assume there are two sect leaders, and one of them wishes to eliminate the other through underhanded means…”

-

“Murder, I think,” Nie Huaisang said thoughtfully. “No – most definitely murder. There is no other path forward. The only question is, I suppose: how much do you want your father to suffer during the process?”

Jin Guangyao smiled.

It was so nice to work with people that understood.

#mdzs #meng yao #jin guangyao #nie mingjue #nie huaisang #my fic #my fics #under the smile #this one was fun #Anonymous

[thebiscuiteternal]

If you’re still doing writing jam— NHS and XY come across each other. It’s not a bad time, to one or both’s surprise/amusement/u name it (Doesn’t have to be this AU, but it was inspired by your post about reverse AU NHS feeling lonely about not being able to travel with friends and my gremlin brain was like “Hey, hey you know who else would usually travel solo—”)

For those wondering, I had a couple of twitter threads about my belated realization that by having Lan Xichen still be Nie Mingjue's friend first and foremost in the Reverse Nies timeline, I'd accidentally put Nie Huaisang in an unenviably lonely position, especially if he'd survived long enough for the abdication plan to go through instead of his having been murdered. So this is sort of an offshoot of that AU.

---

Xue Yang scowled and put a hand over his growling stomach, rumpling the note tucked into his robes in the process.

Being offered a place in a great sect was a big fucking deal, especially for someone like him, but invitations didn't buy food, and if he starved before he even made it to Lanling, what the fuck was even the use?

His scowl deepened even further as he cast a furtive glance around the market to see if there was anything he could easily-

-oh, that would do.

He sidled close to the tables set up outside one of the teahouses -not one of the big fancy joints, but definitely more than he'd ever be able to afford- and the patrons who were too busy discussing whatever boring lives they had to notice a bun or two go missing from their plates.

When he saw the next table on his route only had one occupant, he balked slightly. Sure, the guy had his nose in a book like a loser, but probably wasn't distracted enough to-

Without even looking up from his reading, the man pushed a half-full plate of dumplings right into his path.

What the fuck.

This was a trap, right? This had to be a trap. Maybe the bastard was with the city guard, or-

"I can practically hear your stomach from where you're standing. Come sit and eat."

Xue Yang bristled, fingers itching to go for one of the stolen knives hidden in his belt because now he was sure this had to be a trap.

But after an uncomfortably long pause in which the stranger didn't turn around or make any other sign of being a threat, hunger won out.

Almost sulkily, Xue Yang plopped onto the other bench at the table and grabbed the plate. Not giving a shit about trying to eat politely, he shoved two dumplings into his mouth at once, then nearly choked at how good they were. "Fuck."

"Take as many as you want," the stranger said, finally looking up from his book. "I've already eaten my share."

"Your share?" Xue Yang asked around another mouthful of dumpling.

"I was supposed to be meeting someone, but he sent a message that something had come up last minute."

"You don't sound surprised."

The stranger shrugged and laid his book down, then rested his chin on one hand. "It happens more often than not these days. Tea?"

Xue Yang nodded. "Yeah, that'd be good."

The stranger waved to get the attention of a waitress, then held up his tea cup and made a hand signal Xue Yang didn't recognize. The woman nodded and vanished, returning almost immediately with a second cup that she set in front of Xue Yang.

The tea wasn't as sweet as he thought it should be, but it was sure as hell better than the stuff the man who'd given him the sect invitation had ordered. He could even see slices of some fruits he didn't recognize in the pot.

If this guy was willing to share this kind of quality shit with some grubby nobody, Xue Yang thought, then whoever'd had the gall to stand him up deserved to miss out.

He, on the other hand, was going to make good use of this gift horse until it threw him off.

#reverse nies #xue yang #nie huaisang #fanfic #mdzs

[wangxianficrecs]

Fic Finder

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1.  Hi, I'm looking for an Untamed fic, maybe you'll be able to help. It's a canon divergence AU in which WWX doesn't lose his core, Jiang Fengmian lives and it's implied that his core was transferred to JC (heavily implied; JFM retires as the Sect Leader after that). This is absolutely not the most important part of this fic but it's a paragraph that I've got stuck in my head and now I'm searching for the rest @_@ Thanks in advance! ~ @otemporaetmores

FOUND! by @notsobabblespace, who was reminded of  I’m aching and I know you are too by edenwolfie (part 3 in series, M, 23k, wangxian)

FOUND!  by @jim-is-spocks-thyla, who suggests ❤️ to arrive late is better than not to arrive at all by Moominmammashandbag (M, 35k, wangxian) [ETA:  Oops, not this one.  JFM has no core, but he didn’t give it to JC]

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2.  Hi Mojo! I’m in need of you/your followers help in finding a fic that I read a little while ago. It was a fic where Wei WuXian and Lan WangJi lived together in Cloud Recesses and their children were Sizhui and an OOC that was younger than him. I remember SiZhui faced a lot of criticism for not being the chief cultivator’s real child? And they were happy he had a younger sibling that would be sect leader in the future because he was blood. Come to think of it, this is probably an ABO fic too. Thanks for your time 💜

FOUND! @andidontmeanto believes this is Blue Blood by PotterheadAvengerDemigod (T, 91k, wangxian, my post)

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3.  Aksks it's like 3 am but I just remembered a fic and I can't find it?? I'd really, really appreciate your help. It was a wangxian fic, maybe a oneshot idk, and lwj was kind of a nerd and wwx a badboy? So basically lwj has a massive crush on him and dresses up like wwx etc. (i think he even got an undercut) and after a party they sleep with each other at lwj's place?

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4.  i’m looking for a fic set in the where lwj’s mother killed his father? i don’t think that was a main plot point but it did show up in his backstory - any idea what this might be? ~ @thehype

FOUND!  @rentslirott thinks this could be ❤️the best of you by sysrae (E, 42k, wangxian, my post)

FOUND!  @castaways-logbook offers  The Right to Care by travelingneuritis (E, 39k, wangxian, WIP)

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5.  ... same as #6 ...

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6.  Hello friend, sorry for the inconvenience but I wanted to see if you could please find me a fic that I lost but I only remember more or less the final part, it goes more or less like this, lan zhan and wei ying are kidnapped by jin guangyao and lock them up if not I'm wrong in some cells next to lan xichen after the fights jin guangyao dies but lan xichen did know how bad jin guangyao had done and he didn't care and then to get revenge he wants to kill wei ying but lan zhan kills him and sizhui gets scared It was more or less like that, please help me ~ @isa0123lol

FOUND!  by @wangxiansfics who says that tragically it’s no longer available, but @dulachodladh found it on WaybackMachine here: Thread and Needle by haysel (M, 86k, wangxian)

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7.  Hi, Mojo! I'm glad that you're back but I hope you enjoyed your time off tumblr! Can you and/or your followers help me find a fic? I think the summary was talking about wwx and somehow they were asking mingjue for help since he's the only one who can help. The summary was in italics and it's a dialogue from some guy? And a shorter summary below. Sadly this is the only thing I can remember but I hope you can still help me

FOUND!  @alwayswenning suggests love, in fire and blood by cicer (E, 360k, wangxian, has it’s own fanfic here, I just finished this last night!, my bookmark)

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8.  Sorry to bombard you as soon as you're back, but this one's driving me crazy--a modern AU where they met online. WWX thinks LWJ is an old man from how he talks. I don't remember much except the excerpt made it seem like he still was amused by/enjoyed talking to him, and Wen Qing was telling him it was a bad idea and to stop. It's not How to Fall In Love With a Catfish, tho that one is brilliant! (Also any top notch identity porn would be great) Hope your break was restful, you deserve it! Thanks

Here’s my #identity porn tag, but I’m not sure about this exact story.

I'm the anon for #8 on the fic finder. Though I'm excited to read it, the suggested fic isn't the one I was looking for. I swear I thought I saw it on here around a month ago or slightly more, but searches have failed me.

FOUND!  Rating: General Audiences by Mishaa (T, 18k, wangxian WIP) -  mysterious author LWJ (speculated to be an old man because of his formality) and infamous artist WWX paired up for an Untamed Big Bang (in an AU where JGY was the series’ antiheroic protagonist; this fic was written before the release of CQL.)

FOUND?  could you be looking for  Something Real by Latios (G, 5k, wangxian, my post) - wwx thinks lwj is an old man, but there’s no WQ.  There are many pictures of bunnies.

SIMILAR! @emilysidhe thought of ID Bro Saga by Bowandtie (T, 39k, wangxian)

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9.  Hey, how are you? Could you help me please? I've read 3 fanfics once, but I can't find them anymore. 1 - Nanny Problem, Wei is going to be the babysitter of A-Yuan, he is an omega and Lan is an alpha. 2 - Doctor Perfect, Yibo is an omega nurse and Xiao is an alpha doctor. 3 - The Baby of my Omega, Yibo is omega and Xiao is alpha, both of them are bodyguards, but Yibo has to protect Xiao in the beginning. I think they were at ao3, but I really can't find them. Can you help me please? Thank you!! ~ @weallmad

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10.  Hi! Im happy you’re back. I hope you had a good break. I missed your recommendations, but at the same time i got a break from fics and actually studied to my tests haha.  [Ah!  I’m glad to hear your time was spent productively!]  I’m looking for a fic like Linger in the Sun by etymologyplayground. In the fic im looking for wangxian slowly lose their senses instead of all of them at once. Like they lose their hearing, then touch, sight etc, They can’t see each other or hear each other. I’m sorry i can’t explain very well.

FOUND?  Could you be thinking of  ❤️shadows in the sun rise by Yuu_chi (E, 25k, wangxian)?  Only lwj losese his senses one by one in this one, though.

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11.  heyyy im trying to find this fic where wwx died the first time he was thrown in to the burial mounds then 10 years later he gets resurrected or something. I can't find it on AO3 and it's been bugging me for days. Thank you!

FOUND!  Well, @moku-youbi offers both of these as possibilities:

Did I Not Explain Why the Sunset Turns Red? by 3988Akasha (E, 100k, wangxian)

we're starting at the end by Miss_Enthusiasimal (M, 95k, wangxian)

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12.  Hi I am looking for a fic where wwx is a witch (/mage?) in a world where magic is being persecuted (especially in Gusu) except for Yunmeng/Lanling I think but they're still frowned upon nonetheless. Then after accidentally hurting Shijie, wwx runs away, and ends up hiding in Gusu pretending to be a servant to lwj (lwj is a prince, lxc is the emperor) but lwj actually knows of his identity and tries not-so-discreetly to protect him from being caught. Thanks!

FOUND! by @bibliobasilisk who gives us Witchfinder by misbehavingvigilante (E, 86k, wangxian)

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13.  Hi! Firstly, I'm glad to see you're back, and I hope your break was a good one! I'm trying to find a LWJ/WWX story that I had planned to read and ending up losing before I could. It was set in the immediate aftermath of the 33 lashes, LWJ is in the Jingshi recovering when a healer(?) discovers he's pregnant (by WWX). It may have been a/b/o verse, but I'm not 100% on that. Part of the story was a flashback to when WWX was still alive. Thank you!

FOUND!  by nonny themself.  It’s Unexpected Surprise by Glucose_Gremlin (E, 4k, wangxian)

SIMILAR! @mondelgel suggests my heart is kept as pure as ice in a jade vase/一片冰心在玉壶 by Daledesu (M, 21k, wangxian, WIP)

SIMILAR! from @impending-cuttlefish:  something new, something white, something blue by ariskamalt (E, 140k, wangxian, WIP)

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14.  I'm trying to find this one fic where Jin Ling finds this diary that Wei Ying wrote as the Yiling Patriarch that basically reveals everything, including the golden core reveal and it even has training tips that helps Jon Ling improve. When Wei Ying comes back, he tries everything to keep him there because he is THE best uncle now. I need to find it because it is a N E E D.

FOUND? by @theladypeartree who says, “The Truth (Untold) is jl reading jyl's journals, not wwx's though. And mordant is jl returning wwx's journals that he found, not grew up with. Neither fit #14 properly, but I seriously could not find anything closer after two solid days of searching. Good luck!“

The Truth (Untold) by anxiouswreck0_0 (g, 3k, wangxian, jin ling & wei wuxian)

or this one on ffn:

mordant by tennisnotensai (M, 18k, wangxian, here’s the link for mobile)

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15.  I have heard tell of a Sizhui/Jingyi fic where the boys end up going to Wangxian for advice about how to be intimate. Can you help me find it?

FOUND!  @manaika-chan says this one is On Advisement by LaMachina17 (M, 19k, wangxian, zhuiling, chengyi)

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16.  nm

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17.  Hi! Sorry, do you happen to know that nsfw fic where wwx is still studying in the cloud recesses and he’s reading a novel (im not sure if it was from nhs) that features a cultivator couple and there’s a scene in the book where the woman was pegging her husband? Basically wwx got curious about this and tried fingering himself. I remember he was hiding in the back mountains and then lwj eventually caught him

FOUND?  Could you be thinking of  Deep in the Woods by malkinmalkout (E, 5k, wangxian, my post)?

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18.  Ahhh I'm going crazy trying to think of a fic that I've read where Lan Zhan killed Wen Chao in a locker room and nie huaisang stood guard outside the door! Then lan zhan went to lan huan and said I killed someone and he said did they deserve it? Then it's fine. And I can't remember the name of the fic! Have you heard of it? ~ @uchihaautumn

FOUND! @artemisisdiana offers So Full Of Love (Wouldn't Know Where to Start) by witchupbitch (M, 54k, wangxian, WIP)

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19.  Hi, I was wondering if you could help me find a fic. I read it a while ago and I don't really remember all the details but it was a modern au where Lan Wangji was a police officer in this small town and Wei Wuxian comes back after years, having left the town due to some stuff. Thank you in advance.

Btw love your blog. I live for your fic recs.  [Thank you!]

FOUND?  Could you be looking for medium blues by dark_and_terrible (E,193k,  wangxian)?  It appears to be taken down atm, but it might come back (it’s done it before).

FOUND! by @grannyweatherwaxshat who offers When a Bird Flies, It Leaves Feathers by Bem_Kofi (not rated, 75k, wangxian)

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20.  Hi mojo!! First of all I luv your blog Thank you so much for all those ficrecs.  [You’re welcome!]  Actually I’m looking for a fic I read months ago. I probably found the fic from your blog. But I can’t seem to find it now 😢 it was a modern au wangxian fic (inspired by call me by ur name?) wwx was like 5 years older than lwj. (And lwj was like 16?) Wwx lives in another city but he spent around a year in cloud recesses with lwj in the past. And wwx yanli and jc visits cloud recesses again and wangxian gets 2gether

~*~

[My ko-fi.]

#wangxian fic finder #wangxian #mdzs fic finder #wangxian fic rec

[antiadvil]

Sparks Fly

Summary: Dan and Phil’s vacation after Vidcon is going well, until a mistake from Phil sets the whole thing up in flames. Rating: PG-13 wc: ~2.2k A/N: written for the @phandomreversebang! Shoutout to my team ( @schnaphan as the talented artist and @catboydan as my incredibly tolerant beta who did not mind me getting the fic done a day before posting) for being incredibly helpful and supportive of the weird direction I decided to take a “sparks fly” prompt in. You can see @schnaphan’s art here.

Read on ao3 or beneath the cut.

Phil was proud of this one. An airbnb cabin, far away enough from the rest of the world that they would get some space to themselves for once, but close enough to civilization that it had broadband internet. The perfect place to wind down together after Vidcon. He stretched his feet out onto the glossy wooden coffee table and turned another page, trying to focus on his book.

“Ah!” Dan jumped back a bit as he entered the living room. “Did we really need to keep the cutout?”

“It’s funny,” Phil insisted. He wasn’t sure what exactly had inspired him to stuff the cardboard cutout of Dan into their suitcases when the man from the convention asked if they wanted to keep it, but it annoyed Dan to see a replica of himself stand in the cabin’s living room, so stand it did.

“It keeps scaring the shit out of me.” Dan glared at it, somewhat resentfully.

“Even better.” Phil attempted a wink.

Dan rolled his eyes. “Just wanted to say I’m tired. Going to bed.”

Phil looked up from his book, trying to suppress his disappointment. “So early?”

“Tired.” Dan leaned over the back of the sofa to try to reach Phil’s face, reaching out with his hands to pull him closer when Phil jokingly pulled away.

“Good night,” Dan said, kissing Phil on the forehead, and then on both cheeks when he pouted. “Do your best to survive without me. You’ll have your book to keep you company. Very intellectual.”

Phil rolled his eyes, turning back to his (somewhat trashy) horror novel. “Good night. Sleep well.” It was good that Dan was going to bed early, probably, he hadn’t been sleeping well recently. Hopefully he’d be able to catch up on some sleep tonight and feel better.

The cottage was quieter than Phil expected with Dan in bed in the other room. It was a bit eerie, so far away from the rest of the world, alone in the woods, and Phil found scenes from the axe murderer horror novel in his hand flitting through his head a bit more vividly than he would have liked.

He needed something to calm him down, ground him, and he remembered from the advice he had absorbed through Dan’s therapist. A scented candle, maybe? It would be cozy and warm, and you never saw scented candles in books about axe murderers. There were scented candles already provided on the coffee table, he’d just have to find the matches.

There were probably some in the kitchen. He stood up and moved to the kitchen, searching the cabinet until he found the matches. He struck one, absentmindedly, before remembering the candle was in the other room. The flame was already flickering down—he didn’t have long to get there before it burnt out.

His resolve strengthening him, he summoned extra reserves of strength from deep within him to start a sprint back towards the living room. He was just rounding the corner when he noticed a human figure looming ahead of him. “Ah!” He jumped slightly before realizing it was just the cutout. God, Dan was right. It was terrifying. He looked for the candle, then paused. The match. Where was the match?

A flickering, growing glow in the corner of his eye answered his question. “Oh fuck,” Phil whispered. “Oh fuck, DAN, oh fuck-” he ran towards their room. “DAN,” he shouted again, swinging the door open.

Dan was sitting up in bed, massaging his head. “What the fuck did you do, Phil?”

“Fire,” Phil managed, “fire!”

He was starting to smell the smoke. Dan must’ve too, because his eyes widened. “Phil, you idiot, we can’t get out this way.”

Dan was sort of right, he supposed, the living room was between their bedroom and both the front and back doors, and a large chunk of it was on fire right now.

“You idiot, you should’ve gotten out.” Dan sounded scared now.

Phil wished he could say he had gone back out of some deep seated need to save Dan, but if he was being honest, it was just instinct at this point to run for Dan every time he made a mess. “It’s fine,” he said, looking around for an exit. The window. Phil silently thanked his past self for booking an Airbnb with only one story.

Dan’s eyes followed Phil’s gaze, and he must’ve had the same thought, because he grabbed Phil’s arm, dragging him over to the window and wrenching it open. “The screen-” Phil said, before Dan let go of his hand to push at it until the screen came loose, falling onto the ground on the other side of the window.

“Come on,” Dan said, swinging a leg over the side. He hopped awkwardly down, dragging his other leg after him. “Come on.”

Phil’s legs seemed to seize up, but with enough of Dan’s tugging he made it over the windowsill, his foot catching and sending him tumbling into the sweetly scented, but somewhat thorny, flowerbed. “Ow,” he muttered, looking at the scratches running their way down his long, pale arms. He found himself staring at them, transfixed, as a single drop of blood welled up and trickled down his arm.

Dan pulled at his arm again. “Phil, move-”

Phil stumbled to his feet and out of the flowerbed, following Dan until they were about 20 feet away from the house, just where the grass turned into woods. Oh god, Phil could just see the headlines about how two British idiots were the cause of the latest California wildfire—

“Call 911,” Dan said, sounding just a little less frantic now that they were out of the house.

Phil patted his pockets, looking for his phone. He found a phone-shaped lump in the left one, and pulled it out, his hands shaking as he tried to pull up the phone icon and type in the numbers. It took him a couple of tries, but he finally got the number in right.

A woman’s cool voice sounded from Phil’s phone speakers. “911, what’s your emergency?”

“Right! Emergency. I’m here with my—um—friend,” Phil said awkwardly. “We’re on vacation, from the UK, well, vacation after a convention—you don’t care about visas, do you?” he said, suddenly remembering Dan’s Bahamas fiasco from a few years ago.

Dan glared at him. “The fire,” he prodded.

“Right!” Phil said. “My house is on fire.”

“Do you have an address?” the woman on the other end asked in the calmest voice Phil had ever heard.

“Address,” Phil motioned to Dan with a gesture he hoped clearly communicated, “get me the address for this airbnb,” but Dan didn’t seem to understand. He just looked confused.

“What?”

“What’s the address of this place?”

“Oh!” Dan said, digging out his phone (Phil was suddenly grateful that neither of them could be separated from their phones for long enough to lose them in an emergency). He stared at his screen anxiously, as if he was waiting for something to load.

When it finally did, he didn’t even read it out loud, just shoved the email in front of Phil’s face so he could read it to the dispatcher.

“Alright, sir, help is on the way,” the woman on the phone said. “Are you and your friend a safe distance from the house?”

Phil looked around. “Um, I think so.”

“Perfect. And there’s no one else in the building? Any pets?”

“No. Just us.”

“We’ll be sending an ambulance around just to check that everyone is alright, just so you know.”

Phil hoped he wouldn’t be charged for that. He missed the NHS. “Okay.”

“I’m just going to need you to sit tight until then, okay? Now, can you answer a few questions about the fire?”

She asked a few vague questions about how the fire started, and Phil was grateful that he didn’t have to actually explain what happened, just say it was an accident. Her questions seemed more designed to keep him on the line and calm him down until the fire truck came than to get any actual answers about the fire from him. Phil tried not to look too hard at the growing flames, glowing in the window.

After a few minutes, he could hear sirens in the distance, and a fire truck and ambulance pulled up in his driveway. A few figures in bulky suits hopped out of the truck, immediately getting to work unrolling a hose and aiming it towards the windows of the living room, where Phil could see flames flickering.

“Right,” a very tall man in firefighter gear strode over to them. “I just have a few questions about how the fire started. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to help?”

“You should probably talk to Phil about that, I have to make a few calls,” Dan said, ducking away and patting Phil’s hand before leaving him alone to face his interrogation.

“Yeah,” Phil gulped. “I was there.” He forced himself to look up to make eye contact with the firefighter.

“Right,” the man said, writing something in a notepad. “You saw it start?”

“Yes,” Phil said. “I, uh, was carrying a match.”

The man raised an eyebrow and wrote something down again. “You were carrying a match,” he repeated.

“Yes,” Phil said, finally breaking eye contact. “I was carrying a lit match and I dropped it.”

“Hmmm.” Some more writing. “Why’d you drop it?”

“Well, um, me and my-” Phil hesitated for just a second. “Me and my friend kept this cardboard cutout from this convention we went to, and when I walked back into the living room it startled me and I dropped it.” He didn’t dare look up and risk making eye contact again, but even the other man’s pen scribbling seemed judgemental.

“Right. So then something caught on fire from that?”

“I think it was the carpet. I’m not sure.”

“Well,” the man said, clearing his throat. “You and your friend are lucky you’re safe. I hope you’ve learned to be more careful with matches next time.”

“I have. Sir.” Phil cringed inwardly, hoping it didn’t show on his face. Sir? Was he a child being scolded at school?

The firefighter seemed to accept Phil’s assurance, though, nodding once before turning away and moving back to the truck, just as Dan emerged from the ambulance and jogged over.

“Your turn.” Dan nodded towards the ambulance.

Phil sighed. At least the paramedics probably wouldn’t ask him any questions about how he had managed to start a house fire.

When Phil’s exam was done and he got out of the ambulance, Dan was waiting for him. “I found us a hotel,” he said.

“I love you,” Phil said.

“As you should.”

“What about our stuff?” Phil asked, anxious.

“They let me go in to get our suitcases. Nothing else, though I’m not sure I’d be able to find anything else if I was allowed to try. The living room looked pretty bad.”

They hadn’t gotten a chance to unpack much yet. Just having their suitcases should be fine, though Phil missed his horror novel already. But still, Phil groaned. “Are we going to be in trouble with the Airbnb host?”

“Nope,” Dan said. “I called already, they have insurance for idiots like us.” He smiled as he said it. Phil couldn’t help but appreciate that he had lumped the two of them together, as if this whole mess hadn’t been entirely Phil’s fault. “We’re not getting our money back, though.”

Phil sighed. “Understandable.” It was probably the best outcome he could ask for, especially with he and Dan safe… and how expensive US medical bills could get. “How far is the hotel?”

“About half an hour.” Phil opened his mouth, but Dan cut him off. “I’ll drive. You’ve caused enough damage for today.”

He was smiling, just teasing, but Phil couldn’t help the flush of shame that came over him anyway. “I’m sorry.”

Dan threw an arm around Phil’s back and pulled him closer. “I know,” he whispered. “Now come on. Let’s get out of here and get some rest.”

The hotel room wasn’t as nice as their cabin had been. It was on the smaller side, and the carpet was scratchy and gray. The mattress on the equally gray bed was a bit lumpy, but Phil couldn’t bring himself to care as he dragged himself into it.

Dan collapsed next to him. “How is it that I’m the one functional in an emergency?” he asked. “I’m the one crippled by existential despair all the time.”

“I don’t know,” Phil confessed, wringing his hands. “I just… I panicked.”

“I know,” Dan sighed, patting Phil’s face fondly.

“Nothing like a near death experience to solidify a relationship, though, right?” Phil joked weakly.

Dan patted his face again, a bit more clumsily. “Nothing like a near death experience to make me tired.”

He lapsed into silence then, and Phil listened to him fall asleep, counting every breath, matching them with his own until his eyes drifted closed and he fell into a dark, dreamless sleep where, finally, he could no longer smell the wood smoke.

#phan #phanfic #my writing #phanfiction

[sheron-c]

XiSang Fic Recs

I haven’t seen any rec lists floating about, so for the XiSang Week 2020 challenge - Day 7 - Free choice, I wanted to create a rec list of my personal favourites for Nie Huaisang/Lan Xichen ship. There’s actually a lot of stories that are great and I don’t want to duplicate the entire ship tag, so these are just the top 10 that I found super enjoyable: 1.  My Heart is a Saber by peskyjellyfish (~11k)

Summary: Huaisang is on his way to Xinglu Ridge when he gets sidetracked. Rec: This is the fic that gave me everything I wanted to read about them post-canon. Nie Huaisang is angry and damaged, Lan Xichen is hurt and curious, and they find the kind of hope in despair that can only be found together. 2.  come and find me (lying in the bed i made) by ImaginationCake  @demonic-cultivar​ (~22k)

Summary: After Jin Guangyao dies, Nie Huaisang is ready to enjoy his life free from the burden of revenge plots and subterfuge. But his decisions have resulted in a deep guilt that he can't shake, and he struggles to stay afloat with no one left to support him. To top it off, he finds himself tangled up in politics that he really couldn't care less about.What he does care about is Lan Xichen's opinion of him, but Lan Xichen won't even look at him anymore. Nie Huaisang can only hope that his life doesn't get any worse. Rec: The fic that got me into this ship! ♡ I did of course come to AO3 looking for more NHS & LXC content immediately after watching the Untamed. After seeing that ending scene with their conversation on the Temple’s steps I wanted more, but I wasn’t sure it was a romantic ship for me until I read this story. It’s got everything, a kidnapping, a rescue and a bad case of feelings :D 3.  A Skilled Tactician is the Jewel of a Kingdom by Hypatia3 (~50k, WIP) Summary: During the Sunshot Campaign, Nie Huaisang wants to help despite his terrible sword skills. But there are other things he's good at, and nobody can say his mind is weak. But nobody has to know.After all, he wants to go back to his life of general uselessness after the war is over, and Nie Mingjue would never allow it if he saw a single sign of competence from him.But this has consequences that he didn't expect. Rec: One of the absolute best stories in this fandom when it comes to Nie Huaisang’s characterization -- he’s clever and yet so very Huaisang, in such a believable way that *hands* I can’t explain how much satisfaction I get out of reading and rereading this story. Honourable mention:  A Decisive Victory by Hypatia3 (~24k, WIP) Summary: When Jin Guangyao acts against the Nie Sect a little earlier, Nie Huaisang ends up in over his head as acting sect leader. But he has a responsibility and a duty to his sect. His brother is counting on him until he recovers.Or Nie Huaisang loses his temper, starts a war, and impresses a lot of people along the way. Rec: This is not marked XiSang, and is a divergence from the earlier Tactician story (around chapter 7) but it’s such fun to read and Huaisang’s interactions with Lan Xichen are top notch, so I can’t help mentioning it here.

4.  from tomb to tomb by @the-pretzel​  (~16k)

Summary: It's a lot easier to get truth out of someone, even one with a very good reason to lie, when they're drunk. Or, five times Nie Huaisang was drunk and once it was Lan Xichen's turn instead. Rec: Written to capture moments over the years during the course of the show, as Lan Xichen and Nie Huaisang dance around each other, this story is absolutely beautiful and vivid. I can still see the scenes of the story pop up in my head like drawings, of Lan Xichen walking in on semi-hungover Nie Huaisang and the sheer tension between them enough to keep you breathlessly reading.

Honourable mention:  when i'm reborn by @the-pretzel (~1.1k)

Summary:  Nie Huaisang's daemon settles the day he finds out what Jin Guangyao has done. (His Dark Materials fusion) Rec: A very short, very lovely daemon AU, which I’m definitely reading as XiSang :)

5.  What I had to do by @ibijau​ (~20k) Summary:  After three years in seclusion, Lan Xichen gets an unexpected guest he would rather have avoided. Yet when he learns that Nie Huaisang is dying from a curse, he is forced to confront his guilt toward Jin Guangyao's fate and the people his sworn brother hurt. Rec: I’d say this is a fandom classic, so you’ve probably read it already :D But, one of my favourite things about this story is the way it captures Nie Huaisang running away from emotions, and Lan Xichen being selfless when it comes to those he cares about. 6.  gather jewels from graveyards by LuckyDiceKirby (~15k) Summary: Nie Huaisang stole happiness from Lan Xichen. He stole peace. If he could just see him, and see for himself exactly what he’s done, and know—that will be enough. Then he’ll be able to paint again, and his hands won’t shake as he does it, and he’ll remember why he ever in his life bothered to put brush to ink to paper. After all, a man should have to live with his mistakes. There is no other way to learn from them. His brother believed that. Rec: One of the first stories I read for this ship and so well done! This is one where Nie Huaisang feels very guilty, and who doesn’t enjoy reading that? Nie Huaisang comes to the Hanshi to make amends, and doesn’t go away when Lan Xichen won’t see him.

7.  When the world is cold (I will feel a glow) by @marsdiogenes (~3k)

Summary: Xichen is trying very hard to get his crush to notice him, but gallery curator Nie Huaisang has a job to do and would appreciate it if Lan Xichen's beautiful face would stop for a moment so he can focus. Mingjue just wants to have a nice, quiet family dinner and for everyone to respect his efforts.

Rec: I don’t normally go for Modern AUs for this ship, but this was so fun and sexy! Also Nie Mingjue’s knowing reaction is :3 8.  to embrace doubt by fensandmarshes, Fleetling, idendreams, medievalfantasyqueen, space_enjolras, sxnshot (blasphemyincarnate)

Summary: Five times people thought they understood Nie Huaisang + one time someone admitted they didn’t - a collaborative, semi-chronological character study of Nie Huaisang through other characters’ eyes. Rec: Okay, it’s technically not marked shippy, but you tell me that someone who thinks about Nie Huaisang the way Lan Xichen does in this story, in the chapter that’s from his pov can possibly not love him, and I won’t believe it. The lyrical prose is the best description in a paragraph I’ve ever read of Nie Huaisang.

9.  Love of my life, I hate you by Ibijau (~126k) Summary:  With Qishan Wen growing ever more powerful and menacing, QInghe Nie and Gusu Lan decide to cement a firm alliance between their sects through a marriage between their children. Lan Xichen and Nie Huaisang are less than thrilled to learn this, but nobody is asking for their opinion anyway Rec: At first, I wasn’t sold on Lan Xichen being so thoughtless in his treatment of Nie Huaisang as a child and mostly wanted to smack him, but damn if the later events don’t make up for it, make him grow up, and turn the tables around. :D This story is utterly satisfying to read, like one of those novels that give your Id everything you want, eventually. I love slow burn and this is that in spades! So much fun, I’ve re-read parts of it multiple times already.

Honourable mention: Ibijau has so many interesting XiSang stories, like the one where Jin Rusong survives and Nie Huaisang ends up raising him (Second Chances For First Time Villains), and the one where Lan Wangji and Nie Huaisang, both in love with someone else, make a marriage match and solve crimes together ( We can light a match and burn it down), the god!LXC AU, and many others. Check them out! And finally,

10.  Chapter 95: LXC finds out about JGY and tells NHS,  from MDZS short fics by nirejseki ( @robininthelabyrinth) (~1k) Summary:  In that AU where LXC pretends to be LWJ and discovers NMJ's head, what if he went on a quest to put the body of his old friend together and along the way accidentally ran into NHS who's on the same mission. And they realize the other knows! Rec: Nirejseki writes a lot of great Nie brothers content, and this is one short story that can arguably turn into XiSang in the future. The possibilities of this AU make it so exciting, I had to include it on the list even though NHS and LXC only talk and nothing else happens.  ...Okay, that was more than ten fics here, but can you blame me? 😍 I love these two together. And with the XiSang week running we have so much new stuff!

#xisangweek2020 #xisang #nie huaisang #lan xichen #the untamed #mdzs #fic recs #favourite xisang fic recs #watch tumblr eat this post because external links lol #¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[hils79]

Monday Fic Recs

Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji (The Untamed/Mo Dao Zu Shi)

Deeper grows my longing by feyburner

Jiang Cheng stared at him. “How are you this dense,” he said flatly. “Wei Wuxian. The common people aren’t scared of you, they’re scared of your husband."

“My what,” said Wei Wuxian.

I love post-canon fics where WWX starts to rebuild his relationship with JC, and this has the added bonus of him finally catching a clue about his feelings for LWJ as well

Attached to shadows by LtLJ

It was either a kidnapping or an invitation to a sleepover; Wei Wuxian honestly couldn't tell which.

I really want more post-canon fics about NHS. This is absolutely delightful. 

golden by queen_gee

Wei Ying sees him through the flowers and silk and his heart whispers, oh. There you are.

It is there in one moment and then gone in the next, just a fleeting hint of recognition, relief that spreads through his chest with intensity that makes his knees wobble. There is a beautiful man at his sister’s wedding and he is looking at Wei Ying as if he has been struck speechless and something about the curve of that man’s bowed lips, the molten gold of his eyes, the way his throat bobs and his jaw slackens—it feels like coming home.

----------

A beautiful stranger asks Wei Ying to dance.

This is absolutely beautiful

Death of a Ghost by gotcocomilk

There was a ghost that haunted the decks of Lotus Pier, it was said. If you stepped across the wooden planks at night, walked along the endless docks and flying purple banners, he would appear.

He was always in darkest black, dressed as specter and shadow. In the emptiness where a face should be was a thick fog, features washed away and leaving behind only glimmering red eyes.

He looked ferocious as a ghoul, it was said.

Jin Ling thought he looked sad.

I think what I love most about this one is the fact that yes, WWX and LWJ get together in it, but that’s not really what it’s about. It’s about WWX repairing and rebuilding relationships and it’s really beautifully written

Bodega Love by cicer

Wei Wuxian meets his soulmate when they reach for the same bunch of daffodils at the local bodega. Too bad he immediately puts his foot in his mouth. How can he repair the damage and convince this beautiful man to date him?

Let the group text conversation begin!

I kept having to stop reading this because I was laughing so hard. It’s absolutely delightful. 

Zhao Yunlan/Shen Wei (Guardian)

Yes, I have fallen into a new fandom and with it comes fic recs. These are all short (less than 10k) as I’ve bookmarked a bunch of longer ones to put on my kindle. There is A LOT of hurt/comfort in this fandom, which is a favourite trope of mine so if a lot these have a theme that’s why :D

Ice and Shard by frith_of_thorns

Zhao Yunlan didn't know what made him realise that something was wrong. But something definitely was.

This is wonderfully written and also gave me a lot of feelings

i would give you the world (but unfortunately, i only have this tea set) by blackwatervial

There is a lot that can go wrong when giving someone a gift - that's a lesson Zhao Yunlan has to learn the hard way. At least the entire SID is there to suffer with him. OR Five times Chief Zhao doesn’t manage to court Professor Shen, and the one time he does

This is adorable and hilarious

turn the lights off, carry me home by xparrot

"I don't need to be indulged," Zhao Yunlan told him.

"Naturally not," Shen Wei said.

Zhao Yunlan grinned back at him. "I like it when you do, though."

I am honestly just living for soft sweet fics like this

Momentary Reversals by laireshi

He looks up as if feeling Zhao Yunlan's gaze on him. Their eyes meet across the battlefield, and the naked relief in Shen Wei's eyes hurts. His lips shape a word Zhao Yunlan can't hear across the distance, but he knows what Shen Wei looks like when he says his name, be it Zhao Yunlan or Kunlun.

And then Shen Wei just—falls down.

I definitely need to find more fics about ZYL’s time as Kunlun but this was a lovely little story

We are all still standing by frith_in_thorns

Episode 33 tag/missing scene.

Shen Wei wakes up on a bench and things go slightly downhill from there.

As soon as I saw this episode I know I wanted an additional scene, and this is pretty much exactly what I wanted

Parachute by frith_in_thorns

Shen Wei doesn't have time to be ill. Not on a day full of classes. Which, thankfully, he's already prepared, because otherwise this would be a complete disaster. He gives himself the time to make a hot cup of tea and then grimly embarks, with the same determination he's previously entered battle under.

Just a lovely little sickfic

my heart broke loose on the wind by sarahyyy

If Yunlan is going to learn how to make actual food that requires more effort than just boiling water and putting hot water into stuff, he’s going to have to take all the notes.

“Right,” he says to himself. “How hard can it be?”

He watches all twenty-two minutes and fourteen seconds of Chef Shen's video without fast-forwarding. When it comes to an end, he clicks on the replay button.

He ends up taking zero notes, and the only thing he manages to learn from the whole exercise is that Chef Shen -Shen Wei- is really fucking beautiful when he smiles.

When I get into a new fandom I like to read a few canon based fics before I start on the AUs. This was an adorable AU to start with. It made me smile a lot. 

honey, let me show you where your heart is by sarahyyy

“The touching, for example. The teasing. The gifts.” Yunlan smiles a little at that. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No,” Shen Wei whispers, unable to help himself.

“Okay,” Yunlan says, and his smile could light the entire goddamn city.

Shen Wei is so fucked.

(Or, the one where Yunlan asks Shen Wei to be his boyfriend.)

Ahhhhhh! This one is so SWEET! My heart melted

I Call 'Do Over' by PK20

The Hallows have one final trick to play, and Zhao Yunlan is going to grab it with both hands.

This was exactly the fix-it fic I needed

#fic recs #the untamed #guardian #wangxian #weilan

[a-room-of-my-own]

By Julian Vigo

Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor's New Clothes tells the tale of a ruler who is unconcerned with the reigning of his kingdom—he did not care much about attending the theatre nor making any public appearances unless, of course, he was able to flaunt his latest clothes. That is until one day when two swindlers came to town and tricked the emperor successfully convincing him that they were weavers who could spin him the most beautiful cloth he had ever before seen in his life. These swindlers claimed, “Not only were the colours and the patterns of their material extraordinarily beautiful, but the cloth had the strange quality of being invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office or unforgivably stupid.” It was perfect, of course, for the emperor whose intelligence would not only allow him to see quite perfectly the beauty of the cloth before him but which would also allow him to choose his councillors wisely as he would discard any of them who were unable to perceive the magnificent beauty before their eyes. 

The emperor then bought these fraudsters the most expensive materials of silk and gold and a loom with which to make the clothes. The swindlers kept the materials for themselves and pretended to make the garments from the empty loom. First, the emperor sent his faithful prime minister to check up on the “weavers” who doubted his eyesight as he found an empty loom. He thought to himself, “Am I stupid?” wondering if he was fit for his office. In a choice between his trust of his eyesight or his desire to keep his position, the prime minister quickly came around stating, “It is beautiful. It is very lovely...What patterns! What colours! I shall tell the emperor that I am greatly pleased.” And each of the councillors the emperor sent thereafter had a similar reaction—at first doubting their sanity and then realising that if they did not concede the beauty of the cloth being spun that they risked losing their position. Soon, all those close to the emperor had announced their sighting of a magnificent cloth that in fact was non-existent.

When it finally came time for the emperor to view the completed cloth, the fraudsters and everyone around the emperor informed him how beautiful the cloth was. The prime minister exclaims, “Isn't it magnifique?” However, the emperor had a similar crisis to that of all those he had sent before to check up on the cloth: he saw nothing. He thought to himself, “I can't see a thing! Why this is a disaster! Am I stupid? Am I unfit to be emperor? Oh, it is too horrible!” However, like his officials who realised that their credibility and good-judgment lay in the balance, the emperor capitulates to his officials’ claims and announced the glorious artistry of a cloth that did not, in fact, exist at all. “It is lovely,” exclaims the emperor. After paying the thieves handsomely for their good work, the emperor decides to have the cloth cut and sewn and, in celebration of his new clothes, he has a parade. As he marches down the streets in sheer nudity, everyone in the kingdom is awed by the beauty of his clothes and shares in his delight and belief of the lie. That is until a young child sees that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes at all and the rest of the kingdom slowly begins to realise the same.

This well-known fairy tale serves as an allegory for political ideology that a government can impose upon its citizens, that a well-funded interest group can as well—that of false consciousness. In his essay,The Power of the Powerless (1978), Václav Havel explores what he calls the post-totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia wherein he reveals an ideology of false consciousness that is strikingly similar to the political consciousness of Andersen’s fairy tale. Havel uses the analogy of a greengrocer who displays in his storefront window the party slogan which reads “Workers of the World, Unite!” Just as the emperor's clothes are a production of artistic sleight of hand and cunning trickery, for Havel so too is the party literature, the slogan of the green grocer. The manoeuvre of an invisible cloth or a state-mandated slogan in both cases becomes the vehicle through which ideology surfaces and inscribes itself upon the masses whereby, as Havel writes, the citizens “confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system.”

Havel’s essay is quite critical of political ideology calling it an “almost secularised religion” which maintains its force by offering the wandering masses a “home” that immediately grants the believer a life full of new meaning:

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimising what is above, below, and on either side. 

Havel goes on to assert that ideology feeds a systemic drive that creates a “world of appearances trying to pass for reality” where the post-totalitarian system “touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on.” 

Havel’s essay is not only a damning summation of the ideological rituals common within Czechoslovakia, Poland and other Communist regimes of the era, but it eerily portrays much of what is happening in the west today fifty years later. With samizdat, a form of dissident activity across the former Eastern bloc nations long ago retired, we have laid witness in recent years to its unofficial rebirth among many critics of gender ideology. For those who have pushed back against the onslaught of gender ideology that has permeated the neoliberal left over the past twenty years, many critics of this era’s embrace of identity politics who refuse to be silenced have either taken to social media or they have published blog posts under assumed names. Due to the mounting authoritarianism from the left on this subject whereby individuals have faced losing income, being fired from their positions entirely, or being socially and politically ostracised, the protest to the official narratives of gender ideology has been emanating from unofficial spaces. 

Twitter and Facebook have been the two primary social media spaces where feminists and trans ideologues alike have created secret groups in an attempt to strategise, dialogue, and establish actions. It would be an understatement to state that the wave has not only turned in the favour of these feminists, but COVID-19 has assisted the many who previously doubted the importance of material reality, to understand the difference between identity as feeling and the somatic reality of male versus female, a virus versus a unicorn. I have been in many of the gender-critical groups that are composed of only women, only radical feminists, only leftists, and myriad other variations on a theme. Where women and men from the left have joined forces to fight what they perceive as an ideological backwater of men’s rights activism, this fourth wave of feminism has teeth and it is speaking clearly to what resoundingly appears to be a religious ideology of gender.

Now that the NHS and the BBC have radically transformed their websites in recent weeks to update the information on gender dysphoria to include mentioning childhood desistance and ROGD (rapid-onset gender dysphoria), there is now a mass wiping of servers of these and other institutions of all references to Mermaids, a UK-based lobby group and NGO that has long identified its constituency as “transgender children” and their parents. And Mermaids is no outlier in the industry that seeks the expansion of childhood medical “gender transition” as it has consistently encouraged policy changes within the British government and its agencies to effect the quickest possible transition times of the highest number of children with the fewest safeguards in place. In 2018, Mermaids received £500,000 in lottery funding to this end.

So how is it that in less than two years, Mermaids has gone from being the star charity ostensibly championing the rights of children to now being silently removed from the BBC and NHS websites in their information and support sections as all the claims that puberty blockers such as Lupron are “reversible” have also disappeared? More importantly, why is it now commonplace in recent weeks that the media and public figures as well as private and public institutions have in stealth removed mention of Mermaids and the cheerleading of “childhood transition” from their accounts or servers as if a damnatio memoriae rivalling China’s removal of Zhao Ziyang from most every public record available in China?

Last year British actor, Jameela Jamil,��participated in a video in support of both sic “trans kids” and Mermaids. Yet, in the same time frame that the NHS and BBC servers were wiped clean of any reference to Mermaids with data amended that exaggerated suicide information or that omitted childhood desistance, Jamil has curiously wiped clean her many Twitter posts referring to Mermaids. While Jamil claims she deleted her history to “become a more activism focused account that I can lend to other activists and charities,” many activists have answered Jamil on Twitter noting the non-coincidence of her and British comedian Josie Long having both dumped their Twitter feed within hours of one another, to include the many tweets in support of both Mermaids and the lifetime medicalisation of mostly gay and lesbian children’s bodies. 

On the other side of this debate, you have trans activists like Katy Montgomerie who are soliciting screenshots of gender-critical people who have “bought this latest Mermaids conspiracy theory” as he calls it. One of the tweets sent to Montgomerie as “proof” of wrong-think was that of fellow-writer, Suzanne Moore, who tweeted this past week: “I see all you celebs deleting your tweets that supported the charity Mermaids? Wonder why you are doing that.” Now that Montgomerie is invested in collecting evidence of women’s words on social media (as if their clearly visible tweets were not enough), the pushback to gender-critical voices has become patently absurd, especially since feminists have been pointing out the sexism and homophobia inherent within transgender ideology for years. Next up, Montgomerie or another trans-identified male will claim that gender critics are right-wing, religious bigots because they questioned the sexism and homophobia of Mermaids which in turn made it impossible for them to question the sexism and homophobia of Mermaids. This is pretty much the cycle these online debates take in the vein of “on the wrong side of history” debates that pervade social media.

Content aside, what should trouble us all is that media of public and private institutions and individuals on social media is being scrubbed of history. As Havel’s essay shows us that the greengrocer’s shop slogan is divorced from what the slogan actually says, the true meaning of the social act of proclaiming allegiance to an ideology is quite clear and comprehensible because the code is so familiar: 

The greengrocer declares his loyalty (and he can do no other if his declaration is to be accepted) in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.

Today, here we are in the midst of a tide-turning moment where transgender ideology is being rejected en masse by gay and straight people, men and women alike. Meanwhile, the public institutions which have for years codified the social signs, sponsored the "gender identity" training, crafted the woke lessons transmitted by the BBC and the NHS permeating all arenas of media and public health, in addition to the cast of Harry Potter chiming in with their endless support for “trans people” through Twitter and other media outlets, and we have been handed the perfect storm exemplifying exactly how we got here in the first place. Of course, political ideology is a powerful tool when it leaves no oxygen in the room for anything else. Such an authoritarian narrative creates the subterfuge to the very ideology all these bodies and individuals espouse. 

For those like British journalist Owen Jones who declared in 2015 that all critics of transgender ideology were on “the wrong side of history,” we must be more circumspect in how we approach ideologues who ought to be covering the news instead of participating in it. While gender has wider implications beyond its very narrow media representation, the political backwater of how the media influences public policy, politics and even law is unparalleled today. We need to learn from Havel’s historical example of what happens when we allow ourselves to become the greengrocer who unthinkingly parrots slogans that have neither any base in reason nor any resonance within our society. The repression of artists, poets, thinkers and politicians in the former Eastern bloc countries has been well documented. So too have the attempts to purge antagonistic articulations about gender from the “party line” been noted in recent years across various anglophone countries.

Now that the gender narrative is falling apart quickly, many of its proponents are running for cover skipping over to the very side they previously denounced as “wrong.” Of course, these individuals will happily prefer their slogans be forgotten, to have their tweets removed and their websites altered from public record. “All traces of totalitarian influence, dissidents confirm, define, adopt, and integrate the methods of totalitarianism within their own structure building their 'truth' on its negation,” Havel reminds us.

Let’s now remind these political actors of the dangers that occur when espousing ideological hogwash as human rights. More importantly, let us now learn from this lesson of this dangerous era of public tyranny and return to the drawing board to continue that discussion about historical materialism and its significance today

#gender critical #mermaids gender #Julian vigo

[crossdressingdeath]

(1/3) It always amuses me how stans try to justify JC actions by his abusive upbringing while there were 3 children in that family and both others turned very kind and/or very moral and not at all like JC (and frankly, he didn't even have the hardest position in the dysfunctional dynamic). Or LXC and LWJ whose upbringing was even more screwed up with a LQ who was certainly playing favorites and wanting perfection, and yet this never draw a wedge between them or created any jealousy.

(2/3)LXC loves for LWJ to excel! Same with "but JC had it so hard rebuilding Lotus Pier, WWX was goofing off with the Wens"...JC was paying people to do that for him, yes, while WWX was trying to start from scratch a settlement over a mountain of corpses with a bunch of weak or old people and not to die of hunger comes winter. While separated from all his friends and hated as a monster by the cultivation world. "But JC was so lonely during the 13/16y, so that justifies him lashing out" And WWX

(3/3) was dead, killed by his brother and thinking that there was not a person left on his side in the end, and yet, that didn't make him act like a dick? Or athg else really, because everything that JC went through in the past, WWX did also, but in a worse way because he lost his parents young, lived in the streets, didn't have JC societal privilege or money and has to harness an unstable necromancy practice on top of that. And yet no one uses it as arguments to explain his actions, only for JC 

Honestly? While none of the Jiang kids were in a good position, out of the three of them... JC did have it the easiest. It was still awful for him, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting his childhood didn’t suck, but given it was made very clear to JYL that her only purpose was to be married off to JZX so her mother could tie her bloodline to her best friend’s and WWX was treated like a servant at best... Yeah. If I had to pick, I’d choose having a distant father and dealing with a mother who’s constantly emotionally abusive over having a distant father and dealing with a mother who’s constantly emotionally abusive and being treated like a bargaining chip/treated like a servant and/or bastard and being whipped for actions that would get the rest of the clan a lecture at worst. Again, I’m not saying JC didn’t have it bad, but his siblings having it worse is... interesting, given neither of them decided to be dicks to Literally Everyone over it.

I do have to say, even though this is about JC, there’s nothing suggesting LQR was playing favourites with LXC and LWJ. He was strict, yes, probably stricter than he should’ve been, and LXC probably did get more one-on-one interaction with him, but given LXC was going to be sect leader/became sect leader at a young age that makes sense. This is not super important to the point of this post, but I do find it odd how often people make LQR out to be this horrible person who’s always awful to his nephews because he’s Strict when we... don’t actually know anything about how he raised them. I don’t like him all that much, and he probably didn’t do a fantastic job of raising them, but the man did try, and he clearly wants his nephews to be safe and happy (even though he has inaccurate views of what that entails...), and given how the parents/parental figures of the cast generally act he deserves some credit for that. Also the Twin Jades ended up considerably better-adjusted than most of their age group, which... isn’t saying much all things considered but it does say something. If nothing else neither of them seem to feel actively unsafe around him, so he’s definitely not the worst parental figure in this novel.

...I had a surprising number of thoughts on LQR there. Whoops, sorry about the tangent. Maybe I’ll make a post about him at some point. Anyway, yeah, LXC and LWJ clearly adore each other! LXC would be delighted if LWJ surpassed him at something! Same with Nie bros; they argue a lot, but there’s no denying that they love each other. That’s what insults and threats out of love look like; NMJ threatens NHS all the time, but NHS clearly isn’t all that bothered by it until JGY starts fucking with NMJ’s mind and the threats become more serious, which really isn’t NMJ’s fault. It’s because in the other sibling relationships both parties are invested in staying close. They love each other and want to be close for the rest of their lives! Meanwhile JC is obsessed with WWX outperforming him at Literally Everything, and WWX genuinely believes that JC is allowed to treat him the way he does and it’s fine and healthy.

And yeah, JC wasn’t exactly rebuilding Lotus Pier all by his lonesome with his own two hands. In fact, going by what we see all the rebuilding was done well before WWX left! And I don’t doubt for a second that WWX was involved in that process; I have very mixed feelings about the scene in CQL where he blows off his duties to go and get drunk, because on the one hand it does do a good job of showing just how bad his mental state is getting (and how JC refuses to acknowledge it despite WWX obviously being Not Okay), but on the other hand... I just can’t see WWX not throwing himself into helping JC with everything he’s got even while his mental state is coming crashing down around him. I mean, this is the guy who created an incredibly powerful weapon that even he couldn’t fully control, not knowing what using it would do to him, to help his brother win a war. I’m pretty much certain that WWX ran himself into the ground helping JC rebuild and run the sect... then when he found himself in charge of a small group of desperate people, scrambling to keep them fed and clothed and healthy, JC just abandoned him to deal with it on his own.

And the whole “Oh, but JC was so lonely, don’t you feel bad for him?” shtick. I hate it so much. If he didn’t want to be lonely, he should’ve considered that before alienating everyone in his age group and leading an army to murder his brother, the only person left who was willing to put up with him! It’s... really hard to feel bad for someone who’s brought most of their suffering on themselves through a series of generally shitty and frequently downright cruel actions with easily foreseeable consequences. If he got sick of being alone, he should’ve apologized to his peers for being a dick to... literally all of them and tried to make amends and strike up some sort of relationship. Or, if that didn’t work, go out! Meet new people! Try not to be as awful to them! Also, he’s a sect leader. If he couldn’t even maintain a positive relationship with other sect leaders, people who, let me remind you, he has to work with on a regular basis and several of whom are actually nice and friendly people, that is on him. If you are awful to people you will end up alone. And then JC decided to respond to learning that the people he was a dick to every time he saw them (and, in LWJ and NHS’s cases, caused the death of someone they cared about) wanted nothing to do with him... by whining about how lonely he was as if that wasn’t largely his fault. Like, he lost his family and that’s awful, but he could have had friends to help him through his grief, and it’s his own damn fault that he doesn’t.

WWX’s life was miserable. He had plenty of friends, yeah, but he spent years on the streets after his parents died brutal deaths; was raised in a family where he was treated like a servant and a scapegoat; lost everything in an event he was blamed for despite having nothing to do with the attack; had to sacrifice his incredibly powerful golden core (thereby losing his primary means of defending himself while on the run and drastically shortening his lifespan) to keep his brother from letting himself die; was thrown into a corpse pit for three months where he had to create an entirely new and experimental (and as such incredibly dangerous) form of cultivation and probably resort to cannibalism just to survive; had to fight a war almost immediately after escaping; spent a... good portion of time (not sure how long exactly because the MDZS timeline is more a suggestion than an actual coherent timeline) being treated alternately as a tame pet or a rabid animal and having to pretend everything was just fine while everyone tried to either control him or remove him and his brother very obviously got increasingly resentful of his skill and power; had to abandon his home, his family, and everything he had left of his old life to save a bunch of innocent people while everyone, including his brother, acted like he’d gone mad for not wanting to let them die horribly; had to go back to the corpse pit he spent three months in because it was the only place where they might be safe; accidentally killed his brother-in-law due to losing control after being ambushed on the way to a celebration for his nephew that he was invited to by people he trusted, almost certainly making him wonder on at least some level if that was why he was invited; lost two members of his new family who he clearly loved because of said accidental murdering; learned their deaths were for nothing and, when he retaliated against the planned attack that shouldn’t have happened because that’s what WQ and WN gave their lives to prevent, saw his beloved sister die to save him; and, after all that, lost the rest of his new family to a siege on a civilian population led by his brother. And after all that, his response was... to destroy the incredibly dangerous weapon he’d made because he didn’t trust the sects to not destroy each other and themselves with it and kill himself rather than risk losing control again and hurting anyone else. In the novel too; I don’t doubt for a second that WWX planned on dying in that siege, even if he didn’t expect destroying the seal to do it.

Take a look at that paragraph. All those things that happened to WWX. And in the end, he was kind. He was so, so kind, and remains kind even after thirteen years of being dead. He would have been well within his rights to go all “Then let me be evil” on the sects, but every time he attacked them they struck first, and most of the serious damage he did happened as a direct result of losing control of his experimental and mostly unknown new cultivation, which is a real risk even with spiritual cultivation; NMJ probably would have happily killed everyone in Qinghe if the qi deviation hadn’t gotten to him first, given how easy it was for him to attack even his beloved little brother. Everything bad that happened to JC is on that list, pretty much. Everything that JC suffered WWX did too, with some variations in the details (and of course dead versus alone for the same period of time). JC had the advantage of a sect at his back and a high rank by virtue of his birth, while WWX’s position was entirely reliant on JFM and, later, JC. And yet some people insist that WWX’s trauma doesn’t excuse his actions but JC’s somehow does. Now, some people argue it’s different because WWX was a mass murderer. Yeah, well, JC’s a fucking serial killer, and he doesn’t have the excuse of losing control due to using resentful energy to cultivate and being attacked by everyone he’d ever known and trusted.

...I’ve kind of lost track of where I’m going with this. Short version: I very strongly disagree with anyone who insists WWX’s trauma doesn’t excuse his actions while bending over backwards to argue that JC’s trauma excuses his.

#well that got... long #and probably not super fun #i have Thoughts about this particular subject it seems #grapehate #asks #anon

[spockandawe]

So, I was thinking about Nie brother tragedy times, because I didn’t even come CLOSE to getting it out of my system with that fic

(oh dear, this got longer than I expected)

So first, a few snippets on the things Nie Huaisang does and doesn’t value, and how... strained his relationship with Nie Mingjue is when it comes to these things (based on the last quote I’ve copied over for this post, I get the impression that they might have argued over art vs sabers a lot, but that the genuine, intense anger on nie mingjue’s part is a very new, very shocking development for nie huaisang)

First of all, generally setting the scene

One day, the moment [Nie Mingjue] returned to the main hall of the Unclean Realm, he saw about a dozen folding fans, all lined in gold, flattened out one next to the other in front of Nie Huaisang, who was touching them tenderly, mumbling as he compared the inscriptions written on each one. Immediately, veins protruded from Nie Mingjue’s forehead, “Nie Huaisang!”

Nie Huaisang fell at once.

He really did fall to his knees from the terror. He only staggered up after he finished kneeling, “B-b-b-brother.”

Nie Mingjue, “Where is your saber?”

Nie Huaisang cowered, “In… in my room. No, in the school grounds. No, let me… think…”

Wei Wuxian could feel that Nie Mingjue almost wanted to hack him dead right there, “You bring a dozen fans with you wherever you go, yet you don’t even know where your own saber is?!”

Nie Huaisang hurried, “I’ll go find it right now!”

Nie Mingjue, “There’s no need! Even if you find it you won’t get anything out of it. Go burn all of these!”

And then, introducing Jin Guangyao as a brother figure who understands Nie Huaisang in a way that Nie Mingjue doesn’t/can’t, and one who’s happy to indulge Nie Huaisang’s hobbies. In fact, even when Nie Mingjue is already generally pissed at Jin Guangyao, has tried to kill him in the past, and is angry right now, Jin Guangyao is still willing to speak up on behalf of Nie Huaisang.

All of the color drained out of Nie Huaisang’s face. He rushed to pull all of the fans into his arms, pleading, “No, Brother! All of these were given to me!”

Nie Mingjue slammed his palm onto a table, causing it to crack, “Who did? Tell them to scurry out here right now!”

Someone spoke, “I did.”

Jin Guangyao walked in from outside the hall. Nie Huaisang looked as though he saw a knight in shining armor, beaming, “Brother, you’re here!”

In reality, it wasn’t that Jin Guangyao could calm Nie Mingjue’s anger, but that since Jin Guangyao came, all of Nie Mingjue’s anger would be directed at him alone, having no time to scold others. Thus, there was nothing wrong with saying that he was Nie Huaisang’s knight in shining armor. Nie Huaisang was absolutely delighted. He greeted Jin Guangyao again and again as he grabbed the fans in haste. Seeing how his younger brother reacted, Nie Mingjue was so outraged that he almost found it amusing. He turned to Jin Guangyao, “Don’t send him those useless things!”

In a hurry, Nie Huaisang dropped a few fans on the ground. Jin Guangyao picked them up for him and put them into his arms, “Huaisang’s hobbies are quite elegant. He’s dedicated to art and calligraphy, and has no propensity for mischief. How can you say that they’re useless?”

Nie Huaisang nodded as fast as he could, “Yes, Brother is right!”

And then, more of Jin Guangyao being indulgent when it comes to Nie Huaisang.

BUT. Also.

Explicitly bringing up that Jin Guangyao is a pro at figuring out people’s likes and dislikes, and using that to figure out how to ingratiate himself to them.

Jin Guangyao nodded lightly and sat as he had been told, “Brother, if you’re concerned for Huaisang, softer words would do no harm. Why this?”

Nie Mingjue, “Even when a blade’s at his neck he’s still like this. Looks like he’ll always be a good-for-nothing.”

Jin Guangyao, “It isn’t that Huaisang is a good-for-nothing, but that his heart lies somewhere else.”

Nie Mingjue, “Well you’ve really discerned where his heart lies, haven’t you?”

Jin Guangyao smiled, “Of course. Isn’t that what I’m the best at? The only person whom I can’t discern is you, Brother.”

He knew of people’s likes and dislikes so that he could find suitable solutions; he loved running errands and could do twice the work with half the effort. Thus, Jin Guangyao could be said to be quite a talent at analyzing others’ interests. Nie Mingjue was the only person whom Jin Guangyao couldn’t probe out any useful information about.

Now, this is brought up in the context of how Jin Guangyao was never able to get this sort of read on Nie Mingjue, but it comes right at the end of a LONG passage where... yeah, this is exactly the thing he’s been doing with Nie Huaisang. And considering how much he leans into these tactics and how he’s already been established as a skilled spy and double dealer, it’s... telling that when he can’t do this to Nie Mingjue, he’s working his little brother this way instead.

And then, change of pace. One quoted passage about how as time went (and as Jin Guangyao cozied up to Nie Huaisang more, and as Nie Mingjue’s instability built towards that last qi deviation), Nie Huaisang even more clearly saw his brother as an adversary and Jin Guangyao as an ally.

If only Nie Huaisang were like Wei Wuxian and could feel how great Nie Mingjue’s rage was, he wouldn’t grin in such a bold way. He protested, “Brother, the time is up. It’s time to rest!”

Nie Mingjue, “You rested just thirty minutes ago. Keep on going, until you learn it.”

Nie Huaisang was still giddy, “I won’t be able to learn it anyways. I’m done for the day!”

He often said this, but today Nie Mingjue’s reaction was entirely different from his past reaction. He shouted, “A pig would’ve learnt this by now, so why haven’t you?!”

Never expecting Nie Mingjue to burst out so suddenly, Nie Huaisang’s face was blank with shock as he shrunk toward Jin Guangyao.

So, I’m not terribly inclined to regard Nie Huaisang as a chessmaster manipulator type, more someone who’s good at sneakily inciting chaos, while Jin Guangyao relies on having ironclad control. But Nie Huaisang is definitely smart, and had plenty of time to put certain pieces together. I’m fascinated plenty by whatever it was that took him from ^^^ to this

(I love what fatal journey did, and I love the idea of jin guangyao making nie huaisang more actively complicit in his brother’s death, because that is deliciously fucked up, but I am also trying to be careful with any claims as to Absolute Canon, so I’m not going to go into the movie)

What I’m even more interested in... is the aftermath. I’ve read delicious self-recrimination fic from a variety of characters, but it seems like there’s less when it comes to Nie Huaisang, and I think that’s such a shame.

Because this storyline is so tasty! So tragic!! I love the one post I’ve seen a few times, where it contrasts lan wangji’s and nie huaisang’s reactions to New Brothers, where nie huaisang is like ‘new brothers! excellent!! I will expect backdated presents for each of my birthdays, thank you.’ Which, like... that might not be canon, but Jin Guangyao pretty much rolls with that exact idea. He works out what Huaisang likes best in no time flat, and starts bringing him all kinds of fantastic presents. And he starts arguing in favor of Huaisang’s own preferences and strengths to Nie Mingjue’s face.

There’s something that really gets me about the tragedy of a situation where someone doesn’t realize they’re caught between ‘someone who doesn’t understand me, but loves me’ and ‘someone who understands me, and uses that to use me.’

It kills me, because at the very end of Nie Mingjue’s life, Jin Guangyao was definitely using the disconnect between the two brothers as a way to provoke Nie Mingjue. He might not have caused the division, but he was happy to lean into it. He’s capable of mediation, but instead, he wholeheartedly takes Nie Huaisang’s side in these arguments, which looks gr8 to Nie Huaisang, but has the end of effect of infuriating Nie Mingjue, until that last time, when he finally snaps and qi deviates to death.

I just love the tragedy of realizing someone you thought was an ally was actually... probably indifferent to you, and was definitely using you as a tool to hurt someone you love. 

(I don’t necessarily think that the relationship was established just to manipulate nie mingjue, I think jin guangyao tends to establish this kind of relationship with anyone who’s likely to be a power player of any sort, but I do think that when he wasn’t able to ingratiate himself with nie mingjue directly, nie huaisang was the best method available to steer him)

I wish there was more fic getting inside Nie Huaisang’s head as he works this all out, but it’s not like I have much confidence in my ability to write anything so much in his head and emotions myself, haha. My fic scratched some similar itches, but just taking things away from nhs pov dramatically limits how much you can do with this situation. 

Because it really was an internal situation. Who would he have shared it with? Jin Guangyao definitely had spies in Qinghe, Lan Xichen would have been grieving Nie Mingjue and absolutely would have been reluctant to blame Jin Guangyao for anything, and it isn’t like Nie Huaisang ever had proof. The situation is so tragic and so isolating that I keep coming back to it in my head, and while I was writing the nmj fic, I reread the section I quoted above, and was struck by the nature of the relationship that Jin Guangyao established with Nie Huaisang, on this kind of emotional foundation, and how Nie Huaisang had to maintain that relationship, for years, knowing that the relationship was something Jin Guangyao used to hurt his brother.

#nie huaisang #nie mingjue #jin guangyao #the untamed #i do love jin guangyao #but also #my general position is #nie huaisang did nothing wrong :V