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joy of life | princess of beiqi

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Also posting this individually because I'm just proud of it.

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Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 庆余年 | Joy of Life (TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Fan Xian & Emperor of Qing Characters: Fan Xian (Joy of Life), Emperor of Qing (Joy of Life) Additional Tags: Father-Son Relationship, Post-Season/Series 02 Summary:

“I hear you want to enter the Fan ancestral hall,” the emperor says.

(The fallout from Fan Xian’s declaration, once he returns to the capital.)

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A SVSSS fic I want to write one day is Airplane and Shen Yuan being ejected from the System and sent back to the mundane world, but with the difference that Shen Yuan's 'edits' to the story have been retroactively applied to PiDW and as a result it's gone from 'top story in a hyper specific web culture niche' to 'international sensation with a Netflix adaption in the works'.

Keyly, PiDW is still told largely from the PoV of Luo Binghe- so neither he nor the audience is at all aware that it's now Isekai story. Instead it's billed as this heady romantic drama about prejudice, the passage of time, and redemption- where a big part of the appeal is trying to piece together the otherwise enigmatic Shen Qingqiu's motives.

Was he harsh on Binghe initially because of he sensed/knew about Binghe's demon heritage (as it's now possible to find hints that he may have in fact known all along)? Or because he saw Binghe's potential and wanted to do the tough-love training thing? Or was it because he was trying to chase Binghe away from Cultivation because he knew it would lead Binghe to misery one day? Did he throw Binghe into the Abyss because he was genuinely shocked and disgusted by the Demon reveal? Or because he knew Binghe would be killed if he stayed and he was trying to 'protect' him? Or was it because he genuinely wanted Binghe to fulfill his demon Emperor destiny and thought a clean break would do it? The fandom has no idea but lovvvvvves arguing about it.

This all leads to things coming full circle, as Cucumber, sounding like an absolute insane person, is left to rant online about how the obvious answer is that Shen Qingqiu was Isekai'd earlier in the story and replaced by a completely different person- a theory which is mocked to the point of memery, and leads to Cucumber being dunked on endlessly, no matter how much evidence he brings up or how many essays he writes.

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When Fan Xian first sees the words on the monument his mother left behind, his reaction is awe quickly followed by: "I get why she died now." He reflects on how she was a great, brave person who wanted to change the world, and effectively goes, RIP to her but I'm different. I'm not that brave. I just want to be happy and live a good life. I'm not here to transform the world into a better place.

I mentioned how he wasn't taking anything seriously at the start and was feeling like he was outside it all, and his reaction is in line with that. He's like, wow, this vision is so objectively impressive. Good thing it's got nothing to do with me.

The next time he talks about the monument is after Teng Zijing's death. He furiously demands from Zhu Ge if anyone even reads the words written there--the words of how people are equal, and how therefore Teng Zijing's life doesn't matter less than anyone else's. Suddenly, these are not just words too brave for this world to bear; suddenly, he's furious that this world isn't like that--that nobody's even trying to live by these ideals.

He still says he's not ready to become the person who makes this vision into reality. He keeps saying that he's not brave enough. But he keeps coming back to this monument in time of crisis or after a brush with injustice. He gets angrier and angrier, over time, about how few people care; he doesn't want to be the person who cares, but he can't help the outrage that bubbles up in him, either. He wants the world to be better. When an injustice leaps out at him, he's got to fix it. And he oscillates between incandescent rage and the voice in his head which reminds him that, in order to live in this world, he has to play by its rules.

Isn't this why his mother died? Didn't he himself say the world wouldn't tolerate someone wanting to change so much? Doesn't he just want a quiet, happy life?..

He still tries to have that good life, is the thing. He doesn't want to be the one man standing against the crowd, as he says during the examination arc. He doesn't want to challenge the emperor. He spends season two trying to live within the system while it becomes increasingly apparent to him how ill the system fits him--how little it serves anybody except those taking blatant advantage of it. And Fan Xian has immense privilege; he could cruise along easily, if only he could turn off that pesky conscience. It's what most everyone wants him to do. But when push comes to shove, he can't. And it's pretty clear that this will usher in his eventual confrontation with the emperor, however little Fan Xian looks for it.

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It's interesting to see Fan Xian himself clock this, and use this at the end of s2. Fan Xian bets that not even grandmaster Ye Liuyun can kill him--not unless he wants the Ye family to be wiped out. Fan Xian is confident that the Ye family's heads will roll in the event of his death; the only question is whether the grandmaster will care. And the grandmaster does care, but more to the point--everyone knows how important Fan Xian is, now. I wonder how--if at all--this will change his interactions with people once he returns to the capital.

Hearing Lin Gong say confidently:

“I’ll kill Fan Xian! Let him come into my courtyard, and then my guards will ambush him! Don’t worry, I can bear the responsibility!”

… makes it so clear how at this point, none of these people know who Fan Xian is. Can even the Prime Minister’s son bear the responsibility for killing a secret prince and the apple of Chen Pingping’s murderous eye? This is all way above his pay grade. If Lin Gong had succeeded in killing Fan Xian, he would likely have doomed himself and his whole family, and he has absolutely no idea

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The thing about Fan Xian at the very start of the show is—he’s not taking any of this seriously.

The plotting, the scheming, the treasury, the emperor’s marriage edict, society’s norms—he’s treating all of this like it’s optional for him. He breaks the accepted rules of behaviour because to him they're not important. He’s fearless before the princes because he sincerely doesn’t want any part in the struggle they’re embroiled in. It’s not that he acts like he’s above it all—more like he’s outside it, as he once tells Wan'er; like he doesn't really belong in this world. For him, it’s as simple as living by his own rules and assuring everyone: “I don’t want this treasury, I don’t want this marriage, I’ll leave you all to these plots and go off and be happy.” Once he and Wan'er affirm their love for each other, his plans are still to return to Danzhou with her and Ruoruo, be neighbours with Teng Zijing, and distance himself from all the expectations and power struggles of the capital.

He doesn’t yet realise how little choice he actually has, or how deep his ties in this world run. There never was a way out of this for him.

Teng Zijing’s death makes the seriousness hit home, and that’s when Fan Xian first grimly says to Ruoruo that they're not returning to Danzhou after all. But at this point he still sees his involvement as a choice; others have thrown down the gauntlet to him, and he's ready to pick it up and make them pay for Teng Zijing's death. He's still fearless and flippant in many ways, most clearly so when he doesn't kneel to the emperor and speaks irreverently while within the palace. He still sees himself as someone who isn't playing the same game everyone else is. It doesn’t register how inescapably bogged down he is in the political quagmire until Xiao En reveals the truth to him. Hearing how long of a con against Xiao En he's been unwittingly part of, discovering who his real father is, and learning how the lies and manipulations have spanned his entire lifetime—all this puts things into sharp relief for Fan Xian. It makes him scared, and it makes him angry. And it makes him see that his clean exit from this entire struggle only ever existed in his head.

From then on, Fan Xian is different. He even says it himself: he has a goal now. He wants to know what happened to his mother—not just with curiosity, but with a bloodthirsty glint in his eye. He wants to live well, and for that he needs to take down or outmanoeuvre some very powerful people. Upon his return to Qing, gone are the carefree air and the impression that he's separate from concerns that occupy everyone else. Sure, there are lighthearted moments, but when he deals with various plots he’s also furious, and upset, and up to his ears in everything that’s going on, with no hope of surfacing. He qi deviates, even, at a moment of great emotional upheaval and when it momentarily seems like there's truly no one he can trust.

He never again loses sight of the reality of his situation. The closer he deals with the emperor, the clearer it becomes why the Second Prince made that half-incredulous, half-bitter face when Fan Xian blithely told him, during their first ever meeting, that he was going to reject the emperor’s edict and choose his own path. The Second Prince had been living with this all his life; he knew what it meant to have the emperor steer you into a position you never wanted. So Fan Xian does strategically kneel before the emperor, now. He understands the weight of the emperor's edicts—even when they're seemingly nonsensical, even when they're undeniably cruel. He still pushes, and acts cheeky and unconventional, and retains his free-thinking spirit; but he also puts on a mask to protect himself and hide his real thoughts (and his rage). Ruoruo suggests they run away to Danzhou after all; Fan Xian, mouth twisted like the Second Prince’s once was, knows that escape in this form was never really an option. He’s playing for the ultimate stakes, at this point; his back is as much to the wall as the two feuding princes’ (and his smiles at his adversaries are now as full of knives as theirs).

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Thousands of premature infants were saved from certain death by being part of a Coney Island entertainment sideshow.

At the time premature babies were considered genetically inferior, and were simply left to fend for themselves and ultimately die.

Dr Martin Couney offered desperate parents a pioneering solution that was as expensive as it was experimental - and came up with a very unusual way of covering the costs.

It was Coney Island in the early 1900’s. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators.

The brainchild of this exhibit was Dr. Martin Couney, an enigmatic figure in the history of medicine. Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s.

Behind the gaudy facade, premature babies were fighting for their lives, attended by a team of medical professionals.To see them, punters paid 25 cents.The public funding paid for the expensive care, which cost about $15 a day in 1903 (the equivalent of $405 today) per incubator.

Couney was in the lifesaving business, and he took it seriously. The exhibit was immaculate. When new children arrived, dropped off by panicked parents who knew Couney could help them where hospitals could not, they were immediately bathed, rubbed with alcohol and swaddled tight, then “placed in an incubator kept at 96 or so degrees, depending on the patient. Every two hours, those who could suckle were carried upstairs on a tiny elevator and fed by breast by wet nurses who lived in the building. The rest [were fed by] a funneled spoon. The smallest baby Couney handled is reported to have weighed a pound and a half.

His nurses all wore starched white uniforms and the facility was always spotlessly clean.

An early advocate of breast feeding, if he caught his wet nurses smoking or drinking they were sacked on the spot. He even employed a cook to make healthy meals for them.

The incubators themselves were a medical miracle, 40 years ahead of what was being developed in America at that time.

Each incubator was made of steel and glass and stood on legs, about 5ft tall. A water boiler on the outside supplied hot water to a pipe running underneath a bed of mesh, upon which the baby slept.

Race, economic class, and social status were never factors in his decision to treat and Couney never charged the parents for the babies care.The names were always kept anonymous, and in later years the doctor would stage reunions of his “graduates.

According to historian Jeffrey Baker, Couney’s exhibits “offered a standard of technological care not matched in any hospital of the time.”

Throughout his decades of saving babies, Couney understood there were better options. He tried to sell, or even donate, his incubators to hospitals, but they didn’t want them. He even offered all his incubators to the city of New York in 1940, but was turned down.

In a career spanning nearly half a century he claimed to have saved nearly 6,500 babies with a success rate of 85 per cent, according to the Coney Island History

In 1943, Cornell New York Hospital opened the city’s first dedicated premature infant station. As more hospitals began to adopt incubators and his techniques, Couney closed the show at Coney Island. He said his work was done.

Today, one in 10 babies born in the United States is premature, but their chance of survival is vastly improved—thanks to Couney and the carnival babies.

https://nypost.com/2018/07/23/how-fake-docs-carnival-sideshow-brought-baby-incubators-to-main-stage/

Book: The strange case of Dr. Couney

New York Post Photograph: Beth Allen

Original FB post by Liz Watkins Barton

[mira-likes]

Watching Old Fox be impressed by Young Fox is something.

I got to say, Fan Xian is fucking TERRIFYING! It's the blessing of that world that he has a conscience or he'd be the unstoppable monster taking over the world.

Luckily, he has a moral baseline. But the above scene demonstrates not just that but the fact of how he's unique in being able to see humanity in more than just "his" loved ones - Prime Minister Lin is super smart but he cannot process what an unthinkable thing it would be to betray a brother until FX makes an example with someone PM Lin cares for. Most of the characters in this are genuinely, frighteningly solipsistic.

But with that solipsism, without morals, Fan Xian will basically be Second Prince. They share being incredibly smart, quick on their feet, a fondness for risk, a sense of the delight in the absurd and even buckets of charm. But Fan Xian has a conscience and Second Prince's has long been dismantled and here we are.

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I found the scene of Fan Xian and Fan Jian jumping around with the discipline ruler and putting on the anger/punishment act very entertaining, but I just saw someone’s comment that like “Fan Jian knows he can’t hit him” and that made me pause. Can Fan Jian get away with flogging Fan Xian (the emperor’s biological son) if he wants to? How much of his approach to parenting Fan Xian is down to him being well aware that the emperor is looking over his metaphorical shoulder?

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okay but like WHO IS THIS GUY

"Eunuch Hong" or whatever he's calling himself these days. He's everywhere! He admitted to keeping his original name and hometown a secret from everyone (except YOU Fan Xian, because you're SPECIAL to him) (...). He acts like he's overly open and honest and yet everyone seems to do what he wants them to do at all times. His background music is often sinister. Given the whole Prime Minister-related Rube Goldberg machine-level plotting, he apparently really was engaging in exam fraud on behalf of the Emperor. So he works for the Emperor, presumably, which undermines his claim of being loyal to Fan Xian. That and his creepy theme music. Plus he was clearly up to his eyeballs in the chain of events that ended with Eunuch Dai being executed. So that, yeah, still leaves us with:

WHO. IS HE.

Who is he! I'm offended by how confusing he is! I do like his little face, but honestly that may make my level of offense higher. Like don't do all this suspicious stuff and then be CUTE about it, what the hell.

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WRAGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

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a They Deserve Each Other shipping scale where on one end of the axis you have the “no one else is good enough for them” ships, and on the other end you have the ships that need to be together monogamously forever as a quarantine measure. whatever the fuck is wrong with both of them must be contained for the greater good.

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The emperor, sending Fan Xian to watch as Lai Mingcheng is flogged to death: This is what I call a ✨teachable moment ✨

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When I first watched s2, I mentioned how I expected the emperor to have Thoughts about Fan Xian entering the Fan ancestral hall. I just didn’t see the emperor loving the idea of Fan Xian declaring himself as part of the Fan family after the emperor had very deliberately revealed his real parentage. I'd forgotten that the emperor actually brings up the subject in episode 10!

Right after Fan Xian stages that excellent show in the Imperial Court and gets the Censorate to investigate the Second Prince, the main dad council convenes. The emperor muses on how Fan Xian's scheming is deep for his young age, and segues from that to saying, offhand: “Is Fan Xian registered in the Fan ancestral hall? It’s better that he isn’t. His personality will bring a lot of trouble to the Fan family in the future.”

And because the emperor is very hard to read, there could be different options here!

Maybe the emperor means to emphasize the trouble part. In the discussion that follows soon after, he indicates he's miffed that the Second Prince is being so publicly investigated, and intends to protect him as his son. So he could be straight up saying: it may be better for the Fan family if you're not inextricably linked to Fan Xian and all of his future fuckery.

Or then the emperor is issuing Fan Jian a warning of a very different kind. Given that the emperor brings up the ancestral hall topic right on the heels of talking about Fan Xian's plotting acumen in an impressed tone, he could also be saying: hm, that kid just got more interesting… so let’s all remember that he is my kid, fellas, and not get ideas about registering him officially as yours.

To Fan Jian’s credit, he immediately and pointedly chortles that Fan Xian’s last name is Fan, ancestral hall or no, and Fan Jian is ready to take responsibility for all of his chaos. Like, in any case that man wants to stand his ground as the Main Dad. It’s no surprise that later in the season he’s touched by Fan Xian’s decision to enter the Fan ancestral hall and is fully onboard with the idea. But I do wonder if this little moment foreshadows an eventual conflict there...