#EDIT: I HAVE A TAG FOR THE HAIJI FIC WTF I FORGOT THANKS KI

[hideyseek]

hmm... now that i'm posting one fic, i'm somehow as a result starting to turn other ideas in my mind again. the primarily two are zheng bei at 15 and gu yiran goes home. there is, of course, no actual promise that either of this will come to any kind of fruition, it's just interesting to me to consider them and what is compelling me in particular about them.

wow this got long. and extremely tangenty so i'm putting it under a cut. but wow thinking about (as has been said in discord already) zheng bei's general behavior as performance, but linking it to schechner's definition of performance as twice-behaved behaviors and going from there to the idea of responses to incidents from childhood surviving in instinctive behavior often through to adulthood ... whew. extremely exciting to me! aaaaand the second part of: well i sure seem to keep trying to write about a guy going "home" after he's been fundamentally changed, what could that possibly mean?

zheng bei at 15, is, of course, just a shorthand for "i want to dive into the aftermath of this kid's trauma so fucking bad" -- to perhaps nobody's surprise. though i did do some metawriting about it this morning while ruining my fried egg via inattention, and beyond the post-trauma / "how did zheng bei come to be the way he is in canon" aspect, i'm also really interested in exploring the ways in which this experience reshapes the dynamic of zheng bei's friendship with xiaoguang (in the way that friendships change when one person goes through an extremely changing experience that is almpst entirely impossible-to-concieve/experience/comprehend for the other person), and also in some specific choices i could make about younger!zheng nan, and how her reaction and her parents' reaction to zheng bei's kidnapping influences how he replies and what patterns of response he lands on that we continue to see when we meet him as an adult in canon. (oh actually now that i'm writing this, i'm thinking suddenly about patterns of response as twice-behaved behaviors, or richard schechner's definition of performance, which one wow ive never considered that and two ohhh i think is particularly apt for zheng bei. oh my god. the idea that i can go reread performance studies texts to get into zheng bei's mind ... thrilling!!!!!!!).

ok anyway. totally sidetracked. that wasnt even remotely the point of this post lmao. moving on to what i thought this post was actually going to be about lmao

that is, the thought i had that gu yiran goes home is a project in a series of projects with similar themes that intrigues me. back in like ... 2019 maybe, when i was writing for inception, i toyed with a fic idea for a long time of arthur going 'home' after the big job of the film, now that cobb can return to his children, no longer playing pseudo-parent to james and philippa, and finds himself adrift. and then again in 2021, when i was writing for kaztsuyo, i had an idea of writing a canon divergence fic where haiji's dad dies right before the ekiden, and haiji goes from the ekiden (which plays out as it does in canon) to the hometown he hasn't returned to since he left for college, for his father's funeral, with two of the primary driving elements of his life suddenly gone: his ability to run, and the complex emotional relationship between his father and his father's expectation of his running. (this was also a fic about haiji's mom, and how her sense of identity shifts with the death of her husband, but that's beside the point.) anyway, it was weird to me that it happened twice, this idea of a character grappling with the loss of some primary driving / defining force in their life (for arthur, dealing with cobb's entire life; for haiji, running and his father's expectations) and then going "home" (even in the inception fic, arthur was going to his parents' house) to a house that isn't actually their home, to figure out what to do afterward. and, yknow, i can draw the parallels to my own life easily enough.

so i was both surprised and unsurprised to watch the first shot and, at first, not feel compelled to write a post-canon fic. but well, now i'm here, and gu yiran goes home seems to be another version of this story: after the halan lucifer case, after the legal resolution to this driving need for -- revenge, perhaps, but i tend to think of it more as justice for his father -- after all that, gu yiran goes home to huazhou, and to sort through his family's apartment. i don't know what happens after that. i honestly don't know if zheng bei is involved at all. i think what i'm more interested in looking at with this version is ... the character coming back home, to what was an actual home, with more closure than any of the other versions. maybe gu yiran gets to take his time to go back to huazhou, rather than that being the only place he has to go back to (as was my intention with arthur and haiji). he goes back knowing he isn't going to stay there (and maybe that's what makes this version different, because i'm inclined to adhere to this element of canon). he goes back knowing he has someone where else to truly return to. hmm ... which means this version then is less about the slow discovery of what "next" looks like, and more about the slow grappling with and acceptance and refining of moving inevitably toward that next. maybe gu yiran is given a certain amount of leave with flexibility to get his affairs settled in huazhou? hmm. i'm not entirely sold on that. perhaps that's only indicating that it's too eary to try for details, perhaps that's an indicator that this isn't the right details.

well. anyway. long post. lol. if you are still here, reading, i salute you. this was so fucking long.