I’ve grown to appreciate the aus where Shen Yuan enters the story as “Shen Yuan” - same name, probably similar face, generally able to interact with PIDW as himself and change the story through his added presence. I like the sense of “if only you’d been here, things might have been better the first time around” of it all.
And I was thinking, it’s a funny coincidence in that scenario that someone named Shen Yuan gets put into… another Shen Yuan. What are the chances? What a weird twist of fate that Airplane would pick out the name that his most dedicated critic could slip into seamlessly.
What about a version where it’s not coincidence at all?
Airplane goes to school with a kid named Shen Yuan. He’s prickly and hard to approach and a little intense, but Airplane is persistent. In fairness, Airplane is relentless - and maybe it’s a good thing that they end up being friends, because they’re a little too much for anyone else to handle. They balance each other out. They’re the “weird kids” in class and they’re okay with that, because even when they don’t have any words for it, they know they’re not like their classmates, not really. That’s okay; they don’t want to be.
Recesses and breaks are consumed with the elaborate stories that Airplane wants to tell, and all the holes Shen Yuan pokes into them. It’s not mean-spirited, though, even though Shen Yuan isn’t the kind to temper his words. It’s passionate. He cares about those stories the way Airplane cares about them, and it can’t be mistaken for anything else when they lean together conspiratorially across the lunchroom table. They’ve both got notebooks filled with details and characters and monsters. Shen Yuan’s practically got a whole bestiary sketched out in wobbly childhood attempts at art, entries fervently scrawled beside them. Airplane prattles out plots nonstop, always with the promise of shining eyes and being asked “what happens next?”
They come up with a whole world together. Airplane’s going to write about it someday. Shen Yuan is going to read every word.
Shen Yuan misses school. Shen Yuan starts missing school a lot.
Airplane goes to the hospital room instead. He doesn’t think to worry, because Shen Yuan is okay - that’s what he says. He looks okay, and he’s a kid, and it doesn’t feel real that anything bad should happen to a kid. He doesn’t think to worry. He doesn’t think to say goodbye.
It’s one of the older Shen brothers who catches him on the way up to the room one day, in the hallway just outside - snaps at him to go the fuck home, and when Airplane hesitates, pushes him into the elevator and tells him not to come back. “Tells” is a generous way to describe the way the words come out - a growl, a hiss, the sound an animal would make when a hand got too close to a wound.
(It’s not fair to name a villain after him, even if the name never really comes up in the story. He wasn’t trying to be mean. He’d lost a brother minutes before, and he was getting his brother’s friend out of the way so he didn’t have to… see. It isn’t fair, but then, none of it is fair.)
Death feels very real after that.
The notebooks get shoved into a closet, and it’s not until Airplane’s moving out and one falls on him from a high shelf that he thinks about it again. He’s written things, lots of things, but nothing as ambitious as this - nothing as important. It could be good, he considers. He’d promised. Shen Yuan wanted to read it.
The problem was that no one else does, not for a long time, not until Airplane has whittled himself and his art into a corner and into such an unfamiliar shape that he has to wonder how it’s still his own face he sees in the mirror. He has to eat. He has to pay rent. Shen Yuan would yell at him, but Shen Yuan isn’t there to yell at him, and who cares. Who cares if it could have been better? The people who actually are here love it, and it’s paying his bills, and sometimes stories don’t go the way they’re supposed to and the world is fucking unfair. It doesn’t matter.
(It does. But he shoves that thought away along with styrofoam cups and soda bottles to the bottom of a garbage bag.)
Authors are not gods and their power is limited, but Airplane exercises just a sliver of what he’s been granted and gifts an inconsequential sort of immortality. He thinks about making him a rogue cultivator, maybe the kind that goes around documenting beasts and compiling his findings. He thinks about making him someone too powerful for death to touch, or too important to threaten, but when Airplane looks at the world he crafted and everything that’s become of it, it feels like the kindest thing he can do for Shen Yuan is a childhood where he’s loved, and a death that’s peaceful. What does it say about that world, that he’d kill off his best friend too early again instead of making him live there?
(The best writing he ever does is the only, shining moment of humanity that his scum villain ever displays: a lament about death that comes too early, about a brother gone too soon. The commenters praise him. The commenters flatter over how real the emotions feel. The commenters don’t get any response from Airplane on that chapter.)
Death is incredibly real when it comes for him too early, too, still hovering over his keyboard with the story technically finished and incredibly incomplete. Airplane could tell himself that’s because the written version can never be the version in the writer’s head, always shifting and with every possibility still on the table, but he knows better than that. The System knows better than that, with its condescending message about “improving” his writing and “closing plot holes” and “achieving his original vision”...
…and he’s a child again. He’s a child in his own story, he’s Shang Qinghua now without the benefit yet of a peak or cultivation or anything, and maybe he’s a little bitter, and a little scared, and…
And Shen Yuan - with longer hair, with robes, with a couple of older kids watching him from across the street, but undeniably the prickly little boy who used to sit down imperiously across from him and tell him everything that was wrong with the chuck of writing that had been handed to him last period, but with that smile that said he was only invested because he knew it could be better and they were going to make it better - marches up to him with a fire in his eyes and a frown that warns of a coming tirade.
“You told it wrong,” is the first thing he says.
Shang Qinghua wants to ask how him how he’s here, how this is possible, or maybe laugh because, yeah - yeah, Shen Yuan has no goddamn idea how wrong he got absolutely everything.
(Shang Qinghua wants to say “I missed you” and “why did you leave so soon” but he’s here now. He’s right here.)
“I know,” he says instead. “I’m sorry. It all kind of… spiraled out of control.”
Shen Yuan frowns, but then it dissipates the way it always does, and his eyes shine with ideas the way they always used to. “That’s okay,” he relents, grabbing for his hand. “We’ll fix it. We’ll make it what it was supposed to be.”
899 notes
·
View notes
"Hey guys I got whooping cough."
"OH! OHOHOH! BEGONE SICKLY ONE! QUARENTINE RIGHT F*CKING NOW I CAN'T BE GETTING THAT."
"Woah calm down--"
"Do not tell me to calm down! Do you have any idea how contagious this shit is?!?!"
"Well, I heard but I'm wearing a mask and I'm literally on the other side of the glass wall, talking to you on the phone right now!"
"Like I give a rat's ass! I work at the child centre!! I. CAN'T. GET. WHOOPING. COUGH. BEGONE. NOW."
"Okay okay okay! I get it, going now! only like 8 of the kids could get it anyways...not even the same species."
"Love you!! I'll make you some cabbage soup!" with that she goes back to her lunch. Oblivious to the strange looks from her co-workers.
"Uh, what's whooping cough?" asked Op reaching for the salt with her tail.
"A very contagious human disease that gives you a nasty cough for several days to a few weeks."
"Oh, that doesn't sound too bad."
"Yeah but it can make you feel just awful and is actually very dangerous for infants, young children, and the elderly."
"How dangerous?" Fenrir asked
"Well...they could die."
*silence*
"Its not often though, usually rare, they're just more at risk. I mean I had it when I was a baby and look! I'm perfectly fine."
For a while no one said anything. Just eating. Until Fenrir asked another question.
"Why is it called whooping cough?"
"Because that's what it sounds like. The inhale sounds like a whooping noise. But according to my parents I sounded more like a barking seal."
"What does a seal sound like?"
"Hold on." she fishes out her phone and finds a video of a seal barking.
*Seal noises*
"...and what does whooping cough sound like?"
*Whooping coughing noises, which honestly sounds like someone coughing up their heart and soul*
"...how the f*ck are you alive???"
"I second that."
"My Dad tucked me into his coat and walked out in the winter air so that it would clear my lungs."
"That's it?!"
"Cold air is what saved you from death?!"
"...I mean I probably had some antibiotics but yeah. There's no real cure, just a vaccine."
"THERE'S NO CURE FOR THAT?!"
328 notes
·
View notes
I don't really know where this lands on the scale of basic to hot take, but I don't see the locked tomb as a very overtly political series. Like yeah, it has a lot of subtext you can interpret politically, obviously, if that's your jam. but to me, the series has always been an intimate exploration of existing as a badly uncomfortable and isolated person. there are a lot of different reasons people in the series are fucked up, but the important thing to me is that they are. and that they're being witnessed. To me it's a love letter to all the deeply fucked up people out there (esp the deeply fucked up lesbians) saying "you exist, and someone sees you"
Edit: Since apparently people are linking to this post to interpret and argue with it indirectly, let me clarify. I don't mean the story is apolitical. I mean that as I see the story unfolding, the central narrative is focused on the characters, and the heart of the narrative is human connection and character exploration. Of course there are political themes being explored—I've posted a lot about them myself—but that exploration is about asking a lot of questions I don't expect the series to necessarily answer.
Tamsyn Muir doesn't have the answer to colonialism. She does have the answer as to what will happen to two mentally unwell painfully lonely girls I suspect we've all grown quite attached to.
151 notes
·
View notes
Good evening and please take these 5/2 human beans gently in your palms.
Hmm? Where are they from, you ask?
Why, it's the one and only Things That Bleed! Written by @ghostly-cabbage , @kkachis , and @artistfingers . In which it establishes the possibility of sometimes family being a child spy, a scary scary assassin, and an eldritch horror boy.
Recently went back for a ... I honestly lost count how many times I've re-read this story. It's a gift that just keeps on giving, sometimes I just like go back to get soaked in the Scenery of quiet and restless hotels and underground parking lots and long car rides. hohoho don't let these mundane elements deceive you >:)
One thing I like to imagine is the post-reveal relationship these three may have, when Alex and Yassen get comfortable around Danny's ghost form, how they might just sit around in some rundown motel figuring out the next course of action but like. With a fun-sized eldritch noodle spreaded out on the bedsheets. Draped over the TV. Curled up in the cool tub or mini fridge. Rolling and eeling under the bed. Letting Alex wear him like a scarf. Yeah... yeah.
I am not certain how soft and fluffy these three can be when they spend enough time (and experience some Horrors) together, so these may be a bit ooc. but, well. I had fun drawing and I have faith in them💪
----------
more info of the fic can be found @thingsthatbleedfic
216 notes
·
View notes
So I was reading this transcript of an interview the Kratt brothers did and at one point Martin talks about how he almost became a veterinarian, but ended up changing his mind and becoming a zoologist.... so I raise you.... TEAM MEDIC MARTIN?????
Bro carries around a slew of random medical supplies on him at all times. (Just like the creature power disks nobody understands how he can remember where everything is but he's always handy with exactly what he needs)
Chris skins his knees climbing up a cliff? Martin's got bandages and antibacterial spray.
Koki burns her hand while tuning up the Tortuga? He's got burn cream and a cool towel and making sure she compresses it for at least 10 minutes
and God forbid someone in the Tortuga so much as SNIFFLES in his presence. It's bed rest, soup, and fluids from there.
And beyond that, I think he'd be very knowledgeable about natural remedies too. They ran out of cooling ointment for their sunburns? its okay, they can use the aloe vera plant sitting in the window! Aviva is nauseous because she's had nothing but redbull and coffee for 2 days? peppermint oil and ginger tea!
Just like how they learned from the Orangutans about the leaves that relieve muscle sores, Martin would pull a lot of inspiration from nature's remedies.
196 notes
·
View notes