#i'm of to slashfic land

[laisy]

Whoever made those gifs, BLESS YOUR SHIPPING HEART! 

Everyone needs person who loves you as much as Pep loves to *strike* molest *strike* hug Mikel. 

[whetstonefires]

What if Itachi was isekai'd into MDZS? As Jiang Yanli of course. He is killed by his little brother, as he wanted, and he can finally rest... And then he wakes up. He is Jiang Yanli. Jiang Yanli has /two/ little brothers. She also is sickly/has weak cultivation/both, so overwhelming violence is not a viable response to any immediate threats, depending on how soon to Plot he lands in. If she only has weak cultivation because she simply wasn't expected to, Itachi can fix that, but I'm pretty sure she was sick as well and well. At least he has experience with that? Whether he knows any plot at all or where he is is debatable. I don't know if he would read something like MDZS, but if not I thought it would be funny if Kisame liked it, despite all the duplicity involved, but he liked to imagine what would have happened if everyone had just been honest with each other (for better or worse). Or maybe Itachi has to go on a mission with a pre-Hidan ninja and they just wouldn't shut up about it. Or maybe he just saw the cover of the book somewhere and would recognize whoever had been on it if he saw them but otherwise has no clue what he's got landed in. I don't know really know what he'd do once he became Jiang Yanli, but the thought was very entertaining last night when I was trying to fall asleep.

ANOTHER OF THESE BASTARDS. 😆😆😆 it is in fact true that i am basically a gacha machine where you put a deranged question in and a torrent of relevantly deranged words comes out but a;lskjdf

Okay so first response point is, I cannot imagine mdzs as it exists being written in the Naruto setting.

A lot of the way subjects like Magic Sword War are handled by the narrative derives specifically from how those elements are 'escapist' and unrealistic to the intended audience, which creates a specific type of narrative distance that makes certain stories easier to tell.

You could get the general plot of mdzs, especially the backstory setup for the actual main plot, into a Naruto-setting novel, fairly easily. Mdzs is, after all, constructed of cliches rotated several degrees and slotted together into a slightly weird machine that is then displayed from a weird angle.

You could do the whole story centered on Jin Ling and have it be a relatively standard mystery-adventure bildungsroman with a vastly more interesting Undead Gay Uncle subplot going on in the background, we've all seen something like that lmao.

You could do it as a tragic romance about Jiang Yanli fantastically easily. The resulting work would look almost nothing at all like mdzs due to how few scenes she's actually in and how little of all the drama she ever learns about, but what wwx would look like in a jyl-pov novel that ends with her throwing herself in front of a sword for him is a fascinating thought-exercise.

Technically I think he'd be the villain of such a book but the kind you blubber over and wish you could have saved.

Which is, after all, the point.

(Actual mdzs as elaborate post-canon fix-it slashfic for the Jiang Yanli tragic romance novel--plausible. This also, I think, is somewhat the point. Fun with archetypes!)

But the specific work being done with the framing of the meta nonsense around Wei Wuxian and the concept of 'villainy,' and the social reception of deviance and restorative versus retributive systems of justice, etc.--you could maybe pull it off effectively with the same overall plot structure in the schizo-techy not-Japan of Naruto?

But you'd still handle some elements quite differently, writing it there, simply because in a world where 'Magic Combat Clans Kill Each Other' is a politically relevant issue, the symbol-language wouldn't do the same things. What you chose to shorthand in what ways would be different as what counted as 'realism' and 'genre convention' were different.

Naruto ninjas have better healing magic than the mdzs setting's cultivators! That alone alters a lot of beats, even for civilian readers who don't personally have access to healing techniques. Similarly, the narrative conventions around bullshitting up tricks with talismans would be a bit different in a setting where the similar but non-identical art of sealing is just. A real technology that exists.

And by the standards of the Naruto setting Jiang Cheng's character design with the yelling and wearing purple and having an iconic purple lightning whip is restrained and elegant.

Also no one in Naruto is openly gay, suggesting a repressive environment on that front, and they don't have the internet to circulate trashy novels on. I suspect the Naruto universe version of mdzs would, among many other differences, need to be vastly raunchier in order to pay for its own printing. I don't know how it would manage this exactly. Not my department.

Anyway though yeah, it would all depend on when he landed and how much he wound up identifying with/as Yanli.

I think if he wound up close to Plot it would have a dramatic impact because Itachi at time of death is wayyyyyyy too damaged to convincingly portray Jiang Yanli. Even with all his infiltration skills whatever those are and a detailed character dossier. It isn't happening. Everyone would be Concerned.

He would feel really bad about taking this person from her family? But like, Itachi is as we all know a past master of not letting the fact that he feels bad about something affect his behavior in any way, and these aren't people he personally cares about, so he's probably not going to be that broken up.

Also he just...doesn't want to be alive, was looking forward to not being alive, and has no ability to observe or affect the situation his brother is now in, which has been the only thing he's cared about for many years, and would mostly be upset about that and disinterested in his actual environment. So that's just a huge mess. Getting a satisfying narrative out of that would be a job and a half.

Drop him in as a baby and he gets some time to recover and move on and bond--it depends. I feel like he'd be initially so relieved to be without talent?

Just, the evaporation of that parental pressure around excelling that defined him so much as a person...but unlike actual Yanli he's got an existing history and relationship with power and duty, so he wouldn't develop quite the same way even if he did find his way to being kind enough to himself to lean into I Don't Have To Become Good At Killing This Time Because This Body Has No Talent and therefore did, in fact, enjoy being left to spoil little brothers and get good at soup.

Unlikely to manage to crush on Jin Zixuan lmao. Not out of the question would be willing to be romanced by him, eventually. Would, I think, be positively disposed toward having baby, but less willing to leave natal family to do so.

I think Jiang Yanli's disposition and body were both ill-suited to cultivation; Itachi having already been molded into a weapon once would have different emotional stumbling-blocks? But I have no idea how e.g. experience channeling chakra would translate into utilizing the related but distinct magic system of xianxia taoist sword cultivation. If you wanted you could bullshit prodigy Yanli out of this but that is boring.

It's possible Itachi!Yanli would give her(?)self repeated qi deviations fairly early in the process of trying to cultivate a core by trying to balance yin and yang energies in a way that a cultivator body is fantastically ill-suited to do.

(Because, as I understand it, the taoist practices this fantasy milieu draws on emphasize developing the masculine yang qi, while the Naruto worldbuilding states that the default chakra draw is a fairly even blend between spiritual yin and physical yang. Arbitrarily medical as well as genjutsu techniques require yin iirc, which is fairly transparent Girl Gating but may have some precedent idk. But anyway these habits could cause problems.)

Having experienced the traumas he had...it wouldn't matter how weak Itachi was in this lifetime, he'd push himself harder than Yanli did, to have murder and/or political options of some kind, because he 1) expects the world to fall apart and 2) thinks it's his job to fix it. Neither of these apply to Yanli, even after her world falls apart once--she persists in regarding peace and happiness as the default and trauma as an aberration.

Once the war hit, assuming having had most or all of a lifetime to naturalize and care, this version of Yanli would go kind of feral. Everyone would be scared.

Well, everyone who knew. That's probably not a lot of people. Wen Chao might not live long enough for Wei Wuxian to catch up with him, depending on where this Yanli chose to focus--Itachi's abilities as an accomplished assassin wouldn't be entirely neutralized by a lack of physical superpowers. A lot of them are tactical.

Even if 'searching for unofficial brother' and 'vengeance' weren't topping the priority charts, Wen Chao would be a good target because he's more exposed than Wen Ruohan and despite being an incompetent deputy he still is one of this father's generals, and also his incompetence frequently takes the form of careless destruction.

Assassin!Yanli crossing paths somehow with DoubleAgent!Meng Yao would be a fun scenario.

Itachi!Yanli would favor Jiang Cheng over Wei Wuxian because of his lasting Sasuke issues resulting in Little Brother Tunnel Vision that would be pretty well set by the time the secondary target was added. But that doesn't mean he/she/they wouldn't get pretty attached to wwx too, especially in the face of Madame Yu making further favoritism over blood relationships feel like puppy-kicking.

Itachi!Yanli would undoubtedly be much more authoritative after the sacking of Lotus Pier, being up to 20+ years older than she looks and having experience at working through this kind of trauma as well as in small-unit command, so the sequence of events that led to the core transfer and thence to the rest of their family's unspooling tragedy might get disrupted at the root.

Or they might not! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[billsfangearring]

Thanks for answering my question about the rec lists! It's really fun to read how you got into it. I started reading fics when ao3 didn't exist yet, so fics were much less centralized, and I found all the fics I loved through rec lists. I love ao3 and the search and filter options but there is something very special about reading someone else's rec of a fic. I love old fics too! It's really fun to see all the different ways people took the story before we knew the whole canon.

You're so welcome! I'm also from the pre-AO3 days, and it really was the Wild West out there! I originally stumbled onto MuggleNet's fanfiction site (I mostly read Hinny, Jily, Marauders gen, and Dramione), briefly moved onto FFN (Jily and Marauders gen) before hanging out on LJ for years (slashfic of almost all stripes), and eventually landed on AO3 in the mid-2010s when I was in a big Drarry phase. I never spent much time in ship-specific archives, but those seem like they would have been fun too!

Rec lists are such a great way to share and discover new fics. I've also found them to be a really lovely way of making fandom friends and giving back to the authors I appreciate! There are plenty of people who still do fic recs, but it's definitely a bit of a lost art now that you can filter and sort your heart out on AO3. I think they're something that those of us who are "fandom olds" hold more dear than those who came of age on AO3. AO3 is wonderful, but there's no real community aspect there like there was on LJ/DW and in the forums on MNFF.