#ik it isn't a very popular opinion but in the end i am bingpilled through and through

[nyoomerr]

Thoughts on Qijiu (as a ship or just in general?). I feel like when YQY or, rarely, the original Shen Qingqiu show up in your fics, they're treated pretty sympathetically, but I'm curious to know more on how you feel about them.

i've never really made up my mind about qijiu, tbh. toxic doomed yaoi VS tragic brothers VS two people who went through something awful together and since then have changed so much as people that honestly they really would be better off without being anything to each other...

in part my general non-commitment to a particular stance on qijiu is probably just a result of my general ambivalence to the characters themselves ;; i'll put my opinions below the break, so that no one has to see my lukewarm sentiments if they're keen on these characters (especially sj!sqq)😅

i often write yqy in a favorable light since sy!sqq likes yqy, but personally i think he's just... fine. i can tell i'm supposed to feel bad for him, but honestly i don't have a lot of sympathy or understanding for someone who feels so horrible about their own self that they then decide to... let somebody else act and feel horrible? i think he's got nice older brother vibes, but the fact that he knew about sj!sqq's abuse of his disciples and didn't intervene kinda cuts into his image as the 'respectable' one, for me.

for sj!sqq... he's a very complicated character, and an interesting character to me because of it. however, i love binghe VERY much, and in the end i just can't actually like anyone who is cruel to him.

at the start of my time in fandom, my opinion of him was just that: "he's interesting, but i don't really care to think about him very much because he was very awful to the character that i DO want to think about a lot." and because i didn't care to think about him, i also didn't care to tackle how complicated his character is - i honestly very frequently just used him as a convenient plot point for binggeyuan without really caring if it was OOC for sj!sqq.

but over time, i've seen a lot of sj!sqq fans who try to wash him clean in ways that feel very weird... as if there is this need to have him proven innocent of every single one of the crimes he was accused of, just because some of them were proven to be misunderstandings. in particular, i've seen this theory that sj!sqq only dumped tea on lbh because the tea was medicinal (??) and it was how he could treat lbh for his injuries (??) without breaking his character (??)... and i've seen this several times, from multiple different people, and all treated very seriously -- this isn't just one person shouting at the sky with this idea.

i guess, as someone who loves bingge when he's soggy and loves him still when he's insane and violent and awful, beyond just feeling like the fandom often misrepresents sj!sqq for the sake of turning him "likeable," it also just feels a bit cheap and cowardly 😂 like, sure, by all means, love that man! but, please love him while also looking the fact that he abused lbh in the eye.

anyway, so i guess tldr: i think sj!sqq is very complicated, and more often than not i just don't care enough about him to represent that correctly, but sometimes i see a take so Weird that it makes my teeth itch. 'raised by winter winds' was more or less the culmination of all of those moments - me going, "okay, let's just for once give genuine care and attention to how i represent this character, since if i want to complain about other people's misrepresentations than i had damn well better make sure i'm not being so careless with my own characterizations."

u can u up, no can no bb, and all that.

to circle back to your original question with all that context: i'm generally ambivalent to both yqy and sj!sqq, so i'm also generally ambivalent to qijiu or what form it takes. there have been a couple fics where i find moments that i'm really invested in them, because i do think that sj!sqq is a complicated and interesting character, but it isn't something i seek out.