#jingshun

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chat is it well-adjusted of me to use my professor's "ahah don't kill yourself" litany word for word in this girlyaoi moment

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How did Arric and Jing Shun meet, or get married?

i may or may not have fudged some history (or maybe i didn’t i’m actually not sure) so take the stuff with a grain of salt

(the fudging of history occurs because i’m pretty sure the 1980s weren’t as nice to us as 2000s. so kick it back and let’s pretend technology advanced like 50 years earlier)

the year is… approximately 1950 (1949?). the second world war has concluded (1945), the cold war has begun (1947), there was a just-ended war in china between china and taiwan resulting in china being declared communist (1950), and martial law had settled upon taiwan (1949). 

it was a very scary time for china. and taiwan. it was a very bad time for everyone, because everyone’s trying to recover from the world war, alright.

this is the martial law: newspapers are limited to only say good things on the government. distribution of anything saying otherwise - or even reading them - is illegal, and will result in death or jail (this is called the white terror if you want to google that)

if you asked a chinese person if taiwan is a part of china, they’d probably say yes. if you asked a taiwanese person, they’d probably say fuck you. (i had a chinese and a taiwanese student in my history class once and that was an actual thing the history teacher asked them. their answer went as well as you’d expect.)

short, mostly factual history lesson aside, the story goes like this:

jing shun was born in 1939, alright, and so she’s roughly 11 by the time the martial law had settled in. her family is poor, they’re trying their best to send her to school, and It happens (eventually, when she’s a teenager). she finds out about free thinking, and she absorbs herself in the literature that had been publicly banned.

when she was 18, she fled the country. she apologized to her parents, took all the she had saved, and left. she leaves to the closest country she could find that was not communist, and was not suffering - britain.

(now hear me out here; sure they fucked up during the world war but 1960s britain.)

she tried her best to work, but her chinese and poor grip of english just won’t cut it. and she struggled there, for two years-

and back up for arric here, just for a second - 

arric is a year older than jing shun, alright - and he never had parents. he was abandoned at an orphanage as a child. he never really - pitied himself or anything, though, he just hardened himself to everything and taught himself to read and write and soon at the age of 18 he was an office worker making his way up the ranks by smarts and charm alone. 

when he’s twenty-one, he meets jing shun.

she’s a factory worker, but she’s not very good at it - almost too weak most times, sickly, the smoke isn’t good for her - and he takes a look at her, this small chinese lady that’s probably starving half to death, and he takes her by the hand and leads her away.

he takes her to dinner that day, and he weighs his options. he sees her face light up at food and he could barely make sense of her words - out of all the languages he knew well, chinese was not one of them, but he knew enough to hold a conversation that ends with if you marry me you will never need for anything.

and he watched her consider it; he watched her ask for time to think about it. however he knew as intelligent as jingshun could have been (and was), she would not be able to turn him down.

and so -

a year later, with no love between them, they married each other.

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meows plaintively when the fuck is the writer gonna release more jingshun this is unconscionable (<- is the very writer)

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I love the bastard (derogatory) to bastard (affectionate) pipeline in jingshun's relationship

why thank u 🥰 parentage is a touchy subject for both of them (wjw having dead parents vs ls having 2/3 shitty parents and one being a lil bit mmmm Complicated shall we say) so it's also their favorite thing to talk about

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the guarded bower by arthur hughes... jingshun? idk i know they're like not whats the word. its not chivalrous. but i keep seeing paintings like this one & they're my first thought. its the ambiguity if that sword is protecting or about to stab for me (ok the ambiguity is lost in the title...) bc while their relationship is homoerotic point and attack it is also contentious yes? i hope im reading them right im sure its frustrating if people dont see your vision... my eyes and ears will be open when they make an appearance i promise!

oh the fucking squeak i just squonked.

fuck my shitty drawing skills i need this as jingshun right myeow im shaking and shivering like a collapsing building. the cold directness of the woman's gaze. she is radiantly lit while he stands back in the shadow. the ambiguity of the sword braced in front of her, the contrast of that against their linked hands--he's holding the sword, but she is holding his hand because he is her weapon. his gaze not at the viewer but only at her. the flowers at the hem of her dress

also HELLO THIS DESCRIPTION OF THE FRAME???

ok yes it says chivalrous there but i get what you're saying like. this is the first time i've ever seen this painting and i didn't know about the context but yes i also got big jingshun vibes im picking up what ur putting down!!!!! they are a little bit like, a twist on chivalric roles huh. princess / knight lends itself well to inspector / guard comparisons

baby you got the vision like no one else has got the vision before

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wan ji (pre-courtesy name jingjing, full of useless scheming in her heart) at 15, seeing li shun for the first time: oh she's so needy i can't NOT manipulate her and bend her to my will

li shun (fresh from basically a sanctioned blood sport) at 16, watching wan ji dab at her injuries with a look of both fear and wide-eyed concern: oh she's so pathetic i can't NOT humor her

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😳...

😳

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tonight..... the jingshun extra 🫣

"Do not disappoint"

"this one listens and obeys, cishi"

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so does anyone remember when in arcane someone tries to make the big buff guard sevika betray the mob boss dad silco and she swings her armsword, cutting silco's chair but killing the traitor guy? and then silco was fuckin panicking and terrified bc he came so close to death and he hadn't even considered that sevika would betray her but in that moment he was bluffing and thought he was toast? this is like that. but make it girlyaoi

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wjw playing mind games vs ls eating the pieces

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everyone groans when they see her walk into the debate/psychology class (jingjing I love you but she'd quote the joker at least 3 times..)

shakes head..... she wouldn't quote the joker she would start getting psychoanalytical or maybe she'd even be like "it's such a basic concept, you would know if you've read any Shang Yang" and then her classmates would be like "THIS IS A POTTERY CLASS NOT EASTERN PHILOSOPHY" and she'd be like "i can tell 😒"

you know who would quote The Joker though? li shun specifically because it would piss off jingjing really bad like. wjw just wants to watch her goddamn zhang yimou films in peace

LS: "do you know what happens when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons her--"

WJW: this is why your parents didn't love you

LS: at least I have parents

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what does wan jingwei like best physically about li shun im imagining the scenario you've described but like. its a diagram wjw has titled a glorious victory but li shuns arms are way beefier than they actually are & the expression vitally is one of subserviant defeat (not true to life)

(covering myself in layers and layers and layers

they were i think 15 and 16 at this point?

back in the mainland she once attended a cultivation conference (it's complicated but basically the chao was flexing by gathering the southern sects in one place and showboating) and wan jingwei was a political hostage slash ward of the emperor. and she got a front row seat to watch how li shun got her reputation as a violent and dangerous monster (which, to be fair, she was being a violent and dangerous monster. but also to defend women's wrongs, she totally had a right to do that. overreaction? yeah. but girls will be girls). li shun was NOT playing by the gentleman's rules of the sport and she had to be disqualified because she got very close to killing other competitors, to the great shame of the li and the delight of the chao

anyway. wan jingwei, no courtesy name yet so only called wan ji, escorted her out since she was only basically a random lackey at the time (plotting in her heart but she was powerless and at the lowest point in her life so far....) immediately she zoned in on this neediness and insecurity in li shun and thought she could use it to her advantage, or at least practice her (at the time, very weak) manipulation tactics on her. she was very nice, nonjudgmental, and she tried not to show fear while bandaging her up

(li shun saw right through it but found it endearing and strange)

(that was an act. wj was not actually afraid. bc she's cocky the way some ppl think they can totally tame a wild tiger. ahahah layers)

there also happened to be some problems on wj's end (some cultivator bothering her) and, tldr, she made this known to li shun who handled the problem. both testing each other. only they know what the results are. after that, they don't see each other again for a few more years. coincidentally, there appears to be a curse on the wan family--how could so many members die in succession? so odd

sorry what was the question? oh yes. wan jingwei likes li shun's hands

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wan jingwei may not top all the time but she thinks of herself as a top. when thats not the physical reality its just a deviation from her true path a diverting aside that will not even make the footnotes in her illusory autobiography <- just yapping idk her yet

CACKLIGNGNSASLKFJFHALSFKDFJ NO BC U GOT IT. THAT'S THE ONE YOUR HONORS. ABSOLUTELY CRYINGGGGGGGGGG

WJW: i'm a top because you'll do whatever i tell you to do

LS, folding her like a . thing that folds: cishi i think we need to go over the terminology again

WJW: history will vindicate me

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do jingshun have an associated fruit, flower, fruity flower?

the Wan family in general are associated with magnolias but that means both jingwei and her long-gone aunt Wan Qiuye are both like that so it's an inherited association, not a relationship one the way plums would be for SSR

li shun..... hm idk if I've assigned her anything yet. tbh she's as hard-headed as a coconut lol but I'm not assigning her that! would anyone be mad if i gave her the aguwason. yes it's a Philippine fruit (they literally call it Luzon fruit in Mandarin even though it's native to Hainan too) but in English it's named after st. ignatius. "why this obscure fuckass fruit" THE STRYCHNINE

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you know that painting of the knight and the princess meeting in some narrow staircase not even looking at each other called "the meeting on the turret stairs" ... is that jingshun?

there's too much tenderness and chivalric longing in that image to be jingshun I'm afraid 😔 if anything, that painting is giving shuangyan

jingshun would be closer to "Judith Slaying Holofernes" off the top of my head. I can probably find a closer match if I dig but I'm eepy

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jingshun playing just dance is a weirdly funny thought to me

you know how in hannibal, those two dudes would talk to each other about some obscure thing like "in ancient greece the seme was the blablabla tell me will" whatever? and then everyone else is like "wow this is a REALLY good liver paté dude what's your secret" to hannibal lecter?

that's what it's like for jingshun. in a modern au their Just Dance game night is a psychological flirtation. in their own universe their court meetings are just like that in front of everyone's salad. someone save zhi lansheng from the daily onslaught of girlyaoi (he knows it's there but he doesn't care. someone save cao fen next to him bc HE's muttering "goddamn idc if good things are happening to my boss' stepsister it should be happening to ME" while clicking his abacus)