#or scooping wwx up like a cat

[tea-cat-arts]

Comments like "Lan Wangji is so much better in the donghua because of how expressive he is," "Lan Wangji is so much more in love with WWX in the donghua! Look at his face," or any other variation of "LWJ feels more if he shows more on his face and that makes those adaptations better" are now grounds for instant blocking from me ✌️. Like, logically I know he's not canonically autistic, but I've gone my whole life getting shit for not showing enough emotions on my face and seeing a fictional character I like with the same struggle get the exact same shit from people just makes me want to punch dry wall

[yahargul]

incredible to think how lwj could have literally scooped up yiling laozu with one arm and taken him back to gusu. “but novel wwx was so scary and powerful!!” the second he felt lwj’s biceps he would have curled up like a cat and went to sleep 

[melongumi]

Yanli pursuing Meng Yao sounds like glorious and incredible sitcom, because everything will be hilarious mess. Yanli competing with Xichen ( and possibly Qin Su, who also apprently was one to initiate and court him). Meng Yao, stuck between his desire to climb in politics and get revenge, and wide variety of beautiful kind and badass tops to choose from. How is Jiang Cheng coping with his sweet older sister both moving on from JZX but also seeking to outbid WWX in ''Social Scandal of Year' 1/2

How is Madam Jin dealing with fact that her husband's illegitimate kid by prostitute is far more sought after than her son and heir? Is Meng Yao receiving well-meaning but absolutely horrible advice from Zixuan, who is awkwardly wanting to make up to both him and Yanli for being rude, and Xue Yang who may be totally honest ooor just think it is hilarious, but also has same understanding of romance as particularly bloodthirsty feral cat? Again, thank you so much for this idea, it is genius 2/2

First of all, ending up finding a cute trophy husband to marry in is a great accompaniment for Sect Leader Yanli, so jot that down. And if Qin Su is also trying to compete - it’s better for her in the long run if she drops out of the running sooner rather than later, but - one could suppose she might conclude that she must aim to become the Qin sect leader, which sounds fantastic.

An incomplete list of Embarrassing Scenes JYL has been involved in:

Impromptu poetry recitation competition with Lan Xichen; onlookers cannot explain why, but are positive they were moments from pulling each others’ hair when it was broken up.

Later that same evening, a covert drinking contest with Lan Xichen and Qin Su - Qin Su ends up drunkenly making out with Luo Qingyang and chooses to drop out of the running 

Lan Xichen, however, is a terror when drunk -- Yanli is visibly smug at the very public chaos right up until Jin Guangyao takes it upon himself to babysit him until he sobers up. 

After Jin Guangyao was publicly berated by his father for some event planning slip-up that wasn’t his fault, slipped laxatives into Jin Guangshan’s tea. Nobody knows how she accomplished this.

Madam Jin is not a problem: Yanli has thoroughly converted her by commenting, absently, that if she can win over Jin Guangyao, wouldn’t that make his father’s wife her mother-in-law? She’s so looking forward to such a happy day, she says. Of course, if she’s going to be the Jiang sect leader, she’ll have to invite her beloved mother-in-law to be her guest instead of visiting Koi Tower... (Madam Jin was the one who helped her sabotage the tea.)

Jiang Cheng is highly embarrassed by all of this commotion, and has decided he probably despises Jin Guangyao much more than he ever did Jin Zixuan. This is made worse by the fact that Wei Wuxian has betrayed him. Wei Wuxian thinks he’s pretty cool, actually? What’s the fuss, Jiang Cheng? 

Wei Wuxian has already scooped Jin Guangyao into private Yunmeng Jiang swordsmanship lessons a half-dozen times and wow, he picks stuff up quick! And he doesn’t even press about Wei Wuxian demonstrating with a stick instead of with Suibian, and he has intelligent commentary when Wei Wuxian starts rambling about demonic cultivation theory. It’s great. Plus, he hasn’t stuck his foot in his mouth about shijie even once! He’s clearly an improvement. 

(Wei Wuxian is a terror, and Jin Guangyao half wants to orchestrate Wei Wuxian’s untimely accidental death.) 

Yanli is the one who’s rescued him from each of these training sessions with tea and snacks; her didi is the best wingman ever.

Xue Yang may not be a factor here - if we’re going by the novel timeline (and we usually are), I would assume he was brought to Koi Tower sometime after Yanli’s marriage, or even after Zixuan’s death. We’re not quite there, yet. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: Yanli has lasered in on all of Jin Guangyao’s weak or sore points, and uses this knowledge shamelessly. 

He is half a head shorter than her, so she is constantly finding excuses to take a seat and look up through her eyelashes.

“Sprained her ankle” on some steps and had to be carried.

Constantly comments on his being a war hero, and oh, what inner strength it must have taken--!

Compliments his event planning.

Talks about wanting like five kids that take after an admirable father. (Says this in front of Lan Xichen, looks especially smug.)

Look, I’m not saying that Jin Guangyao doesn’t stand a chance, but like. He doesn’t stand a chance.

[chibisquirt]

That Fic I Want

Okay, so @flange5​, @kagekanecavi​, and @trickyarchangel​ have succeeded in pulling me down into the abyss which is The Untamed.  (It is soooo preeeeetty!!!!  And the Stony vibes are *real* let me tell you!!!)  

Anyway, naturally, I want fic-- and because it’s me, and I am the *most* predictable, one’s a crossover, while one’s a first time fic.  I will maybe someday write one or the other of them, but I have way too much to do to start on them now, so summaries it is.  

The first-time fic is standard “yes of course Bubbles wants that fic” fic, and no one should be surprised because I am trash.

The crossover, otoh, is a Doctrine of Labyrinths crossover which turns into Fix-it Fic because fuck you, this is my wish-fulfillment, I’ll save my tiny hyper-competent girlfriend if I want to.  I know I could write it in such a way that you don’t need to know both fandoms to read it, you only need to one or the other...  Hopefully this description is readable like that, too.

Help me, I’m in hell.

So the first place this comes from is, “you know who it would be *hilarious* to throw at these two gay idiots?  Felix and Mildmay!”  Which means non-DoL people need to know who those are.  

Felix is a magic user, and Mildmay, his half-brother, is an ex-assassin, ex-thief.  They both have SO MANY issues, from their personal histories (both children of poverty and abuse, but Felix was trained to use the manners of the powerful magic-using class, while Mildmay lived on the street) to the power differential between them to personal losses they’ve undergone.  Mildmay does not have magic, which makes him “annemer.”  The MDZS guys would say that Felix is a cultivator, and Mildmay is not, but that right there is one of the hurdles to writing this fic.

The way magic is described in the DoL books does not line up with the way Cultivation is described in MDZS.  So you have to find a way to reconcile those two.  DoL describes the uses and even abilities of magic changing as you move to a different culture, so that accounts for some of it; MDZS describes the energies involved in such a way that annemer may well be able to practice cultivation, so that fixes the rest.  For the actual fic, it’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun to explore the similarities and differences in the two systems while still having a cohesive worldbuilding, but for the purposes of this summary, just know that the two are similar, but not the same.

So why do I want to write this nonsense?  

WELL...!

Felix is a powerful magic user, who used to be a child prostitute before being scooped off the streets by an INCREDIBLY abusive necromancer and trained as his protege.  He is incredibly talented, and eventually breaks free of the dark magic he was trained under, and the course of the books is basically one big story of him becoming a better person.  He is also as queer as a football bat, and proud of it. (One scene in the books in which he is voluntarily participating in an orgy is changed into a rape scene when he realizes that one of the participants is a woman.  He is That Gay.  He makes both LWJ and WWX look incredibly straight by comparison.)  He is glib, and clever, but with an addictive personality, and he’s prideful but for good reason, because next to him all the magicians in Corambis really do look a bit like morons.

Sound familiar, at all...?

Mildmay, on the other hand, was raised on the streets by a “thief keeper,” a woman in this case who taught him to use knives, and steal, and then-- when he got his face busted up and couldn’t be unobtrusive anymore-- to be an assassin, instead.  He has a large scar that makes his speech slur, so he rarely speaks or changes expression, but despite his troubled history, he is a Good Person, compassionate and actively *wanting* to be good.  He’s low-class-- and even when he has an opportunity to pretend to be high-class, he never takes it-- but he’s still, in his own way, a Gentleman.  He likes to tell stories, and to hear them; if he had been taught to read and write, he could easily have been a novelist.  Also he is apparently The Greatest Ever at cunnilingus, which really is the cherry on top of my adoration for the boy.

...Okay, so my MDZS folks all know now why I’m slavering to introduce these two assholes to LWJ and WWX, right?  Cool.  Glad we’re on the same page.

DoL ends with our heroes at loose ends in a country with an empire of unknown characterization and size across the sea from them; also, they live on the coast, and have a history of traveling.  So it’s easy to imagine that they ended up in Ygres for... some reason... and that Ygres borders the land MDZS is set in (which as far as I know doesn’t have a name???)  

So this story would start with Felix and Mildmay being called into an audience with the Ygressine empress, who was originally from the Wen clan.*

The Wen empress is pretty thoroughly Ygressine by this point, but still wants to do right by her tiny bits of remaining family.  She sits on her cushions and pets her cat and gives our boys a task.  

She tells our boys about the Sunshot campaign that ended her clan, and about the cruelty afterwards that finished off the last of them.  Then she says that one of her relatives managed to survive the purge after the war by putting her soul into a vessel.  “This cousin of mine, Wen Qing, was very skilled and very clever, and so she has been able to retain her life, but her body perished.  She was a friend of the Yiling Patriarch, and was sure that he could restore her to herself, but alas, he himself died only a few days after she did, long before she was able to reach his side.”  

“So she’s stuck,” Mildmay says.

“Unfortunately, yes.  She made her way to me, and I have kept her safe and comfortable as well as I can since.”  She strokes the cat again.  The cat lashes its tail.

“You want us to restore her,” Felix guesses, madly trying to figure out what he knows about necromancy and praying this chick hasn’t become a fantome or a rachenant in the meantime.

“I doubt you can,” the empress says, “you don’t even know the basics of swordsmanship. No, I want you to find the Yiling Patriarch, Wei Wuxian.”

“The dead one, you mean?”

“We heard the story from three different spies,” the empress says, smiling thinly.  “He has returned to life.”

Now Felix is hoping Wei Wuxian isn’t a fantome or a rachenant.  

“You will escort my cousin, Wen Qing, to his side, and remain with them until they have succeeded in restoring her.  They are both quite clever-- and you’re adequate, too, in spite of your poor education--”  Felix is so indignant, y’all--  “I am sure you will resolve this swiftly.”   

The cat stands up after one last pet, stretches, and starts walking towards the door.  “I have a purse and luggage all packed for you, lacking only any personal items of your own you would like to bring.  We’ll leave at first light,” she says.  She stands on her hind legs with her forepaw on Mildmay’s thigh and bats at his hand.  “Aren’t you going to carry me??  It’s too far to walk!”

Felix and Mildmay:  “What the actual fuck!!!!”

So Cat Wen Qing (Wen Qing-tten?) and the brothers make their way to the MDZS lands, where Lan Wangji is now Excellency and WWX is wandering around cultivating shit and Lan Sizhui is building a cenotaph with Wen Ning, both of the unaware that they are in for a very large surprise.  

And that’s the setup!  There are so many good things I can do with this, so many ways it can go!

They don’t know where WWX is, so they determine to as LWJ, who is about the only one Wen Qing can think of who might know and also tell them without trying to kill her.  They do this without realizing that LWJ is the Excellency now, because when they left Ygres with it’s spy network the news hadn’t happened yet.

LWJ isn’t telling a damn soul where WWX is, least of all foreigners with a talking cat.

He tells them to stay.  (This is actually so that he can get to know them and evaluate them, but god forbid he actually tell anyone that.)  

Felix meets Lan Xichen and is very sympathetic to his recent loss.  He has been there, okay, he knows how this goes!  

At some point they start actually talking about the difference between what Felix and Mildmay know as magic and cultivation, and Mildmay has the “oh god every single one of them is a necromancer!” epiphany/breakdown

Also under the category of “difference between cultivation and magic,” Wen Qing is aware that they have a problem.  Felix is a foreigner, who does not read or write the language, does not sing, does not play an instrument, and barely speaks the language.  So literally no one is going to listen to Felix as a Cultivator if he doesn’t have a sword.

She gets him a sword.  She makes him learn to use it.  It is very, very ugly.

Wen Qing is a better swordsman than Felix is, and she’s still stuck in the body of a cat.

When Mildmay laughs, she makes him learn the sword, too.  

At some point, someone challenges Felix to a duel.  Felix shrugs, then cheats.  

LWJ finds out about Felix’s appallingly bad sword skills, and makes him practice with the juniors.

Mildmay also knows the juniors, because he talks them into teaching him how to gamble.  Then he takes all their money.

His stake in this game is all of the hairpins from his braid, each one of which is worth one (1) story.  He has to tell a story first to prove he can, but once they realize he knows a whole bunch and they haven’t heard any of them, the juniors all hoard their collection of hairpins jealously.  They’ll ante in all of their money, but if they have one of his hairpins, they hold onto it.

Someone buys him a new set of hairpins at some point because his braid is getting really unmanageable.  

Then everybody else buys him increasingly nice hair ornaments until he has the prettiest red queue in Cloud Recesses.

Lan Sizhui at some point gets another family member back, which I think we can all agree he too deserves

Wen Qing finding out who SiZhui is, though

At some point, Cat Wen Qing runs into Wen Ning and just climbs him, racing up his chest and perching on his shoulders to yowl fish-breath into his face, loudly and repeatedly scolding him in cat-noises.  

Felix and WWX in a room together, building towers of bullshit in the air together.  I just... really need that to happen, so much

Wen Qing and Mildmay have a mutual “I’m not good enough” slowburn high-pine-content sort of romance.  They both *deserve* it, damn it, as well as their happy ending!

Wen Qing tries to fix Mildmay’s leg with acupuncture, and it doesn’t work but it does help some

Everybody underestimating Mildmay because he’s not a cultivator and then Mildmay pulls some Mildmay-esque stunt, like stabbing a man fifteen times before he blinks or going over a wall that they thought was unscaleable, and they all just lose their fucking jaws.

*for DoL people who don’t know, the Wen clan are the bad guys of the first half of MDZS, and then they’re defeated, and the cruelty towards defeated Wens drives the action of the second half of MDZS.  So there are good Wens, too.