#really harrowing and heartbreaking stories. I do not tend to enjoy them in fiction

[llycaons]

I talk big about in-character writing as if I wasn't 2 chapters into a wx AU of a desperately tragic yet very hokey movie called 'unleashed' about an orphan raised like a dog by a mob boss as an enforcer who breaks free from his captors and starts reconnecting with his humanity and this orphan hero is none other than lan wangji...

edit: I'm almost done and this is less offensively bad that just....deeply odd. long rambling post under the cut

this is why I tend to dislike AUs based on very specific works - the characterizations and relationships just don't match and it feels like reading another story. because it IS.

first of all, why is this dehumanized and abused character manipulated into a weapon who lost his parents young and was treated like an animal lwj and not wwx? it would fit the story better. wwx (survivalist, very powerful, abused and used in canon) escapes and finds a lovely, stable, (wealthy), somewhat naive, caretaking piano teacher with a young son. he slowly recovers in a safe place as he grapples with his past of abuse and cruelty. he learns to love and be loved. but lwj is one of the wealthiest and most sheltered characters in the show! the choices simply do not make sense!

like...the lwj is decent, but that's only bc this lwj has been raised in very different circumstances and his core character traits (loving animals/music/wwx/small children, having a hidden humorous side, wanting to help people and generally unwilling to hurt the innocent) are somewhat simplistic. his other important traits (like his specific relationship with rules, his character arc as it related to his sect, how he acts wrt his privilege) don't really get a chance to manifest in this situation. he's pretty straightforward, which just makes the wx dynamic pretty boring.

based on his thoughts and dialogue, wwx just thinks he's just a hot sweetheart and so so good and brave. which he IS ig, but it's lacking the drama or intrigue or flair of canon. canon wwx didn't fall in love with simply a good brave kind sweetheart, he fell in love with someone with very strong principles that aligned with his, who challenged him at every turn and surprised him with his hidden sweet side and caretaking streak and humor and eventual willingness to break rules. who is also hot and good at swordfighting. there's shades of this to the relationship, but it's ultimately just a watered-down and decontextualized version of canon. and the draw of wwx and lwj and their relationship has so much to do with canon that this AU is just kind of boring and irrelevant to read

speaking of which, the wwx is VERY odd and somewhat insulting. he's currently a single dad of a-yuan (🙄, and side note but wq and wn aren't even RELATED to the bad wens???? way to drop a really important and thematically relevant detail), and he's a building super so he collects rents, and his personal history is similar to college except he has this really strange characterization around college and in this entanglement with this woman whose death he feels responsible for. like he describes himself as a failing student who drank way too much without getting into the why of it all or the other people who were definitely in his life at the time, also canon wwx at that same age was still a highly prolific and celebrated author even in the midst of severe trauma AND alcoholism. and he described himself and this oc woman as 'two shitty people who had nobody else to be shitty with' or something and then talked about how she was an addict and it was just a really strange and and insulting (to addicts) and ooc direction for his character to be taken.

like wwx always had a ton of friends except for when he was a social pariah for saving people from literal death camps and even then the wens and his siblings really cared about him so idk why his primary social connection is this oc woman whose only purpose is to have a baby and then be a bad mother/partner and then die to make wwx feel angsty. like, he does talk about her ballet skills and her intelligence and her humor but her role in the story is pure plot device. it must be from the original movie but it's SO random and shitty and ooc and cruel to addicts? and if you write an AU for a fanfic that you want to make sense you really have to actually alter the other work a bit to accommodate the other relationships and character dynamics. it would have made more sense for wwx to be barely scraping by while working three jobs and getting disowned by the jiangs and still getting straight As even if he struggled with alcoholism. and then he still would have taken in a-yuan if the alternative was the foster system. a-yuan's biological parentage and wx's adoption of him is genuinely so important oh it makes me mad they erased that

speaking of family, the jc and jyl aren't too bad and the jfm is mostly fine but the myu is bizarre. instead of the abusive, out of control, shaming, self-centered, violent woman from canon who literally hates wwx's guts, she's a kind of sharp divorcee whose method to curry favor with her grandchildren is to buy them expensive gifts and who asks nosy but well-meaning questions about wwx's love life. I do think myu would dote on a grandchild, but NOT if it was wwx's. his role in the jiangs is a little difficult to translate completely accurately to a modern setting, but her dislike for him and her blame on him for ruining her marriage and being better than her son is a really important part of her character. adult wwx would by all rights offer her the respect she is due as his parental figure, but would likely avoid her when possible and need to seek support from other people in his life when he interacts with her. and I don't think he'd easily let her be a part of his child's life. because she abused him as a child and teenager!

[qqueenofhades]

Also having some not-entirely-formed but nonetheless interesting thoughts about the grimdark genre and how we’re often told that it’s the only valid fictional framework because it “reflects reality.” Wherein, evidently, everyone is morally relativistic and/or outright amoral, everything is bad and heartbreaking and violent, happy endings aren’t real, and that this is the only possible way for fiction to be “sophisticated” and “complex” enough to appeal to the oh-so-intelligent postmodern consumer, who only feels emotion ironically. And just.... really? That’s how all of “real life” is all the time, for everyone, everywhere? We’re supposed to just suffer and do bad things in reality AND in fiction, and that’s the only thing that gives the human experience meaning....?

Aside from being profoundly cynical, pessimistic, and, one would argue, not actually reflective of most people’s day-to-day lives on the individual and human level, it makes me wonder how much of this is a controlling/conditioning tactic used in the service of maintaining the status quo. Like, think about it. If you strongly believe that grimdark fiction “reflects reality” because everything is terrible and there’s no point in trying to change anything because everyone is just as bad and selfish as you, then are you actually going to do that in real life? I’m going to say no. Why exactly do we have so much media pushing this as the main message, and who stands to benefit from promoting a message that the world consists entirely of pointless cynicism and you should just kinda throw up your hands and give up on it?

Of course, this doesn’t mean stripping your narratives of all conflict, drama, emotion, darkness, genuine evil, and complex morality. As I’ve said before, I personally enjoy stories and characters that tend toward the thematically darker and more complicated, because it opens more avenues to ask important questions and come up with nuanced answers. Aside from the patently stupid argument that fiction should only reflect or represent things that would be “acceptable” in real life, trying to sanitize or censor it is as prudish and pointless as trying to sanitize or censor reality. So when I’m critiquing “grimdark,” that doesn’t mean all dark or violent fiction everywhere, or anything with themes or plot dynamics more complex than a fluffy coffee-shop AU. I mean the particular subgenre which makes the cynicism, violence, amorality, and “what’s-it-all-for?” nihilism its entire philosophical and moral point, and then holds that up as also being essentially representative of real life too, so that anyone who doesn’t get that also doesn’t get “the way things actually are” and is too naive and stupid to really think that they could have an effect on the world. And just... this is literally known to be, for example, Vladimir Putin’s exact mindset: make any change as difficult and painful as possible, demoralize anyone from thinking that positive morality is even desirable or achievable, or that the world is anything more than selfish, violent actors performing selfish and violent actions until they all spiral down into the abyss together. That is bleak as fuck. And if that��s what you believe, that’s going to be how you act.

This is even more ridiculous because people demonstrably like stories where there’s allowed to be genuine good, love, hope, healing, or redemption, even if it comes paired with that darkness, pain, death, grief, and trauma. The best recent example of this is, again, the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series. There are plenty of scenes that are absolutely harrowing, emotionally and viscerally, and outright painful to watch just because of the amount of in-universe darkness attached to them and the fraught histories that the characters have together. But the series weaves a consistent message of goodness through it as well. Its entire central emotional conflict is about love, the loss of that love, and finding a way to move on even in the midst of that same dark night of the soul. It doesn’t cheapen or play down the pain and suffering, but it doesn’t make it the entire, agonizing, bash-you-over-the-head-again-and-again moral point. The hero is allowed to move on from it, and for his good choices to matter both individually and to the world at large. This was clearly a message that viewers responded to, both as Star Wars fans and more generally. They liked being allowed to experience a narrative where endless sacrifice, destruction, and suffering weren’t the only thing, even if they existed strongly. That there was more to life, and more to human experience, than that.

Anyway. Fiction and reality always complement and inform each other, due to the innate human fondness for stories and structured narratives that reveal something to us about our interaction as sentient beings living together in a society. I just wonder what changes to our current society would be possible if we started valuing this kind of story more.