#xuli ends up having a very rich history where jing wen is from a distant past where the kingdom was likely prospering
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fortune-maiden · 4 months ago
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No no, don't spare me the 700 words of character rambling. I want to read it. Please?
IF YOU INSIST ANON =D
(admittedly it's closer to 600 words now after editing lol)
(this is partly cyrano au stuff, partly general character ramblings)
OK SO JING WEN.
In canon we don’t really know too much about his motives towards Ling Wen other than he wants to wear her down and destroy her reputation, and this stems from her showing him up in an essay contest. From the revision, we can also add plagiarism to his sins – he knows Ling Wen is more talented than him and despises her for it, especially because she’s a woman. (Although I think her lack of scholarly background also heavily plays into it. She isn't a woman from a family of scholarly officials. She's a shoeseller who writes letters on the side to make ends meet.)
For the Cyrano (but not really Cyrano) AU, I’ve added a layer of lust and entitlement towards his feelings for Ling Wen. He was the one who discovered her! He rescued her from a life in prison and made her a junior heavenly official! People remember her name and her story because of him! He’s her hero!
And he thinks that it’s about time she acts like it! Ling Wen wants to keep her head down and avoid him as much as possible. Do whatever job he wants from her and hope it keeps him in a good enough mood to leave her alone. Except Jing Wen wants to reduce her to the girl who was saved by him and devotes herself to him in return. It drives him crazy that she does not, and would even dare to get close to other men (PM & SWD) when she treats him (him!) with barely concealed contempt. He discovered her! She was no one before him and he is the only one who can have her! (and her talents!)
This is meant to contrast this AU’s Shi Wudu who also discovers her hidden talent when he exposes Jing Wen's plagiarism (mostly by accident) and immediately falls for her brain and wants to see what she can do with it when she isn’t tied down by Jing Wen and his ego. He finds her interesting, a match for himself (one of two people he’ll acknowledge as such), and rather than save her, he wants to give her the tools she needs to save herself because it’s much more fun for him that way. (This is also the real reason Bai Jing is not in this AU, because he treats Ling Wen with genuine kindness and doesn’t have any kind of pedestal or expectations in return and I think given everything she has been through at that point, that genuineness would be more attractive to Ling Wen over someone who wants to make a girlboss out of her. If there’s no BJ to compare against, I think LW would be a little more receptive to SWD’s feelings.) (Although both are interesting to think about.) (Also on a sidenote, even in AUs where he isn’t explicitly in love with her like this one, my SWD always ends up a bit of a dogged nice guy towards LW, ready to do anything she asks. This is partly because she helped him with the fate swap, and partly because he REALLY values her friendship. There’s a bit of a second-love aspect to their relationship from Ling Wen’s side because she knows SWD feelings towards her but it’s not the same love that BJ made her feel.)
And also because I just like talking about him, Jing Wen’s possessiveness and refusal to be shown up by a woman also kinda contrasts Pei Ming a bit, since he’s also a traditionalist and believes the guy should save the girl (and would be pushing SWD in that direction in his pseudo-cyrano role), but he’s also capable of acknowledging that if that doesn’t win her love, it doesn’t win her love (not that that’s ever been an issue for him personally) – and if a woman shows you up, the solution is to Do Better and show off properly to her later (this is him with the Rain Master. Anytime she gets the better of him, he sulks for a bit and then sets out to show her how cool he actually is. He wants her acknowledgment!)
#random tgcf thoughts#tgcf#the cyrano (but not really cyrano) au#one of these days i'll write the ling wen backstory frankencanon of my dreans haha#which this au is a bit of an offshoot off#idk i just find the whole xuli backstory incredibly fascinating#and especially just interesting a character jing wen is#considering he only appears in one scene in the original tgcf#and doesn't physically appear at all in the revision (his presence is there in the flashback but he never gets any actual scenes)#that one scene just reveals so much about him; lw; pm; and xuli#(and that's on top of what rong guang also reveals about xuli)#xuli ends up having a very rich history where jing wen is from a distant past where the kingdom was likely prospering#and he holds on to those glory days of it#then ling wen was born in an era where corruption was much more rampant and her essay's victory reflects that#things were likely even worse in pei ming's time (although xuli was waging and winning a lot of wars with him in command)#and this culminated in an actual military coup that pei ming stopped with his own hands#(whatever rong guang's actual motives for the coup was (whether he believed pm would be a better king or wanted to seize power himself)#i think there was already plenty of dissatisfaction among both the military and the populace for the current state of affairs#that he could justify his cause)#(but also there's a comment about how pm thought the current king wasn't that bad so it could also be that pm's xuli was improving a bit#compared to ling wen's xuli)#but then of course after pm's era we get bai jing's era and everyone agrees that the kingdom is a wretched hive of scum and villainy#and on the verge of collapse...#(sorry to ramble but there is a reason the three tumors and all characters related to them are my favorites xD)
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