dvd commentary: in your little grey heart
This is barely a DVD commentary, and mostly discussion of background noise concepts that influenced the fic in an indirect way. It's still nominally revolving around the thing I wrote, though, so, you know.
in your little grey heart: 5,311 words, beefleaf. on ao3 | on dw.
Content warnings
discussions of abuse + brief suicide, incest, and rape mentions. woof. THIS POST IS HONESTLY DARKER THAN THE FIC. SORRY
“Date Night” by Anatoly Kuvin (1956)
preamble
This was an exchange fic, so I was writing to a prompt, but the prompt was mostly vibes-based. I like the opportunity to pull something out of the bin of stuff I already wanted to write but wasn’t sure I’d ever make time for, and then tailor it to a specific person’s taste. The final product always ends up shaped by what the recipient wants, so it isn't exactly the same as it would have been if I was writing it on my own! It’s fun. Stuff like this is why I continue to ~do fandom~ to whatever degree I can be said to do so instead of only writing fic into the abyss (though I still do plenty of that.)
I have enough canonverse Beefleaf stuff written or in progress that I spent the first several weeks of the exchange writing period convinced I needed to go AU in some way, because surely I didn’t have any other canon compliant ideas that could be made workable. I ought not have doubted myself. I am in my Destiel era, so to speak. I’m usually more of a “write one big manifesto that lays it all out and then walk into the sunset” type, but so far my experience writing TGCF fic is that writing one idea is like cutting a head off a hydra.
I was originally planning on writing my PacRim AU, because [recip] likes sci-fi, but I realized that idea was going to require more words and mental effort than I had to spare. I only landed on the concept I actually went with about two weeks in advance (and I was camping for several days before the deadline, so I had about ten writing days), but thankfully once I had the aha moment where the handful of floating ideas I had coalesced into the fic that actually manifested, I felt jazzed about it and could just go ahead and write.
conceptz, pt.1 (tgcf highlight reel)
There are two passages from canon that launched a thousand ships re: my characterization takes and informed whatever I was doing here. The first one is the exposition on the Shi sibling Boxcar Children era:
They sent Shi Qingxuan away and pretended he’d been given to another family, then dressed their son to look like a female baby before bringing him back. The family then claimed that the female babe was an adopted daughter and raised the little young master as a little young mistress instead. […]
Over those ten years, the once-wealthy merchant household gradually declined. The parents of the two elemental masters passed away, and internal conflicts over inheritance raged. Shi Wudu tired of it all, so the year he turned sixteen, he left home and brought with him the little Shi Qingxuan, who was younger by many years.
The brothers depended on each other to survive. Shi Wudu was the first to enter the mountains to cultivate under a master, and he settled his little brother in a town at the foot of the mountain. Every day, he cultivated and trained until late, not returning home until it was deep into the night. There was also nothing to eat in the mountains, so he could only take meals at home.
One faithful evening, Shi Wudu was caught up in sparring with another disciple and lost track of time. Shi Qingxuan waited and waited, but still his brother didn't come home.
Worried that his brother was surely hungry by now, Shi Qingxuan decided to go up the mountain to deliver food.
Shi Qingxuan was still a child at the time and didn’t know how to hike the dark, rugged paths at night. […] Just then, a figure cloaked in shadow approached from the far end of the mountain road. “Is it Xuan-er up ahead?”
This vignette is so fridge horror to me. Beyond the obvious "young child being stalked by a monster that aims to drive them to suicide one day" thing. Just, like... tfw you're ten years old and alone most of the time, trying to keep a two-person household running ???? Keeping a massive secret about your identity ???? With zero social supports outside of a codependent relationship with Mr. Big Brother God Complex "It's Fine We Can Strike Out On Our Own Even Though You're Literally Ten Because I Am So Cool And Talented I'm Going To Make It Work" ???????
Then there's the epic transmisogyny compilation:
Shi Wudu’s sharp gaze swept over. “Qingxuan, mind your manners!”
The moment he reprimanded her, Shi Qingxuan lowered her head, shamefaced.
Pei Ming laughed at the sight of this. “Water Master-xiong, your little brother is quite the force to be reckoned with. Only you can keep him in line. It isn’t really anything to worry about if he messes with me, but if he messes with the wrong people, they won’t let it go so easily for your sake.”
Shi Wudu opened his fan and continued to lecture his younger sibling. “Did you hear what General Pei said? And how many times do I have to tell you not to walk around in that form all the time? What a disgrace. I don’t care what appearance you prefer; you must use your true form while you’re out!”
Although Shi Qingxuan loved her lady form passionately and wouldn’t stand for such outrageous demands, she still didn’t dare offend her brother.
Xie Lian thought, The Wind Master says she’s not afraid of her older brother, but that doesn’t seem to be entirely true.
Yet unexpectedly, Shi Wudu ended the lecture with: “What if you encounter someone with wicked intent who’s strong in spiritual power, like General Pei?!”
Ling Wen laughed unkindly, and Pei Ming nearly spat out his wine again.
“Water Master-xiong! If you keep that up, we can't be pals anymore.”
OK all of this is bad obviously but re: the last exchange specifically: sometimes all you can say is WHAT GOES ONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
conceptz, pt.2 (gothic themes)
The person I was writing for asked for “the gnarliest worst vibes,” so I decided to take them at their word and wallow in some of [gestures above], specifically where I see it coming into play in Beefleaf's dynamic (since I'm like 1.5k into this post and have not mentioned He Xuan once. A RARITY).
To overexplain myself and also be reductive for the sake of making a point, this fic basically proposes that there's a reading of this storyline as a Gothic triangle of struggle and attachment and desire between the ingenue Shi Qingxuan, the dominating guardian Shi Wudu, and the outsider/dark stranger He Xuan. (I'm super taken with the description of the original Reverend of Empty Words as a "figure cloaked in shadow" that appears and assumes a level of intimacy/familiarity with Shi Qingxuan for nefarious reasons, because the continuity with The He Xuan|Ming Yi Situation is just... chef's kiss.)
In general, I think that Shi Qingxuan is underappreciated as a complex and interesting character in their own right… the working title of this for a while was “SQX can have psychosexual problems too.” I wanted to write something exploring the idea that this intense and pretty weird sibling relationship is Shi Qingxuan’s blueprint for love and care, and she's continuing to map that onto the dynamic with Ming Yi, where it doesn't fit, because it really is a totally different relationship. At the same time, Ming Yi and Shi Wudu aren't completely far off in terms of personality (and this is part of why she's so invested in Ming Yi's attention/affection)... they're cold and arrogant but protective of her in their respective ways. But then Ming Yi also gives her things that she doesn't get from her brother, like uhhhh gender affirmation, and types of intimacy that sit outside of kinship and might still feel forbidden or illicit because of the "history of isolation to protect your terrible secret" thing. (And of course the paranoia is justified, because He Xuan is the monster they're afraid of. Hehe moment!!!!!!!!)
So you have a shady pseudo-patriarch, exerting control over the sexuality/gender/body of the lesser status kin member, vs. the interloper who represents the vague possibility of external threat, but in fact provides the possibility of a liberatory escape for that lesser status person from the constraints of The Family, but... also... in the end... is the violent realization of that potential threat. 🤪
The other part of the situation worth mentioning is "the sinister outsider whose presence illuminates the constraints of The Family is also a beautiful woman sometimes, and Shi Qingxuan really, really likes being a woman among women, and her brother's disapproval is insufficient to quell that."
conceptz pt.3 (horny)
On that note... Beefleaf is honestly not a very horny ship as it stands in canon, but they are CONCEPTUALLY very sexy (It's Gothic horror. Sexy titillating peril is baked in.) and I'm making it work. I’m devoted to trying to make anything in the ballpark of “trans fic” sexy (this is not news), which means that maybe someday I’ll write Beefleaf fic that is not E-rated but it hasn’t happened yet. One of the things [recip] was in the market for was fucked up angsty porn so I basically had no choice. 🫡 aye aye cap'n
A couple months ago I realized that I'd written 50k+ of Beefleaf fic and Shi Qingxuan had never once eaten pussy and I felt so bad for her... like, for a character with no canon sex life to speak of I am rarely so certain that they would want to go down on girls... this is inhumane, can she have NOTHING......... so I started rotating scenarios (since it didn't fit into any of my existing WIPs.) These are notes to self from May 19:
running up against the border of [He Xuan's] own morals, testing how far sqx will go for her. Sqx kind of mildly scandalized by the way she's being suddenly and starkly propositioned and has also found herself in an unnegotiated D/s dynamic she didn't know was happening (except for in the ways that she kinda did and found it titillating and flustering)
The story ended up distinct from that Vision, but those overtones were still... present, lol.
The other secret ingredient is that, way back when my Beefleaf career really took off (so. September 2022.), I remember going "He Xuan is a character where you don't need to worry about writing cringe sex dialogue because they would never ever dirty talk anyone, can you imagine." … Unless.
actual writing process
For a story that clocks in at <5.5k, this was pretty tough to write... I wrote a different Beefleaf fic for an exchange in January and wrote 8k in about the same amount of time with much less effort.
I initially saw it as having a tripartite structure, with one section from SQX’s childhood, one during the pre-canon Heaven period, and one postcanon section. I realized a couple days into the writing process that getting to the postcanon piece was completely unrealistic—I do like the ideas I had, and I’ve shelved the stuff I did get to writing, and will hopefully revisit it later.
I did so much free association notetaking and rambling around talking to myself while cleaning the house trying to figure out what was even happening in this story, because the core concept kind of came to me in a flash of light, but I was like “ok but we have to… write this… in the next week and a half, a webweaving moodboard and vibes IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.”
Tangent re: webweaving moodboards: legendary Beefleaf ally/accomplice ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sleepingsickness is rereading A Game of Thrones, and I had a moment looking at their liveblogging where I realized that part of the reason that the Shi Wudu & Shi Qingxuan dynamic has always given me extreme heebie-jeebies is that it pings me like Dany & Viserys at the start of AGOT—I’m being extremely "guy who's only read ASOIAF: this is giving me ASOIAF vibes..." rn I know I know BUT. There's a Venn diagram of "children of a formerly wealthy family, plagued by tragedy within their lifetimes, eke out a transient and impoverished existence; jaded older brother, who is significantly older than the ingenue younger sibling and so is in that weird parentified orphan zone, is a) convinced he's the protagonist of reality and b) has all these No Really We're Gonna Make Good Again Don't Worry schemes, and the younger sister*, who has never known any kind of longterm stability due to her birth coinciding with the onset of The Bad Times, is like 'Whatever you say bro! 👍'"
(*The Gender Of Shi Qingxuan is up for interpretation, but this fic takes a pretty clear “Shi Qingxuan is a trans woman” angle, which is an interpretation of that character that I like, but not the only one that I'll write or read.)
The dynamics are definitely not The Same, not least because the sexual abuse subtext with Dany and Viserys is just text rather than an unsettling ripple you glimpse here or there like it is in TGCF, but I felt very "much to think on" about it.
I’m often hesitant to even use the word “abuse” in relation to fictional characters because it's so associated with ship wars and weird fandom morality arguments, and I’m really not interested in litigating which characters are or aren’t “abusive” as if it’s a static character trait, but I am interested in thinking about abuse as a phenomenon and a theme, and that’s what I mean when I say that I’m interested in Beefleaf & co. as a narrative about abuse, and specifically the kind of abuse that happens for someone’s “own good” and gets interpreted as loving behaviour. I wanted those currents to be palpable in the main story without it being obtrusive, considering that this is... largely smut fic that Shi Wudu only appears in via childhood flashbacks... I think ? Hope ? I did an okay job ??????????
the actual fic
Shi Qingxuan didn’t ask for any beverages except tea. She rarely felt tempted to drink much when she was hanging out with Ming Yi. It was easy enough in her presence, even while sober, for Shi Qingxuan to reassure herself, Everyone loves you and you're the most beautiful person around and Ge is proud of you and you are wished well in every room you leave.
A lot of this fic was just me spelling out my headcanons in a pretty unsubtle way, lol. Shi Qingxuan is one of those characters where I don't think it's accurate to characterize her as ""being an alcoholic"" rather than just someone who likes to get lit, but when taken alongside everything else we know about her it's like... it would be weird if this wasn't in some way related to other stuff she has going on? Not in a way where it's like oh my goddd she needs to stop drinking she needs an intervention!!1!! but like. You know. It's clear the carefree exterior is sitting on top of a lot of anxiety that has been there since childhood and never left, only become more distant.
“I only do things with you because you bribe me.”
"Well, that doesn't count. You never ask for anything I wouldn't give you for free."
"I guess I should trouble you more, then. If your favour is so cheap."
Not that I had time to do a lot of extensive edits, but the flow of the conversation over dinner got reworked significantly more than anything else... I am happy where it ended up tho.
But she really didn’t want to sound ungrateful, or doubtful. There wasn’t much that Ge liked less than being underestimated, and he had things pretty well under control, didn’t he? Weren’t they getting by alright? [...] Ge, sensing that she still felt chastened, complimented her on the doneness of the radish.
Trying to portray Shi Wudu's specific type of guy is hard, because when he's being peak awful he's so awful, but he's charismatic (in the way that abusive people often are, lol), and I don't think we're given to believe that it's an "unpleasant to be around 24/7 and his sibling just doesn't know any better" thing--I imagine their relationship involved lots of moments of comfort and demonstrations of love (he hugs her after the first run-in with the Reverend of Empty Words... TT), even if that was an infantilizing and proprietary kind of love. I hate it when characters exerting power/control in Bad interpersonal dynamics come across as cartoon villains. So I hope that the fic succeeded at giving a sense of what Shi Qingxuan loves about Shi Wudu even if it's like Haha nooo...
Her eyes were even, as they always were; nothing phased good old dependable Ming Yi, which Shi Qingxuan was usually grateful for, rather than flustered by. One would have thought that Ming Yi did this all the time, even though Shi Qingxuan knew that couldn’t be the case, because who else on earth would ever have the opportunity?
Shi Qingxuan nodded to herself, thinking, so we have found another of our secret rituals, and, filled with the bravery only intimate friendship could instill, picked up another piece.
Shi Qingxuan is interesting for being on the one hand pretty socially adept and also, like... not really having models for how to have a close relationship with anybody except her brother, which, as established, is a really weird and bad relationship. And this works out well for He Xuan (or, from another angle, works out very badly for them 🙃) because it's like, yeah sure I guess this is just how a relationship between BEST FRIENDS works! even when it's like... SQX please... you deserve better than someone who is kind of a dick to you most of the time and has ulterior motives and hates you as much as they love you. But she will never come to this conclusion until it's too late! So! :)
Semi-Public Pseudo-Erotic Hand Feeding Scene was excruciating to write btw. Writing things that are obviously super horny but aren't actual sex scenes is uniquely embarrassing. But I had a vision to execute and I needed to put stuff about consumption and service and desire and humiliation on the metaphorical and literal table. So. Here we are.
Shi Qingxuan could read decently well, but Ge would do all the voices, and he was good enough at it to make the hair stand up on her arms during the scary parts, which she loved. [...] Shi Qingxuan held her body still, but her thoughts drifted stubbornly back to familiar night-time fantasies of figures that were blurry, dark, and shifting in her mind's eye. She had gotten into the habit of falling asleep while thinking about being spirited away in the arms of faceless yet somehow distinctly handsome men to places where she wouldn’t have to worry any longer about going hungry if she let the produce spoil. The idea made her feel restless and tingly, but was also comforting, like a bedtime story she was telling herself.
MY GOTHIC INGENUE SHI QINGXUAN VISION. DO YOU SEE IT
Honestly I just think it's super funny to imagine fantasizing about getting whisked away by a sexily sinister mysterious stranger and then later falling in love with Ming Yi, because Ming Yi is sinister and mysterious, but in a way where he's a weird off-putting eccentric. He is not serving Christian Grey. But we take what we can get when it comes to attaining the goth girl semes of our dreams or whatever.
They were edging towards it: The Thing They Didn’t Talk About.
Part of why I’ve written so much for this ship is that I feel open to a variety of contradictory concepts, thought experiment-style, within the bounds of overall characterization parameters; this is my first “they were fucking the whole time” approach to the precanon timeframe… I think I'll continue to lean towards "infinite stupid courtship," but it was fun to indulge in the "what-if."
Just then, her sharp brows were drawn together slightly in the middle. “Stop messing around. You’re not a child. If you want to play grown-up games, then act like it.”
In conjunction with the very silly thing I wrote about Ling Wen sleazily seducing Shi Qingxuan I've become convinced that, based on the contours of Shi Qingxuan's psychology, one of her fantasy scenarios is to get scolded by other women in a homosocial manner for acting like a floozy, based on doing things that are objectively speaking not really anything. It just feels realistic.
“I don’t know what you’re waiting for,” Ming Yi said, and Shi Qingxuan’s mouth went dry. [...] “I don’t care if your clothes are on or not.”
The kombuchagirl.mp4 moment I had re: He Xuan sex dialogue was when I was like, "What does He Xuan like doing more than anything? Being unpleasant!"
As if Shi Qingxuan hadn’t said a thing, Ming Yi continued, “Not much of a surprise. You really do love girls.”
I have rarely felt as fond of this character (a high bar to clear) as I did while describing He Xuan berating Shi Qingxuan for being a pathetic needy lesbo directly after having had her [redacted noun] [redacted verb]. Oh, you!
I need to stop ending Beefleaf fics with them literally cuddling in bed like a) WHO AM I b) this is KIND OF A DARK PAIRING but. I shan't.
So that's that... I was hoping I’d have a chance to edit and expand on the fic further before reveals, including adding a third flashback sequence to round out the back half a little more, but I ended up just not having time to do substantial revisions or add much Net New Content to the first draft. The epic highs and lows of external posting deadlines.
I was convinced this turned out like the worst shit ever so I was kind of scared to reread it, but I’m hoping that was just because I had a sprawling and ambitious vision of what this story was supposed to be and I couldn’t possibly live up to it? I do feel a bit better about it after having just reread it now than I did! So that's something???
I have a writing playlist I also wanted to post about but I don't have it in me to format it right now so it might get a separate post. Sorry!!!!