DVD commentary: FLIGHT OF A ONE-WINGED DOVE

[headstone]

I don't have any expectation that anyone will read this; if you do, cool, and I'd love to hear any thoughts you might have, but much like the fic itself, I am writing these reflection posts for me. (Personally, I love reading “DVD commentaries” and writing process posts even for stories I haven't read, but I don't think this is a universal experience.) Apologies in advance for wonky formatting; this is a lot of words to try and wrangle in the janky Dreamwidth HTML editor.

A lot of this will not be new to you if you follow me on Twitter or have talked to me about the fic at some point. It's a collection of thoughts and ideas which have come to mind throughout the writing process, which I jotted down in a huge, disorganized Google Doc and now am trying to organize in a readable fashion, because I anticipate being interested in reading it myself in a few years. It's an extended effort in a) overexplaining my concepts and b) showing how the sausage gets made, so if neither of those things appeal to you, turn away, turn away!

In case you somehow came here without context, this is a postmortem of my 100k Nie Huaisang/Jiang Cheng fic flight of a one-winged dove. Like the fic, this post is extremely nsfw.

To be on the safe side, content warning for all the same stuff as the actual story—grief, family death, dysphoria, suicidality, self-harm including references to detransition used as a form of self-harm, as well as a variety of under-negotiated but consensual BDSM practices.

Obligatory note on pronouns—in this post, I'll be using he/him to refer to canon-era Nie Huaisang and she/her for dove-era Nie Huaisang, although there will probably be some bleed between the two. dove Nie Huaisang lives in the past to some degree, anyway.

I'm going to first talk about the project in general terms, including the early writing and outlining process, etc., and then move into the more traditional DVD-commentary style of going through the story chronologically and grabbing pull-quotes of anything that I have specific things to say about, and discussing the rest of the fic as I go.

BACKGROUND

This fic was published between Oct 2020-Dec 2021. It was written serially, and where it was going was kind of a mystery even to me.

Obviously, there's a lot to this fic other than being Transgender Issuefic. Some chapters barely mention it except in veiled conceptual terms. That being said, the fic very much did spring from a desire to write a specific kind of narrative about gender, so I have to talk about that before getting into anything else.

Last summer, me and my boyfriend and some of our friends began to conceptualize a vision of postcanon Sangcheng that involved Nie Huaisang becoming Jiang Cheng’s mean mommy domme, which started out as a kind of jokey idea and quickly became a very ingrained part of the way I thought about both characters. Before long, I genuinely really wanted to read slow burn longfic that would a) chart their relationship development from tense ??acquaintances??former friends??colleagues???? to being an actual couple and b) explicitly delve into the Nie Huaisang trans headcanon stuff in a way that had emotional weight to it. None of which is the sort of thing you can just wait on some AO3 stranger to deliver, obviously.

My investment in Transfem Nie Huaisang Theory(™) went like “lol check out this guy's dysphoria hoodie, egg much -> wait a second.” The concept ties into a lot of the themes that I find most compelling about the character. I fake it so real I am beyond fake. Separation between selves. Sense of living in the bad timeline of your own life. Taking refuge in audacity, but more than that, in shame and humiliation and social abjection*. Failure, on a variety of levels: societal, familial, personal. Grief. Longing. Negative coping mechanisms. Etc.

_{* This link is to an archived version of a post by tumblr user baeddel, the original of which appears to have fallen prey to tumblr's most recent wave of "sensitive content” blocking. In any case, the following section, which I screencapped for reference months ago, gets across some of the relevant ideas for our purposes here:}



“Okay, I can see where the Nie Huaisang transgender red-string board is going,” you may say, “but why this milquetoast pair the spares ship?”

There's two main prongs to what I like about Sangcheng in this context. First, the idea of two emotionally immature people who lost their young adulthoods to trauma and premature responsibility coming to relate to one another as older adults in a way where that shared history is always present in the relationship. Second, their reconnection being rooted in the fact that their experiences have changed them, that they can never go back to the past, and that they must move on to achieve some degree of peace.

So much trans fanfic is either the simultaneous coming-out/coming-of-age narrative about characters who are young and inexperienced and unsure of themselves, or about adults who transitioned at some point in the distant past and are comfortable in their identity, often to the point where it is never remarked on as any more novel a fact of their life experiences as being lefthanded would be. There's nothing wrong with either of these approaches; they have their place, for sure, and the world would be worse off without them. However, neither is very relatable to me on a personal level or engaging on an intellectual level. On the other hand, it felt enticing and novel to cut my teeth on trans fiction (in general, because I had never managed to write trans characters in my original fiction at all before this either) about a later-in-life transition, and specifically to write about characters who have done some very bad things in their lives, which the narrative continues to concern itself with even while they're busy having transformative journeys of selfhood, or whatever. They are powerful people whose emotional dysfunction has implications for those around them, and their actions have consequences.

Also of interest to me was the concept of being a cis-trans het couple in a highly gendered society, where having been assigned the same gender at birth in the same set of social conditions means the characters have a specific set of childhood and adolescent circumstances in common, while also having very different lived experiences of gender and relationship to patriarchy, misogyny, privilege, gender conformity and/or failure, etc. One party’s transition introduces a new dimension to the relationship which allows them to understand new things about themselves and each other.

I've always loved writing about people's fraught relationships with sexuality, but for a pretty long time, I saw trans fiction as something that lacked any of the same kind of inherent id appeal. It was a topic you could explore either because for diversity and representation reasons or because you wanted to engage in personal projection, but I didn’t conceive of it as something that you would sink your teeth into for its own sake—like, it just really wasn't something I saw as gratifying and enticing on an emotional/thematic level outside of how Very Important it is. Obviously, this mentality is totally self-defeating when it comes to writing fiction that you feel passionate about. That being said, this fic changed the way I approach fiction writing in general in the sense that I've come to understand that writing about transness has the potential to inspire a lot of narrative curiosity and delight for its own sake, rather than being something I feel like I Should write because [mealymouthed joyless justification].



Preamble out of the way: onto the actual writing process.

Nie Huaisang is a character of whom it’s possible to have very wide-ranging interpretations, especially postcanon, and the Nie Huaisang in this story isn’t the only version of the character that I'll read about, or even write about. I wrote a previous Nie Huaisang character study last summer; that fic also delves into my interest in the themes of his arc as a vehicle for trans narratives, though in a less explicit way, and I don’t consider the two fics as taking place within the same timeline, or even the Huaisangs in them as having the same experience of gender. I found that a really engaging, although sometimes torturous, writing process, and this made it a bit easier to get off the ground running with this story, even though my characterization takes were slightly different as to facilitate the kind of story I wanted to tell here. The approaches were similar enough for me to have a sense of what Nie Huaisang’s internal life is like, as well as how to approach the POV voice. For this reason, once I had some basic ideas, I could just sort of sit down and plunk them out.

I started out writing scattered snippets of scenes based on whatever came into my brain, and then the plot outline was born of trying to string them together, and from there I wrote the rest of the fic in a pretty linear fashion. Part of what made it easier to believe I could see through this pretty long and elaborate concept was that, when I sat down to grind out the first chapter, I expected that it was going to be kind of a slog— when I wrote serialized chapterfic before, the first two-ish chapters really dragged to write because I was impatient to get to the fun stuff—but ended up writing, like, 3k in one day? I got the first chapter from concept to published in, like, a week and a half to two weeks, which by my standards is very fast, and reassured me that the project had legs.

At the time I started posting updates, the outline was for 8 chapters with a ~30-45k target wordcount. A ton of stuff was jettisoned from these early outlines, which I’ll go into in greater detail as I go through the fic itself. The outline pages for the first few chapters looked like this: just a bunch of impressionistic notes, nothing elaborate or very interesting.



The fact the story came into being so quickly forced me to deal with one of my big dilemmas sooner than I’d have preferred, by which I mean figuring out how I was going to share it, if at all. I was having enough fun writing it for my own sake I could’ve kept it just as drawerfic, but I also wanted to share it so other people (even if they were just my friends) would talk to me about it. However, I still wasn’t sure I actually wanted to post it publicly, and needed to be encouraged by friends, otherwise I was strongly considering it just sharing it on my locked Twitter by Google Docs link or making a sockpuppet AO3 account. It was partially fear of backlash, but mostly just self-consciousness. Deciding to share something like this publicly under my general fandom pseud felt extremely vulnerable. On the one hand, I worried about judgement or active hostility from transphobic cis people, and on the other hand, trans people can be really mean about each other's art, especially when it's about transness, because we're all constantly triggering each other’s dysphoria by accident.

I've talked about my former disinterest already, but there was definitely a time where, on a subconscious level, I viewed my own unwillingness to write trans headcanons into fic and only write about cis characters as evidence of my own level-headedness and ability to be Objective and not make all my fanfic a bunch of self-indulgent projection, unlike ~those other trans fic writers… it was never this level of explicit in my head, but there was some imagined superiority on the basis that I was able to leave my identity at the door, so to speak. It wasn't really clear to me how entrenched this mentality was in my brain until I was writing actual factual Trans Fic and finding it absolutely mortifying, certainly more than I did writing about the variety of dark and edgy subject matter I've posted on main. I spent way too much time at the start self-pityingly imagining people who subbed to my AO3 for my previous CQL fic getting this torrent of email notifications about the Nie Huaisang transgender epic and judgily unsubbing. This has probably happened, and is not actually a big deal.

I won't say I’ve completely defeated the voice in the back of my head that's like “okay make sure you write about some cis characters again soon so people know you're chill and normal and not just going to Make Everything Trans For No Reason”, but it's much less of a concern than it was, and if you've ever said anything nice about this story or engaged with it positively, your feedback has meant a lot to me in fighting it!

CHAPTER ONE: GUSU I

I feel myself pressed harder into this life.

Sometimes it’s so near and docile
I can feel my hand take hold of it.

Other times it's that old, alarming
sorrow, that animal scrambling

to its feet, desperate

to be living.

Because it's mine, I wait for it to die.
Then I bury it.

CARRIE FOUNTAIN, from “BURN LAKE 3”


I said earlier that this fic hit the ground running because I'd already written a 15k Huaisang-centric fic, but one of the things I noticed pretty quickly was that the voice and tone of dove was very different. a river of changing faces takes place within the canon timeframe, and the tone is pretty grim, even if there are moments of whimsy and affectation. From the beginning, dove came out much more playful and chatty, which I hadn’t expected, because this Huaisang is very nihilistic and depressed—in some ways, even more so than in river, because at least during the latter part of canon-era, Huaisang has a Sense Of Terrible Purpose. Postcanon, there’s much less urgency, and as such a real sense of absurdity. This helped speed things along on the writing end, because it wasn’t quite so dour to spend time in this Huaisang's head, even though this is a fairly heavy story.

I really value a well-deployed sense of humour in other people’s writing and I think I’m a relatively funny person in my actual life, so it’s been a point of frustration with my own writing for many years that I struggle to let humour enter narratives; it's not an instinct that comes to me naturally. I improved on that a lot with this fic, which is partially just down to maturing as a writer, but I also think that the kinds of characters I’m drawn to write about, especially in fanfic, are generally ones with a sense of… gravity. They’re typically very cerebral and have a lot going on internally, usually in a way that is incongruous with their external selves. Huaisang definitely fits this type, but unlike most of the others, is actually fun to hang out with (when not making himself intentionally unbearable). This juxtaposition is one of the things about Huaisang's character that interests me so much. I wanted the humour to serve a few different purposes:

• To establish characterization—Huaisang is a clown;


• To encourage us to view Huaisang with sympathy, despite everything, because she’s charming and it’s fun to hang out in her head;


• To act as a bulwark against the story tipping over into the bad kind of melodrama.

I don’t see Huaisang's status as assigned-comic-relief-character-at-birth completely vanishing from her internal world even when she changes as a person. If anything, I think the comic sensibility deepens the further into the weeds she gets, or at least it becomes more self-aware. The best part of Dune are the epigraphs from Princess Irulan, and this one always sticks in my brain:

“The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.”

I'm obviously very interested in the similarities between Nie Huaisang and Jin Guangyao, but this quotation gestures at one of their major differences, in my view. (And, to quote Princess Irulan again, “Which of them was the stronger? History already has answered.”)

I've mentioned my outlines, but over time I've become less and less rigid in terms of my story planning, and this fic was a process of discovery. Besides certain beats I knew I had to hit, I just let the themes/emotional currents/vague plot ideas take me where they whilst. For the first chapter especially, I just had a general sense of the things I needed to set up, and I found myself coming up with quite a few details on the fly which later ended up as foundational to the whole story, or which received call-backs much later.

For example, I came up with this detail—that this isn’t the first time that Sangcheng have hooked up—simply because I wanted them to believably hook up again without it requiring much buildup.

He’d assumed that Jiang Cheng hadn’t given it a second thought, or if he had, only as retroactive proof that Nie Huaisang had never been anything but a hedonistic, irresponsible excuse for a sect heir, let alone a sect leader. He may have been an active participant at the time, but Jiang Cheng was good at making excuses for himself. But Nie Huaisang looks at Jiang Cheng’s ducked gaze now, a decade and a half later, and thinks, perhaps he hasn’t forgotten, and perhaps a mountain scaled once can be scaled again.

In Sangcheng fanon, it’s a fairly common trope that they hooked up when they were studying at the Cloud Recesses—the setups are usually either that they had a fling then, or they had a thing during Huaisang’s Schemes era (and they need to renegotiate it after the truth comes out), or they only get together postcanon. Neither of the previous two options inherently grab me (though they can, in the hands of an author who convinces me of their vision), and neither feels like a self-evident fact based on canon, but I did want to have them sexually cut to the chase in my fic—I knew from early on that I only wanted the emotional arc to be a slow burn. When I tried to think of things I hadn’t personally seen in fic for the ship before, I landed on having them have a one-off encounter during the Fatal Journey timeframe: after Wei Wuxian has died but before Nie Mingjue has passed away. Jiang Cheng has entered his Dark Period but Huaisang has not, and there’s an imbalance in terms of where they're at in life—Huaisang is still clinging to irresponsibility and naivete that Jiang Cheng can't access anymore. I imagine that this would have frustrated Jiang Cheng quite a bit (but not too much to not let his dick get sucked one time), and it makes me doubt they could have had any kind of real relationship during this period, even if Huaisang wistfully imagines that AU. Another thing I liked about this setup is it didn’t require a bunch of backstory about how and why the relationship ended; Nie Mingjue died and that was that.

In retrospect, I think this is a pretty solid set-up for the rest of the fic. So much of their relationship is about trying to recapture youthful experiences of love and desire that they didn’t get to have, but at the same time, they're experiencing it together now because they’ve become bitter, lonely people who are able to meet each other where they’re at. (It also helps that neither has any straightforward moral authority over the other, though they might believe that they do, so they’re also each other’s match in that way.)

The path to the Hanshi is as immaculately kept as it ever was. Nie Huaisang takes a meandering path, eating out of his hand as he goes. Is Xichen-ge taking his evening meal, still abiding by that regular Cloud Recesses tempo even in seclusion? If Nie Huaisang knocks on the door of the Hanshi, will he disturb him?

The above is another example of something that came into being while I was writing the first chapter but which later became important to the story as a whole. The original outline for Chapter 1 has two pages of notes, but the only part that mentions Lan Xichen at all is one line: “Huaisang goes wandering, wonders where Xichen is, toys with idea of going to visit him, hasn’t seen him since the temple”. There’s no mention that “Huaisang has been writing him reams of unhinged letters for the last year or so despite not getting replies,” but I started formulating those ideas when I was writing this chapter and beginning to carry through every concept to the worst possible end. Like, why stop at “Huaisang is wandering aimlessly and thinking about hypothetically visiting Xichen” when you could do “Huaisang intentionally left the banquet early to go trespass around Xichen's house like a creepy stalker”? Romantic comedy heroines have a blank cheque to be weirdos with poor boundaries! Lean into it!

Nie Huaisang adds, “I'm surprised you aren’t taking the opportunity to spend time with Jin Ling. It must be harder to see him, these days.”

“I don’t see how that’s your business,” Jiang Cheng spits, with enough sudden vehemence that Nie Huaisang's interest is really piqued.

The Jin Ling & Jiang Cheng conflict was in my mind from the beginning, but it was supposed to get resolved way earlier in the story. (I don't know why I thought that was a good idea, and clearly, I changed my mind.) This fic was a dumping ground for my postcanon concepts, because I knew I was realistically only going to write one, so I might as well say my piece about anything and everything. One of those vague ideas was that I wanted to see Jin Ling and Jiang Cheng go through a falling-out: specifically, a stalemate over something which, on its own, isn’t a huge deal, but ends up being the flashpoint for tensions that have been present in their relationship for a long time. This would lead to a situation where Jin Ling sets a boundary or ultimatum of some kind with Jiang Cheng, which Jiang Cheng cannot deal with, because he has a strict and conservative view of how children should interact with their parental figures (despite Jin Ling being a wilful and insolent child who disobeys Jiang Cheng regularly even in canon, before he's an independent adult and leader of his own sect). On the one hand, Jiang Cheng's worldview has no room for the idea that children should be able to set boundaries of any kind with their guardians, but on the other hand it is absolutely tearing him apart to be on the outs with his nephew, who has been the focal point of Jiang Cheng's emotional life for almost twenty years, now. As a result, Jiang Cheng feels stuck between a rock and a hard place, and this is part of the emotional background for why Sangcheng begins happening at this point in time, and why Jiang Cheng gets so emotionally invested so quickly; there are other reasons as well, of course, but his social life is a wasteland at the moment.

Nie Huaisang can make out the gleam of his wide, shocked eyes. When their gazes meet, Jiang Cheng’s lips fall open, and Nie Huaisang feels a surge of giddy viciousness that takes him by surprise.

Draft revision notes for the first chapter include the item “make it clear that Huaisang genuinely thinks Jiang Cheng is hot and isn’t just playing mind games”, which is hilarious considering how the later sex scenes read. I knew things would get more romantic, but I don’t think I would have believed the levels of corny lovemaking that this fic would get to later.

His head disciple’s face is flooded with visible relief when Nie Huaisang emerges to join the rest of the Qinghe Nie retinue—they know better than to ask him too many questions about where he went last night, or why, but they’ve managed to get along in his absence. They’re packed and turned out in travelling clothes, sabres ready for the flight home, and it strikes him once again how much they’ve learned to get along on their own in the years since da-ge died, and how little they need him at all.

There was initially supposed to be more detail here about Huaisang’s relationship to the sect, his disciples, etc., but the bulk of it got moved to Chapter 2. I thought it was better to start in medias res and focus on the Sangcheng dynamic, and then widen the camera angle once people were already invested and I could unload my headcanons on the minutiae of Qinghe Nie day-to-day life once I had a captive audience who wanted to read more weird porn.

I have a hard time conceptualizing something as a serious project if it doesn't have a title, at least a temporary one, so after my first binge-writing session, I picked flight of a one-winged dove as a placeholder. I assumed that I'd eventually change it, because I felt residual embarrassment over choosing a Sufjan Stevens lyric (out of apology to Sufjan for sullying his work by association with my fic, not cringe about listening to Sufjan), but nothing else came to mind when it came time to post the first chapter, and I've actually come to really like it! The whole Carrie & Lowell album is about grief and self-destruction in the aftermath of a family death, so it fits the themes pretty well, has a character-appropriate bird motif, and, perhaps most importantly, it has a romance novel quality to it, while also being appropriately morbid.

CHAPTER TWO: QINGHE I

Perhaps one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance. […] I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, a project, a plan, and finds oneself foiled. […] Something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choosing.

JUDITH BUTLER, from “VIOLENCE, MOURNING, POLITICS”


This story is, at its core, idfic, in the sense that the motivations both for writing it in the first place and for most of the storytelling choices within it were a desire to provide myself with things that a very unfiltered and self-indulgent part of my mind wanted to see. It’s really tropey. It wallows in woobie protagonist angst. It's a hard-E explicit rating with a lot of kink, and the sex drives the character development. There’s a lot of sensory material culture details. There’s a prominent epistolary motif. There’s crying in the rain. The emotional arc is about hard-won hope and self-knowledge and transformative love. This is all My Shit, and I resolved to be gung-ho about it and not try and account for an imaginary audience while making my writing choices.

One of my goals for writing a river of changing faces was to think through what Huaisang's thought processes and actual methods were during the revenge scheme era, since it's almost entirely off-screen. I developed a lot of headcanons while writing river that had to get set aside because they weren’t relevant to the actual fic. A fair number of those made their way into dove, which is why I say this truly is idfic, because I indulged myself in things that in a more tightly written story would get snipped down, which includes gratuituous sexual content (which is the context the term “idfic” is usually used), but not limited to it. I set out to write about things that were interesting to me, but I had little reason to believe would appeal to the reader unless I executed them in a compelling way (and lured them in with pornography). With that in mind, this chapter was much more difficult to write than the first; all of the chapters after the first one presented their own unique challenges, but this was one of the hardest. I worried that it would be boring, since it has pretty minimal ship stuff and a lot of character work, scene-setting details, and set-up for later payoffs. This is where I started to feel internal pressure to make the writing good on a technical level, because it felt like the prose was the make-or-break-it factor of the story in general—I wasn't confident that other people would find the subject matter inherently interesting, and after the first chapter got more attention than I was expecting, I suddenly cared about that. (You only just decided to start posting it at all, and you're already concerned with audience reception? How quickly we sell out for the favour of the AO3 commentariat…) As you can imagine, this impulse is at odds with the story being idfic, and this push-pull definitely plagued me throughout the writing process, lol.

His calligraphy is messier than it should be, considering he hasn’t had that much to drink, and he doesn’t need to embarrass himself in front of er-ge anymore. He leaves the letter at that, signing off simply with his name. He could call himself Lan Xichen's affectionate didi, as he once would have, but that might be laying it on too thick. He would like a reply, one of these days, or at least he thinks that he would. He can’t imagine what it would feel like to actually get one.

On a conceptual level, a lot of the Huaisang-Xichen stuff was grafted over from early drafts of river. That fic has a tripartite structure, with the first two sections on Huaisang's relationships with Meng Yao/Jin Guangyao, and the third section was originally supposed to be postcanon and focus on his relationship with Lan Xichen. I realized that didn’t work and swapped out the Lan Xichen stuff for Mo Xuanyu, after which everything came a lot better. It was prescient of me to realize that postcanon was outside of the scope of that fic, because fucking clearly I have a lot of opinions about postcanon Huaisang. I also came to realize that the things I wanted to express weren’t so much about Huaisang's actual relationship with Lan Xichen as about the way that Huaisang feels towards him, so Lan Xichen doesn’t need to be physically present in the story. The thing that matters is this one-sided emotional dynamic where Lan Xichen's status as the only surviving member of 3zun makes Huaisang feel like the two of them are still bound together in some way. She feels cheated that, because of his seclusion, she can’t see Lan Xichen and take out her unresolved feelings on him, and as such is using Lan Xichen as a repository for her dissatisfaction with the state of things. It’s all Lan Xichen's fault she doesn’t feel closure after her successful revenge, because he is refusing her access to him, and she feels entitled to that in a more deeply held way than she is probably even aware of, considering how much play-dependence on him she's expressed over the years.



Because of the in medias res opening chapter, I avoided having to specify where Huaisang is in terms of her Transition Journey, either physically or in terms of how she's framing this process to herself or relating to her own gender, etc. This chapter, I had to bring the trans stuff into sharper focus, which I found really agonizing and embarrassing to write and definitely contributed to what made this chapter so difficult. I wanted to keep things vague in terms of the specifics of xianxia HRT, but it ended up writing itself into more detail than I intended when it began to overlap with the “plot” of the fic, such as it is. When I got the idea that Huaisang has been investigating dodgy/fringe cultivation methods in hopes of figuring out ways to mitigate the damage of sabre cultivation, and just happened to discover a cultivation method that sometimes has a fantasy estrogen side effect, I knew I wasn't likely to come up with anything better, in terms of integrating various parts of the story.

He pulls the rest of his clothes around himself and folds his arms across his stomach to keep warm; he feels a sudden draft wafting through the room. He is sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet dangling over the side, and he taps his toes against the floor arrhythmically just to do something with his body. Then, after some time has passed, he cautiously lifts his right hand to feel through the cloth.

I never specified this in detail, but what I was imagining is that during that original conversation where she learned about this method, it was said or implied outright that the feminizing effect is something that people sometimes pursue as an end goal, but not always, and that Huaisang knew in some level of detail what could theoretically happen in terms of physical changes. On one hand, there are legitimate other reasons to pursue the cultivation method, so there's plausible deniability as to why she would rationalize herself into trying it in the first place, but on the other, there was a very real and possible chance that it would produce those effects.

Obviously, trans people can still write transphobic things, and especially as a transmasc person writing about a transfeminine character, I did put a lot of effort into trying to be as respectful as possible. At the same time, I didn't want to I didn't want to write a milquetoast transition narrative that perfectly follows the guidelines of a “how to write trans characters 101” post. One of the typical rules of thumb given is not to dwell on characters' pre-transition lives, which is a rule for a reason when it comes to the way cis gazes tend to frame trans existence, but I clearly left that one by the wayside. The tame and politically correct approach to a transition narrative where it's unambiguous that the character has always been a woman, and sees herself as a woman, and has decided to pursue hormonal transition fully consciously in order to alleviate her Gender Dysphoria, etc., felt both boring and pretty ill-fitted to the character in question or the ideas I wanted to explore. I was a lot more compelled by the idea that Huaisang was putting the cart before the horse, in a way, where she starts enacting transition on her body before having come to terms with actually wanting what it's going to do to her, and it helped to have an in-universe justification for how she could rationalize starting in the first place.

Nie Huaisang left a half-empty jar of wine under his desk before attending the cultivation conference. The taste bears out that it’s been sitting, opened and forgotten, on a floor for weeks, but after the first few mouthfuls he stops noticing. […] There’s a half-written letter on top of the desk, and at a glance he remembers why he started it.

The reason that Huaisang first noticing breast development and, by extension, realizing that HRT actually is doing something to her is immediately followed by a) drinking and b) writing to Lan Xichen isn't just because it freaks her out and she starts engaging in bad coping strats, but because the decision to transition itself is deeply related to her self-destructive impulses. It's genuinely scary and threatening, and it's made possible by her lack of care for what happens to herself or her body. She wants to avoid dying of qi deviation, but that has more to do with familial trauma than genuine self-protection. An aspect of Huaisang's character that I find really interesting is her willingness to sacrifice physical comfort, when it suits her, while at the same time not striking me as a masochist at all; when she does things like collapse on the hard ground in fake fainting spells or stab her own leg to frame someone, I don't think she's getting anything out of it, but is also able to force herself through it despite not even having a battle-hardened pain tolerance, or anything like that. And then, of course, there's the Nie sect leaders' pattern of slow transformation into a monstrous version of themselves, which can be paralleled with transition in all manner of ways.

His hands linger on a piece of sable silk. He remembers an afternoon spent sending up motes of dust, swirling in the candlelight: Mo Xuanyu poured over the embroidery of some of Nie Huaisang’s cast-offs with obvious longing, and grumbled about how he wished he wasn’t so tall.

Originally, there was supposed to be a fair amount of Mo Xuanyu stuff in flashback. This got cut by like, 90%, both because the story was too long already and because I could communicate what that story thread was supposed to communicate in other ways. I also think it’s pretty in character for Huaisang not to think about things like that in a direct way, and to let his presence enter the story via negative space. She does a lot of thinking around it, and framing of her past actions as just ~the things I had to do. Queen of disavowed agency <3

Art is balance, the delicate intertwined with the harsh. This is something Jin Guangyao understood less and less over the years; the longer he spent at Carp Tower, the more extravagantly tasteless his gifts for Huaisang became. Everything was so gilt and shiny the form itself was clouded. A fan, after all, should be a beautiful thing, but it has function. If it can’t keep you cool in the summer heat, it’s just a waste of materials.

There's a lot of attention paid to material goods throughout the story, which is mostly because I like that kind of thing myself, but it is in character for Huaisang to pay attention to that, because she loves Stuff.





Also, because this is character study fic with a lot of the “action” being “the protagonist, at home, thinking and having feelings”, I took cues from the visual design of the Unclean Realms in CQL, especially Fatal Journey, where we get to see Huaisang's bedroom (including in concept art):





I love how it looks quite fancy and nice, but there's still a sense of severity compared to the other sets. I like thinking about the way that Qinghe Nie aesthetic mores, etc., play out in Huaisang's personality/taste, despite the seeming incongruities.

“Ah, of course. You’re a busy man.” The stones on the playing field have begun to form coalitions, gathering together in force and numbers, the stragglers hanging, vulnerable, in the empty expanses of the board. Jiang Cheng’s style tends towards the defensive; he likes to feel secure, with his feet dug into the earth and his weapons pointing outward. Nie Huaisang tuts his tongue and floats his hand indecisively over the board, a piece in hand, his fingers wiggling in the air. “You spent some time here during the war. Does it look any different to you now?”

The weiqi stuff was not intended to be a set-up for future scenes, I just wanted to write them playing board games as flirting, because, again, it's a trope I love and my decisions here were made on that basis. This scene is one of my favourites in the fic, though.

A lot of chapters in the early outline got combined or heavily condensed, and this was one of them; originally all of the JC-visit stuff was within Chapter 3, but I quickly realized that that chapter was way too long and this one way too short. Even though the chapter total grew significantly, the chapters being “added” later on mostly weren’t new stuff being put in but stuff that I thought would take one chapter or half a chapter actually taking two in order to be given enough weight. I had to work on refiguring my outlining mentality away from “this chapter is the one where [thing happens]” and towards figuring out the internal emotional arc for each chapter and letting that inform the contents, which is obviously much better for a character-driven story.

CHAPTER THREE: QINGHE II

Up to this point, something that had bothered me was that the fic felt very aberrant in terms of genre, and that made it hard to get my footing. I kept thinking things like, “I’ve never read a story like this before and it's disorienting”, which is kind of still true, but Chapter 3 was the point where I realized that structurally, this is actually a very standard comic romance. Knowing that made everything much easier.



There are a lot of ideas I had for this chapter early on which I couldn’t get to gel together. The first drafts included a scene where Sangcheng went out on a little snow adventure (“winter wonderland” above), and I could not get it to click, but it was a darling that was hard to kill because it involved so many things I like. Having your ship go on a cute little horseback riding date in the snow… There was this part where they were getting back on their horses after walking around, and Nie Huaisang is like, “Ohh you have to help me up~” and makes Jiang Cheng give her a boost, and then she’s on the horse looking down at him, and he’s looking up at her, and it’s all a prelude to their later Sexual Dynamix, etc., but eventually I had to be like WHY DOES THIS EXIST. WHAT DOES THIS DEMONSTRATE THAT WE DON'T LEARN ELSEWHERE. NOTHING. </3

Nie Huaisang doesn’t have alcohol to blame for his actions, this time, which is perhaps poor planning on his part, but he’s having fun, so he jabs the air with his fan, stopping short of Jiang Cheng’s chest. “It’s good for me to know these things, you know, if you came here looking for something in particular.”

Believe it or not, the egregious amount of sex in this fic this came from a place of narrative intention rather than authorial horniness, at least for the most part. I wanted to write a trans character whose dysphoria affects the way they have sex, but who still has a very active, assertive sense of their own desire. Huaisang is a good candidate for this, being pretty (implictly) horny in canon in a way that's quite endearing. I was cautious about not wanting to present a transfeminine character as hypersexual, and YMMV but hopefully I avoided doing that. At any rate, from the start of the project it was important to me that the sexual content be humanizing and vulnerable for both characters, and that Huaisang's relationship to sex reflects her specific internal life: she's hedonistic but self-controlled and able to compartmentalize; she's able to recognize and play into the way that people are often attracted to her, and is willing to do so, but doesn't really feel like it's “herself”; she doesn't see sex as inherently related to emotional connection, but has experienced romantic longing before, though not in a long time, and so on. It was also in my mind from early on that Huaisang and Jiang Cheng both have issues with their bodies, which come from different sources and have different manifestations, but allow for some mutual compassion as they figure out how to move around each other's boundaries. In this case, dysphoria hasn’t prevented Huaisang from having a variety of prior sexual experiences, even if those experiences were sometimes alienating or otherwise sub-ideal. Jiang Cheng, on the other hand, doesn't experience gender dysphoria but has almost no sexual experience and has his own baggage about his body due to trauma and insecurity.

Writerly motivation aside, though, I did want the porn to be, like, at least kind of hot, and this was trickier to figure out than I expected, mostly due to lacking good examples. It's not super common for me to find trans porn in fanfic that I like, particularly because it can be hard to find stuff that isn't off-puttingly fetishistic (about the trans aspect; I'm not someone who likes to go really hard on accusing trans fic of being fetishistic, but especially when looking at explicit fic about trans women on AO3 I'm a lot more skeptical that the authors of the more iffy stuff are writing Out Of Their Own Experiences than I would be about sleazy porn about trans guys) but still feels authentically horny. Authors, even trans ones, often feel like they're walking on eggshells in this area, which is understandable, but the kid gloves-ness of it doesn’t really hit the way I want it to.



I didn't have it in mind at all when I started that there was going to be petplay in this fic, but it just kept writing itself in to the point where I had to consciously dial it back at several points, both in this chapter and later on, because I hadn't tagged for it and didn't want to hemorrhage my already small pool of readers.

Nie Huaisang considers making an arch comment about Jiang Cheng’s good breeding, to fit the mood, but he doesn’t know if he could say it without making himself laugh. He pulls his hand away and wipes his fingers dry on Jiang Cheng’s ribcage; Jiang Cheng shivers.

If I may go on a tear for a moment about my femdom gripes: I think some people feel guilty about liking het ships, and so think the only way you can do this in an acceptable way is to make everything about how Awesome the woman is, with the guy as her himbo hype man sidekick… which isn’t inherently a bad dynamic (this is what Gu Xiang/Cao Weining are like in canon <3 love is love), but I need it to feel like it’s coming from an organic place, both on the ends of the characters and of the writer. Ditto with Omg Step On Him, Men Get Pegged ships. You still need to sell me on the dynamic for these specific characters!

Like, okay. It's really important to me to feel like the female character in a F/M ship is attracted to the man and wants to be with him for reasons besides just that he’s into her and she finds him basically tolerable. That's not enough for me to get emotionally invested, and if the fic is explicit, I want to get a sense of her own desire for him, not just see her as a receptacle for his. None of this is specific to femdom, but I tend to run into these pet peeves a lot in fic for ships fandom has designated as femdom-leaning (though it might be because I don't read a lot of other het). Relatedly, I hate the trope in more male gaze-y femdom where the domme is a sexy bitch who has no feelings or interiority, and seems to see her sub with genuine disdain. If characters are doing things to each other that involve power exchange or painplay or what have you, I need to feel like either the vibe is bad on purpose, or that there's a sweet undercurrent and the characters are into whatever crazy shit they’re doing in a way that’s ultimately uplifting and positive.

If you put all of these pet peeves together, you begin to see why I wasn't exactly drowning in comparable fic porn to use as a reference, so I was quite nervous for the first few sex scenes that someone was going to comment saying I'd handled things terribly and they thought it was super transphobic or something, but thankfully that never happened, and I did manage to still have fun writing them, especially since the one in this chapter really made me go, “Oh, right, these sex scenes are like… silly.” My fic tends towards the high end of ratings, and I generally enjoy writing porn, but I usually tend towards treating sex scenes as emotionally weighty or fraught in some way… which they are still here, but also pretty irreverent, which was an adjustment.

[Jiang Cheng's ass] is cute. There’s not much of it to speak of, really, but his thighs are as muscular as would be expected, and Nie Huaisang finds himself delighted by the sight of Jiang Cheng’s flat little ass, so bony and pale and tentatively, hopefully quivering, as he once again fails to keep his reactions in check.

I would describe the tone I'm trying to strike in the sex scenes of this fic as between between schmaltzy female gaze romance novel love scenes, sex comedy, and certain M/M erotica house styles, with an undercurrent of existential anguish. As such, I found myself trying to write very tender scenes that include flowery prose and a soft focus gaussian blur effect, but which also feature frank descriptions of people’s assholes and balls and come, et cetera. Huaisang isn't squeamish talking about sex (or at least not talking about porn, and I'm extrapolating), which is very cute, and I wanted to retain that quality, but it was also important that there was a sense of grace and dignity to the sex scenes as well. This may seem like I'm trying to do a whole bunch of contradictory things, but it was really just an attempt to make room for delicacy amid indelicacy, which is kind of the aim of the fic in general.

I was very conscious of not wanting it to come across like trans women's sexuality is inherently vulgar or comical, so I wanted the sex scenes in particular to be warm, and character-based, and for moments of humour in them give us a sense of emotional proximity to everything that’s happening. The core of the “laughing at”/“laughing with” distinction is whether a joke is structured to distance you from the subject or to draw you into empathy with them, so it can be a pretty powerful tool for humanizing a character, just as much as it can dehumanize them. I’ve talked about how fic in general often struggles with comedy, and my theories why this is; I can’t say whether I pulled things off the way I intended, but I feel pretty satisfied with how things turned out.

He’s sneering now, and Nie Huaisang welcomes it; it’s familiar. “I apologize if my performance was below your usual standard. Maybe you should go back to one of your others, I’m sure they’re much more able to satisfy you. It seems as though you have enough to choose from.”

In the original outline, a few of the rogue cultivators were still hanging out at the Unclean Realms and Huaisang was casually fucking one of them. This was supposed to factor into Huaisang and Jiang Cheng’s first breakup. I cut it because I didn’t want to write OCs and wanted the breakup to have to do more with their interpersonal issues and miscommunicated expectations. Why go to the effort of writing Huaisang as having other current sexual partners when Jiang Cheng will go to the effort of making up a guy to get mad at in that regard himself? :)

I think this speaks to how, though the fic did end up more than twice its initial intended word count, in a lot of ways it was an exercise in learning how to streamline. Besides a few things, the plot didn’t really have things added to it; I just figured out what I wanted to focus on, cut everything else, and paid a lot of attention to the stuff that actually mattered.

Since returning to Lotus Pier, I have reviewed the most recent fifty-year agreements pertaining to grain tariffs applicable to all shipments along Yunmeng waterways. As fifty-nine years have passed since signing and no new agreement has been made, the tariffs have increased by 15%, as stipulated, and Yunmeng Jiang is entitled to nine years of back payment. Please review the attached copies at your earliest convenience.

I came up with this plot thread ten minutes before I posted the chapter, because I'd written everything else, but knew that there had to be a final section. I needed Jiang Cheng to get a parting shot at Nie Huaisang, and I wanted that to take place after the actual fight, because I wanted Nie Huaisang to feel like she “won” the argument in the moment. If Jiang Cheng didn't lash out in a vengeful manner to being slighted and belittled it would simply be out of character, and in this fic I felt a particular need to demonstrate that, like, yes he enjoys being sexually submissive with this person but that doesn’t impact his actual personality outside of a sexual context. I eventually came up with the letter with the thought that it would make a fun and concise sendoff, but even then I wasn't anticipating it having plot ramifications or getting brought up again in any more than a passing manner. This is what I mean when I say that the story wrote itself; this letter gets referenced several times in following chapters and is used as pretext for future Sangcheng interactions, but none of that was planned in advance. Judging by the comments, people thought this was a fun note to end on, to which I was like, well, that’s good, because I just needed to come up with something so I could post this chapter I’ve been working on for two months!

CHAPTER FOUR: QINGHE III / GUSU II

It was a mistake to keep this single knife in my heart
so long, but it is my knife, and my heart, too,

RICHARD JACKSON, from “BASIC ALGEBRA”


If this fic is a three-act structure, then Chapters 1-3 are Act One, 4-7 are Act Two, and 8-12 are Act Three. After Act One finished, I definitely had a better sense of my bearings, even though there were lots of challenging parts of the writing process ahead.

It took a while to get Chapter 4 out into the world, because I was really caught up with finishing my Big Bang—which will hopefully get its own DVD commentary post soon, almost a year late—but also because this is one of the chapters that had a lot of structural changes made to it from the outline. It’s also one of the most overtly transgender, which was scary—I still hadn't gotten confident writing that aspect of the story.

Most of the original plan for this chapter was struck out completely, with a bit of it moved to Act Three—certain elements of Huaisang's interiority which hadn't been fully earned yet, plus some Qinghe slice of life details and Nie family backstory headcanons. A lot of the Mo Xuanyu stuff was supposed to be here; it got cut when I realized that it wasn't right for the story, but then it needed to be replaced with something. I was struggling with the chapter because there was no dramatic thrust to anything and very little happened besides Huaisang having feelings, which obviously I can milk for all it's worth, but you do sometimes need to have some things happening and moving forward the action plot at least a bit. There was originally no Gusu stuff, either; that was all supposed to comprise Chapter 5. This all got brought into one chapter, and then the final version of Chapter 5 was completely different, which I'll go into a bit more.

While overhauling the chapter(s), I kept myself busy with canon review to get inspiration and to try and help keep longfic characterization drift within manageable limits. I'm of the opinion that in a longer work that gives canon characters growth beyond where they're at in canon, they naturally will end up “out of character” to a certain degree, but whether or not that pings as jarring has to do with how well-earned the development feels, as well as whether their core values and motives stay the same—or their evolution is justified—and whether the characters still “feel like themselves” in how they speak and act. I drew on both MDZS and CQL for inspiration here, though it skews more heavily towards CQL, largely because the Nies get more time in the spotlight in that continuity; I also worked pretty extensively off of the physical acting choices and mannerisms made by Wang Zhuocheng and especially Ji Li while trying to keep the characters in-character.



_{(Gif source.)}

I paid particular attention on these selective rewatches to the way Sangcheng relate to each other when they’re just young adult friends—socially, physically. Sangcheng got a more fleshed out relationship in CQL, which I appreciate; there are a lot of little moments here and there, particularly pre-timeskip but even afterwards, where we’re shown that even if Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang were the initial and probably closer friends, Nie Huaisang and Jiang Cheng definitely had a personal relationship and were fond of each other and comfortable in each other’s presence! It's really quite sweet.

I also had the chance to flesh out my concepts a bit; I came across the academic anthology Transgender China ed. Howard Chiang around this time, and though this is a very anachronistic and non-realist work, several of the essays stuck in my mind as I wrote the rest of the story.

ZUYAN ZHOU, from “THE ANDROGYNOUS IDEAL IN SCHOLAR-BEAUTY ROMANCES: A HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL VIEW”

But eventually I had to get back to writing the thing. Among the things that got cut from this section was a bit wherein Nie Huaisang, upset about the situation with Jiang Cheng and Life In General, decides to keep herself too busy to think, and accepts an invitation to visit a nearby minor sect leader. It’s immediately obvious that the family has a bunch of unmarried daughters that they’re trotting out in front of Huaisang in an obvious and kind of tacky way, and she’s already so nihilistically depressed that she starts just getting shitfaced at this fancy dinner while also contemplating whether she should stop transitioning entirely as the physical changes are still within the realm of plausible deniability, and go get into some loveless political marriage and make some heirs and then probably and go kill herself at some point etc. She wasn't actually going to do it, but I still only got halfway through writing this before being like oh my god this fic is already grim enough without a near miss detransition/explicit suicide plan subplot. I genuinely just can't.



This is the thing about writing Nie Huaisang… she’s terrible and I don't like it when people sanitize her personality or actions too much, but also she's suffered enough that I don't have the stomach to make her suffer that much more.

So, seeing as I cut so much stuff from this part of the story, I moved the Gusu scenes up to fill the gaps.

On his way to Gusu, he’d wondered whether he was on his way to stand trial for something related to the things that had happened leading up to the evening at Guanyin Temple. The specifics didn’t really matter, Nie Huaisang’s response would be the same, but it was mildly entertaining to imagine having that conversation with Lan Wangji. “Did you have accomplices?” Yes and no, or rather, shouldn’t you know, Your Excellency? His body sleeps next to yours every night.

I knew that I wanted to have Wangxian background in this story because I have takes about postcanon Wangxian (heavily informed by conversations with mercurious, as well as reading his Wangxian fic… Off-screen, I imagine they've been living out the plot of common law, or something similar to it) but no desire to write standalone Wangxian fic, but I didn’t know any specifics of where I was going with that or what wanted to have happen.

Lan Wangji has sacrificed his own freedom to keep any more authority out of the hands of Nie Huaisang or Jiang Wanyin. Maybe Lan Wangji tells himself that it won’t be for long, that a few years of secluded meditation will suffice, and then Lan Xichen will, like Lan Wangji once did, emerge to live a life again, and on that day Lan Wangji will pass off the mantle he’s been keeping warm. Surely, Lan Wangji has to believe that.

I think that Chief Cultivator Lan Wangji is kind of dumb and he would hate it, which is exactly why I like it for this story in particular—it not only freed Huaisang up to do whatever and be particularly aimless, but it worked with the theme of people doing things that make them miserable out of a sense of duty or compromise, until they come to a point where they can’t any longer.

Enough. He blinks, and meets Lan Wangji’s intractable gaze. “Say, if that’s all—is Wei-xiong around? I’d like to catch up.”

At last, that produces a reaction, though a small one by anyone else’s standards: the way Lan Wangji holds his eyes shifts. “Wei Ying is not here.”

I liked the idea of them experiencing relationship problems a few years postcanon when Wei Wuxian has returned from his travels and had some time to adjust (or not) to living in Gusu; not because I want their relationship to FAIL!!1!!1, because I love Wangxian and think they're mfeo, but because it's interesting to me to think about them having to mature as a couple and process some of their issues together.

Wei Wuxian freezes like a schoolboy caught out in mischief before his frame goes fluid and he turns around. There’s an open bottle of liquor in Wei Wuxian’s hand, and Nie Huaisang’s eyes are adjusted well enough to the dark to see an odd look pass over Wei Wuxian’s face. “Nie-zongzhu, is that you?”

I'm really interested in the postcanon Nie Huaisang-Wei Wuxian dynamic, but find it hard to write. We only have that one scene to go off of in terms of their postcanon relationship, and I don't think they would be operating at quite that high a frequency of mutual animosity 24/7 if they continued to have one-on-one interactions, but they certainly wouldn't be going back to their very cute pre-golden-core-loss dynamic, which is where most of the examples we have of them interacting come from. On the one hand it's nice that they're both chatty, so the dialogue at least wasn't too too hard to write, but the Wei Wuxian scenes were consistently difficult for me.

He doesn’t envy the stifling closeness that must come from sharing quarters with one’s lover while living as a perpetual barely tolerated guest. It’s only that Wei Wuxian has subjected himself to every form of disgrace, yet Hanguang-jun sleeps next to him at night and calls him husband in public. Does Wei Wuxian know how lucky he is, to have returned from death at such high cost, with a man by his side who looks at his wreck of a life and says that it’s good, that he deserves to be held?

I liked the idea of Huaisang thinking of herself as very independent and not in need of companionship or people’s approval, etc., but realizing that she is more upset than she’d allowed herself to admit about Wei Wuxian's ambivalence about wanting to have any kind of a relationship anymore. Also, and this one is probably more dominant in this scene, she's very jealous of Wangxian for being a couple, though she claims she’s not. In combination with being on the outs with Jiang Cheng, she's realizing that she has no friends, and a personal nadir approacheth.

the day after he returns home from the Cloud Recesses, Nie Huaisang enters that dusty room in search of the relevant contracts. Nie Huaisang should use the opportunity to go over the family records. He’s been putting it off for years, but it’s long past time that he made a list of all the potential heirs, just in case.

For the last chunk of this chapter, I was operating off of a very vague sense of what needed be accomplished; there were some touchstones of emotion or motifs or what have you that I used to inform what I was doing here, but very little in terms of “stuff that happens”. One of those motifs was that of paper and records/documents; a lot of this got moved to some of the final chapters as well, but I wanted to get into the tactility of books and letters and ephemera, and what they represent to Huaisang as someone who is an artist and has opinions about fancy paper products and appreciates the literary arts etc. while also being weighed down by history and the past, and being saddled with this accumulation of objects that represents not only her own life but all of these lives that have come before her. It's a marker of loneliness and her unwanted burden, but it's also, to her surprise, able to bring her into connection with deceased family here, when she finds her mother's letters.

As for what his mother would have wanted, Nie Huaisang will never know—or so he’d thought; he flicks through the stack of letters with shaky fingers and tries to puzzle out the missing half of the conversation. He has a cute face, just like you, goes a lavish, gushing brushstroke hand. Nie Huaisang can’t remember his mother’s face, so he can’t say whether or not it’s the truth.

If I made a fic bingo card for my own work, “overinvesting in non-character fictional moms” would definitely be on there, because I do this every fucking time. Not to overexplain myself, but I felt moved despite the absolute lack of canon detail or interest in [AO3 tag voice] Nie Huaisang's Mother (Mo Dao Zu Shi) by the thought of her being the first loss of Huaisang's life, but more than that, being the reason that Huaisang was raised in a very martial environment by a brother and a father. Honestly, stepping outside of the narrative I don't think it made much difference either way, but within the story I can't imagine that someone transitioning in these circumstances wouldn't wonder if her mother's absence has anything to do with what’s happening to her now, or at minimum, placing feelings of longing and around femininity and womanhood in the emotional space of her mother’s absence. There are gendered aspirational elements; do I still look like my mom? If I'd known her, would she be a model for me to understand myself and my life? This serves as a gateway into the general theme of thinking about all the lives you could have lived and grieving the fact that you didn’t get to live them.

He knows he was a sweet kid, because it let him get away with far too much. He was coddled by the older disciples when he was young, even if he didn’t make many friends his own age. He ran barefoot in the summer and made his own fun. But Nie Huaisang remembers those days from the inside-out; when he tries to picture that boy as he was seen by everyone around him, there’s a disconnection, as if he’s watching someone else’s child and thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to live that way, to be that simple?

I knew that this chapter was going to have to deal with transness in a more direct way, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways to express trans feelings in a way that's legible to a contemporary audience without resorting to stale tropes/imagery or modern language/frames. Obviously there's only so much you can do in that regard, since ultimately I'm writing out of my context, but I tried to tie the gender plot to other concepts as much as I could in hopes that it would produce a gestalt effect and the reader would be invited to fill in the gaps. This whole scene in the study made me cry a lot to write, so it was effective at doing that for myself, if nothing else, lol.

Sitting on the floor surrounded by the detritus of generations past, he still feels like a child playing with grown-up things. Forget da-ge; Nie Huaisang is getting close to the age their father was when he died, and his family left him no good examples of how to get old. […] It’s getting near to the date at which Nie Huaisang will have been sect leader for longer than da-ge ever was, and the sealing ceremony—the last of da-ge’s many burials—is closer yet, but even now, when Nie Huaisang tries to picture himself in twenty years, it’s like looking out a doorway at night.

With this scene, I was also trying to further my ideas about Nie Huaisang’s dysphoria and her fears of what is essentially hereditary spiritual illness as being linked both practically and conceptually, with treatment of one having the potential to be treatment of the other. I was compelled by presenting the choice of whether or not to pursue or continue pursuing transition as a choice between that kind of transformation and another kind, which is also disturbing and “wrong” according to certain measures, but which, instead of eroding the good things about her and making her a worse version of herself, makes her feel more connected to/inside of her body, more aware of her emotions**, etc. She's still not quite at the point of admitting that she actually likes what's happening or of naming what the long term implications for her life will be, but she's getting there, and though it's not spelled out directly in this chapter, she's coming to terms implicitly with the fact that if she doesn't continue to make some major changes in her life, she will probably kill herself. The situation with Jiang Cheng is the catalyst for this realization, but obviously not the cause.

_{(** Before anyone gets on my ass for being gender essentialist, I don't mean it like that, just that this is a commonly reported thing for trans people who go on hormones in general. IDK why I'm so defensive because I don't think that anyone reading this post would take me at that level of bad faith, but… you know…..)}

I was really nervous about this chapter, for various reasons including the fact that doesn’t have a lot of “action” and it's the only chapter in which Jiang Cheng is Sir Not-appearing-in-this-fic, but I was pleasantly surprised by the reception and I think, upon reread, it’s one of the ones I'm most satisfied with.

CHAPTER FIVE: YUNPING I

Only victims have a destiny.

And the hunter, who believed
whatever struggles
begs to be torn apart:

that part is paralyzed.

LOUISE GLÜCK, from “LIBERATION”


Here we are: Yunping Arc. Originally, there wasn't supposed to be three whole chapters set here, but I used up everything that was in my original outline for Chapter 5 in Chapter 4, so I had to figure out what I was going to replace it with. The next plot beat was the Sangcheng reunion, but I knew that more stuff had to happen in between, because I needed Huaisang to hit absolute rock bottom. My notebook saw a lot of use here, as I was trying frantically to get my ducks in a row.

The majority of senior disciples of both the Jin and Nie are present, in case of an emergency, but intervention isn’t necessary; the layers of wards they’ve been laying for months hold, and when the last slab of stone is pulled over the vault, Nie Huaisang experiences a jolt of terror that he’s forgotten something important. He runs through the list of steps in his mind, but they performed every element of the ritual perfectly. It wasn’t for nothing that they spent months in preparation. Once again, Nie Huaisang is reminded that the more planning a thing requires before being undertaken, the more frantic the speed at which it flies past you once it’s begun.

The subplot about Nie Mingjue’s coffin and Nie Huaisang and Jin Ling collaborating on the Nieyao tomb, etc., was another thing that wrote itself into the story. The amount of Nie Huaisang and Jin Ling interaction in the fic was not intended at all. I was initially planning on just having Sangcheng meet up at a random inn somewhere, but once I started rotating the ideas of having Nie Huaisang and Jin Ling meet up in Yunping, it was quickly obvious that it would be much neater and smoother to have Huaisang and Jiang Cheng meet up due to being in the same place and same time due to actual plot reasons. Connecting this to the Nieyao reburial let it all collide with Huaisang’s grief and existential crisis in a convenient way. Sometimes you can trust the process? Word?

He slips into the first alley he can find, leans back against one of the buildings and lets his legs give way until he’s sliding down the wall to sit on the ground in a puddle of skirts and sleeves. There may be an actual puddle forming, but it’s too late to regret that now.

Nie Huaisang tucks his face against his knees to smother the choking hitches of his breath. He’s not afraid of strangers seeing him cry. There’s no reason he should give in to embarrassment now. But if someone reached out to him in sympathy he thinks he would melt like a wet sheet of paper, or vomit, though that might still happen anyway; his body feels like it’s trying to turn itself inside out.

Huaisang's caught-in-the-rain meltdown was another thing not in the outline; I wanted a final catalyst for her total eclipse of the heart, and my personal version of the old “when a scene is boring, have a guy with a gun walk in” chestnut is “have some kind of dramatic weather event happen.” I rely on this so often it's shameless, but I genuinely think that most people writing for historical or historical fantasy fiction underestimate the impact that seasons and the natural world had on everyday life before the last century? I try to take it into account when making decisions for the characters in these settings—what kinds of food are available? Is travel feasible? Etc.

Anyway, writing this was very fun and indulgent. Melodrama is fine in a romance novel, which this is, and I needed Huaisang to no longer be able to continue internalizing her feelings so they don’t show; I wanted it to be immediately obvious to everyone who sees her that things are Not Good.

When he was little, he would bombard da-ge with questions: Do you like my painting? Can’t I come with you to the Cloud Recesses? If we had another brother, would I still be your favourite? He still craves the brusque answers, even when they weren’t the ones he wanted. He wants to whine, in the petulant tone that da-ge was sometimes soft to, a series of questions that all distill to Can you forgive me?

My central thesis of grief as a transgender emotion started to come to the fore here—not only grieving the lives you didn’t get to live/the childhood you didn’t get to have, but grieving a specific person who never got to see the present “you”, while at the same time not being able to tell whether you would’ve been able to go through with transitioning if they were there and you had to face their reaction, and then feeling guilty about that. For those at home playing a drinking game, this is another scene I made myself cry while writing. When I say that feeling more in touch with their emotions happens to a lot of trans people on HRT regardless of what they're taking, I'm speaking out of experience! Despite writing angsty fanfiction for the past twelve years, I never started crying in the Google Doc until I went on testosterone, okay!!!!!

Nie Huaisang widens his eyes in his best look of vapid astonishment. “Ah, Jiang-zongzhu. No breakfast?”

“You don’t mind being kept waiting, do you?”

While writing this chapter, I rewatched some scenes to remind myself how Jiang Cheng acts when he’s fighting with people, and god bless <3333 you are the worst man alive.

“It’s raining. I forgot to bring an umbrella. I also buried my brother.”

Whatever retort Jiang Cheng had in mind dies on his lips. It was a cheap thing to do, to bring up da-ge as an admonishment, but Nie Huaisang makes an effort not to regret things he can’t take back, so he turns away from Jiang Cheng to open the door.

All of the writing choices in this chapter were made to lead up to a situation where Nie Huaisang is really vulnerable and suffering and willing to accept care. Jiang Cheng sees this, and despite still feeling wounded by the way that they last interacted with each other, he knows that, because of the context of Nie Mingjue being laid to rest, this is the one circumstance where he can trust that Huaisang's emotions are real. It levels the balance between their past interactions, and they come to place of tenuous mutual understanding.

I wish it were easier for me to include examples of what my drafts look like because I think they’re pretty fun, since I usually write the whole thing in blocks of stream of consciousness “notes” inside square brackets interspersed with real prose, but since my usual method is just to go in and write over all of the “[ ]” matter when I come up with real prose, there usually isn’t anything left over. It basically looks like this though:





This one is a better example, though it's from the extra chapter:



I originally wanted to write some kind of dramatic kissing in the rain scene at some point in this story, for maximum romance novel indulgence, but I wasn’t able to fit it in anywhere; the Jiang-Cheng-helping-Nie Huaisang-with-her-wet-hair scene is the closest that gets.

Jiang Cheng kneels so that he’s level with Nie Huaisang, and then knocks Nie Huaisang’s wrists out of the way with the backs of Jiang Cheng’s own hands. Following this, he slides his fingers into the wet mass of Nie Huaisang's hair, feeling for the pins. By way of explanation, he mutters, “It was painful to watch.” Nie Huaisang is so taken aback that he continues to hold his forearms aloft, touching nothing, before remembering to bring them down.

This is probably in my top 5 favourite scenes in the fic. I love hurt/comfort! So sue me!

CHAPTER SIX: YUNPING II

This is the shortest chapter in the fic, so I probably don't have that much to say about it. It wasn't outlined as its own chapter, but I split it off from Chapter 7 because together they were like, 12k or something, which at the time I thought was far too long!!!!, which is funny considering that Chapters 9-11 are 34k total or something insane like that.

Ever since da-ge died, Nie Huaisang has had to give himself his own stern talking-tos, and there are a few rules he’s come up with, to keep this collapsing house of his standing for as long as necessary. […] Everything he’s done with Jiang Cheng since the discussion conference has flown in the face of these strictures, and it’s time to bring himself back in hand. It’s just that—who else could possibly come close to understanding?

Huaisang's primary conflict in this chapter is on the one hand wanting to maintain control of the terms of engagement, but also not having it in her anymore to maintain strict control of herself, and no longer being able to resist lowering her walls and getting some relief.

“What was it you wanted to say to me, before I left?”

“What?” Jiang Cheng’s attempt to pretend like he doesn’t know what Nie Huaisang is talking about is winsome.

The actual Sangcheng stuff in the Yunping chapters was tricky, because it’s three consecutive chapters of them mostly just talking to each other, and it was a pain in the ass to figure out in what order conversational topics should happen, and how to move the conversation in a way that made sense and felt like how human beings actually talk. There are parts of it I enjoy, but I think it’s kind of clunky and jumps between ideas too fast, etc. Oh well. I tried my best.

I was really hitting the midway-through-a-project drudgery zone here, which is reflected in my notebook.





It was motivational to try and remember that if I came across this fic in the wild, I would be really really excited about it. This is why chasing your bliss is important.

After some requisite reluctant grumbling, Jiang Cheng snuffs out the candles with a wave of his hand, and then gets on the bed. Nie Huaisang doesn’t need light to sense that Jiang Cheng’s holding himself like a beached fish, but he doesn't know what to do with his limbs either. As soon as he felt the weight of another body on the mattress, his mind plummeted down a well of desire. As his eyes adjust, he recognizes the shadowy outline of Jiang Cheng resolutely staring at the ceiling.

Indulging in “there was only one bed” here was partially a reminder to the readers that despite being somewhat conceptually dense, this is a very silly fanfiction. Adjust expectations accordingly…

Very annoying, that Jiang Cheng is completely correct: Nie Huaisang does want to. Terribly, in fact. And if not now, when? Never again? What a waste […]. Nie Huaisang has spent this whole time thinking that Jiang Cheng is the one out of his depth, but Nie Huaisang doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore either. He lost hold of the thread some time ago, and it’s all knotted up around his feet.

Chapters 6-7 are probably the single most important pivot point for the relationship; everything to come after would fall flat if I failed to execute my concepts here the way I intended. These chapters bring them from being antagonistic pseudo-FWBs to being in a relationship (even if they won’t admit it is one). Some people in the comments expressed surprise over the fact that the characters were able to navigate the conflict as relatively well as they did, and I was biting my tongue as not to go, “Yeah, this fic ends with them being married, so the ship development is like, chop chop, let's go!”

CHAPTER SEVEN: YUNPING III

The original “core scene” of this fic—by which I mean a fantasy scenario which encapsulated the “id factor” of my early ideas and motivated me to write the rest of it—was (unsurprisingly) a sex scene. The elements of it ended up getting incorporated into two different scenes: this one (morning sex in Yunping), and the post-bath one in Lanling in Chapter 9. The fantasy had two parts: the first was this tableau of Nie Huaisang and Jiang Cheng on a bed in an unfamiliar place, where somebody was getting head (who it was varied), and Jiang Cheng was about to get physically hurt in a very deliberate way, and there was kissing, and the mood was lush and intense and a little scary, but very tender, and they hadn’t admitted it to themselves yet, but they reached the point of no return: they were in love. (The other half of the fantasy scenario was a postcoital conversation where Sangcheng talked about their high school sweethearts Rule 63 AU concepts, and Nie Huaisang teased Jiang Cheng about whether he could have been brave enough to ask Nie Mingjue for permission to marry her, and it was a bit pigtail-pulling but actually quite earnest, and Jiang Cheng got choked up when she told him that she thought Nie Mingjue liked him and would have approved of him. This stuff got moved to earlier in Chapter 9, before the sex.) As you can imagine, it felt really good to finally get to the scene that made me decide to write this fic in the first place.

“It’s not going to get hard again for a while,” Jiang Cheng mutters through clenched teeth.

“I know,” Nie Huaisang replies, peaceably, and wraps his hand around Jiang Cheng’s cock once again. Jiang Cheng shudders. “If you don’t like it, tell me, and I’ll stop.”

So, we have to talk about dick. At first, I couldn’t decide if I wanted Jiang Cheng to have trauma-based erectile dysfunction or a premature ejaculation problem, but I knew I wanted this fic to be my soft cock manifesto, and both of those roads lead there one way or another. I ended up going with the latter option, because Huaisang has some HRT-related erectile dysfunction going on anyway and it seemed more fun to diversify.

When Nie Huaisang gives him a faint squeeze, the muscles in Jiang Cheng’s upper thighs jump, and he lets go much too late for Jiang Cheng to think he didn’t notice. It’s delicate business, hurting someone on purpose. Nie Huaisang wonders how long it’s been since anyone touched any part of Jiang Cheng’s body like it was weak instead of strong.

My motivation here was partially horny and partially that I wanted Jiang Cheng to have his own points of shame about his body that would surface during sex. I wanted to avoid a dynamic of “dysphoric trans people are so uniquely fragile and having sex with them is like walking on eggshells, as opposed to cis people who are only ever extremely cool with and in control of their bodies”. I was really engaged by the prospect that navigating constantly-shifting physical boundaries is something both characters have to do as their sexual relationship progresses and deepens, and is a place where they relearn how to treat another person kindly and intimately, and through doing so begin to apply that knowledge to themselves. I ended up pursuing the idea that Jiang Cheng has sensory boundaries about his discipline whip scars being touched for the same reasons, even though that's not a hard and fast headcanon for me (I didn't write it into the Chengqing scenes in mercies, for example).

Nie Huaisang has been playing with fire. He knows it. When you’re trying to outrun something that you also want to catch up to, either way you’ll eventually lose. He just hadn’t thought it would happen this way. He hadn’t been able to think of a way it could happen and not be terrible, so he hasn’t thought about it any more than he must.

I went through a variety of different versions of the trans disclosure scene before I landed on the one I kept. I really didn’t want to derail the story with a very special episode, especially since Huaisang still doesn’t really know what it means; she’s figuring it out as she goes, and this scene is the first time she’s explicitly articulated even to herself what’s happening to her and where these changes are headed.

You couldn’t say he hasn’t earned this, either, after he’s poked and prodded at Jiang Cheng so relentlessly. His body, his sexual history, everything. It was a matter of time until Jiang Cheng figured he could do the same.

Trans characters being outed by having an element of their body noticed or exposed by others, thus rendering them no longer able to pass, is a classic trope of bad writing about trans people, and it fucking sucks unless it’s handled really delicately (and I don't really think cis people should try writing these plots at all), but I’ve pretty much never seen a media representation of the opposite experience—where a trans person who is medically transitioning stops being able to effectively or consistently backpass as their ASAB, even just in one instance or interaction with a specific person. Despite this, I think it’s actually a pretty common experience among trans people who’ve been on hormones. We internalize so much messaging about how difficult passing is that it can sometimes feel impossible that anyone could ever see you or your body as anything but its ASAB unless you’re forcing them to acknowledge it, but sometimes people can pick up on more than you think—especially because physical changes from HRT can come on gradually for the person experiencing them, but someone who sees you infrequently can sometimes notice immediately that something is different. This can also be a scary and dangerous experience, but I decided to go in this direction because I thought it was interesting in the context of Huaisang’s fear of intimacy and disregard for her own body, which she experiences in ways that are frequently alienated, destructive, or just pragmatic and ambivalent. This is how she’s able to discount the possibility that someone who is attracted to her and has had sex with her multiple times in recent months, seen her minimally dressed, etc., could possibly notice that she’s literally growing tits where there previously were none.

Nie Huaisang tuts his tongue and makes a face. Gropes along in the dark. “It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t cultivate with the sabre. I mean… […] It’s only happened a few times, and it was a big secret, so the other clans wouldn’t have heard about it, you understand?”

I went back and forth a lot in terms of the justification that Huaisang would give Jiang Cheng for why transgenderification is happening. I knew she wasn't going to be perfectly honest with him, and toyed with the idea of having it be a patently-ludicrous-but-played-straight “a witch cursed me” type-explanation, or that she actually had qi deviated at some point and that triggered transition in some kind of indirect way, etc. There was an exchange which I cut for being too silly and not working with where their relationship was at this point in time but which I still think is funny, where Jiang Cheng was like [jumping wildly to conclusions] “SO YOU'RE SAYING YOU INVITED ME HERE JUST TO DUAL CULTIVATE WITH YOU TO BREAK YOUR CURSE?? >:(” and is all offended about it but also obviously would have done it if that were the case. Lmfao.

“But how are you going to—” Jiang Cheng hasn’t gotten up, but he keeps blinking and turning his head between Nie Huaisang and the room, as if the furniture holds answers for him. “How are you so calm about this?”

Figuring out the “how” of this scene was definitely much more challenging than the aftermath, which I had a sense of from the beginning of the story. As silly as Jiang Cheng, Good Transgender Ally Boyfriend sounds in out of context, I think he's willing to swallow Huaisang's story that this is all just a weird cultivational side effect that's totally out of her hands and she's shamefully going into exile about it, so most of his brain, especially in this moment is less occupied with what it says about Huaisang as with what it means for him.

Jiang Cheng takes Nie Huaisang’s face between his palms. Nie Huaisang clutches the windowsill for balance, and then he is being kissed.

The Aladdin kiss was come up with pretty late in the game; in the outline, Huaisang gets Jiang Cheng to escape out of the window, Jiang Cheng lingers outside the window on his sword, they’re looking at each other pointedly and clearly lingering, Jiang Cheng does the bit where he makes Huaisang promise to let Jiang Cheng check in on her, etc., and there was going to be a moment of UST where they’re both looking at each other and wanting to kiss, but they both chicken out and Jiang Cheng leaves. In my early drafts, I thought it would be better to maintain the emotional slow burn effect, but then when I was actually working on the chapter it was clear that they needed that kiss, which in retrospect is very obvious and I don't know how I could ever have thought otherwise. I really struggle to write kiss scenes (much more than sex scenes), and I think this is probably the most successful one I’ve written.

CHAPTER EIGHT: QINGHE IV / LANLING I

Act Three! Home stretch!

It was right around this time that I ran into several months of medical issues, so the fic probably got finished a month or two later than it would have otherwise. Ah well, we got there in the end.

Nothing broke when he fell, but his arms and legs were blotchy purple for a week, and he sprained his right hand, so da-ge carried Huaisang on his back. His grip was steady enough that by the time they neared home, Huaisang was nodding in and out of sleep, but even in his half-conscious state, he remembers thinking that he was lucky to have, out of every boy in the world, the strongest and best of all brothers.

I waffled in edits about whether I should keep the flashback sequence at the start of the chapter, because I know I make use of too many childhood flashbacks in general and I’m trying not to use it as a crutch, but… baby mode Nie siblings are cute and I like to see them.



In retrospect, it works pretty well as a transition between the second and third acts, especially since I wanted to bring Huaisang's feelings about Nie Mingjue back to the foreground of the story. They never really left, obviously, but there's a shift that happens where she starts thinking about her brother less in the context of revenge and anger towards other people and more in the context of their personal relationship and what he was to her during his life, instead of during his death, and that's necessary in order for her to start approaching closure. (Also, I'm very interested in queer/trans childhood as a concept and experience, so it's not entirely coming from authorial laziness.)

A lot of 8+9 came into being pretty late because I realized that a lot of the stuff I had planned for this part of the story was kind of boring or didn’t work with the direction the story had gone, but it was too early to go right into the endgame. I wrote a throwaway line about this party happening in the convo with Jin Ling in Chapter 5 and it ended up setting up a two-chapter arc of the fic. I needed a bunch of different characters to be in the same place at the same time for a while before the next discussion conference (which was going to be the end of the story); I also needed Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang to have the interactions where Nie Huaisang is on the one hand requesting a professional favour and on the other trying to rekindle a friendship of some kind with Wei Wuxian (and running into the issue of when your friend is in a new relationship and won't go anywhere without their partner whom you don't like), and this originally took up basically an entire chapter, but I quickly realized that would be boring and I only needed this to take up one or two scenes.

Nie Huaisang had received Wei Wuxian in the main hall with, for once, the appropriate ceremonial gravity. He had enough of dishabille in Yunping. He’s glad that he did so, seeing as Lan Wangji came along, too, uninvited and luminous, as if actively trying to make everyone else look shabby. He had hoped Wei Wuxian would come alone, but could hardly say so. Whatever.

I had fun with this paragraph… it's a good example of the kind of flexibility of register I think you can get from writing Nie Huaisang POV, because it's plausibly in-character to go very erudite or very informal, and to flip between them rapidly. Cher from Clueless, but, like, also she likes to read classical poetry. Obviously the way that registers of formality etc work in practice varies between languages, but this is what I landed on while trying to approximate the Vibe.

Nie Huaisang brings a present for Jin Rulan: a young stallion of the Qinghe mould, sturdy and not easily spooked, but slender and lighter on his feet than most.

You can see me working in horse content anywhere I can, even if it’s barely relevant… once again, thank you Fatal Journey for my life. On this topic, though, what i have of you by astrolesbian is a great read if you like Nie Huaisang character studies with a focus on grief and equines.

If Jin Ling were to burst into a room one day when Nie Huaisang least expects it and tell him he was there to take vengeance for his shushu, Nie Huaisang imagines he’d feel resigned. If Jin Ling keeps that wound salted and open, like Nie Huaisang once did, it doesn’t seem worth it to fight the outcome Nie Huaisang admits he may have earned. He has reason to be grateful, then, that despite the strength of physical resemblance, Jin Rulan resembles Jin Guangyao in personality very little.

The whole time I was writing the above paragraph/scene, I was like “I know I'm subconsciously referencing something right now, but what is it,” and I eventually realized that it was the “When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I'll be waiting” scene from Kill Bill Vol. 1. I would rather not be made aware of the impact of Tarantino films on my creative consciousness, but here we are.

He thinks of his own mother, thrown from the saddle. He thinks, too, of how Jin Ling surely cannot remember Jiang Yanli’s face, and then he doesn’t think of it any longer.

I’m not sure if it came through clearly or seemed like it actually went anywhere, but beyond the gender stuff, the absent presence of Nie Huaisang’s mother throughout the story had a lot to do with, among other things, the idea that Nie Huaisang’s mother is a repository for all of her feelings of alienation and lack of belonging to the sect and family in general—like, if her mother had lived, would her place in the family have been different for the better—or even for the worse? There's no way to get closure on vague possibilities regarding someone you never really knew, so you just have to wonder about it forever until you can make peace with it.

Even when his focus is elsewhere, he feels Lan Wangji’s cold stare crawling over his skin, judging him and finding him wanting—as if someone like Hanguang-jun, someone feared and respected by people who haven’t even met him, whose skill with a sword is legendary and who, Nie Huaisang is sure, has never had to resort to low cunning, has the right. He’ll never make someone like Lan Wangji understand the kind of life he’s led, or the choices he’s made. It’s fruitless to even try to justify himself.

[Nie Huaisang voice] and like, I so don’t even care what Hanguang-jun thinks of me, it’s just that he’ll never GET IT and it pisses me off!!!!!!

One thing I think is really funny about this story is that Jiang Cheng and Nie Huaisang are united in their mutual resentment towards Lan Wangji. Jiang Cheng’s is much more personal, and intense, and more reciprocated; Huaisang feels only vague, habitual contempt at the start, and her sense of frustration towards him really takes off when he serves her the Lan Xichen-related restraining order, which she internalizes as a lot more personalized of an act of censure than it actually is—though the way she reacts to being told to knock it off, as well as the way she’s continued to contact Wei Wuxian with the intention to have him collaborate on her dubious projects, have generated some genuine dislike from Lan Wangji where before was just total disinterest. Lan Wangji doesn’t trust her or like her but this isn’t something he invests emotional energy in until she makes it relevant/potentially threatening to his loved ones—which she is insisting on doing. Even so, I think her conviction here that Lan Wangji is watching her judgmentally at this banquet is at least 50% projection.

The whole vibe of Sangcheng hanging out on the outskirts of the party owes a lot to this art by theresa-draws.

Nie Huaisang’s heartbeat kicks up; he feels pleased and oddly nervous. “I don’t know. Anything you like. This young master presumed to kiss me before, so I suppose I can allow another.”

This whole scene where Sangcheng are doing ad hoc Mrs. Robinson roleplay in the garden is so embarrassing for me to reread. Not even because I think it’s badly written, I’m just like, oh god, this is none of my business, I should avert my eyes.

Whenever they’ve done this kind of thing before, there’s never been any real grievance between them. The scolding and mockery was all pretense, like the exposition to set the scene in a spring book. There still isn’t any actual transgression; Jiang Cheng hasn’t done anything to him tonight but provide an opportunity for Nie Huaisang to indulge his worst habits, but he’s angry with him for that, and afraid—afraid of the generosity being extended to him. He’s untrustworthy with the welfare of others.

This whole scene wasn’t in the original outline at all, and only came into my mind while I was working on Chapter 7. I realized I needed a more transitional scene to move their relationship from the point of “we’re-not-admitting-we’re-dating-but-we-keep-sexting-and-clearly-want-to-hang-out” to “‘jokingly’ talking about the alt timeline where we got married”, so it exists primarily to communicate that. Once I decided that, my vision involved the same basic setup of Sangcheng fooling around in the garden—not fully having sex but like, making out or engaging in foreplay or just Psychological Sex Acts—but from there, they would almost get caught by some rando and it all went in a much sillier direction. I ended up cutting that, obviously, but it was kind of a funny idea. I think it’s funny to have them be horny and stupid.

Obviously, rather than more dumb sex comedy this ended up becoming one of the most important scenes in Huaisang’s emotional arc; this is the first time that she so blatantly articulates to herself that she hates the person she’s become, and not only that, but she wants to be different. She cares about Jiang Cheng and doesn’t want the sex they have to become an outlet for Huaisang to be genuinely cruel to him when she’s feeling negative emotions, even if they engage in sadism other times. She’s also beginning to explicitly occupy a female sexual fantasy persona as a means to get some separation from the things about herself that she doesn’t like and receive some validation and desire, etc. from someone she has feelings for. And then, of course, she lets herself be really vulnerable in front of him by admitting that she still wants to hang out with him even though she doesn’t want to have sex anymore.

Nie Huaisang sees him reach a decision: he lets go of Nie Huaisang’s hand and goes for his own belt. Nie Huaisang stares, dumbfounded, as Jiang Cheng unloops the leather, pulls his arms free of his sleeves—didn’t Nie Huaisang make it clear they weren’t going to do anything else tonight?—and drapes his outer robe roughly around Nie Huaisang’s shoulders.

The Jiang Cheng varsity jacket scene is one of the silliest and most romcom-y moments in this fic, to the point where I almost cut it because I was like, this is too much, but going off of the comments people really liked it, and I’m glad I kept it. IN MY DEFENSE, I think this has canon basis!!!!



_{(Gif source.)}

I’m obsessed with this moment and reference it constantly—it’s so sweet, and along with the Wen Qing comb-posal, etc, has contributed a lot to my idea of Jiang Cheng as having a bewitchingly out-of-place streak of protective, chivalrous earnestness that only comes out around women who have accessed a high level of emotional importance to him—so basically only ever his sister, Wen Qing, and now Huaisang. Jiang Cheng isn’t thinking of it in these terms—I think he’s acting on pure instinct here—but this is one of those things that only happens because he can sense that the gendered dynamic of their relationship is shifting. That, and the relationship is clearly no longer a purely sexual one, which is the point of this chapter. (One of them.)

Nie Huaisang has lived two lives; there’s a bifurcation separating a naive and good-natured boyhood from an adulthood of duplicity, sorrow, and malice. The former died with da-ge on the Carp Tower stairs, and what’s left may as well be a snake taken residence in the shed skin of another. He’s made peace with the fact that he will never recover what he’s lost, and he’s content enough to continue playing out, around others, the same superficial imitation of his old self that he’s been performing for many years. He’s not too bitter about having to put up an act; if he were anyone else, he’d rather know the soggy, spineless Nie Huaisang than the other one, who is fit for no company but his own. This is what unnerves him, you see, about the way Jiang Cheng looks at him. There are times when Nie Huaisang has given him glimpses of the person he is in empty rooms, and Jiang Cheng has stared back as if saying, Open the door, and I’ll let you lock us in.

The above is one of those paragraphs I wrote in a first draft-y, “IDK if I’ll keep any of this but I’m just trying to get my ideas down” sort of way, and then on reread of my draft was like, oh, this sums up the entire conceptual project I’ve been trying to communicate for 50,000 words now, huh.

CHAPTER NINE: LANLING II

When the plane went down in San Francisco,
I thought of my friend M. He's obsessed with plane crashes.

He memorizes the wrecked metal details,
the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke.

Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes:
The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa.

How people go on, and how people don't.

It was almost a year before I learned
that his brother was a pilot.

I can't help it,
I love the way men love.

ADA LIMÓN, from “ACCIDENT REPORT IN THE TALL, TALL WEEDS”


This is the era of the fic where the narrative begins to give over entirely to sounding like the Daniel Ortberg “Things I've Learned About Heterosexual Female Desire From Decades Of Reading” post:

Jiang Cheng surveys the board with grim resolve. He has walked into a trap; his cause will soon be done, and they both can tell. […] He wonders whether da-ge would've seen through the strategy, where Jiang Cheng has not; da-ge who was better at weiqi, but may not have even recognized Nie Huaisang as he is now.

Part of the Nie Mingjue-Jiang Cheng feelings confluence happening at this point is that Nie Huaisang wants to be cared for by Jiang Cheng in a way that’s genuine and comes not from a place of pity for Huaisang’s feigned helplessness but rather out of concern for her genuine unfulfilled emotional needs, and on the other hand Huaisang also wants to care for Jiang Cheng: not because she believes that he’s helpless or incompetent, but just because of all the times he has had to go it alone up to now when he shouldn’t. I pulled from Fatal Journey quite a bit here.





So the meowmeowification of Jiang Cheng begins. She couldn’t protect or help Nie Mingjue as much during life as she would have wanted, and all the revenge couldn’t bring him back (or even put him to rest in a not-awful way), so the best she can do is try and resolve some of those emotions via a relationship with a guy who reminds her of Nie Mingjue in some ways (while also being different enough from Nie Mingjue that it’s not a truly egregious “growing up to date your dad” type scenario. Just the regular amount of Freudian.)

Nie Huaisang places his free hand on Jiang Cheng’s shoulder and pushes him so his head is submerged in the water. He works quickly but thoroughly, running his hand through Jiang Cheng's hair, rinsing out the soap. Jiang Cheng’s hair infuses the water around him like spilled ink. When Nie Huaisang has done a passable job, he pulls Jiang Cheng back up and releases his airway. Jiang Cheng is panting, and Nie Huaisang feels its echo in his own lungs. There’s an intoxicated look on Jiang Cheng's tipped-back face that wasn’t present before, wine or no.

Not to sound ridiculous, but in my mind the fact that the sex they have is femdom-flavoured is crucial to the Themes. This whole situation is Nie Huaisang taking drastic measures to make a fundamental change in her lived experience because it's the only way she can conceive of having any chance of a meaningful life. The way that gets conceptualized as a hard break from her past self is by transitioning, and the subsequent conscious identity formation starts out in a sexual/romantic fantasy space where womanhood is linked to experiences of pleasure and desire and wish fulfillment. Where the femdom comes in is that it felt really important to establish that what's going on is not an equation of Nie Huaisang acts like a ditzy sensitive weakling = Nie Huaisang is actually a woman, but instead that her developing relationship to femininity is an opportunity to begin re-integrating parts of herself she's taken to hiding or disavowing publicly, and it's easier to do this at first if it's taking place at arm's length from her “genuine” self. So through developing this sexy girlsona, her intelligence and strength of will and capacity for violence, etc. can come to the surface and be acknowledged and expressed, which is radically opposed to her behaviour pattern of feigned ignorance and foolishness. Even though those previously hidden traits are central to the old toxic identity she's trying to leave behind, the way they get put to use here allows her to make a connection with someone who comes to see her on this deep and genuine level. Jiang Cheng is able to assemble those disparate parts of her into a coherent whole, and see her as someone worthy of companionship and dignity and respect, who he wants to see living a good life.

But then, of course, it’s also terrifying to have someone see and know you in that way, particularly when you've made an effort to make sure that no one on the planet truly sees or knows you for the better part of twenty years.

Nie Huaisang has a cute face, is not quite as uncoordinated as he’s made himself out to be, and can be charming in a facile way around the right company, but is otherwise a far cry from a heroine, even for this kind of trash; however, his imagination is robust, and he’s familiar enough with the genre to imagine how it might read. […] Nie Huaisang purses her lips like she’s thinking, and then pats Jiang Cheng’s knee.

I'm proud of the way that I executed the pronoun shift as happening through the medium of the imaginary book passages and then carrying through to the rest of the narration, and it still excites me to read when I get to it. I wasn't initially sure I was going to change the pronouns at any point in the story, because I couldn't imagine a way to do it that didn't seem obtrusive, but to start the story using non-canon pronouns would have given a completely wrong impression of where Huaisang was at in terms of her self-understanding (as well as what I was trying to do with the narrative). I toyed with the idea of having the pronouns shift contextually in the narration, with she/her pronouns being used in a personal or intimate context and he/him for Huaisang's public self, and I did end up doing something similar later on, with the pronouns slipping back to he/him when Huaisang thinks back to being a child or young person, but I figured that would be needlessly confusing or clumsy as the main way of doing things (though I don't know; I'm still intrigued by the idea, and I think I might pursue something similar in my original fiction at some point). The inspiration for the spring book passages came to me first, before I realized that they worked well as a pretext for the sort of self-redefinition that can be first tested out in a fantasy space and then taken back into the “real” self.

I tried to tackling this in less obvious ways than the third-person pronouns, as well; notably, over the course of the story there are more intrusions of Nie Huaisang’s first-person direct address into the third-person narration—as opposed to italicized first-person asides—as the POV voice becomes more integrated with her genuine thoughts and feelings and less distanced from her desires. The first-person asides leaking through is also a way to minimize the use of gendered pronouns, which are a necessary grammatical concession for a narrative told in third person in English, but aren’t a reflection of how someone actually refers to themselves internally, for most people. Stylistic conventions of AO3 fanfiction made first or second (but especially first)-person as the primary mode of the story a non-viable option if I wanted to retain any readership, and so here we are with this little compromise.

—she kisses him instead of looking away; anything to close her eyes. It should be impossible to feel this wild just from some petting. When they stop to breathe she can’t suppress small bursts of disbelieving laughter. Jiang Cheng looks a little dazed, understandably so, as Nie Huaisang is all but jumping him, any restraint abandoned—

One of the most complicated things about this story was trying to maintain the balance between emotional realism and melodrama and romance novel logic. I figured that as long as the story was internally consistent and felt like it was following its own rules, the reader would go along with it, and I hope that's… true…

Nie Huaisang feels sixteen again, or twenty-two, ages when it felt like the body was something that existed for sex and it was very annoying to be expected to do other things with it, except instead of a lot of fervent, idle fantasy Nie Huaisang has what she actually wanted, back then: someone pretty, who wants her back, and has the will and the means to help her figure out the difference between what she likes and what she only likes in books. […] It’s a good thing he isn’t hers, because Nie Huaisang wants to take him home and put him in a vault, with the rest of her valuable things too precious to go on public display.

The idealized romance novel/romcom stuff felt necessary because of how Bad Representation this story is—this is still a pretty generous-to-Huaisang take overall, IMO, but even within those bounds, she's often quite horrible and also not even particularly like “cool”, or succeeding at any kind of glam weaponized femininity thing, which are usually the directions people go when presenting a messy female character they still want us to like… romcom women get to be quirky disasters but still find love and be the centre of their own stories, and though Huaisang is actually pretty competent and her cringe and fail is largely either a) on purpose or b) as relates to her personal life, I didn't want her happiness to feel contingent on “earning” it through being successful in any way, and having her inhabit recognizable romantic fiction tropes helped with that.

Nie Huaisang has never wanted children, even before she knew what having children in their family meant. But that means no one to care for you when you’re old, no one waiting by your bedside while life slips away from you. She'd known she would likely die alone, but she’d thought—while still sect leader, she could assume that someone would be around who would be concerned for her, even if it were only the obligatory concern of a disciple for a lackadaisical master. […] Usually, Nie Huaisang can contemplate these things clinically, but right now it gives her a leaden feeling. She doesn’t love life, but she lives it. One is not required for the other. But, when touched like this, she’s grateful to still have a body.

The post-sex conversation is comically maudlin, but I don't know. There’s something that still feels transgressive to me, in a good way, about writing about trans pleasure (in general, not exclusively sexual) in a way that doesn’t present it as occurring because of the absence of sorrow, but in defiance of it, and in response to it, and as (ha) transformation of it.

CHAPTER TEN: GUSU III

CINDY LEE, talking about “I WANT YOU TO SUFFER”

Chapters 10 and 11 were also one chapter in the outline until pretty late in the game, which is funny because they're both super long. It's just that a lot of what happens in them is “Huaisang thinking and having feelings,” so on paper it doesn't sound like it should take that long to get through, but in practice, there's a lot of ground to cover.

They stop, all four of them, and it’s Jiang Cheng who speaks first.

“Hanguang-jun.” He does give the tiniest of salutes and a bare incline of the head, which is more than Nie Huaisang was expecting. After a beat, and in a tone as though it takes him great strain, he adds, “Wei Wuxian.” Nie Huaisang quickly makes her greetings, a trifle more warmly, as does Wei Wuxian.

Lan Wangji does the same, after enough of a pause that his disinterest is fully articulated.

Throughout this story, I found both Wei Wuxian and Jin Ling quite hard to write, for similar reasons; after the events of canon, they're so distrusting of Nie Huaisang that they aren't really acting in the most characteristic of ways around her. A few years have also passed where they've had time to grow and mature (since they're both younger than her by quite a bit). It got a lot easier when Jiang Cheng was also in the scene, because I could let his dynamic with them set the tone.

Nie Huaisang spills over Jiang Cheng’s lap, half-laying, half-sitting up, propped up against pillows. He kneels between her spread thighs with one hand lifting up her knee and the other, slick with oil, under the single loose robe she’s still wearing, and so close—but not quite—to where she wants it.

I wrote earlier about the balance I had to strike with the sex scenes between hotness and the character/narrative work I needed them to do. This scene was definitely written with hotness as a secondary goal, because it's really just an opportunity for Huaisang to work through how she’s feeling for Jiang Cheng in that moment (so that it can shortly go to pieces.) I didn’t want to play into the bad slashfic trope where it’s not real sex until someone’s dick is in someone’s ass, and now that they’re in love they have to have real sex, but I wanted them to have a version of a more traditional sex scene in the interest of maintaining the romance novel frame at a time when the emotional plot is about to get quite heavy. It also felt important for Huaisang's emotional arc that she's letting them experiment together with a sex act that she's enjoyed in the past but hasn't tried with Jiang Cheng yet because it felt like crossing the streams between the way she's had sex with other people and the specific way she has sex with him. She's comfortable enough in the relationship that she trusts that letting him fuck her isn't going to ruin this dynamic that she's come to see as precious.

Her voice is casual, fond, chastening. “You remember what it’s like when I do you? Just do the same thing. I’ll like it too.” She taught Jiang Cheng how this goes, didn’t she? He knows what she likes already, and he doesn’t even know it.

I definitely did use this fic as an exercise in writing different kinds of sex scenes from what I'm used to, and I decided on what happened in them with an eye towards that. One of those was that I wanted to try writing fingering in a D/s dynamic where the bottom is the dom(me), and later stuff in the scene is influenced by wanting to write cockwarming with a similar flip of the usual D/s configuration. I didn't get to go into quite as much detail about that as I'd like to, but it would've bogged down this scene and distracted from its purpose, which was primarily emotional, as I've said.

“Help me out a little, Jiang Cheng—put your hands on my—oh, yes, that’s perfect.” He reaches under her robe; though she can’t see it, Nie Huaisang feels his fingertips dimple the flesh of her ass. The next time she speaks, her voice is just as hoarse, but gentler. “You don’t need to hesitate.”

In all honesty, I listened to Rocket by Beyonce for an hour straight while I wrote this, because that was the kind of deadly earnest heterosexual slow jam energy I was trying to bring. It’s a horny scene because the characters are horny, but I wasn't even personally that horny about it. My emotional palette was just like, I really think these crazy kids might make it, etc.

He stares at her in one of those ways of his, like he’s a fresh orphan again, Jiang Wanyin, Poor Thing, and now Jiang Wanyin, Poor Thing asks through a raw throat, “Is this hard for you, or is it easy?”

This breakup/flop proposal scene was incredibly fun to write. I had to trim it down a lot because it was way too long and it didn't actually need to be thousands and thousands of words to get across what it needed to, but I was having a great time writing bitchy dialogue.

The flop proposal itself was one of those ideas I had as sort of a joke, and then started taking more and more seriously as the story went on and became more and more played-straight as a romance novel that operates in that kind of emotional space.

She slides the door to her rooms closed behind her, takes four steps, and crumples inwards. One of her knees hits the floor at an unfortunate angle. It’ll probably bruise. Nie Huaisang rubs it with the heel of her hand, and thinks of the reasons why she had to make him look like that. She’s out of breath before she’s even realized that she’s crying.

Huaisang is constantly having meltdowns in this story, but she only actually cries twice (outside of brief flashbacks to earlier in her life), and the two scenes needed each other. The first time, they're tears of apocalyptic despair, because she's been forced to admit that she's done all she can to try and get closure for da-ge, and she may not ever achieve it. The second time is also intense and full of sorrow, but it's completely different in emotional register, because these are tears of pure heartbreak, rather than nihilism. She's only able to cry like this because she loves someone (and feels she can't have him). It's crushing because she's discovering that she's still capable of missing someone so much, so the tears are life-affirming, in a way.

Nie Huaisang disgusts herself, which is nothing new, but this is not usually the reason for it. She wishes she had stopped to centre herself before pushing blindly on with the task, but just as she wishes she didn’t love him, it’s too late for that now.

It's a common piece of advice given about how to write, or not write, fanfiction that you should avoid having your characters say “I love you”, and I've kept to this quite strictly over the years. This is usually a good rule of thumb, in that it's easy to use a verbal declaration like this as a cheap shortcut, as opposed to demonstrating feelings in a more subtle and character-specific way. That being said, actual love realizations/confessions have their place, and this is a romance novel! I had to fight against my own instincts here to write it, because I knew in my gut that it was necessary; Huaisang is always thinking around things and being vague and noncommittal within her own head when there’s something she doesn’t want to acknowledge, and I needed this to be totally unambiguous. Girl you LOVE HIM.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: GUSU IV

Writing this chapter was a bit of a slog because I was nervous about wrapping the story up and I missed Jiang Cheng. He needed to be absent for most of it so Huaisang could experience longing and regret, but I was like “noooo Jiang Cheng your presence would make this way more of a fun and chill time,” which is probably the only time anyone's ever thought that about him.

There’s a big book in the sect leader’s office that contains a record of every one of Nie Huaisang’s antecedents, written in their own hands—except for the end of each entry, which is recorded posthumously by its subject’s successor. Burrowing into family records always reminds Nie Huaisang of when she was lost in the crypts below the sabre tombs: they’re her property, and she ought to have mastery of them, but in fact they are the territory of her ancestors, and possess depths she’ll never see.

Throughout the fic, I took pretty liberal inspiration for plot points/conversations/scenes etc. from other works. It's probably obvious if you've read ASOIAF, but the part of this chapter about the Nie family sect leader tome was directly inspired by the White Book of the Kingsguard from A Storm of Swords, since I was rereading that earlier in the year. That scene jogged something in my brain along the line of legacy and the historical record and having to Write One’s Own Life.

“Whatever it is, I’ll be surprised if it’s new to me. I’m not the first member of my family to try and work this out, you know.” She had put her skills towards this long before she enlisted Wei Wuxian’s help. Years of interviewing everyone from priests under vows of silence to some of the strangest fringe cultivators to have sprung up this side of the Yiling Patriarch’s death, and she has reached the edges of her own ingenuity.

Now, I had to actually wrap up the B-plot of this fic, “Huaisang trying to figure out what can be done to mitigate the damage of the family cultivation style.”

“…because the Nie Clan of Qinghe was already pretty much half dead at this point, if something like this got out, Nie Huaisang would become a condemned sinner in the history books and be too ashamed to face his ancestors when he entered those graves himself. No wonder he would rather be a secret laughing-stock among the cultivation world than diligently cultivate, nevermind wielding a saber. Should his cultivation come to fruition, he would become more irascible by the day and end up like his older brother and all those that had come before him: berserk and dying alongside a saber that would curse the world after his death. Rather than cause unrest in the clan, having zero accomplishments was the better choice.

This was a problem without a solution. The Nie clan had forged this path since its founding generation, so would its descendants have to denounce the path and foundation established by their forebears? The prominent cultivation clans all had their unique specialities. Just as the Lan Clan of Gusu was adept in music, the saber spirits of the Nie Clan of Qinghe were fierce and tough; their power was so mighty and destructive precisely because the skill required to master it was a in a league of its own. If they were to abandon the discipline of their ancestors to start anew, to find a new path, who knew how many years that would take? Success would not be guaranteed. Not to mention, Nie Huaisang would never dare defect from the Nie clan to cultivate a different path. Thus, he had no choice but to be useless.”

Even though there are certain things about Fatal Journey I dislike and will ignore (Nie Huaisang on the grassy knoll with the flute—), a lot of it has become pretty ingrained in my interpretation of his character and the Nies in general. (I’m also obsessed with the detail in the movie about the Nies having a skeleton chamber where the sect leaders go to die if they suspect they're about to qi deviate, which is so silly but… oddly compelling. But mostly it’s funny.) Two scenes in particular played a big role in my characterization choices:





and






Things I take away from this: Nie Huaisang has a lot of loyalty and care for his family/sect, but also a lot of criticisms of it, and isn't afraid to voice that criticism (to the point of calling Nie Mingjue by name while fighting with him about it—the subtitle is accurate), and is questioning whether it’s necessary or even sustainable to continue pursuing sabre cultivation even before Nie Mingjue dies. He might have continued to push Nie Mingjue on these concerns if Nie Mingjue hadn’t promptly died. I imagine that it’s harder for Nie Huaisang to take any moves towards reforming the sect after Nie Mingjue dies because of guilt, even if it’s practically easier, in the sense that he’s in control of the sect. (Also Huaisang clearly experienced significant moral erosion and priority drift.)

This is part of why I wrote Huaisang’s motivations for trying to resolve some of the problems with sabre cultivation as not entirely ethical concern, at least not in a direct way—she’s not trying to fix it Because It’s The Right Thing To Do so much as because it’s unsustainable. Though we can infer from some of her canon dialogue that she has complex feelings about the legacy her antecedents have left, she also clearly loves her family and wants better for them, and feels guilty for not being the person she was supposed to be. Letting things go on as they are might be the worst thing she could do for their legacy, if it results in the sect collapsing within the next few decades due to chronic instability/succession crises/any of the other plausible scenarios this could prompt. This obviously parallels the conflict of Huaisang wanting/needing to transition but not knowing how to do that within her life as it currently stands: “adapt or die or live forever miserable, but there are reasons why making the choice to live (or live better) is difficult.” The Jiang Cheng stuff runs alongside it, because Jiang Cheng is entrenched in negative coping mechanisms, repression and immaturity, etc., which have nerfed his ability to exist in the world as an emotionally functional person, and he needs to decide whether or not it’s worth it to go through really difficult and unpleasant growth, if it’s the only way to improve his life in the long term. Sangcheng are able to help each other make these steps by the fact they like each other and want the other person to take steps to make their own life liveable, even if they find it hard to apply the same logic to themselves.

Another work which influenced this fic is the Channel 4 drama Utopia, which I come back to and think of a lot. There are a couple lines of dialogue relating to a specific character which I found drifting up in my consciousness while I was working on this chapter. The main antagonist of the show is a spy named Milner, who has been heading an international bioengineering conspiracy for several decades. She is ruthlessly violent, but also very interpersonally pleasant and affable. Her series two plot involved grooming a man named Wilson Wilson as her protege and successor within the conspiracy organization. She has a line when she is coaching Wilson Wilson through his first murder, where she tells him, “I wish I could leave you as that beautiful boy I met, but I can't.” Later, after Milner has died, Wilson Wilson attempts to repair his relationship to his former friends, who are horrified to learn that he's become part of the organization that is the cause of so much of their suffering in the past, including Wilson Wilson's own suffering. He says, “Milner said when she took life, it felt like she was bleeding inside. I don’t know. Maybe you can come back. Things change. Look at us.”

I wasn't sure what to make of this line on my first viewing; it seemed like a non-sequitur and honestly a bit trite. In the context of everything we know about Milner, her cold pragmatism and villainy, to be informed by a third party of this uncharacteristically emotional and vulnerable thing she allegedly said—which she may or may not have even actually said; maybe Wilson Wilson is just making this up to manipulate people, but if so, why make up something so specific?—feels very strange. Not to mention how, if it was a humanizing effort on the behalf of the writers, surely the time for that was before she died. It’s really stuck with me, though. In the hands of a different writer, it could feel like a reflection of ideas about innate feminine sensitivity, and in the hands of a different writer the line wouldn’t exist at all and Milner would just be an epic girlboss who uses violence because she Can Do Anything A Man Could Do, but I think the writers managed to give a glimpse into a deep undercurrent of sorrow and emptiness in this character's emotional life, which brings the viewer a little closer into her internal world while also making her more repugnant. Like, oh, so you are capable of empathy? You just know how to turn it off? And this is the legacy you've left behind in the world—even this admission becoming someone else's fodder for further coercion?

It should be easier to escape… people. Their remnants. It doesn’t matter if they’re estranged, or dead, or just sitting across from her, sharing an uneasy conversation; she’ll never shake them off of her heels.

It might seem counter-intuitive to spend a lot of time meditating on the harm that the protagonist has done at the very end of the story when we should want her to have good things, but I just don’t think that Huaisang was capable of reckoning with her culpability until now, so everything comes rushing in on the heels of falling in love. It's not that being in love absolves a person, but that in this case it's the final push necessary to reactivate empathetic ways of relating to the world, which is a disorienting and painful process. I'm interested in the separation from oneself that's necessary for violence, and the corrosion of the soul that comes from being the one to mete out punishment, however just—as well as the questionable nature of just punishment as a concept, since it always affects more people than just the party directly punished. This is one of the points where the Nie family predicament and Huaisang's gender journey converge conceptually, because they both have to do with watching yourself become further and further from that boy you were on the other side of time.

she feels a renewed sense of clarity about the path ahead. She knows that it’s the product of poor sleep having cleared away all but the most essential functions of her mind, and as such will not last, but she’ll make use of it. She has places to be this morning: other debts to pay, other judgements to proclaim, if only to herself.

On some level, this fic is my response to tedious “redemption arc” discourse. The question of whether Huaisang “deserves” to live or “deserves” happiness is neither very useful nor interesting, in terms of all of the questions one could explore with this narrative. “Redemption” in the culturally Christian sense isn’t a particularly relevant ethical framework here, but don't think I came to any particularly solid answers about what to replace it with. I think that's fine, though. The impossibility of determining justice is a Theme Of The Untamed/Mo Dao Zu Shi, so it's whatever.

But it doesn’t matter now. I have, of course, already forgiven you a thousand times over. I think there is something missing in me that allows for regret, or else it takes on strange forms, but the regret which I feel regards my failure to help you more in life.

The Nie Mingjue letter is technically the earliest written scene in the fic; a lot of it originally came from a scene I cut from river, where Nie Huaisang goes to Nie Mingjue's tablet and speaks to him. It got switched to a letter both to make it work with the rest of these Gusu scenes and to fit the epistolary motif. Take another shot, because I have genuinely never made myself cry harder while writing than I did writing the first version of that scene and I teared up pretty much every time I edited it, too.

After parting with Wei Wuxian, Nie Huaisang’s body begins rustling with faint tremors; she returns to her own rooms, vomits—mostly stomach fluid—into a basin, rinses her mouth, drinks some tea to ward away the morning chill, and then carries on with her morning’s tasks.

Huaisang throwing up from experiencing the Dennis Reynolds “I'm having feelings again, like some kind of fourteen year old kid” emotional state is another example of how I wrote this fic by going “She feels so bad that she's almost nauseous” -> “Why am I stopping there. She feels so bad that she literally vomits and then has to pull herself together and continue with the plan of going to not-apologize to her ex-boyfriend.” Why settle for anything less than high melodrama? It's not like this is going to be the last straw that scares away my sensitive readers who got this far by reading only delicate subject matter handled in good taste.

Nie Huaisang is gazing into the middle distance, weighing cost and benefit with an expression of abstract concern, when the door flies open. Jiang Cheng emerges; he’s saying something to his nephew, but he breaks off in the middle of his sentence when he sees her.

My vision for the dove bad end timeline, which diverges here: Nie Huaisang never contacts Jiang Cheng again before leaving for her transgender sabbatical, and then she comes back to the jianghu a few years later to officially leave her role as sect leader only to find out that Jiang Cheng got into a loveless political marriage like, six months after she left him, within which he's produced 1.5 children. They proceed to have a torrid and mutually resentful affair which Jiang Cheng feels guilty and self-hating about (Huaisang just feels self-hating, not so much guilty), before that inevitably blows up as well. Thank god that didn't happen, huh!

“You really wanted to take me home with you?”

Never before have I been so invested in the idea of my ship getting MARRIED. (I looked at this fanart a million times like “OP really gets it”.) It’s actually pretty out of character for me, since a lot of my fic ends with my ship at “It's complicated”. I'm usually satisfied if the relationship has changed them both in a meaningful way and there’s some degree of hope for the future. I find it really compelling to think about people figuring out a way to exist in the world and be in relationship with each other that actually fits them personally and reflects things about their individual selfhoods and wants, as well as social constraints. That all kind of came into play here anyway, though, because it’s not that these two getting married is the obvious, natural step, but something they have to be brave in reaching out for. But they do, and it's cute, and we get to follow some more classic romance novel beats, including a pretty played-straight HEA/HFN. This would be too saccharine for me to enjoy if the whole story followed those rules, because I am “guy who hates fluff”, so that’s part of what all the heavier emotional undercurrents are for—the emotions are very heightened and stylized in both cases, and I found it pretty natural to integrate them with each other. The heavier subject matter also kept me from getting sick of my own story for being too sweet and wish-fulfillment-y—which isn’t a bad thing, just not really where my heart or narrative wheelhouse lies.

Nie Huaisang hasn’t failed to realize that she has walked up to one of the precipices of her life: a moment the result of which will determine the choices given to her by all that follow. It frightens her, but less than she would expect. She’s running out of fear, and all that it leaves behind is suffocating lightness.

This whole Sangcheng reconciliation scene is so silly and corny, I honestly love it and it was delightful to write.

“Imagining My Man” came up on shuffle while I was really in the throes with this chapter; I went to go look up the lyrics, and whoever had edited the Genius page included this interview bite from Aldous Harding, which was a real right-words-at-the-right-time moment.



This brought me back to earth and reminded me of what the story is really about at the most basic level. Even though there are other elements to it, at the end of the day it's just about the tender and frightening experience of being in love.

EPILOGUE

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, from “IT WAS LIKE THIS: YOU WERE HAPPY”


As if this post can’t get more embarrassing, my internal soundtrack to the epilogue… was Harvest Moon by Neil Young.

The epilogue went through a number of different forms. For a while, I was intending on writing a jump to a year or two after Chapter 11, when Huaisang has returned to seclusion and everyone is attending Wangxian's wedding, but that would probably require me to write another 10k and I didn't have the stamina. Then I was thinking about just doing letters, and then just doing the Huaisang vacation/Jiang Cheng visit vignettes, and then just letters again, and in the end I decided to do them both, and I'm fairly happy with how that turned out as an ending note.

I had a couple specific images in mind, like Huaisang piercing her own ears, or puttering around buying groceries in this small town and LARPing as a normal person and not an obscenely wealthy member of the gentry, as well as some miscellaneous sexcanons that I thought were intriguing and/or funny, so those mostly got rolled in. I feel like 20% bad that I made everyone read foot stuff to get to the happy ending of this fic, but it's quite mild and I couldn't deny the voice in my head that was like “they do foot stuff whether you like it or not”.

She does her best to stay focused on the last piece of mail she has to read, and not let him see the effect his touch has on her, but by the time he makes it to her ankle, she’s at the bottom of the letter, and her eyes keep sliding over the characters in a futile attempt to maintain her own focus.

I hope it's not too jarring that the cutesy epilogue veers back to them having weird sex but I didn't want to end on a note of, like, “now that they're in love they're going to settle down to being a vanilla boring straight couple As They Should Be.” Also it was fun to write and I missed it </3 They are sex freaks

and then it’s an embarrassingly short length of time before Nie Huaisang is nodding frantically and gasping, “Yes, yes, yes,” until she hears a gust of breath, and Jiang Cheng leans back just enough to demand “Yes what?”, sounding more indignant and confused than any man in his position ought to sound, and Nie Huaisang laughs a little. Isn’t it clear? Yes, Jiang Cheng, yes. Yes.

I deliberately didn't want the prose style in the epilogue to be too analytical, because Huaisang is such a crafty person and I wanted her happy ending to be about accessing a different kind of emotional space, one where cleverness isn't a matter of life and death. I must assume this is the reason my brain went to “ripping off James Joyce” as a note to end on. Clown emoji.

Inspired by kitsch, I had a whole, like 700 word list of “what happens next” stuff that I planned to include in the final A/N, but I had to cut it because I ran into AO3's character limit and my acknowledgements were more important. However, here's some of the highlights:

• Nie Huaisang isn’t gone for all that long. Upon returning to the jianghu proper, she delivers a slightly-more-convincing version of the bullshit story she fed JC about getting forcefemmed by kooky cultivation side effects; namely, that she started qi deviating and had to take Drastic Measures which had the unintended consequence of inducing Rule 63, haha so weird right but what can you do! In the grand tradition of historical trans people claiming to have been struck by bolts of lightning that changed their gender, after a while people are like “I mean… I guess?” and move on.


• Lan Xichen begins to emerge from seclusion in a limited capacity during the time that Wangxian are on their backpacking elopement trip and Huaisang is “in seclusion”. He and Huaisang do in fact see each other again at Wangxian’s wedding, but they mutually keep their distance and manage to go basically the rest of their lives without having to interact directly, which is for the best.


• Totally-real-qi-deviation(-and-subsequent-magical-Rule-63) is also the excuse for Huaisang to bow out of sect leadership, and in the end some lucky (?) third cousin is going to get the Princess Diaries treatment. Doing Julie Andrews to their Anne Hathaway (including explaining the ugly truth about sabre cultivation and Huaisang’s opinions about where to go from here—have fun with that, new Nie-zongzhu!) will eat up the next few years of Huaisang’s life.


• Before too long, though, the mantle will be officially passed off, and Sangcheng do, indeed, get married at Lotus Pier. It’s very sweet. Jin Ling is like ??!?!!?!?!?!?! about the whole thing but still cries at the wedding.


• Huaisang is going to eventually live out her middle age and later years as a eccentric hobbyist art collector and antiques appraiser. Xianxia Isabella Stewart Gardner. She also spends not-infrequent stints of time in Qinghe, enjoying the mountain air and meddling in sect affairs as much as plausible deniability allows—she has significantly more investment in steering the direction of QHN off the record than she does in trying to do influence Jiang Cheng’s day job, beyond giving unsolicited advice and trying to get him to take more time off.


• The mentioned-in-one-line-of-the-extra orphaned child of one of Jiang Cheng’s disciples will eventually become his unofficial ward and eventual heir (poor unfortunate soul). Jiang Cheng refuses to acknowledge that this situation bears ANY resemblance to certain other situations in the past.


• Nie Huaisang’s life choices of a) transitioning, b) abandoning sect leadership, and c) getting married to Jiang Cheng actually do go pretty far towards making reconciliation with Wei Wuxian possible, because these are bananas things to do if you’re maintaining an active career as a supervillain hidden in plain sight, and make him realize that the old silly and sweet version of Nie Huaisang isn’t completely dead. Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian will never be close again, but the proxies of Nie Huaisang and Jin Ling give them opportunities to interact in a not-completely-deranged way without ever having to actually admit to wanting to spend time together or repair their relationship, which is… something? “Guy who I make awkward conversation with at my nephew’s parties and who sometimes goes to brunch with my wife”=probably the healthiest situation for them outside of going to family counselling, which they will never do.


• Jiang Cheng’s boat dad era is real and it is coming. At last, woman (singular) wants him, fish fear him.

I had about five different playlists for this fic, for different moods/genres, and many of them are pretty loose in terms of relevance, but here's something. Not my best work, but, well.

Other works which notably impacted the evolution of this fic which I haven't yet referenced:

Imaginary Boys by busaikko: with the caveat that this story is pretty old in trans-fanfic-years (i.e. was written in the 2000s) and reads as accordingly dated in some ways, this SGA fic (note: I have never watched a single episode of SGA) that I unearthed is probably the closest other piece of fanfic I've found to this one. It’s a fairly long and meaty story about the protagonist's decision to transition as a fully established adult in a high-profile and gendered position of authority, wherein the protagonist also has a complicated romantic relationship with a cis guy, which is central to the narrative but also not the entirety of it. I have some relatively minor criticisms, but overall it holds up decently well and was helpful to me in terms of being reassured that I wasn't insane for trying to write this fic.

“Shannon knows she's not stupid. Cam's got problems and issues. She can see him marrying some Midwest farmer's daughter, just to make his family and his commanding officers happy.

But right now, he's interested in her and her city, and it feels like having a boyfriend. Shannon's so damn tired of being the only one of her friends who hasn't got someone. She likes being able to go to her room after dinner and put on something comfortable, knowing that there won't be any disasters in the night, and she likes knowing that Cam'll come around and probably stay the night. They don't have awkward silences; Cam loves talking about football and video games and crappy action movies and flying.

Shannon supposes that she's shallow to fall for someone who's basically the man she's been trying to be all her life. She has a type, apparently.

"Wish you didn't have to go,” she says the night before Cam leaves. She's lying on the sofa with her head in Cam's lap. She could really get used to this.

“I'll be back in two weeks,” Cam says, playing with her hair. Shannon's exactly one week overdue for a haircut, but it's worth the risk. She wishes she could just keep growing it out, so that the next time she sees Cam – except that with her hair it'd probably just be a bigger mess, she reminds herself. “I don't think you're going to disappear before then.”

“Knock on wood,” Shannon says.

When Cam comes back the next time, he's there for five days. He brings Shannon presents: cookies his mother baked, comic books and DVDs. They have dinner in her room one night, and she locks the door and asks Cam if he'd mind if she wore makeup. He blinks at her and then says Sure, go ahead. She feels knotted up the way she does when he sees her naked, and she's only ever put on makeup when she's alone, so she's pretty sure she's doing it wrong, using too much. Cam watches her, leaning in the doorway, bringing her a tissue to blot her lipstick. After they eat, she says she should go wash her face and Cam says Don't, I want to mess you up.“

Also some selections from the Fucking Trans Women zine by Mira Bellwether. You can buy the zine for $10 USD, and I think it's worth reading just as a piece of trans writing/memoir/etc. besides its intended utility as a sex ed document. I think the below page is the reason there are so many bath scenes in this fic:



I could go on, but I think I've listed most of the crucial things I wanted to hit on, and I'm literally going to hit the absurdly high Dreamwidth character limit at this rate.

I’m sure there are a lot of missed opportunities and underdeveloped elements of this story. it almost certainly would be more cohesive and better paced if it wasn’t written and published serially, but I don’t have the stamina to write fanfiction of this length without serialized publishing, so it’s simply the way it is. I hope that people continue to be gentle with it in their responses, both because of the sensitive nature of a lot of the subject matter and because of how much experimenting I felt I had to do just to figure out what this story could be. It felt creatively risky in a way little else I've written has. That being said, the feedback I've gotten has been overwhelmingly lovely and I'm very grateful, since I was legitimately braced for bad shit and only had one instance of someone dropping transmisogynist slurs in my inbox, and that was from Tomie the ex-Sangcheng-troll who would just go post unhinged shit in random people's replies all the time so this was not a me issue. Also I think she retired not long after, so, cheers babe.

Anyway, if any of this was at all interesting to you, you have any burning questions, just want to say hi, etc., please sound off in the comments; I miss the journal site format.

Comments

[rhodochrosite]

firstly congratulations on finishing this fic <33 secondly i really enjoyed reading this commentary!!! your process / the way you plan and think through things is soooo fascinating (guy who kind of has zero writing process at all but also could literally never sustain anything of this epic length) and your concepts and writing are always so amazing to me :') i think you are so funny and clever. this post was very fun thank you for sharing!!

[headstone]

Ashhhhfbxjfh I'm amazed you read this post... about this insanely silly story... I had a lot of fun tho and who knows, one day maybe the unthwartable longfic urge will come for you too 😋

[rigormorphis]

(I am reading this now and am <3 excited <3 but I want to link this now before I get to the end of the post and forget: there's an archived version of that tumblr post by baeddel that's still readable!)

[headstone]

God for some reason it's still displaying as hidden due to safe mode even though I'm pretty sure I've turned safe mode off? Tumblr what is your fucking deallll (❤ I hope you enjoy it!)

[rigormorphis]

LMAO I accidentally linked you the post itself instead of the archived link like an absolute genius, I'll come back with it when I'm actually at my computer again!!

[rigormorphis]

HERE https://web.archive.org/web/20191010132444/https://baeddel.tumblr.com/post/188190085467/i-just-got-out-from-the-terf-pit-and-i-dont

[headstone]

THANK YOU!!! I updated the link <333 I'm genuinely really glad to have access to a version of that post again, since I think about it a lot.

[verity]

thank you for sharing all your process thoughts and commentary, I loved reading them! Your thoughtfulness and enjoyment definitely came through in your writing. Id fic truly can be so magical ✨

also omg I haven’t thought about that stargate fic in years, that and another fic by busaikko were some of the first trans fics I read.

[belacqua]

(please take my icon as a stand-in for a Jiang Cheng icon)

I've been so looking forward to this and it was such a joy to read! I kept smiling to myself while reading :') I'm glad you and I, if no one else, understand the joy of DVD commentaries / writing discussion in general for things you haven't read. I also love a well-organized DW post this is so nice..

Most of this I was already familiar with but I loved getting the full context! I particularly enjoyed your discussion of Huaisang (I had to sit for a minute with living in the bad timeline of your own life.. [gestures at canon NHS having his high school crush resurrected as part of an elaborate scheme to avenge his brother] what ffnet author would do this). I know the character pretty well by now but this post helped The Vision coalesce for me. When you're such a mystery to yourself that you take xianxia HRT without admitting to yourself that you want the side effects :(( Every excerpt with NHS/LWJ was also extremely funny (uninvited and luminous, as if actively trying to make everyone else look shabby). Huaisang's resentment + how heavily she's projecting comes across really well, and the image you've painted here of post-dove Sangcheng/Wangxian interactions is gold.

A few lines I snipped, because your writing hits very well:

Does Wei Wuxian know how lucky he is, to have returned from death at such high cost, with a man by his side who looks at his wreck of a life and says that it’s good, that he deserves to be held?

Nie Huaisang wonders how long it’s been since anyone touched any part of Jiang Cheng’s body like it was weak instead of strong.

when touched like this, she’s grateful to still have a body

It's not that being in love absolves a person, but that in this case it's the final push necessary to reactivate empathetic ways of relating to the world, which is a disorienting and painful process — this is obviously from your commentary, and we've already discussed this a bit, but just picture me punching the air at how eloquently you phrased it <3 it's easy to escape your own moral judgment when you've decided to extricate yourself from the world, sucks to have someone love you and make you feel like a person again! Being a person is so hard.

Congratulations again on finishing!!! I'm SO glad you got such good feedback after the stress over whether or not to post, it's absolutely deserved. And thank you for sharing this — you talking about writing is always very motivating for me, the passion!! If you end up doing a mercies commentary you know I'll be there in a heartbeat.