A to Z: Wei Wuxian

 

    The most obvious of obvious choices, to the point that I've already outright said this is who I was going to be talking about today. 🤣  Because I can't help loving this adorable little gremlin.

Just look at that cute little gremlin face!  (played by Xiao Zhan)

    So...as per most of my other Mo Dao Zu Shi-related posts this month, I won't bother trying to explain the plot of the original novel, and will just give a brief encapsulation of the character and how I've written him in my fan fiction.

    Being the lead of the original novel, there's obviously a lot to say about who Wei Wuxian is and what he's like.  And I won't do a very good job at summing that up, because I have a tendency to fall flat on such matters. 😰  Um.  Anyway.

    Wei Wuxian is his courtesy name, and his birth name is Wei Ying.  To describe who he is kind of requires talking about where he came from and how he was raised, so prepare for a long diatribe that MDZS fans already know all the details of. 😅

    His parents are the wandering cultivator Cangse-sanren and Wei Changze, and even before he was born he was already causing trouble, in a way, because his mother's arrival at Lotus Pier made the young Jiang Fengmian (who was either the heir to the Jiang Clan or its young leader at the time, not sure which off-hand, if we even know) fall in love with her, despite that he was already engaged to Yu Ziyuan.  We don't have the full story on what happened, but at some point after Jiang Fengmian broke off his engagement Cangse-sanren eloped with Wei Changze (whose position in the Jiang Clan is translated as being a "servant" but I don't think it's quite as low a position as the word "servant" would indicate in, say, a Medieval Europe setting) instead, despite that (or maybe because) both of them were likely 100% aware of Jiang Fengmian's feelings.  But then Cangse-sanren and Wei Changze died when their son was very small.  (The live-action drama specified that he was four; I don't recall off-hand if the book gave an exact year, but probably in that general age range there, too.)  With no relations around, little Wei Ying ended up living in the streets of Yiling and having to fend for himself, including living off of scraps of food out of the garbage.

    Around the time he was eight, Jiang Fengmian found him, though by this point he had been living alone in the streets so long that all he could remember was that his name had a "Ying" in it.  😭  Jiang Fengmian brought him back to Lotus Pier, where he raised the boy alongside his own two children, Jiang Yanli (then about twelve) and Jiang Cheng (then about eight), though since he had ended up married to Yu Ziyuan anyway, he wasn't allowed to officially adopt Wei Ying, because she was punishing the child for problems caused by his mother.  😰  Jiang Yanli took to her new not-quite-brother straight away, but Jiang Cheng was bitter after having his three puppies taken away (because Wei Ying had become deathly afraid of dogs after being bitten by stray dogs so many times as they also wanted the scraps of food in the garbage) and only after nearly driving Wei Ying to run away from Lotus Pier did he finally also accept him as a part of the family.  Yu Ziyuan never did accept him, though, forcing Wei Ying to address her husband as Jiang-shushu rather than as his adoptive father, or even as his clan leader or teacher.  (Because the teacher/student relationship is an inherently paternal one (in terminology, if nothing else) that would have meant she was accepting a maternal position in regards to the boy if she allowed him to address her husband as his teacher.  And she was having none of that.)

    However, despite Yu Ziyuan's animosity, Wei Wuxian grew up happy at Lotus Pier, and as soon as he started his cultivation training, he proved himself not only the best of his generation at Lotus Pier, but one of the best his age in any clan.  That gave him a decided arrogant streak, on top of his self-indulgent whims, his competitiveness, and general happy-go-lucky attitude most of the time.  However, he also has a temper, which at first is only vented at anyone who would dare to insult his precious shijie, Jiang Yanli.  After the plot gets going, his temper turns from minor fights with Jin Zixuan to wreaking bloody and sometimes outright horrifying revenge on anyone who dares to harm those Wei Wuxian cares about.  In the final year or so of his life (the life he loses at the start of the novel, only to promptly get a new one in the next chapter, though that's over a decade later), he spirals into some very dark places, mentally, and his behavior can be exceptionally off-putting in that period.  (Fortunately, that period is a pretty short part of the novel...)

    He likes to style himself as a "bad boy" (especially in the second life that is the novel's present, where he seems to delight in the fact that many of his past actions are "nefarious") but he's actually quite dutiful (eg when returning to Lotus Pier for the first time in roughly fifteen years, one of the first things he wants to do is to go to the Ancestral Hall and pay his respects to Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan as if they were his real parents (despite the way Yu Ziyuan treated him his entire life)) and very concerned with doing what's right and protecting the innocent.  He's friendly and outgoing until someone crosses him, and then look out!  Up until he realizes he's in love with Lan Wangji, he's a terrible flirt with almost every pretty girl he sees, though he never attempted to do more than flirt with any of them.

    Okay, so I think that managed to sum up most of his personality and the situations that led him to become the way he is.  So that means I can finally discuss my own attempts to write about him.  (Though I still struggle to get him characterized correctly...)

A to Z: Very Vexing, Verena

 

    You would think that with fairly common names like Vincent and Victor out there that I wouldn't have any trouble finding a V-named character for today.

    Problem is, in an older phase of my writing journey, I used to write fan fiction for certain JRPGs like Final Fantasy VII and the Suikoden series.  In the former, one of my favorite characters was Vincent Valentine, and in the latter one of my favorite characters was Viktor.  Consequently, I wrote about those characters a fair amount, and it's made it between hard and impossible for me to use those names (or variations on them) in other contexts.  So, I don't have any characters by those names, and I really didn't want to have to cite any writing quite that old, because it was really, really, really, really not good.

    That's left me with the character of Verena to write about.  She's from the untitled novel I wrote for 2012's NaNoWriMo.  Which I posted in entirely unedited form on AO3 a few years back just as a way to preserve it.  Because in many respects it is utterly awful--I hated it so much that as soon as I finished writing it, I never even opened the file again for almost ten years--but in some respects it's actually better than what I write now, because at least things actually happen in it, and with a lot less chatter in between events.  I think some of the pacing is due to the narrative style, actually, that and I was thinking of it as a JRPG.

    Somewhat hilariously, considering what I said just two paragraphs ago, the novel is actually a rewrite of and expansion on an unfinished Final Fantasy VII fanfic.  I had written a very brief story wherein Yuffie Kisaragi ended up transported into the real world, where she kept finding all these signs that maybe her world was just a dream, but they didn't quite add up, and then some FBI agents visited her about some attacks in her area, and she reluctantly told them the whole story of FFVII, since she shouldn't have known their faces for them to be in her dream.  (Her telling of the story was of course skipped over, and the narration merely said that the tale took her several hours to relate.)  But then I didn't know how to handle the final confrontation as Sephiroth attempted to enter the real world, so the fic just sort of died unfinished (as is not unusual for such things).  Anyway, so in the NaNo novel, it was standard third person narration for the plucky young girl being dragged into the ocean by monsters and emerging inside a bathtub in our world, then most of the novel was first person narration as she tells the tale of the grand adventure that had taken place prior to her dunking to the two agents who came to her door.  In addition to borrowing liberally in terms of story elements and character types from Final Fantasy VII (though the one filling Vincent's story role didn't really have much in common with him aside from being hot and taciturn) a lot of the characters were painfully blatantly based on Suikoden characters...though mostly characters from Suikoden III, so Viktor wasn't one of them.  (One other borrowed thing, which I think was unintentional, was that when I needed a name for a water buffalo-like animal, I ended up calling it an armu.  That, it turned out, was the name of a large grazing herbivore in Xenoblade Chronicles, but I guess it had been long enough since I had played that on the Wii that I had forgotten.  😰  Having not too long ago finally gotten around to playing the HD remastered version on the Switch, I now remember that name. 😅)

    Anyway, long story short, it was really bad and excessively derivative.  I don't think I was wrong to just dump it as unworthy of the effort of rewriting.

    But it is something I can talk about and say "here's a link to it" at the end, so...🤷🏻‍♀️

A to Z: Umbra the Unknown

 

    Yeah, this one's weird, but really!  How many names start with U?  (And yes, I do know that "Umbra" is not usually a name.  But it's what I had.)

    So...I wanted to make a quick visual novel for Winter Jam 2022, but I didn't want to have to deal with artists, because I don't work well with others.  Fortunately, there are plenty of artists who sell (or sometimes make available for free) their work on itch.io for people to use to make games.  And after looking around for a while at my choices, I decided on a pair of little cuties...

Character art by Minttydrops

    But the names they came with didn't fit what I was going for, so I wanted to give them new names.  And I settled on Lux and Umbra.  The plot of the game is quite simple:  the two little girls are on the wrong side of a forest and it's almost dinner time, so they decide--or rather Lux decides and drags Umbra with her--to pass through the forest instead of going around it.  It's a menu-driven exploration game, essentially, with a few adventure game-style item puzzles to proceed (though hopefully the puzzles don't quite exhibit the full moon logic of some of the classic adventure games of the 1990s), and it's impossible to lose, because the girls aren't in any danger.  (Plus they both pick up and use the necessary items automatically, so even if a player feels stuck, all they have to do is visit every single location and something will happen.)

    Umbra is an oddity of a character.

    On the one hand, she is serious and often left extremely alarmed by the actions of the zany, flighty Lux.

    On the other hand, she talks exclusively in emojis.

A to Z: Teukros and Tekmessa

 

    Technically, I was also considering Thetis, but I decided I had slightly more interesting content for Teukros.  So, starting from the top:  Teukros (better known by his Roman name, Teucer) is the son of Telamon by a concubine.  In the Iliad, the identity of that concubine is not specified, nor are her Trojan origins mentioned (though they can still be surmised even there), but in all later works his mother is specifically Hesione, elder sister of King Priam.  (Which actually makes for one of the spots in the mythic chronology of Troy that feels off.  But that would take several posts to go into in any depth, so I'll leave it for some other time.)   The name Teukros proves his Trojan ancestry pretty efficiently, because Teukros was also the name of one of the mythic founders of Troy, hence that "Teucrian" is one of the words used to describe people or things as being in some manner Trojan.

    Although Teukros features prominently in Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, there's also nothing particularly exceptional about him there; he pretty much just follows the standard "devoted brother of Aias" routine that's set out in the original myths.  Which is not to say that he deviates from that in the Atalanta and Ariadne books!  Far from it!  It's just that being set almost twenty years after the war's end, I get to portray an older Teukros, king of a prosperous realm (and particularly wealthy and powerful because he controls copper mines that were so important to making bronze for weapons and armor!), father of a teenage daughter, and proud uncle who had raised Eurysakes to be his father's equal in just about every way.  (Which is only deviating from the myths in that there he would not have gotten to raise his nephew in the original version.)

            “Certainly, [the events in Egypt that were just under discussion] happened long enough ago that the princess wouldn’t know anything about it,” the king added, with a chuckle that made his nephew blush.
            “What, another fiancée?” Atalanta asked, laughing.
            “Of course not,” Eurysakes answered instantly.  It was quite possibly the fastest speech that Ariadne had ever heard from him.  “Egyptian royalty can only marry Egyptian royalty.”
            “That’s the only thing stopping her, from what I’ve heard,” King Teukros confided in the girls, making Eurysakes’ blush grow deeper.
            “I’d never have guessed you were so popular with women,” Ariadne teased him.
            “It’s not that,” he insisted, somewhat weakly.
            “I fail to see what else it could be,” the king laughed.  “You have a gift with the ladies that your father lacked.  Probably because your face looks so like your mother’s.”
            At the moment, Eurysakes’ face looked more like a pomegranate, it had turned so dark.  Ariadne actually started to feel a little sorry for him, so she decided to change the subject.

    Just being devoted and loving doesn't mean he can't do a little teasing. 😉  However, there's actually not much I can quote about Teukros in the present of the novels, because his sole appearance is so deeply mired in the overarching plot of the series that his scenes wouldn't make any sense out of context. 😅  So I'll just talk about the prologue to book five, since I omitted it from the post on Patroclos.

A to Z: Strangely Superfluous S

 

    Again, my writing is weirdly low on S-named characters.  It's not that there aren't any, it's just that somehow they fail to be significant.  (This is made all the more frustrating because apparently "Sally" is my go-to random female name the way "Freddy" is for random male names; I found at least four of them just in looking over everything I had written in the last 10-12 years, and I'm quite sure there were more I just didn't stumble across.)

    So, like I did with Q, I thought today I'd just provide some quotes and tidbits about various S-named characters.  For whatever reason, they're all fan fiction characters.  Not sure why my original works don't feature any major characters with an S-name, but...🤷🏻‍♀️

    Anyway, the first S-named character I can talk about is Shannon Hazelbourne from Velvet Goldmine, about whom I ought to have a lot to say, yet somehow I don't really?  (Doesn't help that it's hard to treat her consistently...)  Any discussion of Shannon is going to be rife with spoilers for the movie, so tread carefully beyond the "read more" tag!  (After Shannon, there are MDZS characters (and spoilers) to be found...)

A to Z: Randomly, Ramses II

 

    Okay, not exactly "random," but...I admit that it's a pretty weird choice.  Only strangely enough I don't have very many characters of any note whose names start with R.

    He's also a weird choice in that most people would not put the Trojan War as during the reign of Ramses II, but I do.  Or rather, I did for the Atalanta and Ariadne books, which then bled over into Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, albeit only slightly.  (He sends troops to aid the Trojans in year...seven or eight I think, though he's only identified as "Ramses" so it could be Ramses III, who's more in the time frame typically associated with the Trojan War.  In any case, it's a one-time event with minimal repercussions no matter what you do...unless the feud between Odysseus and Palamedes is still going on at the time...)  There are reasons for my placing the date of the Trojan War when I did, and as I'm trying to be more relaxed about these posts now, I'm just going to quote what I had to say on the subject in the timeline section available at the end of the interactive version of Scions of Troy:

         So, there’s a lot to say here, and much of it could be spoilers for later books in the series, meaning I can’t say a lot of what I would ideally want to. There is a “traditional” date for the Trojan War: 1184 BCE. This would have the war either beginning or ending (depending on whether you see that as the start date or finish date!) less than a decade before the Bronze Age Collapse.
         I couldn’t use that for obvious reasons! Even more so than the “having the girls travel through what would be their equivalent of a post-apocalyptic wasteland is not what I wanted” reason, there’s also the fact that the myths firmly establish that a good deal of time passes between the fall of Troy and the fall of the other citadels. (Though the ancient texts are not consistent about just how much time, to be honest. And of course they had them all fall to Dorian invaders when most of them seem to have fallen more to earthquakes than to warfare.)

    My original drafts had assumed "about 1250" for the fall of Troy, but that meant that the girls were going to arrive in one of the locations for the later books at a time of great upheaval, and I preferred to avoid that.  So I shifted things around a little more, and put the start of the Trojan War at around 1267 BCE...which is about the same time that the Hittite Empire was going through upheavals as Hattusili III was overthrowing his nephew, Mursili III.  Meaning that the Hittites would have been much too busy to send aid to Troy!  I was so pleased by that coincidence that I decided that, as far as my personal headcanon is concerned, that simply was the date of the Trojan War.  (The deposed Mursili III fled to Egypt, btw, and the political wrangling and threats of war as Hattusili III demanded he be returned lasted for nine years, thus handily both proving that the Hittites had too much else on their minds and that Ramses would have been unlikely to get involved.)

    Even better than the upheaval among the Hittites was the earthquake that struck around Mycenae in about 1250.  This earthquake forced the rebuilding of the citadel walls and was when the grave circles famously looted excavated by Schliemann were brought inside the walls.  Which made for a perfect time for, say, Orestes to carry out his act of vengeance for his father's murder.  And more importantly made an excellent opportunity for Korythos to oust Aineias as the post-war king of Troy.

    In other words, I ended up with a time that fits the larger picture of the war's place in the Late Bronze Age world really well (aside from making the Dorian invasion take place several decades before the Bronze Age Collapse 😰), so I was extremely pleased with it.

    Corollary to all this, because Ramses II had an incredibly long reign (1279-1213 BCE), that means he's still seated on the Egyptian throne when Atalanta and Ariadne first escape slavery around 1239 BCE.  And that means if I wanted them to visit Egypt--and of course I wanted them to visit Egypt!--then he's the man in charge when they get there.

    And when they get there is in book five, so it'll be a while before it's been rewritten...and it's probably going to change a lot in the rewrite.  (Partially because I didn't put in as much research as I should have at the time. 😅)

    That's not the only reason, but I'm going to talk about that after I address how I characterized Ramses in the original draft.  (Which will probably not change too much in the final draft...)  Obviously, it's a tricky thing, trying to write fiction involving a real historical personage.  Even more so considering that the ancient Egyptians did not keep the kind of records that tell us much about what their rulers were actually like as people.

A to Z: A Quirky Quartet of Qs

 

    Ahem.  Yeah.  Q is not easy when you're dealing with character names.  Though, somewhat absurdly, it would be easier for me if I was trying this at some future date after I've written a couple of other fan fiction projects I have planned.  But I haven't, so...I'm having to cobble together a post about characters who have been quite minor in what I've written so far.  Even worse, one of the characters is exclusively from something I haven't edited and posted yet, and two others get a lot more for me to talk about if I use their appearances in things I haven't edited and posted yet. 😰  (More and more proof that I may have decided on this theme without quite enough due thought...)

    Oh well.

    Let's get into it, then.

    I guess we can start with the one that's oldest.  In 2012, I hated my NaNoWriMo project so much that upon its completion I closed the file and didn't open it again for almost ten years.  At which time I read it to comfort myself that my new project was better than it was...only to feel like in many (most?) ways my new project was actually worse.  To provide myself a constant reminder that my skills seemed to be atrophying rather than improving, I posted the whole novel, unedited, to AO3.

    In that novel, the heroine's culture is kind of a hybrid of Chinese and Japanese, but the names are all Chinese, sourced from a writer's aid book on character names from different cultures/languages.  (Though rereading bits and pieces of it now that I have more knowledge of how Chinese names work, I'm not sure if I should say "I made mistakes" or just that I had that fantasy world's names work differently than Chinese names do, despite the names being linguistically identical.)  The heroine's childhood friend and kinda/sorta childhood sweetheart is named Qiu Yun.

    He's a sweet guy, a bit ruled by his passions, and gets himself killed in battle for the heroine's sake.

    There's, uh, not really a lot more to say about him than that.

    So...

    After that, chronologically, there's no other Q names until I started writing Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic, since Q names are not common in most languages.  (Unless one wanted a character (nick)named Queen.  Which technically some of my Suikoden fanfics had, since Queen is the name of a character in Suikoden III, but I'm endeavoring not to go back that far in selecting works for this.)

    As to the MDZS characters with Q names, unfortunately my own rules prevent me from using Wen Qing, about whom there's lots to say, since I'm going by the "whatever name is used first in speaking about them" meaning that for MDZS characters you have to use their family name, unless they haven't got one.

    Which is why I can use a-Qing for this, because she only has that name.  (Why MXTX put two different women with the given name Qing in the same book is a question, but not one I have any answer to.  Though the Netflix subtitles on the live-action version decided to get around that by changing a-Qing to a-Jing.)  Unfortunately, though I have some fics planned where a-Qing will play a much larger role, she basically only has cameos in the ones I've written so far, and one of the ones she cameos in hasn't been edited and posted yet.

    In canon, a-Qing is a fun character, and very much the type I've always enjoyed.  She's a smart-mouthed teenage thief, but also something of a con artist, in that she tricks people into believing she's blind, so she can also get hand-outs as well as using her alleged blindness to avoid (at least some of) the suspicion whenever something she's stolen is noticed to be missing.  The way she accomplishes this is that, somehow, she was born with pure white eyes, so she looks blind even though she can see.  (This was not the case in the live-action version.  For some reason, there she had normal eyes, so it's unclear why in the world she would have chosen the blind routine.)