So...a week ago Monday, I started rereading MDZS.
Like, I actually did nothing else on that Monday except read MDZS; no internet, no TV, no games, nothing but reading. I thought reading a gay romance novel from China in which two tyrannical dictators and a couple more would-be tyrants were thoroughly defeated was a good way to show my spite and disgust at something else that was happening in the real world that day.
I ended up getting partway into volume three of the official translation in that first day. (They had just defeated the Xuanwu of Slaughter when I finally stopped reading and went to bed.) So, in one day I got through about 2 and 1/3 volumes. The remaining 2 and 2/3 volumes took me six more days to get through. 😅 (I.E., I finished on the following Monday. Well, except some of the bonus chapters. Those were still pending and didn't end up finished until yesterday.) Admittedly, I barely even opened the book at all on Saturday because I ended up having to spend most of the day out of the house actually doing things.
Anyway.
Rereading the novel really jammed my face down into the reality that I have been doing a very bad job in trying to recreate the characters in my fanfiction. (It also really forced me to notice how sloppy my memory was of various things about the novel, including that I had been convinced the Yi City arc ended in volume one when it was actually entirely in volume two.)
Okay, technically, I'm not too bad at writing for Lan Wangji, since he rarely ever talks, and his behavior is mostly "look cold, stare at Wei Wuxian, defend Wei Wuxian from any and all physical risks, be spontaneously horny with Wei Wuxian when no one is looking," etc. When he does talk, I'm at maybe 50% accuracy at best. Though technically that's his behavior after he fully accepts his own feelings. It's unclear even in the novel exactly when he stopped denying his feelings for Wei Wuxian. Definitely by the time they're trapped together in the cave on Mount Muxi, but did he fully accept his feelings by the time of the Qishan Grand Symposium? Or did he flip out about the forehead ribbon thing specifically because he was still denying his feelings? (Though if that's the case, then there's an inconsistency in the bonus stories that show him with the bunnies in the time after Wei Wuxian was kicked out of Cloud Recesses but before the Grand Symposium, because he sure seems to know he's crushing on Wei Wuxian in those stories. Or maybe not. I dunno; we're almost never told what he's thinking, so it's hard to tell sometimes if his behavior is consciously dictated by his romantic feelings or unconsciously dictated by them.)
Who I'm really worst at, unfortunately, is Wei Wuxian himself. He has this blend of arrogance and charm that I can't even begin to approach, unfortunately. I also fall flat on getting Jiang Cheng's temper right, too, particularly in the sense of the kinds of things he says when he's really angry. (Fortunately, I tend to write AUs in which he and Wei Wuxian never become estranged, so there is at least that much less anger in Jiang Cheng's general life in my fics.)
The way the plot weaves together across the two time periods and the fact that once you know what's going on you can see all sorts of indications of what people are doing and thinking behind the scenes is also really impressive across such a long work. She must have really planned it out very carefully and extensively in advance.
On the other hand, there's also a lot of spots that are inconsistent, too, so it feels sort of like maybe giving it an editing pass before it went from the internet to the printed page might have been a good idea, but I guess that's just not how it's done when a web novel graduates to physical editions. (Mostly those had to do with more minor things like Jin Ling's age, but there were also a few other things, especially in that Wei Wuxian's attitude towards Lan Wangji at the start of the novel is actually pretty inconsistent with his attitude towards Lan Wangji right before his own death, so it's like his memory issues had temporarily made him forget how friendly they were...?)
Another thing I thought of that was probably obvious to everyone else right from the start was another point in the Xue Yang as "shadowy reflection" of Wei Wuxian line of thought. (I've discussed this idea before in a post about Xue Yang and another one just about the comparisons between Wei Wuxian and the trio from the Yi City arc.)
Specifically, what I spontaneously realized was that both Xue Yang and Wei Wuxian were ultimately destroyed because of a single act involving ~fifty people, an act for which they were universally condemned. But even this highlights the differences between them, even though the cultivation world reacted the same way to both acts. Because Xue Yang's act was to slaughter the fifty-ish people in the Chang Clan, in order to repay with interest an old grudge of his, punishing an already dead man by killing his entire family. But Wei Wuxian's act was to save the fifty-ish Wen Clan remnants being held in inhumane conditions, repaying a debt to an already dead friend by rescuing this small number of his fellow Wens. (Also in the process reviving said dead friend as a fierce corpse, and allowing him to avenge himself by killing the guards who had murdered him, which was of course the larger part of what the rest of the cultivation world was upset about, but...)
In both cases, these acts led directly to their deaths (though at least Wei Wuxian's death wasn't permanent, lol!), and everyone around them acted as though the action was entirely indefensible. Well, everyone except Lan Wangji and Mianmian, in Wei Wuxian's case, as Lan Wangji refused to condemn his beloved Wei Ying for any reason (and especially not for what was at the bottom line an act of mercy!), and Mianmian was the only voice of reason willing to point out that killing four guards who had murdered their own prisoners was hardly an act of indiscriminate slaughter.
So...mostly I have no actual point here, as usual.
I guess what really hit me was just the fact that in both cases the number of people is "about fifty." That simply had to be intentional, you know?
Hmmm...now...what else did I want to say?
I've been planning to make this post since Monday, so....I've sorta lost a lot of the other details...
Might have been something about how I'm trying to get writing again, and since my VN idea is still stalled at the planning stage, I'll probably dive into another fanfic instead. And given my reflection on how badly I've been doing at portraying the characters, I should probably go for one of the AU ideas I have where Wei Wuxian is raised somewhere other than Lotus Pier, or at least leaves it very early on.
Oh!
There's also the whole "bingo" thing.
On one of the game dev Discord servers I'm part of, people were posting "bingo" cards for their goals for the upcoming year. (This was in like late December I think.) The original form seems to have been for plans for artists regarding pieces they wanted to make in the next year, but people were adapting them to game dev and general life instead. And I did one, too. As "Reread MDZS" was on my bingo card, that means I've filled out one of the squares! (Two, actually, because at the time I couldn't think of anything to put in the last square, so I left it as "figure out something to put here" and I did figure something out to put there, namely "figure out how to deal with suddenly being lactose intolerant" so...)
Anyway, here's the updated version of the bingo card.
The way I organized those, though. It's like physically impossible for me to get any bingos since I just stuck things on there in the order in which I thought of them, except for a few I had to move to different squares 'cause they didn't fit due to the flower decorations making some of the squares smaller. I should scramble them to be random so a bingo would actually be possible.
I would say that I'm working on reducing my console backlog, since I'm now in the later stages of finishing up a game I got via a Kickstarter, and I've finished with Metaphor reFantazio (which was absolutely epic, though the massive length of the post-final-battle sequence was killing me because of how late at night it was when I started the final battle), only just last week I got a package from PlayAsia with three more games in it. 😅 So even when I finish the game I'm playing now, my backlog will still have increased by one since I put that task on my bingo card.
Anyway, about that game I'm playing. It's called Roots of Pacha, and it's a cozy farming sim with a "Stone Age" setting. (I put it in quotes because at the start of the game you're the first person ever to practice agriculture, and by the end of the story section of the game (which I hit in Year 2) you're using bronze tools. So that covered like five or six thousand years of human pre-history. My archaeology is too strong for this game. 😅 But I knew that going in. And it does at least say as you boot up the game that it's not supposed to represent reality in any way, just a hypothetical conjecture kind of thing.)
The reason I bring up the name of the game is because this one character's portrait for some reason makes me think of Jin Zixuan and I have literally no idea why. This is the character's portrait (which I borrowed from someone's Steam guide to the game, someone who had way higher friendship with him than I do):
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...
...hmm.
If I had anything else to say, I've forgotten it.
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