Because all I can write right now without my heart freaking out is light fanfic, I've dived back into that, because I hate not writing. 😅 So, I wanted to share a comment I left on the second draft of an already completed fanfic... (because yes, I use the Notes feature on Word in between drafts so I know what to change in the next draft, and sometimes just because)
Hmm. Not sure if that's legible without clicking on it. 😓 (It's a moment I'm really fond of, though; I often have difficulty writing anything even remotely romantic, so this sort of flirty stuff feeling even remotely natural is really rare for me.) The reason for the comment is that I ended up showing my mother a .gif I had downloaded of the two leads from the drama, and she thought they both looked like girls. 😠😡😬 This is the .gif in question:
Sure, they're both very beautiful, but they're also both very clearly men! 😠
Anyway, the one I'm currently writing is actually based on the live-action drama The Untamed rather than the original novel, Mo Dao Zu Shi (The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation), because I am a deeply stupid person who commits to the strangest things, so when I initially interpreted my heart palpitations as the "curse" of one of the characters because in the rather dark fic I was then editing for posting on AO3 I had ended up killing him off via a heart attack when he was about my age my reaction to that assumption was to promise him that the next fanfic I wrote would make him the lead instead of the lead's adoptive (and later deeply estranged) brother. Because of that, I wanted to work with the drama's version of the story because I have a list of characters who have to live if it's going to be a happy, fluffy (well, as close as you can get to fluffy in a story with death and war and zombies) fanfic of the sort I typically write. And on that list are three characters from the Wen Clan. In all versions of canon, the bad elements (read: majority) of the Wen Clan attack the lead's home and kill almost everyone there, making the lead and his two adoptive siblings orphans, and giving the adoptive brother in particular an especial hatred of all things Wen. But in the drama, he already knew two of the three Wens who are on my "they must live" list, and in fact had a fairly adorable crush on one of them. (Who, btw, is the only one of the three who actually dies in canon. That novel is really hard on its female cast. 😭)
Soooo, long story short, because of that, he doesn't quite hate all Wens as much in The Untamed, and is still carrying a bit of a torch for Wen Qing, therefore I could make him the lead and still save them if I used that version of canon. Which required me to rewatch a hefty chunk of the drama (though I stopped before most of the tragic events, since they were going to be prevented by the alternate storyline of my fanfic and why should I do all that crying for no reason? (plus if I had watched the entire thing I wouldn't have finished it in time to start rereading the novel to celebrate the final volume coming out)) so I actually learned that I had forgotten a few details in the first episode when I wrote in an earlier post that there were some problems regarding the hero's revival. It turned out that there were a few lines of dialog and voice-over to explain that no one in the household had seen the crazy young man's face as an adult, because he had taken to wearing a mask or heavy make-up ever since he returned home a failure, so that's why no one realized that he was gone and the revived hero with his own face had taken his place. Not quite as simple to explain and digest as the version in the book, where the hero's soul just takes over the unfortunate young man's vacated body, but perhaps a tiny bit more palatable, and more simply allowing them to keep the same actor throughout the whole show.
Aaaanyway, I also wanted to share a bit I just wrote from this new fic in the drama's version of canon, because I really liked it. It goes like this:
Jiang Cheng and a few of the Lans hitched up three of the horses to the wagons, and by the time they were done, Wen Qing was lecturing them for not helping the villagers move their belongings into the wagons.
Why was he being lectured by someone he was doing a favor for?
…and why was he just doing what he was told?
Scowling, Jiang Cheng turned the idea over in his head several times as he was carrying an old woman's belongings to the wagon. While she usually seemed quite mild in temperament, when she started ordering people around, there was perhaps just a little bit of his mother in the way Wen Qing acted. Maybe that was why he was simply doing as she told him to. It was just habit. It would fade in time as he became more used to his new responsibilities. But he shouldn't keep on doing this manual labor, especially not on behalf of Wens.
After he set the things in the wagon, Jiang Cheng turned back towards the rest of the village, planning to think up a good reason he could give to stop carrying these villagers' things around. He found himself facing the old woman from the graveyard, who held the tiny child in her arms. "Thank you so much for doing this, gongzi," she said, bowing as best she could while burdened by a squirming child. "But a fine noble like yourself shouldn't have to be working to help common folk like us."
Was she giving him permission to stop? What kind of insult was that?! Did he look like a weakling who shirked his responsibilities? Did she think he was a pampered little peacock? Those reputations might not have bothered Nie Huaisang and Jin Zixuan, but Jiang Cheng wasn't about to settle for such a meager store of repute!
"The sooner the work is done, the sooner we can be on the road," he muttered, moving around her.
Or, to put it more succinctly:
Wen-popo accidentally uses Reverse Psychology.
It is super-effective!
🤣
(Hmm, I may be too easily amused by my own antics.)
Trying to work with the drama's canon has proved difficult in terms of physical logistics, I have to say. I'd already consulted several fan-made maps of China so I'd have a rough idea where the various locations from the novel are, right? There's a line in the drama claiming that the two locations furthest from the Wen Clan's home are the closest locations. These are all real places in China, I might add. Why are foreign fans getting the map better than the people in China who made the live-action version did? Mind-boggling.
Anyway, because I was also going to rewrite the war (because the novel's 2-year-long war became a 4-month-long war in the drama...and the hero who was supposed to have been the biggest terror on the battlefield missed everything but the final battle!) I needed a map I could actually mess around with. So since I had an account on a map-making site (intended mostly for, like, DMs of tabletop RPGs and stuff), I decided to use that to make my own, using the map from the MDZS wiki, since it seemed like the best and most comprehensive. This is what I ended up with:
It's not done yet, but this is the core map so far, the one I'm using for planning. (I'm going to go ahead and post the final map when I post the fic to AO3, but in multiple versions, to show the stages of the war as the alliance against the Wen Clan pushes them further and further back. Hence multiple lines to show the same thing.) Of course, that volcano is a problem. The drama went all out in wanting to make sure you knew at a glance who the villains were, so they (as I mentioned in an earlier post) literally went as far as to make the Wen Clan's home base on a cliff above a literal river of lava, in addition to them evidently having told their architects "make sure every detail reflects how maniacally evil I am, or I'll hurl you into the lava!" I went ahead and looked up volcanoes in China, and none of them are anywhere near Qishan. 😰 I am astonished that they would do something so goofy. Especially considering all the lava effects had to be expensive!
