Thirded (but I also love long chapters 🥰)
Another way I've seen handle flashbacks are with timestamp headings? Smthg like "Ten years ago..." or "In the Seventh Month of the Fifth Year of the Reign of Empress Zhao".
This way you can keep standard formatting without being too intrusive to the flow?
You never know when them receipts would come home to roost 🤞
Ooooh..can we get a chime from Wangji-qin? What does Suiban think of this?
This might be a killjoy (in which case just ignore me and write what brings you joy ofc), but I feel like this also presents an opportunity for a WWX that reinforces his boundaries? Shotputs LWJ back (lovingly) whenever he crosses it? A delicious dynamic that we don't get enough fics of imho.
James Purrchanan Barnes 🥰
I think your original comment works pretty well already. But to convey the tone even more, maybe just adjust the lead-in? Smthg like:
"[This is amazing and I would read] 8 million more words of this [AU], omg."
So does that make WWX’s stage name WifiWu¥ in this case?
This AirB&Bs in my mind rent free, so totally understandable haha. Happy re-reading!
Maybe this one? With the added parallel universe travel in that CQL!YYLz sends a-Yuan to MDZS!Cloud Recesses Era WWX:
archiveofourown.org/works/68812656
Ahh so cute!!! The mischief and earnestness combined in WWX's pose! The ruffled chicken offered in 'tribute'.
Also, it's been a while so I can't rmb if there was a name for LZ!Chicken in the story. But I really hope in one universe WWX named this chicken Wang-Jī(雞 chicken as pronounced in Mandarin)
Couldn't happen to a better Shufu (Lan Qiren deserves every provocation real or imagined haha).
That's an unhinged hot take I can get behind lol
Card Captor Sakura, 12, Fanfiction .Net
*Sigh* The Old Man AND the Sea
I am not Englishing today, clearly
Major correction >> the anthology is Edgar Allen Poe 😅🫠
I actually did read Old Man by the Sea (Hemingway) but i don't think that was for class
Spread out through middle and high school (+ a Shakespeare per year):
The Hobbit
Of Mice & Men
To Kill a Mockingbird
One of the Hemingway anthologies that included the Tell-Tale Heart
Lord of the Flies
The Catcher in the Rye
To Kill a Mockingbird
Brave New World
A Handmaid's Tale
The Stone Carvers
#1 I’m squeeing it’s so adorable!!!
#2 I don’t trust Horse!Ji’s serene expression.
#3 do mine eyes spy Donkey!Xian?
#4 W/e flavour of equine WWX is, his smile is saying he got up to six impossible shenanigans this morning and forgot to eat breakfast; I also don’t trust it
All dynasties had extensive (and often obscure) sumptuary laws to denote rank & hierarchies already so prob the most obvious place to start.
But also just popped into my head, thinking about bi-lighting 🤣：
- using the background to also set the scene?
And “expelling impurities via cultivation >> white jade skin” as a trope pops up everywhere, which doesn’t help.
But maybe visual shorthands borrowed from C-dramas? some brainstorming:
- clothing: not only colours but fabrics?
- headdresses, hair pins & ornaments: symbolisms galore
- Make-up
Not a visual artist, but you did get me thinking as a writer occasionally wrestling with this phenomenon while playing with XianXia tropes. Because the belief of paler skin >> more pure is surprisingly pervasive in Chinese culture even today (see every East Asian makeup/beauty ad)
YLLZ is a responsible eldritch horror tyvm 👿😤
(but also hilarious bc who was the one who canonically complained about Lan cuisine ?😂）
(Also, as a treat: a chance to nail the Lan on secondary charges a la Al Capone, to take them to task for the first siege of the Burial Mounds and the massacre of the Wen Remnants.)
Honestly l enjoy sympathetic portrayals of LXC, but he got off lightly imho in canon.
I wonder if anyone had written a fic where NHS accuses LXC the Clan Leader of being accessory to NMJ’s murder. Feels like there’s a spicy what-if there to really drive home how LXC f-ed up.
WWX was cutting it close to the end of summer hols, though. So he took care of one more haunting before driving straight back to Yiling to get the admin and financial stuff sorted for his second year.
and NHS had bullied him into getting them patented back in high school, convincing WWX it’ll be a leg up on his university applications. NHS did turn out to be right, as his full tuition scholarships were largely due to those patents.
WWX thanked him with his home-ec talismans instead, for the first time since he left Yunmeng Jiang dipping into his fancy xuan talisman-grade paper and non-toxic cinnabar and his most proper calligraphy. They were always a hit with the non-cultivator staff at Lotus Pier,
hooked WWX up with a surplus RV stainless steel sink. So WWX took a detour to meet Wen San-shu’s contact (an old classmate, now a QC manager). The man adamantly refused payment, saying it was a favour for Wen-shixiong
Just as he was grabbing coffee in preparation for the drive back to Yiling, Wen Ning passed on a message from Wen San-shu: the auto mechanic did some work on an RV for a client and learned where the rv sink was manufactured. Turns out he had connections to the manufacturer and long story short
A bit of serendipity: the packaged new mattress just fit inside the mouth of his traditional qiankun book bag he received with his acceptance letter to YPoly. Pleased, WWX jovially treated Rong Shatang to thank you dim sum, before hopping back on the train to Lok Ma Chau and through to Shenzen.
WWX settled on the plushest Sea Horse mattress option since that was friendlier on his wallet (something about a mattress he can sink into made him feel more secure; he could have gone without learning that about himself. No, he was not unpacking this in the middle of an HK mattress showroom)