beach bum

I think I made this last set of nails just a bit too long, because I’ve managed to pop off seven of them within a week. So, I gave up and took the final three off tonight. I would have like to have worn them a bit longer, at least to the end of the week, but it just means I’ll have that much longer between sets while I make extra sure my March/St. Paddy’s nails are short enough and finalize the design. It’ll be healthier for my natural nails.

Also, one of those interesting typographical things I’ve noted since I’ve taken to composing my posts in Scrivener—well, interesting if you’re into typography, anyway—but curly quotation marks break html tags all to hell. Once I figured out that was what was doing it, I have to remember to copy and paste the post to my plain text editor, check to see if all the quotation marks changed to straight rather than slanted (they don’t always, which is another interesting typographical quirk), and only then can I copy and paste to the post entry window. Would it be easier to compose into my plain text editor? Yeah, probably. But I’ve got Scrivener customized so it’s nicer to read while I’m writing, and I’ve kinda grown spoiled by it.

At any rate, tonight’s viewing was episode 7, which is in fact both the episode with the gorgeous Qixi lantern ceremony and the episode in which Jiang Fengmian calls off the betrothal between Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan. Also, as an aside, it’s not that I forget that Jin Guangshan gives full-on Creepy Old Dude vibes from the moment we first see his face, but that those vibes never lessen, even after so many rewatches. But watching this episode again tonight after writing up my mulling on the lack of prominent women in the main generation of the drama, I did pay attention to how many women were present at the lantern ceremony. Honestly, it did look like about half the disciples there were women, so now I feel even more robbed that we didn’t get more of them as secondary or even tertiary characters with names and lines (more lines than teasing Yanli in this one scene and then never appearing in the drama again).

I do have, and have had for a while, a plot bunny in which JFM had written to YZY as per his dialogue in canon, to tell her his plan to break the engagement, only to get a reply before he could leave Cloud Recesses again, telling him that if he was going to break the engagement she had spent so much time and effort setting up, then he’d better set up another one, preferably for that brat Wei Ying. So, of course he asks Wei Wuxian’s preference on the matter of a future partner, and either there’s a mix up in which Wei Wuxian thinks he’s being asked who he thinks is his equal, or he says he isn’t really feeling the marriage thing, but he does consider Lan Wangji his confidant, and Lan Wangji consents to a marriage because, well, they kind of already are. And Wei Wuxian is actually rather impressed at Lan Wangji’s sneakiness in tricking him when he finds out about that part, which makes him think maybe they are suited, after all.

But of course, there are actually a fair number of stories in which, through various shenanigans, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian end up married or claiming to be married during the Cloud Recesses lectures, usually in some way involving Yu Ziyuan’s wrath over the broken engagement of Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan. A more novel approach, I feel like, would be something I mentioned in the comments of my previous post, which is a kind of matchmaking free-for-all conducted by the various parents and guardians during the course of the Cloud Recesses lectures, in which the kids are all under instructions to write home every night about the other sect members they’ve met, their position and prestige in their respective sects, the kid’s general impression of and compatibility with them, and any noteworthy things they’ve done during the course of the lectures (positive or negative), and the parents meanwhile have their own flurry of letters going back and forth with each other, inquiring as to birth dates and parentage, while consulting matchmakers and their own records for existing treaties to determine the most advantageous matches.

I don’t know nearly enough about famous Chinese narratives of comedic marital or sex hijinks, but I do know it could be played a number of different ways based on several Western genres: a pastiche of Austen skewering the British Season and its attendant marriage mart around the turn of the nineteenth century, a pastiche of Oscar Wilde doing the same about a century later, a riff on the 1960s sex comedy focused on the kids sowing their wild oats while their parents, in blissful ignorance, mix and match them, an homage to the Bridgerton-style ensemble bodice and breeches ripper, and those are just keeping it grounded in the mimetic, comedic, and romance genres.

As fun as several of those sound, though, I’ve already spent several years working on a fix-it AU that will, if I ever finish it, be my only long contribution to the fandom, and my first contribution to any fandom clocking in at over 10K words. I can’t afford to split my focus if I want to finish any long narrative. So, while I can watch the bunnies play in the meadow, I can’t feed them, and I certainly can’t take another one home to Lotus Pier.