![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fanfic post!
Jul. 25th, 2023 05:25 pmI finished a thing! I don't know that anyone here wants to *read* this thing, but people in the Le Guin bookclub have been hearing me talk about it, so if any of you are curious about it, now you can know. I'm in the stage of recently-finished where I just want to babble about it, so it's also fine if nobody is curious. :)
The thing: Ways To Make A Marriage, a sedoretu AU of The Untamed, a Chinese fantasy TV series.
I say that I don't think anyone wants to read it because it leans pretty heavily on knowledge of canon (although maybe someone here is also in this fandom? hi!). It's a fix-it fic, and I think a lot of what's neat about it is seeing how things change in this AU. (With bonus irony of the characters having no idea how dark canon was going to get, so sometimes they're like "such bad things have happened!". Haha, you have no idea.) The story follows four women, three of whom die fridgey deaths in canon - part of why I wanted to write a sedoretu AU for this fandom was because I like how the sedoretu structure (when written strictly) forces there to be 50% women for every 'ship, and part of why I wanted to write about the women in particular was because the show was not great to them, both in terms of having them in the first place (there are 2 or 3 times as many named male characters) and in terms of who's left standing at the end.
More specifically, it's a fix-it fic where the fix is "What Would Ursula Le Guin Do?", or maybe "what might Le Guin's Taoism suggest as alternate solutions to the central conflicts of the first half", drawing on Four Ways to Forgiveness, Tehanu, and "Unlocking the Air", as well as Le Guin's Tao Te Ching. (And, obviously, her sedoretu stories.) And I finally figured out what I wanted to do with the voices/POVs after reading Birthday of the World - I was aiming for the same "telling my life story" voice as some of those stories. So that's what I've been up to lately! It's also the longest thing I've finished since like 2015, so that's exciting for me.
The thing: Ways To Make A Marriage, a sedoretu AU of The Untamed, a Chinese fantasy TV series.
I say that I don't think anyone wants to read it because it leans pretty heavily on knowledge of canon (although maybe someone here is also in this fandom? hi!). It's a fix-it fic, and I think a lot of what's neat about it is seeing how things change in this AU. (With bonus irony of the characters having no idea how dark canon was going to get, so sometimes they're like "such bad things have happened!". Haha, you have no idea.) The story follows four women, three of whom die fridgey deaths in canon - part of why I wanted to write a sedoretu AU for this fandom was because I like how the sedoretu structure (when written strictly) forces there to be 50% women for every 'ship, and part of why I wanted to write about the women in particular was because the show was not great to them, both in terms of having them in the first place (there are 2 or 3 times as many named male characters) and in terms of who's left standing at the end.
More specifically, it's a fix-it fic where the fix is "What Would Ursula Le Guin Do?", or maybe "what might Le Guin's Taoism suggest as alternate solutions to the central conflicts of the first half", drawing on Four Ways to Forgiveness, Tehanu, and "Unlocking the Air", as well as Le Guin's Tao Te Ching. (And, obviously, her sedoretu stories.) And I finally figured out what I wanted to do with the voices/POVs after reading Birthday of the World - I was aiming for the same "telling my life story" voice as some of those stories. So that's what I've been up to lately! It's also the longest thing I've finished since like 2015, so that's exciting for me.
