azdak

A while ago I realised that one reason why I find writing post-canon NiF fic so hard is that I'm only really interested if Mei Changsu is still alive. There are, of course, numerous excellent fix-it fics out there, but it seems like cheating to use someone else's idea, so here is my own explanation of how yet another branch in the many-legged trousers of time was opened up.


Title: The Care and Feeding of Snow Beetles
Fandom: Nirvana in Fire
Word Count: 3710
Location: AO3

Great Nirvana in Fire vid here on AO3: Secret

Nirvana in Fire spoooiiiileeeers

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Like many people, I have now read Shelley Parker-Chan's She Who Became The Sun. In her foreword, Parker-Chan says the story is based on "wildly addictive Chinese costume dramas" and it really shows. Had I read this two years ago, I would have found it enchantingly exotic, but with two years of wildly addictive Chinese costume dramas under my own belt, what it actually felt like was coming home. There is a even a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Daliang! Unlike all those c-dramas, though, She Who Became The Sun gives female c-drama audiences what they really, really want, namely a heroine who gets to do all the stuff normally reserved for men. Is it a perfect book? Well, I could have done with less sex and an awful lot less epic manpain, but I'm aware that for many readers these will be features and not bugs. More irritatingly (from a reader's pleasure point-of-view) I had a real suspension of disbelief problem when it came to the heroine passing as a man once she reached adolescence. The narrator mentions that she starts "bleeding" but we are given zero information about how, in a monastery surrounded exclusively by men and boys, she manages to wash her stained underclothes and bedclothes or even the rags she presumably uses to mop up the Curse of Eve. This problem must become even more acute when she becomes commander of an army, who would certainly be spotted if he regularly had to sneak out of camp in the middle of the night to wash his own clothes. It is my headcanon that General Mu Nihuang*, when in the field, avails herself of one of the numerous Chinese poisons (probably with a poetic name like the Poison of the Darkened Moon) to avert menstruation, but if this is Zhu Chongba's solution, there is no mention of it in the book.

Periods, with their messiness and ickiness and complete separation from the will of the person experiencing them, would be blindingly unfair as it is without men weaponising them to gatekeep their own superior social status, but men being what they are, this is exactly what they do. It was therefore with a sense of incredulous joy that I read this article in the Guardian about period pants. Dazzled by the prospect of freedom being dangled before me, I rushed online to order some for my daughters (since I am, thank God, no longer in need of them myself), only to discover that Marks and Spencer's was (unsurprisingly) completely out of stock, so I had to order them from Modibodi. If they work as well as the article claims, I shall report back!

*Today I read on the internet that that godawful scene where Nihuang gets jealous of Gong Yu was the brainchild of Hu Ge, who thought it would make Nihuang more "womanly". So now I'm in the sad position of having to hate Hu Ge.

I have written an unexpectedly lengthy piece of Nirvana in Fire outsider perspective fic - it isn't at all angsty, because it turns out NiF itself is so good at fulfilling all my angst and pining needs, it doesn't leave space in my head for angsty fic.

Title: Noble Souls
Summary: Lin Shu's family watch the events of Nirvana in Fire from the afterlife
Author: Azdak
Rating: Gen
Length: 10,000 words
Genre: Humour
Location: on AO3.

Since lockdown, I've watched a number of cdramas and kdramas. For potentially interested parties, here are some non-spoilery plot summaries:

A time-travelling master-servant duo fails to prevent a murder.

A secret police agent with a tragic past discovers she’s into furries.

A grieving widow throws off the shackles of social convention and is finally able to be her true self.

An unfaithful fiancé escapes his betrothal and becomes a successful assassin.

A remarkably long-lived insect dies.

nineveh_uk has been writing haikus. Apparently they "should derive from spontaneous, concrete, personal experience in a certain moment of heightened awareness". And since there is not a lot of personal experience going on outside the home these days, here is mine:
SPOILER for Nirvana in Fire
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This is not a criticism. Nirvana in Fire is terribly sad in many ways, but not in ways that make me, personally sad. Quite the contrary, I thoroughly enjoy wallowing in the character's emotional agonies. What did make me cry was The Story of Minglan and I didn't enjoy feeling those feelings at all - a child's traumatic farewell to a dying mother strikes a chord of "This has really happened to some people" in a way that the specifics of Mei Changsu's fate do not. But I also very nearly cried at the scene where Minglan leaves her father's house to get married and her grandmother momentarily breaks down - the relationship between Minglan and her grandmother is AWESOME, even more awesome than that between Minglan and Gu Tingye, and the actress playing the grandmother is terrific. Hmm, perhaps I should try writing a haiku about how Minglan's grandmother is worthy of my tears.

I'm still splashing around in the shallow end of Asian dramas but my current viewing, "The Story of Minglan" (which I'm enjoying, don't get me wrong) has brought the two outstanding features of "Nirvana in Fire" into very sharp focus. One is Hu Ge's phenomenal performance as Mei Changsu - it's not that there aren't stellar performances among the remaining cast, because there most definitely are, but Mei Changsu is the role with which the whole series stands and falls, and Hu Ge provides one of those once-in-a-generation meldings of actor and role that makes every single scene he's in riveting to watch and raises the game of everyone around him. The other aspect is the plotting. When your protagonist is a strategic genius who spends 12 years preparing his schemes and 53 out of 54 episodes executing them, they need to be good, but Mei Changsu's schemes are on another level altogether. It's like watching a 53 episode version of Fischli and Weiss's The Way Things Go transformed into drama, as click by click the cogwheels interlock and the dominoes fall over, in a combination of meticulously-laid groundwork, brilliant extemporisation, and, when all else fails, a truly impressive talent for trolling. And at another level, the story itself is as brilliantly plotted as any of Mei Changsu's schemes, intricate threads woven with such expertise that even the tiniest details are tied into the main narrative until you suddenly recognise the pattern episodes later. Yes, it has the odd painful lapse (but then even "The Lord of the Rings" has Tom Bombadil, koff koff), and there are some Chinese genre elements that play weirdly to Western audiences, but my God, it's so intricate and far-ranging and convincing, and it means that the emotional beats, when they come, are truly, madly, deeply earned. Don't come to me with your oaths of fealty, people, unless you can overlay them with at least three layers of sub-text, three decades of back story and multiple episodes of character interaction.

After a couple of months of obsession with “Nirvana in Fire”, I have finally started to wean myself off it. The obvious place to look for distractions was to other Chinese and Korean dramas but I have to say that the results have been a mixed bag. I bounced hard off “The Disguiser”, despite its having the extremely compelling hook of reuniting most of the NiF cast (although not, alas, Mu Nihuang) and a setting – spies in Japanese-occupied Shanghai just prior to WW2 – that should have been right up my alley. Unfortunately, even these attractions can’t compensate for the fact that it’s atrocious. I think it’s trying to be iddy, but without the writers doing any of the work to set up the iddiness. It’s like reading one of those fanfics that begins “Pain coursed through his body like a thousand fiery suns...” - fine if yours is the kind of id that can cut straight to the chase, but cringemaking if you need groundwork and build-up and a narrative that has some kind of logic to it. I got a little bit further with “Ode to Joy”, which is also largely populated with NiF actors (this time including Nihuang, although Mei Changsu is sadly absent) but the relentless infantilisation of the female characters proved too much for my delicate nerves after five or so episodes. It doesn’t help that I’m not really cut out for romance-focused stories. If a highly intelligent business hot-shot has left a top job in America and returned to Shanghai to search for her lost brother, I want to watch her try to find him, not engage in tiresome internet flirtations with an anonymous and frankly rather unappealing Unknown Bloke (also, I accidentally watched episode 1 of season 2, by which time she has met the Unknown Bloke, and it turns out he is spectacularly awful but the show thinks he is charming and romantic).

The other series I have tried are the Korean dramas “The King: Eternal Monarch”, “Rookie Historian Goo Hae-Ryung”, “Crash Landing on You” and “Hotel del Luna”. “Rookie Historian” absolutely charmed me with its opening couple of episodes, but it goes on far too long for its very slim storyline (far too long even by the standards of kdramas, which basically regard “interminable” as something to aspire to), and when I finally – FINALLY! – got to the end, the climax turned out to be a cheap rip-off of “Nirvana in Fire” (though it did at least enable me the pleasure of going back to wallow in all the richness and depth of the original, which shone all the brighter by comparison). Apart from its lovely opening episodes, the best thing about “Rookie Historian” is that it introduces you to the concept of Joseon-era historians (many thanks to legionseagle for the link), an institution we are in sore need of today and a fantastic example of thinking outside the box. By contrast, the sole virtue of “Crash Landing on You” lies in its premise – rich South Korean accidentally paraglides into North Korea, where she falls in love. It’s a straight-up romance starring a male lead who has only one facial expression (I’m unclear if this is because that’s all he can manage or because he believes it’s the only facial expression heroic North Korean army officers have at their disposal), and it was written by a team/someone who believes that love is at its most romantic when it makes people jealous and irrational. The female character is unbelievably irritating, but this is a writing rather than an acting choice. I assume she’s meant to be unlikable at first and gradually improve, but I didn’t make it as far as her improvement because I was bored out of my mind long before then (quite an achievement given that she was hiding illegally in North Korea, which one would think would make for an exciting storyline).

Best of the bunch are “The King”, which has a team of down-to-earth cops operating alongside the eponymous fantasy-type monarch, and wacky (and not-so-wacky) parallel worlds/time travel hijinks to dilute the romance, and “Hotel del Luna”, which I totally didn’t expect to like. I knew from skygiants' costume polls that the heroine is constantly changing from one high fashion outfit to the next, and that kind of high maintenance femininity is not my cup of tea (to use a Jang Man Wol phrase), but it turns out I did Jang Man Wol a huge injustice. For all her fake fingernails and bright red lipstick, she is in reality a Magnificent Bastard with a backstory full of epic manpain (yes, she’s a woman, but it’s definitely manpain she’s feeling, and it just goes to show that female characters can be as fascinating as male ones in these sorts of roles and writers should let them do it a lot more often). The romance is even more diluted than in “The King”, this time by ghost-of-the-week subplots and an array of former boyfriends and reincarnated souls from a previous life. I’m on episode 11 (of 16 – what makes for the interminability isn’t the number of episodes but the fact that each one is TWO HOURS long) and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It isn’t “Nirvana in Fire” levels of enjoyment, but then, what is? I’m semi-resigned to the fact that “Nirvana in Fire” is a once in a lifetime fannish experience and I shall not see its like again.