#i wish i had the darkfic skills to write the shuangxuan i wish to see in the world

[taihua]

omg can you please talk about beefleaf as a ship, dynamic, friendship.

oh also what are your thoughts on that scene in last arc - when he xuan diguised as hua cheng comes to help them out for a bit and gives back sqx's fan - and when he sees sqx being himself still, his talking way and brag?, his laugh/antiques. he snorts/ humphs/ scoffs. honestly to me i loved that seen i just don't know how to explain my thoughts on hx reaction to that but i loved it.

thank you<33 [i love your blog sm]

*english isn't my first lang so forgive me for the grammar and wrong words that i might have used ig..

Sorry for taking so long to answer, this landed while I was on my way to Boston and I wanted to wait until I was back on my laptop to answer!

I also really like the scene where He Xuan gives back the fan because of how subtle it is--it's the kind of thing that you can miss if you're not paying attention. I think I probably missed it the first time I read the book and had to go back to verify. Doing it undercover is such a He Xuan way to handle it, too. He spends most of the book in disguise so it feels right that a big gesture like this would also be done in disguise.

My thoughts on them as a ship are mostly that I don't like the fanon focus on them as cute silly girlfriends. From what I've seen in fandom, their female forms are kind of just taken as representation for its own sake, but I think what it's doing as a metaphor is showing how both He Xuan and Qingxuan are not who they say they are. It's almost like a fun game to Qingxuan to flit around in pretty dresses and act like the arbiter of justice, but he's not even supposed to be there and the fact that he is there is actually the ultimate injustice. (Compared to Ling Wen, meanwhile, who is forced to present as male to even be taken seriously, Qingxuan just seems frivolously out of touch.) And He Xuan is obviously pretending to be Ming Yi, so there it's just like... a double reveal about "she's not who we thought she was." It's all disguises to He Xuan anyway, so why not throw some gender on there too.

Anyway, Shuangxuan aren't really that interesting to me as a ship until Qingxuan is being held prisoner in the creepy underwater prison--to me, they're a darkship that I would compare to Xuexiao in MDZS. I guess that's like... the moment that they're honest with each other? He Xuan reveals who and what he really is, and Qingxuan comes to the understanding that he didn't ascend on his own merit. That's when it's interesting to ask "so what if they're attracted to each other?" because now they have to contend with the issues.

The thing is that both of them care about each other, which is important to me for a ship (and also something that I think tends to be dismissed by people who don't ship it). Qingxuan clearly feels remorse and understands that he stole something irreplacable from He Xuan (who he genuinely saw as a friend while he was Ming Yi), but He Xuan doesn't blame Qingxuan and doesn't go out of his way to hurt him even when he had the opportunity to. It's not really enough for them to reconcile, but it sure is enough to play around with a doomed and toxic post-canon relationship.

Lastly... ghosts in TGCF can disperse if they give up on whatever's tying them to the world. I think Xuan Ji gives up her resentment for Pei Ming and is able to disperse and move on since that was what kept her there as a fierce ghost. He Xuan's revenge is supposed to be what keeps him around, but he doesn't disperse even after enacting his perfect revenge plot. His story is deliberately left unfulfilled because it's supposed to show that revenge is unfulfilling, but that also leaves a really nice opening for He Xuan to rediscover what it means to love instead of hate.

Also, Qingxuan definitely ascends for real sometime post-canon so they have time to work it out. MXTX herself told me so in a dream