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extrapenguinIn the darkest hours of the night, I am more likely to lie awake in my bed than actually sleep. While this is bad for my alertness, I do get a lot of revelations about myself then. And when I say "myself", I mean "my fandom opinions".
A long time ago, there was a post, the comments of which touched upon what levels of sexual/romantic experience Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan might have. The fandom consensus is that Zhao Yunlan is experienced and Shen Wei isn't; a few commenters discussed the opposite case and expressed their love for the concept. I found myself squicked by it, and now, months later, my brain has decided to tell me why!
Let's take a step back: we have on the one hand an alien with superpowers who is sort of a head of state and widely seen as a hero amongst his kind, and on the other hand a regular human civil servant who is good at leadership and manipulating people. We can all see the power gradient, right? Our war hero could very easily kill or hurt the civil servant physically. And from the points of view of their respective bureaucracies, the war hero is irreplaceable, unlike the civil servant. To add to that, over the course of the series, the war hero alien knows more things than the civil servant, and withholds information even when he could safely tell it. Now, Shen Wei does have his reasons, but I think we can all observe the way the deck is stacked.
Switching our viewpoint to a romantic relationship, Zhao Yunlan's people skills even the ground a bit, but Shen Wei is still someone who habitually keeps secrets from Zhao Yunlan (including unnecessary ones, like that time he went to have a chat with Zhao Xinci and acted like it was a hostile interrogation the moment Zhao Yunlan maturely asked about it). Experience would be a good way to even this – make Zhao Yunlan the experienced one, and he can have fun showing Shen Wei what love and sex and so on can be like! When you put that card as well into Shen Wei's hands, however, it just turns the relationship into something squicky to me.
More commonly, though, I just see stuff that flattens Shen Wei's character unpleasingly. He's the Envoy, confident and competent at it, yes, but he's also more than just the guy who turns himself into justice. (For one, he has a trollish sense of humor. Bears, anyone?) A key trait is the streak of vulnerability: Shen Wei is the person who gets flustered when flirted with, cares very much about Zhao Yunlan's opinion of him, and spends the course of the series scared that Zhao Yunlan might not return to him from the wormhole. To remove that and make him into an authority figure with no weaknesses is to run contra to the show's message that Dixingians are human, too.
On the Zhao Yunlan side of the equation, he is a master manipulator who's capable of landing on his feet no matter what conversation he's dropped in (though occasionally he doesn't want to slip out because that'd be against his morals). I see a lot of people go "ohh he's such a subby sub!" and then cite scenes that to me are very explicitly about him using social judo to get his way. To insert a metaphor, he is a master at limbo: the fact that he bends backwards is incidental; the point is that he got to the other side of the bar like he wanted. He covers himself in a veil of artifice – we know he is both the person who'd ask a foreign diplomat to clean his bedroom and the person who single-handedly planned and then organized the plot to capture Zhu Jiu. His interiority is a lot harder to pin down, but I'd argue that we see a lot of him with minimal pretending during his first trip to Dixing, and that really makes plain how much mask-wearing he does in his regular life.
A long time ago, there was a post, the comments of which touched upon what levels of sexual/romantic experience Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan might have. The fandom consensus is that Zhao Yunlan is experienced and Shen Wei isn't; a few commenters discussed the opposite case and expressed their love for the concept. I found myself squicked by it, and now, months later, my brain has decided to tell me why!
Let's take a step back: we have on the one hand an alien with superpowers who is sort of a head of state and widely seen as a hero amongst his kind, and on the other hand a regular human civil servant who is good at leadership and manipulating people. We can all see the power gradient, right? Our war hero could very easily kill or hurt the civil servant physically. And from the points of view of their respective bureaucracies, the war hero is irreplaceable, unlike the civil servant. To add to that, over the course of the series, the war hero alien knows more things than the civil servant, and withholds information even when he could safely tell it. Now, Shen Wei does have his reasons, but I think we can all observe the way the deck is stacked.
Switching our viewpoint to a romantic relationship, Zhao Yunlan's people skills even the ground a bit, but Shen Wei is still someone who habitually keeps secrets from Zhao Yunlan (including unnecessary ones, like that time he went to have a chat with Zhao Xinci and acted like it was a hostile interrogation the moment Zhao Yunlan maturely asked about it). Experience would be a good way to even this – make Zhao Yunlan the experienced one, and he can have fun showing Shen Wei what love and sex and so on can be like! When you put that card as well into Shen Wei's hands, however, it just turns the relationship into something squicky to me.
More commonly, though, I just see stuff that flattens Shen Wei's character unpleasingly. He's the Envoy, confident and competent at it, yes, but he's also more than just the guy who turns himself into justice. (For one, he has a trollish sense of humor. Bears, anyone?) A key trait is the streak of vulnerability: Shen Wei is the person who gets flustered when flirted with, cares very much about Zhao Yunlan's opinion of him, and spends the course of the series scared that Zhao Yunlan might not return to him from the wormhole. To remove that and make him into an authority figure with no weaknesses is to run contra to the show's message that Dixingians are human, too.
On the Zhao Yunlan side of the equation, he is a master manipulator who's capable of landing on his feet no matter what conversation he's dropped in (though occasionally he doesn't want to slip out because that'd be against his morals). I see a lot of people go "ohh he's such a subby sub!" and then cite scenes that to me are very explicitly about him using social judo to get his way. To insert a metaphor, he is a master at limbo: the fact that he bends backwards is incidental; the point is that he got to the other side of the bar like he wanted. He covers himself in a veil of artifice – we know he is both the person who'd ask a foreign diplomat to clean his bedroom and the person who single-handedly planned and then organized the plot to capture Zhu Jiu. His interiority is a lot harder to pin down, but I'd argue that we see a lot of him with minimal pretending during his first trip to Dixing, and that really makes plain how much mask-wearing he does in his regular life.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-13 16:30 (UTC)I personally call this the akashi seijuurou syndrome lol. Attack someone with a scissors ONCE, suddenly he's charcterized as a yandere holding scissors 24/7, even though said scissors weren't even his in the first place.
Its prevalence was enough to make me go into rare pairs instead where characterization is usually more accurate (and interesting!)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-13 17:54 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-13 23:05 (UTC)Glad that it made someone laugh though!
Edit: wait a minute, my comment IS a top level reply right? In that case sorry for this irrelevant comment lol. I'm still using my phone ORZ so the format isn't that user friendly
no subject
Date: 2019-07-13 23:52 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-13 17:54 (UTC)Oh yeah, the fanon overload characterization generally doesn't form for rarepairs, so writers have to actually form the characterization themselves from first principles, instead of regurgitating ever-diverging-from-canon fanon.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-13 18:12 (UTC)I almost made this comment twice in other places in this post, and then refrained because I didn't want to sound like I'm belittling your gripe - venturing out now, and still really not belittling your gripe: over the last few weeks, I've had the experience on multiple occasions that... sometimes discussion seems to make certain interpretations look sharper and more extreme than they really are if the same person takes the character as a whole and, like, writes them. Like, I've been in a few discussions lately where I went away thinking, "your fic characterisation makes total sense to me and is in breathing distance of mine, yet we sound worlds apart on issue X, wtf is going on here?". I love fannish discussion, and I love that there's a lot of it in Guardian. But yeah, I wonder sometimes if the sharp focus of discussing an issue can make you think there's a gulf, and then in fic, there isn't.
That's not to say that that always applies, honestly, and, like, my personal squick is literally all over the fic place. Sometimes people just disagree. But I wanted to offer this thought, as it's one I've found both intriguing and potentially helpful recently. :-)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-13 18:26 (UTC)Mm, yeah, it's probably because in addition to the opinion on the issue itself, people also have opinions on how important the issue is! So two people who have diametrically opposed opinions on the issue but both consider it as mere trivia characterization-wise would find each other's fic more agreeable than each other's meta, frex.
My squicks are present in some fic, though more on the vibe level/characterization points there level than as actual explicit worst-case characterization, and then I have to either read through my fingers or backclick. (There is of course a plethora of fic that doesn't contain my squicks, and I can generally find out whether it'll contain them right at the start, instead of potentially being squicked right at the end.)