Just let me lie here on the tile

Lost Tomb is really fun - I see ppl are racing through it but I am plodding behind, and I just watched ep 5 and just enough of ep 6 to see the cliffhanger resolved. Sometimes it feels a lot like watching someone play Skyrim for the first time, very badly:

( some spoilers )

ETA some spoiler-free screencaps from ep 6 just For Reasons:

( the camera loves Wu Xie )

It looks like you can watch Zhu Yilong's new tombraider adventure show free, with English subs, legally, here:

https://www.iq.com/play/2ffkws2vkdd

It's only the HD version you pay for, but up to 720 is free? And we don't even need to beg fans to make us subs?

I'm amazed. Also amazed at the terrible English title, "Reunion: The Sound of the Providence" -- yeah no. It's called Lost Tomb, end of.

gonna watch at least one ep before I go to bed...

I picked up a pinch hit for frith_in_thorns for the Hurt/Comfort Exchange, so needless to say, I wrote her some Shen Wei hurt/comfort. XD

dorinda, naye and xparrot provided exceptional help in the way of handholding and cheering-on as well as beta, and I'm very grateful.

Under a Cloudless Sky (19202 words) by marycrawford
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shěn Wēi/Zhào Yúnlán
Additional Tags: Altered Mental States, Fever, Magical Exhaustion, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon
Summary:

They were having lunch in the garden, it was a lovely day, and Shen Wei was certainly not going mad.

On Twitter, wenella posted about a pdf with a ton of Zhu Yilong magazine interviews translated in English:
You can get to the files using the link and password code she provided, and I can see them (a .pdf and a .doc) and read them in my browser, but I'd really like to download them so I can use a PDF reader, use better text options etc. The website is in Chinese (Baidu) and when I try to download, I get some kind of popup and I can't proceed. Wenella says she will help anyone who has trouble, but I don't have a Twitter account, so I can't ask.

EDIT: I'm good, thanks to a PDF download link from a friend, feel free to send me a private message if you need one too?

Oh dear me Zhu Yilong MUST YOU come for me like this?

I mean I had plans for today.

Bonus: this fan edit showing just what to do with those ReFa rollers.

I have a friend staying with me this week, which is great fun but means not a lot of time for posting, so this is a little late. I wrote a Guardian story for kalakirya for the Sundial Exchange, and it's basically the kind of story I would have wanted to read after watching the last four episodes of the show.

(Can someone explain to me why there is no official "Idyll" tag on the AO3 yet? How is that not a super common trope? I'm baffled.)

Only the plum trees (7374 words) by marycrawford
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shěn Wēi/Zhào Yúnlán
Characters: Shěn Wēi, Zhào Yúnlán
Additional Tags: idyll, Getting Together, First Time, Romance, Post-Canon, Fix-It, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Shen Wei deserves nice things
Summary:

Ai-ya, trying to get Shen Wei to take time for himself was like dragging a stone statue up a mountainside. Backwards, blindfolded, through the brambles, and barefoot.

Okay, I am not the best person to rec this vid, because I can't read Chinese and so I can't name the person who made it, or the title, or what shows the footage is even from.

However: this is a constructed reality vid that is just gorgeously well done, where Bai Yu is a cop and Zhu Yilong is some kind of criminal mastermind, and it is HOT TO DEATH.

There is some dialogue subtitled in English, setting up the story very sparely, and there is a single sequence I recognize from Guardian (Shen Wei healing the scrapes on his shoulder) which just fits in seamlessly here, even though I know we didn't see Shen Wei taking a shower afterwards (and really, why not??).

The sequence starting at 00:30 where Zhu Yilong is in disguise as a waiter, recognizes Bai Yu as a cop, there is a fight, and then ZYL abseils off the building is amazing. I would watch this movie, just saying.

(Special mention for Zhu Yilong's little side-smile at 1:36, which is just perfectly placed in the middle of Shit Blowing Up that he certainly didn't have anything to do with. Yum.)

‘This area is mostly stories about concubines and favourites who win their favour from the Emperor by whatever means necessary,’ Nie Huisang said matter-of-factly, and waved his fan at a wide area of the shelves in his bedroom antechamber. ‘Over here, we have villainous women who have to take men for their companions so they can keep their matriarchal tribe going, and this bit,’ he waved the fan again, ‘is the stuff about sworn brothers who are trapped on the road together when it snows and have to shelter in very small caves. You might want to start here?’

from Adult Learning by halotolerant, or Five Times Lan Wangji learnt something about sex

So I said I wasn't going to read Untamed fic - I blame @bonibaru and her ways - and this bit of meta humor made me laugh so much. Yes, indeed, Lan Zhan might start his education there, and I have lingered by those shelves myself an AWFUL long time.

I just posted my signup letter for the @sundial_exchange and I honestly think I could have replaced all my words with WHAT IF SNOW? because really, that covers everything.

Lots of people are posting things for Weilan week, which is a lot of fun and I wish I could participate, but I'm off to Vienna until Friday.

The main reason is to see the Duerer exhibit - these are the drawings and watercolor paintings that rarely get shown at all, and I can't wait, the man was a wizard - but I also hope to visit Schonbrunn (not the whole castle, but the Palm House and Desert House sound like they would be fun to visit at this cold wet time of year) and just wander around the city and eat a lot of pastry. (We're not going to the opera, the only affordable tickets were standing-only and I am not that much of a masochist...)

I've never been to Vienna before, do any of you have any tips? 
 

naye posted: AO3 Update relevant to C-drama fandom

Finally, no more "English as default" for new fanworks! I was one of the people who wrote in to the AO3 Support to request this, and I'm very happy with this update.

There's a new recs comm for Guardian fanworks, which is great, and which asks people who post recs to actually talk a bit about WHY they want to recommend something, and that is my jam. I love reading recs even for stories and vids I already am familiar with, just to see what others think about them.

merit_brush_recs

Welcome to Merit Brush Recs! We are a recommendations posting community for fanworks of all kinds (fic, vids, art, etc.) for 镇魂 | Guardian (both the novel and drama), related RPF, and other projects starring the lead actors, Bai Yu and Zhu Yilong. This includes commercials in which they play characters clearly separate from their own public personas.

For my first rec, I posted Fanvid: Honey Meta Edit by @lola

 This is a gorgeous vid using Zhu Yilong's commercial and behind the scenes footage, set to lovely ethereal sensual music that fits him to a T, and including that amazing Time Engraver commercial. The mood is a little subdued and pastel/black&white until 0:36 where the beat kicks in, the color explodes gloriously, and the lyric is "I got your honey, baby" - well YES. Yes, I do believe you do.

Thanks to qikiqtarjuaq's lovely gifs, I can illustrate these two fantastic moments in Guardian, which have a common theme:

"Let me comfort you with my Zhao Yunlan"




"Let me shoot you with my Zhao Yunlan"

I have stared at this gif of Zhu Yilong bumping his head and...stretching languidly?...while smiling?...approximately seventeen times.
Make that eighteen.
Okay, fine, nineteen it is.
Edit: FOUND!

(Wow, I tried to embed three Youtube videos into this post and every time the damn thing breaks. So here are some old fashioned links instead; sorry if you saw this post appear and disappear, this is the third...)

Big God by Scribdoodle - spoilers for later parts of the show. This is a delicious, dark, fairly angsty portrait of Shen Wei's supernatural side, as well as how much Zhao Yunlan is into it (not a spoiler: it's a lot), and I admire the choice for the last clip featuring Chu Shuzhi SO MUCH.

Make Me Feel by lola  - no spoilers, except for one angsty moment (from ep 33) that gets used for non-angsty purposes. Just so much fun, full of sparkle effects that work and add to the cheerful, sexy vibe. The way she recontextualizes the "bomb defusing" scene is fantastic, and every time the "lay your body on the shag carpet" moment comes up I just lose it. Oh Zhao Yunlan. <3
It doesn't hurt that the song is a Janelle Monae banger, and I may have watched this about 20-odd times already whenever I need a pick me up. The vid is on AO3 if you prefer to leave feedback there.

Fire's Gonna Burn by Nerjaveika - no spoilers, the perfect introduction to the bonfire of angst and hotness that is this show. If you're in the fandom, I suspect you've seen this vid. And if you're anything like me, you clicked on it anyway to watch it again, because it's just that good. (Okay, I could do without the text, but it's well done and that's just a personal preference.)

BONUS: leave the light on by bonibaru - no spoilers because this is an RPS vid about the actors. I just saw this for the first time ten minutes ago and now I am OUTRAGED because I have FEELINGS about L'Oreal commercials???!  (Zhu Yilong's little bitten lip at 1:44, kill me now) It's gorgeous and evocative and it makes me sniffly. Also: nobody should be as beautiful as Zhu Yilong, what even is his FACE.

I have read
all the stories
that pop up in
your comments

and which
you were probably
saving
for later

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

@xparrot started a Guardian hurt/comfort comment thread that is still ongoing, and it is delightful, full of good reading that just goes straight to the id (which is what Guardian was made for, to begin with; it is possibly the most idtastic show I've ever seen.) @xparrot wrote a story for @glymr and me that is so full of emotional resonance and foreshadowing that it gave me goosebumps. <3

If this is your fandom and you're into h/c, give it a try! You can drop a comment with a prompt, and different authors are coming by to magic it into a story. (I really want to try my hand at commentfic too, but man it's hard; I even think just coming up with prompts is hard, and I admire all of the writers and prompters.)

ETA: and then it was three hours later and I wrote a thing? O_O

I've seen all 40 episodes of Guardian. ;__;

The good news: I can now read all the fic and watch all the vids! And I saw some mention of an epilogue from the novel author, anyone have deets on that? (I haven't read the novel, though I've seen a couple translated excerpts.)

The other good news: I finished a story I was working on right after watching ep 40, in sheer stubborn self-defense, and it will go on AO3 as soon as I can figure out a summary for it.

Here's a bit of chat from very early on in my Guardian adventures:

I also feel like we need a way for shen wei to be vulnerable
so, kryptonite, basically
because right now it feels like zhao never would need to worry for him
only the reverse
and ofc I want it to go both ways

...welp. Naming calls, people. Naming calls.

I have watched all but the four last episodes of Guardian. I HAVE MANY THOUGHTS.

The one that is uppermost in my mind right now, though: Zhu Yilong had better have gotten paid A FORTUNE for his work on this show. Fucking hell.

So after a million years of not writing much in the way of fanfic or staring longingly at screencaps, I fell for a new show.

And to even explain what this show is... I feel like that's going to require a lot more words than I have brainspace for right now? Also I'm not the best authority on the subject, having only picked up bits and pieces of its backstory through fannish osmosis, but still, I'll try.

Short version: it's called Guardian, and it's a Chinese TV series based on an online supernatural gay romance novel.

However, gay content isn't permitted to be shown in China, nor is anything truly supernatural unless it's in a historical epic (I think?). Anyway, you can imagine that the show’s writers had their job cut out for them. Especially since they had their budget cut to pennies halfway through.

Miraculously, what resulted is a show that is a BONFIRE of newly subversive old-school slash: hurt/comfort, angst, epic fights, self-sacrifice, secret identities, supernatural shenanigans, and lingering closeups on gorgeous men staring at each other, manhandling each other and tucking each other into bed, with no “girlfriend of the week” bullshit, and just enough plausible deniability to somehow get away with it.

Dirtbag Lollipop aka Zhao Yunlan is chief of a supernatural investigations team, very smart, very intuitive, the Kirk to Shen Wei's Spock, having five different ideas and strategies playing out in his head at any given moment, and fearlessly confrontational, even while pretending to be a dumbass bro. Also, he has a terrible car that could star in "Pimp My Ride", and somehow this doesn't lessen my intense affection for him.

Glasses McPretty aka Shen Wei is a beautiful, quiet, buttoned up professor whose micro-expressions are lighting up my life, and who is clearly just very unlucky, because he keeps showing up at crime scenes that he has nothing to do with and frustrating Zhao Yunlan's investigations. And yet somehow Zhao Yunlan doesn't seem to mind:



The two fantastic actors for Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei pretty much carry the entire show on their backs, and I basically only started watching because I thought that the professor in the glasses was hot, but I quickly succumbed.

Still, the first couple episodes are not as full of h/c and angst as the later ones, and I don’t think I would have kept watching if I hadn’t run across spoilers for the one crucial show element: that Shen Wei, as well as being this sweet harmless academic:



is also this sexy BAMF


(gifs courtesy of qikiqtarjuaq

( Single essential spoiler for the first few episodes )

Shen Wei reminds me of Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel (another cast-iron favorite of my heart and id) and I could watch him change his face in the minutest ways to express the most complex emotions all the livelong day.

Where to find the show:

Guardian is on Youtube, all 40 episodes, with fanmade English subtitles that range from okay to terrible.

BUT because fandom is awesome, there are also HD downloads for the full show with subtitles that solo has painstakingly improved, available here.

The show is also on Amazon Prime (with hilariously terrible cover art that doesn't even seem to feature the right actors? Oy.)

And I wrote a story! Despite not even having watched the entire show yet? O_o. That's upcoming in the next post. :D

Bonus gif and commentary from qikiqtarjuaq : "You know how TV shows have commercial breaks? Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan have silent breaks during lulls in their conversations to have thirsty flirting interludes."

Hooray, my Gimli/Legolas Big Bang story is live, with wonderful art from cybersuzy!


On the Cold Hill Side (24938 words) by marycrawford
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Movies)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Gimli/Legolas Greenleaf
Characters: Gimli, Legolas Greenleaf, Aragorn, Arod
Additional Tags: Dwarves, Elves, Dwarf Culture & Customs, Dwarf Courting, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Pining, Angst, Eventual Happy Ending, Tourism, fangorn, orthanc - Freeform, aglarond, Hurt/Comfort, Snark, Banter, Competence Kink, gimli is a BAMF, so is Legolas, Gimli/Legolas Big Bang, Big Bang Challenge, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Secrets, Canon - Book, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Ents, Talking Trees, Tree Climbing, Walks In The Woods, Caves, Dwarf/Elf Relationship(s), Missing Scene, First Time, Canon Related, gigolas bang 2014
Summary:

In the end, Gimli thinks, Legolas will steal his heart and sail away with it, and even the wonders of the Glittering Caves are not enough consolation for that loss. But when Aragorn calls for Gimli’s help in dismantling the hidden traps of Orthanc, everything changes.

Jaw-dropping realization of this morning: the number of fans participating in Yuletide is bigger than the number of fans who vote for the Hugo awards.

Last year's Yuletide participants: 1995
This year's Hugo voters: 1800 or so - ETA: 1848, by official report.

I'm not even sure why I'm so surprised by this random comparison. Probably it's because I roamed around in SF/F con fandom before media fandom, and this feels like such a strange crossover.

It's also boggling because the Hugos carry a lot of prestige (I think, still?) and yet the group that votes for them is so small, and confined to people who are paying either tons of money to go to Worldcon, or $50 for a 'voting membership' that won't let them go to the con, but gets them copies of the books.

And I don't know how big the overlap with Yuletiders is; I'm betting it's there, but not huge. But I'm fascinated, anyway.

(What do you think the chances are of John Scalzi winning a Best Novel Hugo for Redshirts, if the Yuletide participants were the ones voting?)

I really like the idea of everyone leaving fannish recs on Sandy's birthday. Of course, by the time I saw people's posts, it was already a day later (timezones are so handy that way) and now it's a day later still, but I'm sure Sandy woudn't have minded. I visited her recs pages so often, back in the day.

So have two recs for stories by the same author, both in Tolkien movie/book fandom.

First, an adorable Legolas/Gimli story where, as the author says, Gimli is a BAMF. This is an important part of his characterization for me, and I'm always happy to find fic that showcases him that way.

From One Age to Another (12118 words) by determamfidd
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit (2012)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Gimli/Legolas

Summary: Upon their return to Eryn Lasgalen and Erebor respectively, Legolas and Gimli each have a new adornment. Their fathers would like an explanation.

The second rec is for a much longer crossover-ish story where Thorin and crew are all kibitzing from the sidelines as the LOTR storyline progresses. What with being dead and all, there isn't much else left for them to do - or is there?

This one's a WiP, and we haven't gotten to the point yet where Legolas and Gimli are even friends, much less anything closer than that, but I cannot WAIT for that to happen, and to see the reactions from the other dwarves. And then there's the question of whether Bilbo will be allowed into the Halls of the Dead...

Sansûkh (94511 words) by determamfidd
Chapters: 14/?
Fandom: The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (Jackson movies), The Lord of the Rings (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Major Character Death
Relationships: Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield, Gimli/Legolas Greenleaf

Summary: The battle was over, and Thorin Oakenshield awoke, naked and shivering, in the Halls of his Ancestors.