Roland asked if I wanted to talk about my fics for A League of Nobleman, and oh boy do I.
Poems About Orchids
This fic is very short, as it was written for the fediverse FanPrompt game. To write three hundred words about intellectual property law in fake-late-Tang-ish China, I read multiple academic papers and the first chapter of To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense, which I think you will agree has a banging title. (The section I read was very good; I'm not sure whether I'll finish the rest, as my interest flags once we get out of historical law and into contemporary law.)
It's not that Lan Peizhi isn't perturbed about his poems being ripped off, just that all his friends are so keen to jump in and help him that there's really no need for him to panic as well.
Zhang Ping has not yet realised that inventing woodblock printing won't just let him flood the market with Lan Peizhi's poetry under his rightful name, but also open up all manner of other kinds of copying activity, some less desirable. He'll find out!
Onwards from Yiping
You know how sometimes you write a fic and it just fully convinces you that this is canon now? I feel that way about this one. This is just what happens post-canon, I feel it in my heart! Also, I love each of the main characters in A League of Nobleman very much, but Chen Chou is the truest best boy and deserves the world—so I gave it to him, starting with his gay awakening. After that comes success at beating his own career path outside of the academic-bureaucratic ladder, because (a) my boy is really not the academic type; (b) I fell off that thing too, and it was good riddance.
Xu Dong and Chen Chou both occupy the positions of lower-class, less intellectually-flashy assistant to one of the central characters of the show: Xu Dong is literally Lan Peizhi's employee, while Chen Chou starts out as Zhang Ping's fellow exam candidate, but he fails where Zhang Ping passes and catches the eye of important members of the court. I'm not putting them together to pair the spares, promise. I never really trust myself to get into it with class issues in fiction, but I do think Chen Chou would admire Xu Dong's many skills and would do well for taking him as a role model.
Xu Dong lifted the carrot in his own hand, which Chen Chou had pressed on him without thinking back at the noodle stall, and tapped it slowly against his lips as if thinking. He had a very expressive face, Chen Chou thought, though he wasn’t sure exactly what it was expressing right now. “You mean you’re not taking me back to the magistrate’s house?” he asked.
It was a little mean to write Chen Chou as so clueless, but I think I made it up to him.
I really wanted Zhang Ping to stick around and be a big part of Chen Chou's life, because their friendship is such a key part of the series for me. Would they consider themselves zhiji, at the end of the show? I'm undecided whether either of them would use that word (given that Lan Peizhi and Shulin were such an ill-fated example of purported zhiji) but they're lastingly very important to one another. Chen Chou's excellence at friendship should be recognised!
As for Zhang Ping being ace, it's not my only headcanon for him but it is a well-supported reading (in both book and show)... besides which, I find it amusing for him to have Wang Mowen and Lan Peizhi mooning after him and be oblivious about it. (Those two are clearly fucking, just in case that wasn't clear.) I do wonder if the line about "just why a man would try to marry you to his sister" makes sense to the reader: all I meant was that they feel such affection for him that they would like to have him as a member of one of their families, if they can't have him as a lover, but perhaps it sounds like I'm hinting at some deeper reason.
Obviously, Puffball the cat is one of the white kittens from the show.
Xu Dong's silk handkerchief is a dirty little treat for him and me.
Having read Inked, I am honour-bound to inform you that former desperado Xu Dong definitely has tattoos. He might have one or two scars on his face from convict tattoos that were later removed; I'm sure he also has some more fun ones under his clothes for Chen Chou to discover.
(In Poems About Orchids, I set the Yong dynasty somewhere around the Tang so that Zhang Ping could invent woodblock printing. In this fic, we're going for sometime in the mid-Song, which incidentally fits better with clues given in Zhang Gong'an. It's a fake dynasty, so we can do what we want!)
I appreciate (sincerely) the way that A League of Nobleman adapted a 263-chapter, ongoing, strictly non-supernatural gong'an webnovel into a snappy 29 episodes of dynastic intrigue with magical memory regression techniques. However, my tastes have always leaned more towards the case-of-the-week style, so I was convinced that Chen Chou's and Zhang Ping's future life would follow that pattern! It was fun coming up with the references to their cases by combining things I think are cool (the one with the amnesiac soldier and the salt revenue; the one with the fake cinnabar and the poisoned robes). What I just realised, rereading, is that they also fit with the ways Chen Chou refers to canon events, and that's fun!
No idea what Xu Dong was up to in Hangzhou. Maybe he'll tell me, one day.