Love Like the Galaxy and my sangcheng betrothal au

[gekidasa]

I’ve watching Love Like the Galaxy and I really like it! I’m glad I tried it, because frankly I had yet to enjoy a cdrama focused mainly on a het relationship. This has shown me it is possible for me to like them. The characters are compelling and fun to watch and the story is interesting.

Another thing LLtG has that I find interesting is the focus getting married. Here’s the thing: my entire life, I have had no interest in marriage and weddings, either in real life or as the endgame of a story. I just never cared. But for some reason, in the context of shipping Jiang Cheng and Nie Huaisang I’m fascinated by the idea, to the point where I have two wips that are about them becoming engaged to be married (and a modern fake marriage au, but that’s a different beast and actually more in line with my usual attitude).

Which beings me to another point: the au I’m currently working on, in which Jiang Cheng, who thinks he’s straight, tells his mother (she survived the attack on Lotus Pier) that he’s not interested in the women the matchmakers are proposing, Yu Ziyuan comes to the conclusion that he’s into men and has the matchmakers bring a list of men, and he winds up betrothed to Nie Huaisang.

Anyway, spoilers for my fic: once the betrothal is arranged, I was going to have a chapter (or chapters) at the Phoenix Mountain hunt, and that would be the first time the cultivation world sees Nie Huaisang and Jiang Cheng as a couple.

Except that now LLtG is making me revise that idea. I’m thinking instead, there will be an engagement banquet at Lotus Pier. And I wanted some sort of meeting before the big being a couple in public thing, so I think Yu Ziyuan and Jiang Cheng will visit the Unclean Realm to deliver engagement gifts.

Comments

[groundwiremantaray]

Oooh exciting to hear about future plans for the betrothal AU! YZY and NMJ meeting face to face *-*

I have a similar disconnect between how I think of real life marriage vs fictional marriage. I think it might be a specifically Jiang Cheng thing for me: he wants to protect the ones he loves and for them to *let* him protect them, and a legally binding relationship like marriage would put his partner squarely in his circle of people to take care of. In other words, I just want to give my purple boy everything he wants haha

[gekidasa]

Hmmm… a Jiang Cheng thing? You know what, that may be it. Or a sangcheng thing. Because there is no other ship where I’m like and at the end they get married! Like take Touya and Yukito from Cardcaptor Sakura, the first fic I got involved in fandom for and the first website I ever made. I love them. I want them, basically, to be together, I want them to move in together. I have never once thought ‘I want to read/write about Touya and Yukito getting married”.

Nielan, the other mdzs ship I love? I very much want Nie Mingjue to be able to reincarnate and I want them to find each other again and be happy. But I never think “nielan should get married” 😂