A silly Scum Villain's Self Saving System fic idea I am not writing
I think this would be funny but don't feel inspired to actually write it, at least not right now.
If you're not familiar with Scum Villain's Self Saving System, here's a fun post skygiants made about it recently. In short: nerdy loser Shen Yuan finds himself stuck as the doomed villain of the terrible porny fantasy webnovel he was reading. Making things harder is a System that deducts points if he acts out of character or loses Cool Points etc. By trying to make the protagonist Luo Binghe to like him enough that he doesn't get murdered, Shen Yuan ends up making Luo Binghe fall in love with him.
When I first read the fic, I was a bit squicked by the initial setup: the villain Shen Yuan is stuck in is the then 14 year old Luo Binghe's father figure-ish mentor/teacher. And then I thought: well, we don't know how old Shen Yuan is! He's canonically much younger than the 50ish villain, and skimmed all the original novel's sex scenes to get to the worldbuilding. Maybe he is also around 14, desperately trying to fake being a middle aged sword master.
Canon eventually made it clear that no, Shen Yuan's more like 20. He doesn't think of Luo Binghe as a love interest until a good decade or so later, so it's not as squicky as it could have been, but I was still sad to lose my headcanon.
Recently I was pondering what an AU where Shen Yuan was the same age as Luo Binghe would look like. Imagining Shen Yuan's "cool immortal on the outside, flailing nerd on the inside" with a young teen is pretty funny, but then I got kind of squicked by all the sex and violence poor teen!Shen Yuan would be dealing with as a consequence of the kind of story he's stuck in.
And then I thought: what if the system has a child-safe setting.
All the sex related world-building becomes G rated! All the intense violence and tragedy becomes fluffy and mild!
It could be fun to play with the tropes of both the in-universe novel and the real novel Scum Villain's Self Saving System.
The tricky thing that makes me feel like I'm not the person to write this story is that these are Chinese novels using Chinese tropes I am only shakily familiar with. Like I think I could write adequate Scum Villain's Self Saving System fic that just dealt with the characters and world as they usually are, but I'm not so confident about something dealing with genre in such a meta way.
Also a guy from modern China dealing with censorship is a pretty fraught topic, the author of "Scum Villain's Self Saving System" has herself been censored by the Chinese government for writing Too Much Sex. I mean I could lampshade it by having the System arbitrarily use, like, Australian Censorship Guidelines for some made up reason, but ehhhh idk.
I might be better off writing a total AU or pastiche which uses genre tropes I'm more familiar with. But then it wouldn't be Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe as childhood friends in a fluffy version of the story, and that's part of the appeal!
I guess I could just avoid being meta about The Nature of Censorship and What Being Child Friendly Even Means. Those are topics I find really interesting but they're pretty culturally specific.
Maybe avoid anything resembling censorship and go for something fannish and tropey? I could write, like, a gratuitously fluffy highschool AU version set in a Generic US highschool, that could be funny. Because one thing I do have in common with Shen Yuan is not being from the US but having consumed a lot of US media lol.
There's also the worldbuilding question of: is this the same story with like...filters in place? How does that work? Or is it a new story with new fluffier characters?
HMMM IDK.
For now I'll just let it simmer in the back of my head. I have plenty of other things to write.
But the title would be something like "Pure Scum".
EDIT: Oooh or it's on the AO3 and called No Archive Warnings Apply because that's the setup. WAIT. NO. FANFICTION.NET. Those rules are delightfully arbitrary.
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/754109.html. There are
comments.
If you're not familiar with Scum Villain's Self Saving System, here's a fun post skygiants made about it recently. In short: nerdy loser Shen Yuan finds himself stuck as the doomed villain of the terrible porny fantasy webnovel he was reading. Making things harder is a System that deducts points if he acts out of character or loses Cool Points etc. By trying to make the protagonist Luo Binghe to like him enough that he doesn't get murdered, Shen Yuan ends up making Luo Binghe fall in love with him.
When I first read the fic, I was a bit squicked by the initial setup: the villain Shen Yuan is stuck in is the then 14 year old Luo Binghe's father figure-ish mentor/teacher. And then I thought: well, we don't know how old Shen Yuan is! He's canonically much younger than the 50ish villain, and skimmed all the original novel's sex scenes to get to the worldbuilding. Maybe he is also around 14, desperately trying to fake being a middle aged sword master.
Canon eventually made it clear that no, Shen Yuan's more like 20. He doesn't think of Luo Binghe as a love interest until a good decade or so later, so it's not as squicky as it could have been, but I was still sad to lose my headcanon.
Recently I was pondering what an AU where Shen Yuan was the same age as Luo Binghe would look like. Imagining Shen Yuan's "cool immortal on the outside, flailing nerd on the inside" with a young teen is pretty funny, but then I got kind of squicked by all the sex and violence poor teen!Shen Yuan would be dealing with as a consequence of the kind of story he's stuck in.
And then I thought: what if the system has a child-safe setting.
All the sex related world-building becomes G rated! All the intense violence and tragedy becomes fluffy and mild!
It could be fun to play with the tropes of both the in-universe novel and the real novel Scum Villain's Self Saving System.
The tricky thing that makes me feel like I'm not the person to write this story is that these are Chinese novels using Chinese tropes I am only shakily familiar with. Like I think I could write adequate Scum Villain's Self Saving System fic that just dealt with the characters and world as they usually are, but I'm not so confident about something dealing with genre in such a meta way.
Also a guy from modern China dealing with censorship is a pretty fraught topic, the author of "Scum Villain's Self Saving System" has herself been censored by the Chinese government for writing Too Much Sex. I mean I could lampshade it by having the System arbitrarily use, like, Australian Censorship Guidelines for some made up reason, but ehhhh idk.
I might be better off writing a total AU or pastiche which uses genre tropes I'm more familiar with. But then it wouldn't be Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe as childhood friends in a fluffy version of the story, and that's part of the appeal!
I guess I could just avoid being meta about The Nature of Censorship and What Being Child Friendly Even Means. Those are topics I find really interesting but they're pretty culturally specific.
Maybe avoid anything resembling censorship and go for something fannish and tropey? I could write, like, a gratuitously fluffy highschool AU version set in a Generic US highschool, that could be funny. Because one thing I do have in common with Shen Yuan is not being from the US but having consumed a lot of US media lol.
There's also the worldbuilding question of: is this the same story with like...filters in place? How does that work? Or is it a new story with new fluffier characters?
HMMM IDK.
For now I'll just let it simmer in the back of my head. I have plenty of other things to write.
But the title would be something like "Pure Scum".
EDIT: Oooh or it's on the AO3 and called No Archive Warnings Apply because that's the setup. WAIT. NO. FANFICTION.NET. Those rules are delightfully arbitrary.
This entry was originally posted at https://alias-sqbr.dreamwidth.org/754109.html. There are
comments.