zhongchi - the ship that’s ruining my life
disclaimers:
ship what u want. i cannot stop you. i do not care. be free.
this post is an OPINION and you DO NOT HAVE TO AGREE. if reading about why i dislike zhongchi is going to upset you, maybe give this a pass
i do not dislike childe OR zhongli. i just think their ship is silly.
if you are a zhongchi shipper and you choose to read this anyway, this is not written as a personal attack. i said "zhongchi 😒" one too many times and a non-genshin friend said "why do you hate that ship so much" and then i wrote a manifesto
ive never been involved in real fandom drama and idk how it goes but i would like to remain ignorant and free, pls do not attack me over this i am small and nervous and do not mean any harm
part 0: the ship
"who are they and why does this ship exist?" you might ask, if you've never played genshin. on the surface, this is a simple question with a simple answer. the two characters for this ship are in the same place at the same time and their stories overlap heavily. childe is the big bad of zhongli's story arc. (not that zhongli fights him; you, the player character, fights childe.) so they potentially have enemies to lovers, and they are actually friends before some truths come to light and it's revealed they're on "different sides". childe also pays for things for both you (the player character) and zhongli, which people read as caring. [1]
childe/zhongli is the most popular genshin ship on ao3. there are currently 132,000 works on ao3 for genshin impact and 12,735 of those have the ship tag childe/zhongli. that's only 10% of the all existing works, but the second largest ship tag has only 6,600 works, which is half as many.
relevant as an influencing factor is another popular ship early on in genshin's inception. that other ship was the first two hot male characters to have tension and an overlapping storyline, but they turn out to be "related" and a large part of the fandom collectively dropped them like a hot potato. but these fans were already in the fandom, already playing genshin, and they needed someone to ship. so they collectively jumped over to the SECOND set of two hot male characters with perceived tension and an overlapping storyline, i.e. zhongli and childe. the story containing zhongli and childe is 1) permanent canon content and 2) presented relatively early to the player, so zhongchi as a ship is more accessible than other popular ships that don't show up for 50+ hours [2] of gameplay.
furthermore, neither childe or zhongli have many meaningful interactions with other characters, and both characters were very popular upon launch. their initial popularity caused an epidemic, and a subsequent over-saturation of the ship on ao3. [3]
part 1: the characters
zhongli is a retired ex-god who faked his own death so he could have a break and go play at being human in the most mundane way possible. he's spiritually and emotionally an old man. he watches operas and drinks tea, has very expensive taste but no money, and works the front desk at a funeral parlor. he's thousands of years old and not entirely human (more on that later). [4]
childe is in his 20s and an affable general in the evil army. at 14 childe fell through a hole into genshin hell and lived there for a few months and emerged Changed. he can also turn into a demon now, just as a fun side note. upon getting him back, his parents found him to be a very scary menace and they quickly enrolled him in the military. he is the youngest ever person to be made general in the evil army, but this is less due to him being driven by ambition and more being a violent gremlin who couldn't be controlled and who beat up everyone in his path.
in his spare time, childe gets into unwinnable fights and pushes himself to the limit just so he can feel something. he's utilitarian, having grown up poor, and when you ask about his least favorite food he tells you that being picky about food is a bad thing and you should cut that out. he "has money" but it's not his money, it's his government's money. the budget for his evil task is very, very high, and he uses it for mission things though he tends to be pretty loose about what that includes. his mission budget shouldn't matter, but will unfortunately come up later.
childe is diametrically opposed to zhongli and zhongli's city; or he WOULD be but childe is too friendly and zhongli secretly has a deal with childe's boss, paying them to do the evil thing so he can retire in peace. this is a slight betrayal to childe but when it comes to light he isnt upset at zhongli, he's upset at his coworker for being the literal worst. childe is still seen around fantasy china after he tries to destroy it with a meteor[5], and only the townspeople seem to have any hard feelings. zhongli and childe are not canonically depicted as having any hard feelings.
part 2: "making it work"
past the superficial reasons listed in part 0, zhongchi makes no sense to me as a pairing. zhongli is a boring old man and childe barely seems to consider people anything more than NPCs unless they end up having fighting prowess, in which case he tries to fight them and then (if they don't die) considers them friends.
childe is dynamic, always striving to be better, stronger, faster[6]; childe is an adrenaline addict. zhongli is static and intends to stay that way.
the characters have undergone some personality changes to make them fit together better.
zhongli is part dragon(?) so people give him an obsession for pretty things and a massive possessive streak. since he's "broke", childe becomes a sugar daddy type in many works. zhongli is also almost exclusively on top in sexual situations, because duh, old, powerful dragon. [7]
childe couldn't possibly be in a position of power when he's with a older, more powerful male, so he becomes very submissive and swoon-y and teenage girl. the betrayal hurt him *ever* so deeply and he may never emotionally recover. he canonically has a family whom he loves, so people come down on that hard and say he's a real family man and he wants to have a family of his own and obviously he wants to settle down with zhongli and have zhongli's babies.
:|
part 3: losing sight of canon
the further this ship goes, the further we stray from god. [8]
childe is now super rich and loves paying for other people's things, especially zhongli's (forgetting that the money he has was in fact part of his mission budget). the tag "battlesexual childe" is a sortable tag on ao3, but the zhongchi part of genshin has all but forgotten childe likes to fight. zhongli is now possessive to a borderline abusive degree, and childe likes being tied down (metaphorically) to his dragon husband (did i mention they're frequently and casually married? this is the erasermic[9] of genshin).
another side effect of being auto-married by the fandom is that it pushes the domesticity angle of zhongchi. you know, zhongli, an ex GOD OF WAR who COMMITTED GENOCIDE and a childe, a dude so obsessed with fighting that his own family couldnt handle him and shipped him off to the military at 14. them. domestic. what drugs are you on [10]
part 4: dragons
hey. why did so many people have to latch onto the dragon thing? on a personal note, i do not understand the appeal but have no room to judge. on a cultural note, zhongchi is DOING IT WRONG.
in canon, zhongli's "dragon form" is based off of chinese dragons[11]. which makes sense, since the place he's from, liyue, is modeled after china. genshin impact is created by mihoyo, a chinese company.
what im saying is a chinese company writing a chinese game with a character from fantasy china would NOT make this character a western dragon.
western dragons breathe fire, are very aggressive, collect hoards of gold, and are often depicted as greedy and possessive. eastern dragons not only look different, they're associated with water (rain) rather than fire, they're cultural symbols of prosperity and good luck, and they FOSTER HARMONY. i have exclusively seen zhongli's "dragon personality traits" modeled after western dragons, not eastern ones. like. yeah. i get it. the dragons the english half of the fandom is familiar with are western dragons. maybe they don't even know how eastern, and specifically chinese dragons, are different. but that doesnt make them any less INCORRECT.
and hey! seeing dragon eggpreg content makes me want to die[12]. there’s so much. i wish there was less much. this also further encourages the feminization of childe which is :\ must we keep returning the gender norms to fictional romantic relationships
part 5: the ripple effect
the zhongchi version of childe has escaped containment[13]. im unhappy about it. i always know it when i see it because childe is an insatiable uwu bottom who would rather have sex than have a street fight.
because this ship is so hellaciously popular, other childe ships are relatively rare[14]. anywhere you go, if someone is a fan of zhongli or childe, they probably also ship it. i never want to see another piece of zhongchi fanart again and yet, i soldier on. this is my curse. this is my burden. for childe, i must persevere.
in conclusion,
i dont have a conclusion actually i just hate zhongchi, thanks for coming to my ted talk
[1] those people are incorrect.
[2] i didnt look up this number even a little bit, but i feel in my heart that it is accurate.
[3] "only 10%? and you're calling it an epidemic?" yes. yes i am. "don't you think thats a little harsh?" you haven't seen what ive seen. you haven't suffered what ive suffered.
[4] sorry i know the childe section is like four times as long but i just don’t about zhongli like i do childe.
[5] yes i know it wasnt a meteor but this was written to be read fandom blind and ff7 altered my brain chemistry.
[6] Daft Punk, "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", 2001
[7] there are, of course, bottom!zhongli works. the name for this ship is "chili" (dont get me started on the top/bottom dynamic wars within the same pairing, we'll be here all day and i will scream until i pass out). it's more difficult to use ao3 numbers to prove my point here, as i find the tagging of top/bottom dynamics on ao3 to be inconsistent. instead, i will use statistics on zerochan.net. at the time of writing, zerochan has 1,765 images tagged with "zhongchi" and 228 images tagged with "chili". (so, ~90% of the childe/zhongli ship on zerochan is marked as zhongchi, i.e. top!zhongli and bottom!childe.) should i be using only a single data point to definitively say that zhongchi is exponentially more popular than chili? no, i should not; that's what we call bad science. but it illustrates the skew in the dynamics and the clear fandom preference, and this is a rant post not a scientific study.
[8] to some degree, inaccurate fanonizations involving popular characters in a large fandom is inevitable. i understand this. i do not accept this.
[9] erasermic (aizawa shouta/yamada hizashi) is a popular fandom auto-married ship from boku no hero academia. im not a fan of erasermic either but at least it's existence hasn't left a permanent stain on the characterizations of either character.
[10] ok so maybe zhongli could do the domesticity thing given that he's working that mundane human angle, though it would take some effort and learning and guidance. but childe? a house husband? lol. lmao.
[11] to be specific, he's half-dragon half-qilin but everyone seems to forget the qilin part. this isn't unreasonable, given that my experience is with the english speaking part of the genshin fandom, and qilin isnt really a thing that shows up in english media. one time i was watching a cdrama with a friend and the subtitles said "he has a dragon tattoo!" and she started YELLING and we had to pause the show because it wasnt a gd dragon it was a QILIN and they are VERY DIFFERENT THINGs, and then i got a whole rant about how even a unicorn would be a closer translation than dragon and i had to look up qilin's on wiki to follow along with the rant. and thats how i know what a qilin is.
[12] i have a visceral cringe reaction to dragons now, thanks zhongchi. from my favorite beanie baby being scorch to this, how far i have fallen
[13] im sure the same is true for this fanon version of zhongli but i havent bothered to verify.
[14] @ chilumi shippers: ur cool, i like u, i also like ur art it's cute <3 but your fanfiction is not for me u_u
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Fuck Around and Find Out
An April Fools Smut Fic inspired by the Bad Sex Awards.
Pairing: Paz Vizsla x F!Reader
Rating: Mature/Explict 18+ (By proceeding to read beyond this point you are agreeing that you are 18 years or older)
Warnings: Very bad smut (that's the whole point of this writing challenge), pure filth, porn without plot, unprotected P in V sex, creampie, breeding kink, slight degradation, and truly awful cringey synonyms for male and female genitalia and semen throughout.
Word count: ~500
A/N: I've read some hilarious April Fools Smut fics today and thought, what the hell, I'll give it a go. I figured if it's awful, I'll just blame it on the challenge. Hope this makes you laugh. Unbetaed, and yeeted into the world like the future child of Paz and reader. 😘
If the Maker themselves had told you that you’d be in the position you’re in right now, you would have said they were insane.
But here you are, getting fucked boneless by the most intimidating warrior in the covert.
White hot pleasure explodes through your body as you claw at your wet, ruined sheets. You are powerless to do anything other than take the fat girthy schlong of the beast of a man behind you.
You’ve lost track of how many times Paz has blown his thick choad inside you. How can one man produce so much baby batter? It was beyond your comprehension.
It seems like you both have been going at it for hours now, with no indication of Paz slowing down any time soon.
You only have yourself to blame, really. You just had to tease him, had to challenge him. Well, this was taking “fuck around and find out” to a whole new level.
Paz grabs your hair, causing you to arch your back ridiculously as he pushes past your cervix and spills his hot spunk directly into your womb again with a roar.
How could he possibly fit more in there? If he kept this up, you would be dripping his cream of meat from your snatch for a week.
Surely he must be done with you, but no. In a move that has your mind reeling, he pulls out of your sugar walls and flips you onto your back.
You whine like a massiff bitch in heat and shamelessly beg him for more. You just can’t get enough of his one-eyed trouser snake.
Before he does anything else though, Paz bends down to get a bird’s eye view of his handy work.
To fuck with him, you clench your inner muscles and push a wad of his splooge out of your ruined meat flower.
“Oh no you don’t,” he playfully scolds you. “We’re not wasting one drop,” he says as he pushes his hot nutt back inside you while you keen at his words.
The next thing you register is your knees being thrown over his broad shoulders, heels on his back, as Paz plunges his fuck stick back into your soaked clam.
“Hang on, cyar'ika,” he warns as he starts to move again, determined to rearrange your guts. “You’re not leaving this bed until you’ve been successfully bred like the good little cum dumpster you are.”
The moral of the story, never tell a Mandalorian like Paz they are too old to get it up. Or that they are past their prime and probably shoot nothing but blanks. They will make it their mission to prove you wrong.
And to be honest, that was just fine and dandy with you.
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