I just read a blog of yours mentioning your preference against fics portraying Yan Wuhsi as a softie, and I am interested in reading fics that you did like. Could you kindly share some fics you've come across where Yan Wushi's characterization remains true to his core traits?

I don't remember what exactly I said in that post lmao but I gotta be honest.... I've been super picky about yanshen fics, and yeah yeah bold of me to be so picky when there's so little food (there's literally only 25 pages of EN fic that are over 1k words lmao..), but also. tbh of the fic I did test-run, I only have, like, a handful or so bookmarked, and for the most part they top out at like a 3, 3.5 as far as hitting what I'd want out of a Qian Qiu fic or like, hitting the characterization points I think should be in a good QQ fic

The one fic that I'd give a 4 is so because it's an actor AU and I like those as an indulgence, I wouldn't say it's necessarily THE most in character, but it's sort of like... along the lines of the donghua as far as in-characteredness.

I think the one fic that I feel like (to me!) is the most in character for Yan Wushi is this one:

And, like, it's a Shen Qiao POV fic lmao. But I think it manages to capture something very interesting that, after writing the last two posts I did lol, has also helped me figure out something about how I interpret Yan Wushi vs how I think other ppl do as to defining what it is exactly that I think some people don't "get" about Yan Wushi. (But if I do write more about this in detail, I think it'd probably be in a new post lmao because the paragraph under this is half-typed out before this edit and I think I've already evolved my opinion/how to define my interpretation again lol.)

But yeah- A lot of the other fics to me just like... don't seem to "get" Yan Wushi - if he's too shmoopy or lovey dovey, that's not really his way imo. If there's anything making him feel or express regret, especially for the Sang Jingxing thing, then that also isn't it for me either - because explicitly, he doesn't regret it. (and tbh lmao, I can see why he wouldn't? Like I just pinned down that by Chap 23/24, SQ already has a marked shift towards YWS even if maybe he doesn't realize it, but I think for YWS he's still very much in, like... still in his bonsai-experimenting phase with SQ. Because at that point, SQ still HASN'T fully realized the potential of the ZhuyangCe yet, so he ISN'T (yet) on Yan Wushi's level. Which means that he's not yet Yan Wushi's peer, and at this stage, he's still treating SQ rather more like an experiment to see how far he can push him and where exactly his bottom line might be. (I think, though, unfortunately we'll find that Shen Qiao has perhaps a different bottom line with Yan Wushi than with, say Huo Xijing, but that's yet another matter again.)

(this is the other fic btw lol, where it's like, both a guilty pleasure kind of AU for me and also enough of an AU that I can deal with it being a sort of eau de cologne of characterization vs like a full on parfum if you get my analogy here lmao:

so... sorry, I don't really have a good answer for you here! except that I'm maybe too picky for a fandom with limited food in the Anglophone-sphere lol;;