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I'm currently working on my end of year xiaoven fic rec list (that I'll probably post here too if only for archival purposes for when tumblr inevitably kicks the bucket), which I started last year in order to get some actual use out of the spreadsheet I use to meticulously track every fic that I read. Before anyone asks, I am simply a freak who loves cataloging and so I do it for fun. I was aiming to have 10 fics for the list, but only ended up with 9 that I read within the year that I felt was list-worthy, and then I chopped one for various reasons and was down to 8. To make up the difference, I decided to delve into some of my older bookmarks, and the experience has me feeling reflective about my fandom experience.
I think that by now, Genshin Impact has been my longest stay in any one fandom. My time with Bungou Stray Dogs also spanned a few years, but considering that I passed my 4 year anniversary of playing Genshin this month, I'm inclined to say that it's eclipsed it by now. But Genshin has also been a different kind of experience for me for the simple fact that I've actually engaged with fandom as a Genshin fan more than I ever did in the past.
My fandom experience followed the same pattern before Genshin: I would get interested in a thing, go onto the internet (Google Images, then DeviantArt, then Tumblr) to look at art of the thing I liked, and then in one way or another get pulled into a small cluster of people that would make up my entire fandom group, and then eventually things would shift and I'd end up somewhere else. This was probably aided by the fact that a lot of my earlier fandom experience was spent doing RP, but because this was when forums were on their way out, it was easier to end up in smaller groups than bigger ones.
Genshin was my main fandom at the time that the last group I was in splintered (which actually alienated me from the fandom that I would have considered my main one before that, Persona 5), and I just ended up floating around with my last close friend from that old group and we never really found a new one. It was the combination of that, and I think the fact that Genshin fans (or at least xiaoven fans) comment on fics so much more than fans of the other fandoms that I had written for in the past, that something just clicked and suddenly I was actually engaging with fandom more than I ever had before. It would intensify when I met Hua and they encouraged me to come out of my shell even more, but I'm tracking this by the fact that I was reading fanfiction more voraciously than I ever had in the past.
Let me put it in perspective. Prior to the first Genshin fic I bookmarked, I had 20 bookmarks on AO3. My first bookmark was from February 2017, my last pre-Genshin bookmark was December 2020. Almost 4 years and 7 fandoms worth of interest and/or reading. Now it's December 2024, so almost 4 years. I currently have 104 bookmarks on AO3 and 70 of them for Genshin Impact. Increased that number by 400%, and like 85% of them were for this one fandom, give or take. That's fucking Bonkers, dude. The brainrot hit me hard. And mind you, 30 of those 70 fics are just xiaoven too, that's almost half. I remain down abysmal for two (2) windy old men.
So now I'm going back to reading these fics that I read in 2021 to see if they still hold up and realizing that for the first time in my entire fandom career that I actually had a sense of how the Genshin fandom around me, especially in terms of xiaoven, had changed with time. Despite the fact that I have my name on 9 Bungou Stray Dogs fics, I couldn't tell you jack nor squat about how the wider fandom portrayals of soukoku changed over the two or three years that I was in that fandom because I wrote far more than I ever read, and my perception of people's tastes was pretty limited to my RP group. Meanwhile I'm rereading xiaoven fics and realizing that it tastes vastly different from what I prefer now, but I can identify very clearly why it was so popular at the time.
The first fic I read was I Would Die for Xiao from the Wanmin Test Kitchen, a fic that I never actually bookmarked and didn't even remember that much about aside from the premise, but thought back on fondly. The only reason I didn't forget about it entirely is that it's on the front page of the xiaoven tag when sorting by hits, kudos, and bookmarks, and it was curiosity about what this fic's deal was that made me think back on it fondly and also kept it so popular. What I ended up finding is that Wanmin Test Kitchen is very much a period piece for early 2021 xiaoven in terms of its characterization and that's so deeply fascinating to me.
Ultimately, I decided that even though I enjoyed the reread, Wanmin Test Kitchen wasn't something that I could earnestly put on a reclist because personally, I just don't really feel like it accurately reflects xiaoven's characters nor their dynamic. What it's trying to do, which is portray a xiaoven dynamic that's reflective of its name, where Xiao takes the lead in the relationship, is actually done really well. I find the Xiao and Venti of this fic incredibly endearing. However, they're hindered by characterization that popped up in quite a few fics from around that time of late-2020, early-2021.
Hua likes to say that xiaoven of that time is victim of "Any Two Guys" syndrome, which is to say that people at the time took the barest impressions of xiaoven's characters and bent them in whatever ways they needed to in order to justify them smooching. This is talking about the times from before the Yakshas trailer, before we knew Xiao and Venti had any past relation to speak of. It was a crackship, because they were both short twinky guys with Anemo Visions so of course people thought it would be fun if they smooched. Thanks to that, it was fanon that ended up influencing a lot of xiaoven work at the time rather than canon, hence why I can totally understand how Wanmin Test Kitchen caught on and why I enjoyed a lot myself, at the time.
This isn't to say that all of the fics from before we got more info from Xiao's release were bad, there's actually a fic that's going to be on my list that was published even earlier than Wanmin Test Kitchen that I think nailed their dynamic. At the same time though, characterizations where Venti was a mildly obnoxious scatterbrain with the emotional aptitude of an apple pie while Xiao was the emotionally competent one who found Venti deeply annoying, but in a fond way were rampant at the time. It makes for a really cute dynamic that was super enjoyable to read about in this particular fic, but it's also just. not xiaoven. Not to me.
My second foray was with a fic called A Surefire Guide to Wingmanning, which I did actually have some clearer memories of, mostly because a line of this fic and therefore the moment that I read it permanently branded itself onto my brain for the rest of time. To my great relief, this fic did in fact hold up over time and is still absolutely a worthwhile read, but it was also interesting to read because it was still very much a XiaoVen Modern AU From 2021. Like. All love, guys. The use of the word "simp" in these fics was brash. Despite that bit of cringiness though, it's deeply endearing that I can feel the vibe of 2021 in my teeth when I'm reading these. It's different from my usual fare these days, and sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's not, but it's interesting on a historical level nonetheless (that makes me sound self-important, but I don't think I have a better word lol).
I do feel a little goofy for being so awed by the fact that I can track the tastes of my own fandom through my own bookmarks, because Genshin is a young fandom and I'm a young fan in the grand scheme of things, but I think I'm just sentimental because by some cosmic coincidence I reread A Surefire Guide to Wingmanning three years to the day after I bookmarked it (December 23rd). I'm certain that I have a lot of fandom years in me yet, so this will probably happen again, but for now I'm going to let myself be a bit starry-eyed about the passage of time instead of being scared by it like usual.
I think that by now, Genshin Impact has been my longest stay in any one fandom. My time with Bungou Stray Dogs also spanned a few years, but considering that I passed my 4 year anniversary of playing Genshin this month, I'm inclined to say that it's eclipsed it by now. But Genshin has also been a different kind of experience for me for the simple fact that I've actually engaged with fandom as a Genshin fan more than I ever did in the past.
My fandom experience followed the same pattern before Genshin: I would get interested in a thing, go onto the internet (Google Images, then DeviantArt, then Tumblr) to look at art of the thing I liked, and then in one way or another get pulled into a small cluster of people that would make up my entire fandom group, and then eventually things would shift and I'd end up somewhere else. This was probably aided by the fact that a lot of my earlier fandom experience was spent doing RP, but because this was when forums were on their way out, it was easier to end up in smaller groups than bigger ones.
Genshin was my main fandom at the time that the last group I was in splintered (which actually alienated me from the fandom that I would have considered my main one before that, Persona 5), and I just ended up floating around with my last close friend from that old group and we never really found a new one. It was the combination of that, and I think the fact that Genshin fans (or at least xiaoven fans) comment on fics so much more than fans of the other fandoms that I had written for in the past, that something just clicked and suddenly I was actually engaging with fandom more than I ever had before. It would intensify when I met Hua and they encouraged me to come out of my shell even more, but I'm tracking this by the fact that I was reading fanfiction more voraciously than I ever had in the past.
Let me put it in perspective. Prior to the first Genshin fic I bookmarked, I had 20 bookmarks on AO3. My first bookmark was from February 2017, my last pre-Genshin bookmark was December 2020. Almost 4 years and 7 fandoms worth of interest and/or reading. Now it's December 2024, so almost 4 years. I currently have 104 bookmarks on AO3 and 70 of them for Genshin Impact. Increased that number by 400%, and like 85% of them were for this one fandom, give or take. That's fucking Bonkers, dude. The brainrot hit me hard. And mind you, 30 of those 70 fics are just xiaoven too, that's almost half. I remain down abysmal for two (2) windy old men.
So now I'm going back to reading these fics that I read in 2021 to see if they still hold up and realizing that for the first time in my entire fandom career that I actually had a sense of how the Genshin fandom around me, especially in terms of xiaoven, had changed with time. Despite the fact that I have my name on 9 Bungou Stray Dogs fics, I couldn't tell you jack nor squat about how the wider fandom portrayals of soukoku changed over the two or three years that I was in that fandom because I wrote far more than I ever read, and my perception of people's tastes was pretty limited to my RP group. Meanwhile I'm rereading xiaoven fics and realizing that it tastes vastly different from what I prefer now, but I can identify very clearly why it was so popular at the time.
The first fic I read was I Would Die for Xiao from the Wanmin Test Kitchen, a fic that I never actually bookmarked and didn't even remember that much about aside from the premise, but thought back on fondly. The only reason I didn't forget about it entirely is that it's on the front page of the xiaoven tag when sorting by hits, kudos, and bookmarks, and it was curiosity about what this fic's deal was that made me think back on it fondly and also kept it so popular. What I ended up finding is that Wanmin Test Kitchen is very much a period piece for early 2021 xiaoven in terms of its characterization and that's so deeply fascinating to me.
I enjoyed rereading the fic a lot, but my thoughts on it are pretty critical, so if you like this fic and/or don't want to hear negativity about it, feel free to skip this part.
Ultimately, I decided that even though I enjoyed the reread, Wanmin Test Kitchen wasn't something that I could earnestly put on a reclist because personally, I just don't really feel like it accurately reflects xiaoven's characters nor their dynamic. What it's trying to do, which is portray a xiaoven dynamic that's reflective of its name, where Xiao takes the lead in the relationship, is actually done really well. I find the Xiao and Venti of this fic incredibly endearing. However, they're hindered by characterization that popped up in quite a few fics from around that time of late-2020, early-2021.
Hua likes to say that xiaoven of that time is victim of "Any Two Guys" syndrome, which is to say that people at the time took the barest impressions of xiaoven's characters and bent them in whatever ways they needed to in order to justify them smooching. This is talking about the times from before the Yakshas trailer, before we knew Xiao and Venti had any past relation to speak of. It was a crackship, because they were both short twinky guys with Anemo Visions so of course people thought it would be fun if they smooched. Thanks to that, it was fanon that ended up influencing a lot of xiaoven work at the time rather than canon, hence why I can totally understand how Wanmin Test Kitchen caught on and why I enjoyed a lot myself, at the time.
This isn't to say that all of the fics from before we got more info from Xiao's release were bad, there's actually a fic that's going to be on my list that was published even earlier than Wanmin Test Kitchen that I think nailed their dynamic. At the same time though, characterizations where Venti was a mildly obnoxious scatterbrain with the emotional aptitude of an apple pie while Xiao was the emotionally competent one who found Venti deeply annoying, but in a fond way were rampant at the time. It makes for a really cute dynamic that was super enjoyable to read about in this particular fic, but it's also just. not xiaoven. Not to me.
My second foray was with a fic called A Surefire Guide to Wingmanning, which I did actually have some clearer memories of, mostly because a line of this fic and therefore the moment that I read it permanently branded itself onto my brain for the rest of time. To my great relief, this fic did in fact hold up over time and is still absolutely a worthwhile read, but it was also interesting to read because it was still very much a XiaoVen Modern AU From 2021. Like. All love, guys. The use of the word "simp" in these fics was brash. Despite that bit of cringiness though, it's deeply endearing that I can feel the vibe of 2021 in my teeth when I'm reading these. It's different from my usual fare these days, and sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's not, but it's interesting on a historical level nonetheless (that makes me sound self-important, but I don't think I have a better word lol).
I do feel a little goofy for being so awed by the fact that I can track the tastes of my own fandom through my own bookmarks, because Genshin is a young fandom and I'm a young fan in the grand scheme of things, but I think I'm just sentimental because by some cosmic coincidence I reread A Surefire Guide to Wingmanning three years to the day after I bookmarked it (December 23rd). I'm certain that I have a lot of fandom years in me yet, so this will probably happen again, but for now I'm going to let myself be a bit starry-eyed about the passage of time instead of being scared by it like usual.
