Work Text:
You know that I haven’t actually yet read the novel, but I used to be very active in the MXTX danmei fandom, so I have quite a bit of peripheral knowledge of SVSSS…or, at least I know enough to have rationalized and drawn this crossover.
To me, Roosmav's dynamic has a lot of similarity with BingQiu's, a.k.a. the teacher/student trope that is prevalent in Chinese danmei literature (I think this is also why Roosmav is by far the most popular ship in the Asian Top Gun fandom). Like Luo Binghe, Rooster is the yandere student who is in love with his teacher and has a lot of personal anger and abandonment issues, and like Shen Qingqiu, Maverick is the teacher who is the object of his student’s adoration - and wrath - and eventually acquiesces to his affections. And like BingQiu, Roosmav's relationship is built on a lot of misunderstanding, but also a lot of love.
Maverick as Shen QingQiu
I based Maverick’s “Shen Qingqiu” appearance on Tom Cruise’s Nathan Algren character in The Last Samurai. I still recommend the movie because it is one of Tom’s best and most beautiful roles!
Rooster as Luo BingHe
I wanted to draw Rooster with Luo Binghe’s demon mark because I just think he looks really cool that way!
Also, this is my drawing of the teacher/student trope (based on LetmedieALONE’s BingQiu art set):
Like Luo Binghe, Rooster was also once a sweet little boy, who grows up to be a big intimidating man, but still has a major weakness for his teacher. :3
But I know that your idea was to have Rooster be Shen Yuan, so I wanted to include a bonus picture for you! I presume that your reasoning was because you thought it would be fun to observe Rooster suffer in the System, which I don’t disagree with, lol.
Rooster as Shen Yuan
My experience in the danmei fandom is also why I was able to turn my opinion of bottom!Bradley around so quickly and so drastically. One of my biggest gripes with danmei - or at least with MXTX’s stories (apparently this isn't an issue with Priest's) - are its established top/bottom dynamics. The fixed roles used to grind my gears so much that in rebellion, I would deliberately seek out fanfiction which was written the opposite of the set canon dynamic.
Therefore, I just had to apply that same mindset to enjoy bottom!Bradley. I just had to care about Rooster first in order to be able to enjoy it...and I do care about Rooster now. Very very much. So there is an embarrassing irony that the beginning of my Roosmav experience was marked by me being virulently anti-bottom!Bradley and behaving like the very thing I was always against in fandom (eg: wanting to enforce strict top/bottom roles).
As an aside, Asian fandom in general is still extremely strict about top/bottom dynamics, as observed academically:
- Apart from disparate fanbase demographic constitutions, another discrepancy between Chinese danmei and slash lies in the top-bottom dichotomy. In stark contrast to slash that is characterised by versatility (Xiao 2018), danmei manifests a preponderant and patent distinction between攻 gong 'seme' (top; insertive) and 受 shou 'uke' (bottom; receptive) roles, impinged upon by the Japanese BL (Pagliassotti 2010, Zhang 2016, Yang and Xu 2017b, and the so-called 互 攻 hugong 'versatile' pattern, which literally means 'mutual seme', are attested in an acute minority. For instance, on Jinjiang, there are over 149,000 narratives marked by a well-defined seme-uke chasm, yet only 14,579 works concern versatile protagonists. Source: (x)
I still don’t blame anyone but myself for my former anti-bottom!Bradley weirdness, but I did spend a long time in a fandom space where top/bottom dynamics were culturally-enforced, so I wonder if that subconsciously had an effect on me. The Western slash fandom is still relatively new to my experience because I was predominantly active in Asian fandom (anime + danmei) for most of my life, but I think it’s a great thing that the West is so versatile in its top/bottom dynamics and acceptance of a variety of kinks in general. I wasn’t always very open-minded (I complained about bottom!Bradley and underage bottom!Bradley, in particular), which is why I am where I am now, but I think that everything is a matter of constant learning and growing and trying to be a better version of yourself in the present.
I am sorry for talking about these things on your gift, Kat, but I feel like I will have to keep explaining and apologizing about them forever. You don't need to respond, as I know Top Gun isn't foremost on your mind anymore, but I enjoyed drawing this AU, as it is something I had wanted to do for a very long time.