My contribution to 10 Items or Less!
Nov. 1st, 2025 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
artemisdartI'll post about my contribution to the 10 Items or Less exchange, which revealed last Sunday night. Names were revealed simultaneously -- no anonymous period -- so it's not telling on myself to reveal it here.
I matched on the fandom 薬屋のひとりごと | Kusuriya no Hitorigoto | The Apothecary Diaries (Anime), for the characters Gyokuyou and Lihua. These are two of the four consorts of the Emperor in the Rear Palace of China's Imperial Forbidden City. In the show, they start out hating each other out of rivalry, especially since one of them ends up with a dead child (not the other one's fault, but emotions are running high!).
My idea for these two was to have the consort with the Emperor's favor (Gyokuyou) instruct / help the less-favored consort learn what he likes.
I had the idea for this fic from the very start, but there were a few challenges. For one thing, I wanted to be sure to put in a lot of Chinese culture and references.
For another, I had to figure out when to set the story. I decided to keep the plot point of the dead child, meaning that Lihua had previously won the Emperor's favor enough to bear him a son, only for that child to die. It made sense to me that the Emperor and Lihua would be so consumed by grief and regret that they'd be unable to start having sex again so easily. And the more they avoided sex with each other, the worse the block was likely to become.
A third challenge in the story was about how they would have thought about sex. This isn't sex for pleasure (well, there IS pleasure, but it's not ABOUT pleasure!). This is sex in service of the Imperial bloodline. It's kind of breeding-kink-adjacent without actually being breeding kink. I feel qualified to write about this from my background being raised among very conservative Catholics who definitely have a breeding kink although they don't know the term for it, haha!
I had to research traditional Chinese beliefs about sexuality, orgasm, conception, and so on. And I'm not sure I got it completely right, because I had a scheduling snafu...
After thinking about it for a good 3 or 4 weeks, the deadline was rapidly approaching... I failed to write any on Friday night, but no problem, right? It wasn't due until Sunday night!
On Saturday I logged on and double checked, only to feel my heart sink. The fic was actually due that very same evening at 9 pm my time! And I already had a 2 hour martial arts class in the morning, and then a 3 or 4 hour event in the afternoon.
By the time I got home from that, it was 7:30 pm, so I only had about 90 minutes.
I did my best in that timeframe, publishing a draft of the story at 8 pm and then adding to it up though 9 pm and a bit beyond, so the mods could see that it was a complete story, in before the deadline. But it's definitely not my best ever work.
Still, I did my best, considering my lack of understanding of deadlines! 😅
My gift recipient hasn't commented or kudosed it yet, but someone else found it and left a comment saying they really liked it! That makes me happy!
In this fic, I put Chinese characters in at intervals, followed by the pinyin pronunciation in parentheses, and then the meaning in square brackets. I was inspired to do this by "The Hunt and the Fall," where the Mando'a language and its meanings are interwoven into the story paragraphs. I feel like it's the best way to give the flavor of the Chinese chengyu, along with the pronunciation, so readers can sound it out in their heads as they go. At least, I like it -- I hope my gift recipient does, too!
I matched on the fandom 薬屋のひとりごと | Kusuriya no Hitorigoto | The Apothecary Diaries (Anime), for the characters Gyokuyou and Lihua. These are two of the four consorts of the Emperor in the Rear Palace of China's Imperial Forbidden City. In the show, they start out hating each other out of rivalry, especially since one of them ends up with a dead child (not the other one's fault, but emotions are running high!).
My idea for these two was to have the consort with the Emperor's favor (Gyokuyou) instruct / help the less-favored consort learn what he likes.
I had the idea for this fic from the very start, but there were a few challenges. For one thing, I wanted to be sure to put in a lot of Chinese culture and references.
For another, I had to figure out when to set the story. I decided to keep the plot point of the dead child, meaning that Lihua had previously won the Emperor's favor enough to bear him a son, only for that child to die. It made sense to me that the Emperor and Lihua would be so consumed by grief and regret that they'd be unable to start having sex again so easily. And the more they avoided sex with each other, the worse the block was likely to become.
A third challenge in the story was about how they would have thought about sex. This isn't sex for pleasure (well, there IS pleasure, but it's not ABOUT pleasure!). This is sex in service of the Imperial bloodline. It's kind of breeding-kink-adjacent without actually being breeding kink. I feel qualified to write about this from my background being raised among very conservative Catholics who definitely have a breeding kink although they don't know the term for it, haha!
I had to research traditional Chinese beliefs about sexuality, orgasm, conception, and so on. And I'm not sure I got it completely right, because I had a scheduling snafu...
After thinking about it for a good 3 or 4 weeks, the deadline was rapidly approaching... I failed to write any on Friday night, but no problem, right? It wasn't due until Sunday night!
On Saturday I logged on and double checked, only to feel my heart sink. The fic was actually due that very same evening at 9 pm my time! And I already had a 2 hour martial arts class in the morning, and then a 3 or 4 hour event in the afternoon.
By the time I got home from that, it was 7:30 pm, so I only had about 90 minutes.
I did my best in that timeframe, publishing a draft of the story at 8 pm and then adding to it up though 9 pm and a bit beyond, so the mods could see that it was a complete story, in before the deadline. But it's definitely not my best ever work.
Still, I did my best, considering my lack of understanding of deadlines! 😅
Mutual Resonance
Author: ArtemisDart
Fandom: 薬屋のひとりごと | Kusuriya no Hitorigoto | The Apothecary Diaries (Anime)
Ship: Gyokuyou/Lihua (Kusuriya no Hitorigoto)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Wordcount: 2,511
Summary: Lihua needs the benefit of some advice in order to bear a son for the Emperor.
Well — she might need a bit of practice, too.
My gift recipient hasn't commented or kudosed it yet, but someone else found it and left a comment saying they really liked it! That makes me happy!
In this fic, I put Chinese characters in at intervals, followed by the pinyin pronunciation in parentheses, and then the meaning in square brackets. I was inspired to do this by "The Hunt and the Fall," where the Mando'a language and its meanings are interwoven into the story paragraphs. I feel like it's the best way to give the flavor of the Chinese chengyu, along with the pronunciation, so readers can sound it out in their heads as they go. At least, I like it -- I hope my gift recipient does, too!
