In search of secondary character meta (drama)

[bonibaru]

I've been scanning through the comm and through my reading list looking for meta discussions of Guardian characters in the drama who are not Shen Wei, Ye Zun, or Zhao Yunlan.

As you might expect, the Big Three tend to dominate fannish conversation so I'm coming up fairly empty handed about Lin Jing, Zhu Hong, Chu Shuzhi, GCC, and even though Da Qing has a small but vocal following I'm staring at a fairly barren landscape on the cat tribe meta front.

Might I ask that if you have posted, or read, or participated in, meta analysis/discussion of other Guardian characters excluding SW/YZ/ZYL that you post a link in comments? I am longing for robust discussion about all the found family that I love so much. Even talk about the characters-of-the-week is welcome.

Comments

[extrapenguin]

branchandroot has some about Zhao Xinci (and Zhao Xinci vis-a-vis Shen Wei); I don't think I've come across other meta proper that'd fit your specifications, but a bunch of people talked about secondary characters in the 30 Days of Guardian things.

[naye]

unrelaxing had some lovely thoughts about Zhu Hong for the "favorite episode" question of the 30 Days of Guardian.

[nnozomi]

I would be interested in reading this too! Maybe we could have a side-character-of-the-week discussion post on the comm here for a while? The discussions of Zhao Xinci and Zhu Hong cited above are great, but I bet there's still more to say, and so many other good characters too...

[china_shop]

Ooh, that's a great idea! :-)

[bonibaru]

A really great idea!

[china_shop]

If you or someone else want to run with this, we can easily add a new tag for the occasion -- maybe "type: secondary character discussion" or similar? :-)

Other thoughts: I don't think it would have to involve a great deal of preparation. You could look on it more as crowd-sourcing meta -- invite people to discuss the character(of the week?)'s personality, arc, favourite moments and scenes. Maybe invite fanwork and meta recs too (incl self-recs)?

If no one person wants to run it, we could see if there's enough interest for different people to post for each character...

/random suggestions and ideas from pre-breakfast me :-)

[bonibaru]

If by running it you mean, making and tagging the introductory post each week so that the discussion gets started, I'm willing to volunteer for tribute! I have been kicking around some ideas how to organize and spark conversation ever since I asked (lol).

[china_shop]

Woohoooo! Yay! *\o/* *\o/* *\o/*

*twirls you*

(Ooh, maybe this will be the spur I need to finally get icons of all the team members -- especially if people link to icon sets in the comments! ;-D)

[bonibaru]

I can DM you about when it might start and so on.

[china_shop]

Sure, feel free! I'm very happy to be a sounding board/co-conspirator. Or you can just feel free to do it however you prefer. :-) :-)

Yay, I'm so pleased this is going to happen!

[nnozomi]

yay! :)

[umadoshi]

Ooh, yes!

[trobadora]

Oh, that's a fantastic idea! I'd love that.

[mekare]

I know that at some point (a couple of months back there were some people talking about Ya Qing and her motivations but I have never seen anything about the cat tribe. I recently had the same thought, there really should be something, especially because the information is so scarce. What a great opportunity to make fanon!

[bonibaru]

And even just to dig more deeply into the characters, their archetypes and so on, what motivates them, who they are when they aren't just sidekicks for the mains .... they're all so rich, they deserve more attention <3