soc_puppet | SVSSS and PIDW Speculation (Reply)

The first of many posts of Stuff I'm Preserving from

Still working my way through the books, so I don't know if anything contradicts this yet, but until it does...

Headcanon that Bingge got The Talk from Meng Mo.

Both versions of LBH may have gotten the basics on puberty while on CQM, and then Meng Mo filled in some demon-puberty-specific details; or maybe Bingge didn't get any access to formal puberty education and had to learn everything from Meng Mo, I'm not sure. (Or maybe both of them had to learn everything from Meng Mo, because SY!SQQ didn't realize he needed to cover puberty at all, while everyone else thought for sure that SY!SQQ would take care of it.)

But actual sex advice? Bingge got a lot of the basics from his portable grandpa. Because portable grandpa has been around the block a few times, surfed in more than enough minds to see what works and what doesn't, he can probably give some really good advice. And then Bingge took the advice and built on it with his incredible Protagonist Skills (and other things If You Know What I Mean).

But Bingmei didn't get that advice. Either because Meng Mo didn't really pay any attention to any sort of anal/the giving side of anything that involved a dick, or because every time Meng Mo tried to give Bingmei relationship advice, it included extra "advice" at the start that he should really have at least a few concubines, just to properly demonstrate his power. And there is no way that Bingmei is paying any attention to that, so he started tuning out pretty much all of what Meng Mo had to say about sex after he got the demon puberty tips. Which sucks for SQQ, because Meng Mo actually has some decent kissing tips; he just doesn't think to cover them until after he's talked about going down on someone.

alexseanchai:

I mean, while I assume a lot of the RL medical best practices in xianxia costume that I see in fic is the ficcers' headcanons, I will nonetheless be deeply disappointed in Qian Cao Peak if they typically allow Cang Qiong disciples to represent the sect anywhere with so many different sex pollens without a solid understanding of how not to fuck up fucking-related fuckery

—but also yeah, through some combination of SJ neglect/sabotage/abuse, SY never having been a CQ disciple himself, and no distance learning access in the Abyss, Binghe missed those classes

and even assuming the Abyss was rather more than one percent sheer terror? Bingge undoubtedly, and Bingmei maybe, got plenty bored enough at some point to let Meng Mo blather at him about sex

soc_puppet

See, that complicates things further, because I’m not entirely sure that sex pollen/fuck-or-die shit is actually all that common prior to the realms being merged? The sex didn’t start in PIDW until the Immortal Alliance Conference, at which point LBH gets yeeted into the Abyss, and after which Bingge goes on his revenge spree, and then I think merges the realms. And at that point, a lot of people are suddenly being exposed to new flora and fauna that they’ve never encountered before, and which may never have encountered them before. It’s entirely possible that sex pollen that has an effect on humans mostly grew in the demon realm, as well as the other way around for sex pollen that affects demons. So unless they were making regular trips to the demon realm, human cultivators might not have had any reason for extensive training on treating sex pollen.

I don’t have a lot of evidence to support this, aside from the fact that what canon I’ve read so far doesn’t rule it out—and the fact that ‘sex worker’ is still a shitty job. In a world where “I have to have sex or I will literally die (or other consequences)” is a common occurrence, I like to think that sex workers would be treated at least slightly better. Probably not wholly respected still, but they’d essentially be providing medical assistance as part of their services, and that’s gotta turn the respect, or at least the pay rates, up a notch or two.

(Which incidentally would also make shaming SJ!SQQ’s visits to brothels less about him being lecherous and more about him seeking treatment from outside establishments. How dare he imply that his own sect isn’t good enough to treat any ailments he might acquire in the course of his duties as an immortal peak lord!)

Anyway I was mostly looking for a reason to explain the discrepancy between Bingge’s status as a de-facto sex god and Bingmei being… not that, especially to start, but now I think I’ve accidentally tripped into some interesting worldbuilding implications?

(The other option is Bingge being the Spiders Georg of fuck-or-die scenarios. “'average cultivator gets dosed by sex pollen 3 times a year’ factoid actualy (sic) just statistical error. Average cultivator gets sex pollened 0 times per year. Sex Pollen Georg, who is a stallion protagonist & cures sex pollen over 10,000 times each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.”)

(A third option is that sex pollen is exclusively a demon realm thing, because demons literally farm it. Demons canonically have a much lower birth rate than humans, so if they tend to be as ready to kill each other as some fics I’ve read suggest, they’ve gotta have some way of bumping their numbers back up.)

All that said, assuming that sex pollen and fuck-or-die scenarios are as common in the human realm as it is suggested they are in the bulk of PIDW is also fun and makes for great fic prompts, so I don’t want to disparage that reading, either. I have 100% jumped onto headcanons and fanon for the sake of horny before, and am fully prepared to do so again.

Edit: I've gotten about a third to half-way through the third book by now, and it revealed that the realm merge happened towards the end of PIDW, so not sure how that would impact my "most sex pollen plants are native to the demon realm" theory.