There was one of those hyperspecific polls that had an option like “your grandfather told you war stories that he never told anyone else” and now I feel like I have to tell the story about how a spider saved my grandpa’s life in WWII and how my family doesn’t kill spiders because we owe our existence to that One Single Spider
So to set the scene, it’s the height of WWII in France and my grandpa—a 6'3" 20 year old upper Michigan farm boy—has been separated from his company after their temporary camp was shelled. My grandpa (who, I have to add, was nicknamed ‘the Suicide Kid’ at this point because he worked in demolitions and bomb interception and kept taking the jobs no one wanted with the expectation that he was never going home anyway) is scared out of his wits, wandering around the French countryside alone. He has to move at night and sleep in barns and sheds during the day to hide from people who most definitely want him dead.
On one of these days, he finds a farmhouse of a very jittery couple who agree to let him sleep in the barn, with the conditions that he sleeps in the barn loft and if he’s found, they disavow all knowledge that he was there. He agrees, because he’s exhausted and will sleep in a hay pile if he has to. My grandpa manages to fit all six foot three inches of himself into a feed trough stored upstairs and tries to get some sleep.
However, right when he’s half-snoozing, he hears motors outside and sure enough, here are some very angry officers of mixed Nazi and Vichy make confronting the couple saying someone up the road spotted an American soldier walking this way. They wouldn’t know anything about that, would they? No, of course not.
All the while, my grandpa—now trying to figure out how to either escape the barn unseen or how to fight off six? seven? eight? people at once—freezes up and waits for the inevitable. While he does, a HUGE spider crawls next to his head and onto the loft railing. For one second, he thinks about swatting it away, but that would risk him being seen and killed.
So, instead, he lays there and waits to either fight to the death or get executed in a feed trough. And while he lays there, the spider starts making a huge web on the railing. My grandpa’s transfixed by this thing. He watches her go around and around, building a solid web before plopping herself off to one side and waiting for breakfast. At the same time, the officers finally go into the barn.
My grandpa can hear them searching around, turning over crates and checking animal pens. Then, he hears one say to check the loft.
And then another say, “Don’t bother. Look at the spiderwebs up there. No one’s been there in a while.”
And they leave.
Because my grandpa didn’t swat the spider away and let her build her web, the officers thought no one was there and left him alone. They drive off and my grandpa immediately thanks the farmer couple and hauls ass out of there as soon as he can.
After this, my grandpa refused to kill any spider, and his kids did the same. Because if it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t have lived and would never have had kids or grandkids. So we owe her one.
mxtx guys be really living their wattpad girlie dreams
lwj literally wrote a song about the hot dude in the class, named it after their ship name and got to marry the said hot dude from the class.
hua cheng created multiple fan art of his idol, sent him thousands of fan mails (lanterns), fought xie lian antis, and married his idol who was also an emperor by the end of the story.
and in scum villian i can’t even decide who was the wattpad girlie in the story. shen yuan who married the supposed player, bingbing who banged his milf teacher or shang qinghua who married the rich sugar daddy who was also his literal dream guy?
Wangxian is such a pervasive otp because it fits literally every trope at once. It’s both slowburn because they have 20+ years worth of miscommunication foreplay and fastburn because they get married and start fucking literally the second they’re alone after affirming that they’re dating. It’s a high school romance and a romance between 40+ year old coworkers. It’s enemies to friends to enemies to lovers. They’re both “I could fix him” AND “I could make him worse”. Obsessed.
I deeply appreciate that a major theme in TGCF is that no matter what difficult and painful things have happened in your life, you’re still allowed to enjoy the simple joys and share them with the people you care about. Terrible things happening don’t make you unworthy of building a lovely life regardless. Xie Lian and Hua Cheng have all these traumatic shared experiences and yet they still get to enjoy spending their days chatting as they do chores around puqi shrine. They travel together and share steamed buns and collect scraps. For every grand act of devotion there’s a simple act of companionship.
One of my favourite things in MXTX novels is the little things that the male leads do for the protagonist. like Luo Binghe making time to cook for his Shizun everyday, Lan Wangji ordering spicy food just to suit Wei Wuxian’s palate, and Hua Cheng killing 33 heavenly officials for Xie Lian
i absolutely adore the fact that hua cheng wears bells on his boots. like, he has no reason to sneak around in order to do what he wants. he knows he’s virtually unstoppable, so he doesn’t care if you know he’s coming
