- The Iron Widow duology
- Iron Widow (2021)
- Iron Widow 2: Heavenly Tyrant (2024)
- Zachary Ying And The Dragon Emperor (2022)
They were nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2022.
Tropes that can be found in Xiran Jay Zhao's work include:
- Accidental Unfortunate Gesture: In the Mulan video, they point out that sticking your chopsticks vertically in rice, as Mulan and Mushu do casually at separate points, actually means you're cursing someone to die due to the resemblance to incense offerings for the dead.
- Asians Eat Pets: They refuse to debunk this stereotype because they don't think eating dogs is any worse than eating pigs.
- Cute Kitten: They have two cats, who freely wander around during videos and sometimes mess with the equipment. They even got their own themed video, "Relatable Cat Poems From 800 Years Ago".
- The Fashionista: Specifically referring to their videos where they showcase modern and traditional Chinese fashions, including face painting from Peking Opera and various cosplays.
- Historical Domain Character: Maximilien Robespierre of The French Revolution fame occasionally appears in shorts to accuse people of being monarchs and threaten them with guillotines.
- Love Ruins the Realm: Their video on the male concubines of the Western Han dynasty notes that nearly all the relationships, gay or straight, ended in disaster due to mixing love with politics. This leads to the Rare Sentence "We support gay rights, but you can't run a government on thirst alone."
- Mighty Whitey: Parodied in their film concept "The Last Jacobin", where instead of a white person landing in a foreign country and beating the locals at things they've been practicing for years, it's Xiran landing in revolutionary France and becoming a master orator of the Enlightenment, with Éléonore Duplay as the exotic love interest and Maximilien Robespierre as The Native Rival.
- "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: In their short describing the French Revolution as a Yu-Gi-Oh battle, they include a note that all of the cards Robespierre and Antoinette use (Including "Royal Writ of Taxation" and "The Huge Revolution is Over") are real Yu-Gi-Oh cards.
- One of Us: Is an admitted fan of Yu-Gi-Oh! and various other anime, getting their start in fanfiction.
- Running Gag: In their Mulan review, they explained that guardian lions are usually displayed in a female-male pair, with the female having a cub under her paw and the male a smooth ball. Since the movie had a pair of male guardian lions flanking the doors, they joked that those lions were a gay couple. Since then, any time guardian lions come up in a video, Xiran will note whether they're gay, straight or (in the case of two lions who had nothing at all) non-binary.
- Start My Own: Was motivated to write Iron Widow after being disappointed in the direction DARLING in the FRANXX took in its second half.
- X Meets Y: They've discussed the use of this trope (called "comps") in publishing and marketing on their Tumblr page, explaining it as a way to gauge the market potential of a particular story and often enforced on debut authors. Iron Widow was pitched as Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid's Tale, and Zachary Ying is Yu-Gi-Oh! meets Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
