if anyone is curious, the percentage of xingese speech bubbles for each of them is 18.3% for Ling, 9.4% for Mei, 40.5% for Lan Fan, and 30.1% for Fu
other fun facts I learned while gathering this data
Ling talks so fucking much
Lan Fan and Fu had almost the exact same number of speech bubbles, despite Lan Fan having a lot more screentime. I think this is because Fu gets to talk a lot at Xerxes and in the fight against Bradley, and also Lan Fan just. doesn't talk that much. I knew she was quiet, but this was a surprise to me. it strikes me that it might be a respect thing? particularly when speaking to the Amestrian characters, she usually lets Ling or Fu do the talking, presumably because they're her superiors
Mei's instances of Xingese are mostly thought bubbles or talking to Xiao-Mei. the exceptions are her confrontation with Lan Fan and her short exchange with Ling at the end
Ling speaks Xingese to Lan Fan in front of the Amestrian characters a lot more than I expected
even though it's such a subtle detail, Arakawa definitely made conscious decisions about when characters would speak which language. for instance, when Envy tells Ling and Ed that there's no way out of Gluttony's stomach, Ling starts yelling at him in Xingese, presumably because he's so upset
another bit that struck me is that when Ling rescues Fu from Bradley and talks about how he'll never be a king like him, they're talking to each other in Xingese. Fu then switches to Amestrian specifically to tell Greed to summon the Shield, then switches back to Xingese
when yelling "YOU FOOL" immediately after this, the speech bubble is a strange shape, making it impossible to tell which language is being spoken, further blurring the lines between Greed and Ling in that scene :)
speaking of Greed, when we first see Ling accepting Greed in the mindscape, his speech bubbles are in Xingese, but when that scene is expanded on in the next volume, it's all in Amestrian, so that might just be an inconsistency. he only speaks Amestrian with Greed by default
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