fraactals

beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful

[fraactals]

in case tumblr goes down, you can always find me on dreamwidth at fraactals.dreamwidth.org

blog content (as of early spring 2026 when i started watching cdramas):

75% cdramas - blacklist [#cdramas] and [#fraactals cdrama liveblogging] to avoid spam

25% random (literature, romance novels, politics, history, art, poetry, and... tumblr style posts that just catch my fancy)

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CDRAMA CONTENT INTRO

i am saramouche on MDL and sarawest5 on novelupdates

aside from watching a few shows and movies (hzgg, crouching tiger, etc) with my parents as a kid/teen, i'm basically fresh to all chinese-language dramas/movies. i am currently unemployed by choice and my "full time occupation" is watching cdramas and reading books.

i like shows which have lots of angst, darkness, depictions of trauma, good fight scenes, intrigue, melodrama, politics, people and families wrecked by patriarchal systems, romantic tension, scheming, and thematic depth. i also like tightly plotted shows.

as a romance fan, my favorite romances are between smart and competent people who for Various Reasons have relationships filled with angst, betrayal, deception, groveling, sexual tension, suspicion, and yearning. my favorite tropes include arranged marriage, geniune enemies-to-lovers, marriage of convenience, and spies/assassins.

i am mostly allergic to case/detective shows, humor-focused shows, romcoms, and the slice of life genre. i also dislike long arcs inside shows which focus on school competitions and when shows feature endless petty bullying by women of other women for no good reason

suggestions for cdramas i should watch are always welcome in my ask box!

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currently watching (will be tagged if you wish to avoid):

secret of three kingdoms (ep 30)

romance of three kingdoms 1994 (ep 3)

laughing in the wind 2001 (ep 4)

the untamed (ep 7)

[fraactals]

me: jfc who is this actor they got to play this random general leading a raid on yuan shao's granaries? his eyes alone!!!!!! these random veteran actors make everyone else look bad!!!!!!!!!

20 seconds later...

me: oh shiiiiiiiiit, that was cao cao!

[dancyrilkingston]

Portrait of Jayne Manners by Tadeusz Styka (c. 1930-1935)

[fraactals]

In [the Spring and Autumn period], logistical services were built along the roads as well. For example, it is stated in the Rites of Zhou: Offices of the Earth, Left (Zhouli: Diguan Situ, Yi Ren) that on the main highways connecting the cities with the countryside, a booth known as a lu was set up every 5 km to provide travelers with food; a “night lodging” or su erected every 15 km to provide accommodation, food, and hay for horses and cows; and a “market” or shi established every 25 km, which had better conditions and provisions for travelers. Besides this, the individual states also built wayfarers’ stations along the roads and prepared carts and horses and assigned full-time staff to manage the roads.

— An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture by Qizhi Zhang

for some perspective on traveling between cities in around 500 BCE...

(I think of the shows I've watched maybe only the prisoner of beauty is viably set near-ish this time; it gave me warring states era vibes and the focus on canals would be right for that era. most are set later)

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

modern medieval fantasies don't have enough weasel-based necromancy

[maniculum]

Please elaborate on this topic at length

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

i think i've made my position clear

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

anyway here are some medieval discussions of weasels and their necromantic abilities:

gerald of wales: The weasel also, when its young are dying from any hurt, recovers and restores them to life by the use of a yellow flower. We are told by persons who have witnessed the fact, having put the whelp to death to make the experiment, that the weasel brought the flower in its mouth, and first applied it to the wound, and then to the mouth, nostrils, and other orifices of the little animal, that it might inhale the odor, by which, through the efficacious touch of the plant, breath was restored, though life seemed extinct, some slight and imperceptible vestiges of it only having remained.

aberdeen bestiary: it is said, also, that they are skilled in healing, so that if by chance their young are killed, and their parents succeed in finding them, they can bring their offspring back to life.

thomas of cantimpré: Accordingly they are said to be expert in all the arts of medicine, so that, if they find their offspring dead, they make them naturally recuperate by means of a herb

also in marie de france's lai eliduc, guildeluec uses a flower she got from a weasel that was resurrecting its weasel friend to resurrect guilliadon

conclusion:

behold, a necromancer

[more about medieval weasel beliefs]

[fraactals]

i just wanna say, the fact that cao pi tells sima yi upfront what he came to yecheng for but sima yi can't believe it, but liu ping told the empress the night before there was a knot inside cao pi's heart because of his brother's death

i was so right in this post, that's all

[ajaxbell]

I feel compelled to make a pretty in pink joke about Cheng Lei, but I mean it's true?

Pink and white blend seamlessly, light and shadow linger, a romantic rendezvous awaits 💓～Goodnight💤

[fraactals]

i will say that the plotting in this yecheng arc has been a bit too Convenient for my tastes

like ok lucky for everyone cao pi just ran into the young madam yuan! luckily diaochan just happens to be in town on her own mission! lucky sima yi walked straight into lu bu when he went investigating in the inner courtyard!

in another lesser show i'd overlook this in an instant but the first part of this show was so pitch perfect....

[fraactals]

god it's so good though

when they sit at a table: the emperor, cao pi, sima yi, the empress, and dianchao

five people, five agendas. every person is a player, just the way it should be

every glance, every movement from regina wan is perfection

also im actually dead that cao pi and the empress were the musicians for dianchao. lmaooo

[fraactals]

i will say that the plotting in this yecheng arc has been a bit too Convenient for my tastes

like ok lucky for everyone cao pi just ran into the young madam yuan! luckily diaochan just happens to be in town on her own mission! lucky sima yi walked straight into lu bu when he went investigating in the inner courtyard!

in another lesser show i'd overlook this in an instant but the first part of this show was so pitch perfect....

[ashmindpalace]

average first sentence of a math wikipedia page:

A snorkle basis is a particular sort of set that has some properties and is generally "nice" (in a rigorous sense) and can do many things and is very practical.

[lady-of-the-harbour]

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE 花樣年華 (2000) dir. Wong Kar-wai

[fraactals]

wowowow i definitely thought i started this blog in 2012 when i found media fandom (because, no joke, i read an article about fanfiction in the Atlantic) but i guess i actually read fanfiction for almost a year before starting a tumblr

thinking back, there were at least two or three times i seriously considered deleting this blog

either close friends would leave/delete and say they wanted to be free and that deleting felt great and i'd wonder if i should try, or i'd be looking through my archives and feeling like i had said a bunch of embarrassing things on this blog and there were sooooo many posts and how would i ever clean up the blog to reflect a better self? and blah blah blah blah Insecurity Insecurity Insecurity

anyways it's good to not be a baby just graduated from college anymore, and

i am very glad i managed not to delete. i dont keep a diary/journal, and my chats with friends have migrated over like five or six different platforms, so this blog is in fact maybe the only easily available way to look at all of the versions of me i have been over the past decade

[edwoodette]

Mother, did you suddenly say this today because you think he can now replace me as your new puppet?

How Dare You

Episode 19

[fraactals]

man tho i think i disagree with the entire world about the attractiveness (or lack thereof) of tsunderes and/or disapproving overly stern men who Take Rules Seriously

(otoh i often find genuine villainy, suspicion,and reasoned antagonism and hostility super hot lol)

the cheerful fast talker x cold superior dynamic is soo not my thing (under the power, legend of the female general, kinda back from the brink), especially when it's gendered the stereotypical way like the three i just listed. i also feel like a lot of dramas fall back on this type of interaction to fill space sometimes?

but! it's the untamed and i'm enjoying everything else so far. i think they'll be equals and less of the boss/subordinate dynamic in this, plus it's gay not het so probably it will be ok

[leonardcohenofficial]

there is something so fascinatingly deeply unsettling (positive) about both the sound and the fury and absalom, absalom! and i’ve been trying to find the words to articulate just what it is about both novels that prompts that particular affective response. faulker is invested in an examination of both the compson family and the south itself as different but interconnected mythos (it’s difficult to not see parallels with ancient tragedy); it often seems that through this myth-making and storytelling and retelling and various streams of consciousness he’s attempting to find the root of what exactly is rotten in the county of yoknapatawpha but also in the compson bloodline; the death of the “southern way of life” and of the compson and supten families are interwoven in such a way that the works require you to consider the broader sociopolitical systemic issues causing a multitude of personal familial and social collapses. quentin’s line from the sound and the fury “theres a curse on us its not our fault is it our fault” is the one i return to most across all of faulkner’s work, and is perhaps the question i find most haunting—if you are doomed by the fact that you are a member of the house of atreus, is it your fault? how do you deal with that knowledge? how do you get out?

[leonardcohenofficial]

quentin compson tells the story of the house of supten with all its history and mythmaking and violence on par with the house of atreus (faulkner gets much more explicit with references to greek tragedy in abalsom, absalom! than he does in the sound and the fury) but in his heavily biased commentary quentin seems to forget that his family is just as cursed and also they live in a disintegrating haunted house on haunted property but the spectres seem to be just as much of their own making as they are tied to the dirt of the compson place

[fraactals]

i wanted to watch more secret of three kingdoms today but i made the mistake of reading 45 pages of my book on general chinese history + doing casual wikipedia reading on the side on things like the well-field and equal-field systems that i didn't know much about, and this all took me like two hours and afterwards i discovered secret of three kingdoms draws from the same well of enthusiasm and willpower, so i didn't have the mental energy for so3k (or ro3k 1994 lmao) anymore

soo, yeah good thing i am also watching the untamed !

[inland-delta]

Natalia Goncharova, Yellow and green forest, 1913

[arte-artem-artibus]

Natalia Goncharova - Yellow and Green Forest, 1913, oil on canvas, 102 x 85 cm