Hello! I guess I am going by hoarous now, although you may also know me as semiramis, meigui, or variations thereupon. I prefer hoarous, but my given name "Mei" (玫) is also acceptable. My art tag is here, and my fic tag is here. FYI, I block anything that follows me and looks like a spam blog. If you've got fandom stuff on your blog, you're probably fine. Don't hesitate to pop me a message just to be sure, or for any other reason!
Seasonal Affective Disorder is just emotional scurvy, all my core wounds are reopening and they won't be fixed until the big lemon in the sky comes back
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
I kept forgetting to cross post but i’m working on a fic right now! Honkai Star Rail, Dan Heng centric. Probably more fun to read without knowing the pairing ahead of time but if you’d like to know, uh… it’s in the AO3 tags.
Currently on chapter 3/4. should be finished… idk, within a couple weeks i guess?!
not technically a tabris but i’ve always wanted to do a mahariel who has an uncanny resemblance to shianni and has a real confusing time when they make it to denerim because everyone keeps mistaking them for shianni, but then they actually MEET shianni and it’s even weirder until they have the time to sit down together and figure out that, actually, mahariel’s mother wasn’t from another clan, she was a city elf, so of course her family didn’t approve of her running off with a dalish apostate
after dad mahariel died, mom tabris-mahariel stayed just long enough to deliver twins and name one of them before wandering off into the night with the other, where the clan assumed she died but it turns out she was saved by some human freeholders, whom she served until her death of fever five years later
#I kind of ignore/gloss over mahariel's backstory bc ''mom wanders off into the woods to die of a broken heart'' is such a tired trope#but the concept of momhariel wandering off with no warning with just ONE of her children is gonna haunt me for a while thanks
listen, shianni living in a human freehold with her mother until said mother died when shianni was five, and shianni fantasizing about her dad being dalish, AND mahariel’s mother’s family not approving of dadhariel are also all canonical. all i did was stitch all that together into one piece!
my original idea was that momhariel didn’t actually deliver the second twin until after wandering off, but then i thought maybe that’s not actually. like. biologically plausible. i figure she was at least little bit delirious when she did it though.
The urethra on our training mannequins got kinda gunked up and we didn’t have mannequin lube on hand, so I was just white knuckle squeezing this plastic penis while trying to shove a essentially a thick dry fully cooked pasta noodle up it, so the instructor told me I could use hand sanitizer as lube, and then she added, “ONLY ON MANNEQUINS. DONT DO ANY OF THIS ON A PERSON.”
Okay so I know you didn't read the book, idk if you've watched the donghua, but in both of these Lan Wangji has golden eyes. (WWX has grey eyes in the donghua, idk about the book tho) And this is.... not really a meta question? But more like I wanted to ask if you maybe know why giving them these eye colors isn't considered racist? Like obviously chinese people don't all have brown eyes, but the majority does? Is it because they're chinese characters by a chinese author? Or do you know if this is just a trope chinese authors do? I wanted to look this up but all I found is, well, that it's racist to do this with characters of color. I was planning to write a fic and wanted to go with the donghua design, aka golden & grey eyes, but I got unsure because of all the posts saying it would be racist. Like yeah a lot of people in fics go with LWJ having golden eyes etc. but this made me a bit insecure? No matter if you can help, thank you for reading this and for your time ❤
hoooooooo buddy okay anon, there’s a lot, a lot you’re asking here, so let’s take this apart layer by layer:
before we even get into talking about MDZS/CQL, I do want to point out the inherent problem in asking a person whose defining trait on the internet has become, well, being a member of the Chinese diaspora in fandom the question of “is xxx racist (or not) and why?” because I am not and should not be taken as a spokesperson for an entire ethnicity, race, or subculture. Just because I say something is fine (or not-fine) doesn’t mean that it is, across the board, fine (or not-fine!). What reads as okay to me might be mega-not-okay for someone else; what sets me off might be shrug-it’s-fine-I-guess for someone else. Deconstruct the idea of the Chinese diaspora as a monolithic entity! Yeet the idea that you can get a “get-out-of-racism-free” card from one member of a large and diverse group out the window!
next, I think we have to also acknowledge the difference between attitudes towards race between mainland China (where these works are being produced) and the diaspora/Western world (where these works are now being consumed and often taken out of context). If you take a moment to think about it, growing up as part of a minority in majority-minority countries (especially the U.S.) gives you a very different perspective on race and racism in media than growing up as a majority in a majority-Han environment (i.e. mainland China).
(and it’s also worth pointing out that race relations in East Asia are complicated!!! oh my god!!! it’s so messy!!! it’s ongoing!!!)
Overwhelmingly, Chinese diaspora folks are going to be much more sensitive to representational accuracy and authenticity because there is a very real sense of danger when we see misrepresentation in media. We don’t get a lot of representation in Western media, so when Western media gets it wrong, it hits much closer to home.
and on top of all that, MDZS/CQL are particularly complicated by virtue of 1) their genre (xianxia, and thereby unmoored from a strict anchoring in a time or place), 2) the sheer number of different adaptations with different character designs, 3) again, Western reception of non-Western texts/Western fandom interaction with non-Western texts. I’m not going to get into examples of whitewashing or moralization with Western values in this fandom, but I’m sure if you’ve been around long enough, you’ve seen those discussions go by.
Okay!!! let’s talk about the MDZS donghua. Firstly, animated works play by different rules than live-action works in terms of character design. Especially for donghua like MDZS or TGCF, the stylization of characters can be much more fanciful and fantastic (@Ling Wen’s blue hair), and we accept that, because it’s animation, because generally speaking, we don’t watch animated works looking for photorealistic depictions of these imagined worlds. Ethnicity reads differently on heavily-stylized animated characters; physical characteristics that might otherwise give us clues tend to get flattened into the animation style. And beyond that, ethnicity isn’t really... an element of characterization that matters in the MDZS/CQL world because it appears to be more or less homogenous.
MDZS/CQL isn’t concerned with race, ethnicity, or representation, because it’s a story made by and for a Chinese audience; bringing the question of race into the text which otherwise does not even address race reflects Western thoughts and perspectives. The question of whether “it’s racist or not because a Chinese author did this” feels like it’s missing the context in which these texts were written, designed, made, produced--i.e. a context where race is not a question and representation not a concern. Whether or not a character has an unusual eye color isn’t a matter of accurate racial representation to the author/designer/animator since that question is literally not even on their minds.
I’m going to hop over real fast to your question of ‘why giving these characters unusual eye colors is/isn’t racist’ (keeping in mind the caveats from earlier in the post, and not taking my opinions as definitive statement) and try and poke at why changing physical attributes of an ethnicity willy-nilly might alienate people. In a world where, whether we like it or not, beauty standards are often measured by ‘proximity-to-whiteness,’ going in and saying “this character is Han Chinese, but I do not vibe with brown eyes because brown eyes are boring, so I am going to give this character eyes of this exotic color” is playing into that exact neoimperialist mindset of “a person of this race would be more beautiful/attractive/cool if I changed this physical attribute about them.” I... don’t have to explain how alienating that is, right? Because it’s really, really fucking uncool.
“But the donghua does it--” yes, the donghua gives MDZS characters more unusual eye colors, but the donghua is also fundamentally unconcerned with representation or realism. And if we wanted, we could have a longer conversation about the worldbuilding of MDZS/CQL as a whole and where the story takes place (I’ve talk a lot about the temporal unmooring of CQL but I haven’t really written about the spatial unmooring either--the tl;dr of it is that the world does not map onto historical China, nor does it not-map onto historical China, and I think we’d all enjoy things a bit more if we stopped obsessing about historical accuracy!!!), but the point is, the donghua cares more about aesthetics than accuracy. And that’s just fine! It’s an animated show!
I think this post is starting to go in circles, so I’m going to marshal up some bullet points in an attempt to get to a conclusion:
yes, the donghua designs stray from what we might consider ‘conventional Han Chinese traits’
I don’t consider that inherently racist because of the production context
(please take a moment to recall that I am not a representative spokesperson in this matter, and that this perspective is purely a matter of opinion)
changing physical attributes of a character of color is a pretty shitty thing to do
especially if that “unrealistic” attribute becomes the defining aspect of their appearance/beauty/specialness/overall worth
like if a character of color is sexy specifically because of this one (1) imagined trait that makes them ~different~ from other characters of the same ethnicity, that’s kinda yikes
that being said, specifically in the context of MDZS, you’re not doing it out of nowhere; you’re basing this design on an existing adaptation
would we even be having this conversation if the live action didn’t exist, grounding these otherwise nebulous characters on the bodies of Han Chinese actors?
would we be having this conversation if we weren’t taking an Americentric perspective on race and representation?
look, I don’t think you can be faulted if you base your image of the characters on an existing adaptation. if you’re really concerned about it, you can add a note explaining where you got the unusual eye color from. If you’re really, really concerned about it, you can relegate it to the specific fandom tag on AO3 (i.e. the MDZS donghua tag as opposed to the CQL tag).
but the general rule of thumb: if you’re worried that something might come off as racist, then don’t do it! don’t even bother taking that risk (unless the thematic focus of your work is precisely this, at which point, have lots of conversations with many people about this!)! If your heart is uncomfortable with the idea of something, odds are, your heart has something to say about it.
I feel like something else that’s a major factor in this is that, from studies on cross-race bias in face perception, coloration is only a salient cue to people who are white or who primarily interact with white people. So in the context of graphical media produced by han chinese for han chinese... the eye color is more of an incidental design detail rather than a defining feature, as it would be in western media. You see this in language as well—in Chinese, all the poetic terminology for eyes describes shapes rather than color (phoenix eyes, peach blossom eyes, willow leaf eyes, etc.) whereas in english when you want to describe someone’s eyes, the first descriptor you reach for is the color.
ETA also, as for novel LWJ—to my recollection, his eyes are simply described as pale, slightly unsettling, and it’s played as a tiny, subtle detail that’s the only way to tell him apart from his brother at a glance if you’re paying a LOT of attention, like wwx is.
ok so my sister brought this about drells to my attention: “…their hyoid bone, located in their throats, is particularly developed. This allows them to inflate their throats and produce vocal sounds outside of the human range.”
yes that’s right INFLATE
and then she said “do you think they croak when they really like someone”
“imagine your otp croaking sensuously”
and of course this popped in to my head and MY POINT IS i can never take thane serisously ever again.
Hello! I've been scrolling through your blog, and if I'm correct, you've only watched cql and listened to the audio drama right? I had a question about a part in the novel, but luckily it was also in the audio drama! While wwx and lwj are in the Xuanwu Cave, lwj tells wwx that he "really [is] an awful person" as he's crying, and I've always wondered why he said that because I don't think wwx said anything disrespectful regarding his father or Cloud Recesses. What are your thoughts?
ooof had to trawl through half a dozen audiodrama episodes to figure out which one it was, I truly blitzed through the audiodrama too fast and have no concept of what happened in any order
so the line anon is referring to is “魏婴, 你这个人真的很讨厌” which, at least on the version with English subs that I have access to, has been translated as “Wei Ying, you... are really detestable”
which, whoa, I mean, 讨厌 taoyan does have a dictionary definition of ‘detestable, repugnant, loathsome,’ but it’s really not that strong? I’d say it means more ‘annoyance’ than anything; if you break the characters down, you get 讨 tao / to incur, to invite and 厌 yan / to fed up with, to be bored of, and, yes, to detest. But calling someone 讨厌 taoyan today isn’t that strong; in fact, I’m pretty sure it can be flirtatious if said in the right tone
I’d translate that line as “Wei Ying, you’re really an annoying person” if anything.
As for why Lan Wangji says it... well, not to lean on character tropes, but this feels like pretty textbook tsundere behavior; I’m pretty sure he doesn’t actually think that Wei Wuxian is a detestable person, but it’s also worth considering that this scene follows hot on the heels of 1) the burning of Cloud Recesses, 2) the mortal injuring of his father, 3) the disappearance of his brother, 4) a healthy assortment of injuries including but not limited to an extremely badly-off leg which prevents him from moving freely, 5) being pretty damned stressed out about being trapped in a cave with his crush, 6) having said crush both confirm that he’s not gay and also ask if he’s into Mianmian, 7) having said crush be stupidly flippant about the life-threatening situation they’re in, and 8) break down crying in front of said crush because he’s exhausted and distressed and feels more helpless than he ever has in his entire life, okay
I also think there’s an unspoken ‘but’ in that sentence that doesn’t make it out of Lan Wangji’s mouth in that moment because he’s too busy crying; you really are an annoying person, Wei Ying, he says, but I’m thankful you’re here with me
but I’m thankful that you saved my life
but I’m thankful that your stupid optimism can distract me from the darkness and despair
but I’m thankful that you are so good, so giving, that you’d freely give me all the medicine, you stupid self-sacrificing idiot
but I’m thankful that you’re clever enough to get me to spit out congealed blood even if I’m really, really bothered by the way you did it
and if we die, I’m thankful that I’d die by your side
IDK if it’s present in the audio drama—it certainly isn’t in CQL—but not for nothing, in the novel, this is also the same sequence where the action that CN fandom (and also MXTX, I think?) seem to consider to be LWJ’s love confession occurs. That is to say, when LWJ bites WWX’s arm, in reference to the saying 啮臂之盟 niè bì zhī méng—an oath biting the arm, which means a secret oath of engagement
From what i can tell, WWX never actually realizes the significance of it.
Hey whaddup, any thoughts on jgy’s character arc vs the 十恶/ten abominations of dynastic law?
The 十恶不赦 shi’e bushe / Ten Unforgivable Abominations was a list of the worst crimes a person could commit, codified into law during the Sui Dynasty. The Ten Unforgivable Abominations were the only cases where the Eight Deliberations (a set of principles used to lessen the punishment for members of the imperial family/aristocracy) were not applicable.
The Ten Unforgivable Abominations were:
謀反 moufan: plotting rebellion
謀大逆 moudani: plotting damage to royal temples, imperial halls, and altars for sacrifice
謀叛 moupan: plotting defection to another state
恶逆 e’ni: plotting to murder one’s parents, grandparents, or any elder relatives
不道 budao: murdering three or more innocents; brutalizing their bodies; using poison to kill
大不敬 dabujing: displaying great irreverence towards the emperor
不孝 buxiao: displaying lack of filial piety by treating one’s parents badly or violating mourning periods
不睦 bumu: causing discord by harming one’s in-laws
不义 buyi: unrighteous conduct, including murdering one’s superiors
内乱 neiluan: incest
(paraphrased from the Wikipedia page and the Baidu-Baike page)
prguitarman
janainaart
gummygunk
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
titsay
baratheonpilled
izzy806
