It is very exhausting being in western fandom spaces sometimes. Tell me why I just wanted to enjoy a cute oubing ship vid on tiktok, and half the comments section was about people saying you can't ship them???
I wanna complain into the void, so here's a comprehensive of why Oubing/č鄼/Lotus Root Cake is fine (and even if it wasn't, why I don't give a shit):
(Spoiler warning for Nezha 2)
1. "You can't ship them cause they're brothers'": No, they are not brothers. Not by any definition of the word. Not by blood - not even sworn brothers technically, because they only refer to each other as best friends. They each have their own parents - those parents are not related to each other in any way, shape, or form. One of them is a freaking dragon, an entirely different species. Also, they're technically made of lotuses now. They weren't raised together either. Clarifying this point feels ridiculous.
2. "But they used to be part of the chaos pearl": If you wanted to define them by any type of relationship, they are soulmates. This is not me trying to spin them romantically, I mean they are literally soulmates. Their spirits are each half of a single Chaos Pearl, and they each represent opposite halves. They are literally soulmates and yin and yang.
3. "But they're children!": No, they are not three years old. If you wanna be pedantic they are technically six. But in actuality, they are thousands of years old. They've lived for centuries as a chaos pearl. I need you to understand that the original entity we saw at the beginning of Nezha 1, IS a creature that has been alive for thousands of years. They had personality too while they were fighting Taiyi. They were made into the pearls by the cauldron. Now, their mortal bodies as we understand it is 6. But because they're not really human, and their developmental stages therefore don't mirror a human, the movie shows them maturing into an adult form in the span of about 3 years. How do we know this? Ao Bing is the same age as Nezha, and he went from a baby to his adult form in those 3 years. The only reason Nezha is still in a child form is because he has the qiankun circle suppressing him. This is also the reason that putting the circle on his wrist releases his adult form. Also it's sort of maybe implied by the end of Nezha 2 that he may stay permanently in his adult form, since he reformed his body into it while he was in The Soupā¢. I dunno how accurate this part is so I suppose we'll see by Nezha 3. I would like to point out further that no three or six year old talks or acts like they do. Ao Bing and Nezha have very complete vocabularies, and are able to understand the complexities of their circumstances. They're both new to the world in this form, but they're not at the mental capacity of a 6 year old. It's like if you were dropped into a new form of existence with an adult brain.
4. "Nooo, why are you shipping them now": This ship is NOT NEW. It's been around since at least 2019. It is WILDLY popular in China. Back when Nezha 1 first came out, oubing literally won an award for best couple. I want you to understand the scale - from my understanding, they beat wangxian in cql. Y'all can correct me if I got this part wrong because I can't find the source of where I read this information, but if it's true, that's wild. I know the award part is correct. There was an official shampoo ad that reads like a shipping comic. Now that Nezha 2 came out, it is still one of the most popular ships. Every other post on my social media has been about Nezha 2 and at least half of that has been Oubing. There are over 2000 chinese fics on ao3 currently. Stop with this "why are you shipping them now", WE'VE BEEN SHIPPING THEM.
5. "It's not canon.": Not that I give a shit what's canon or even what the original creator thinks about shipping usually, but Jiaozi, aka the director of the movie, has stated that while he wrote Nezha and Ao Bing to just be a friendship that he thinks it is fine if people ship them. I'm pretty sure he also said something along the lines of 'people can interpret things how they want' or something.
6. Even if all of the points I made were not the case, I cannot stress enough how little I care about what someone should or should not ship. If you don't like it, just block the fanart/fic/video and move on. I promise society will not crumble because someone decides to ship two fictional characters from a mythology movie. We will be fine.
(Also if you see anyone in the chinese fandom write č鄼cp, the cp stands for "couple". Just to clarify. They use different terms for shipping in chinese fandoms, they'll say they "ke CP" aka ship a couple)
Some of the comments I've seen make me wonder if people have even watched the movies. 'You can't ship them cause they're brothers', god don't make me laugh.
Don't let them find out that the chinese fandom is also shipping Ao Bing and Nezha from the 1979 cartoon, they'd lose their minds.
