A guide to commonly used honorifics in 魔道祖师/The Untamed
OK - so, I’ve actually seen some confusion floating around on specific honorifics commonly used in 魔道祖师 and I figured I will put a post up to address some of this - especially the situations when they get used. Hopefully it’ll be helpful for fic writers or whoever else out there that’s getting turned around by the various translations.
As with most of Chinese vernacular, there’s a TON of similar, but different situations in which it may be permissible to use certain titles/honorifics, so bear in mind this is not an exhaustive guide. Also, I don’t have a PhD in Chinese honorifics or anything, I’m just a Chinese person that watches/reads a fair amount of historical dramas. So if I missed anything/if there was anything that was kind of unclear in the novel or drama, feel free to let me know!
公子 / gongzi/ master
Let’s start with the hardest so I can get this out of the way. You will see this translated in a variety of different ways - master, young master, sir…and they are all correct! Congratulations, you’ve hit the jackpot - depending on the situation, gongzi can be a whole hodgepodge of things.
Master: The most commonly used version in MDZS. This is a separate meaning of master from some of the honorifics discussed below - it is specifically used to address either:
Your literal master if you are a servant in the household
A somebody from a distinguished household in a polite way
General honorific: Gongzi can also be used between strangers/acquaintances as a respectful term. Gongzi is, in some ways, an indicator of respect of the other person’s status. So oftentimes you’ll find two young masters from different sects referring to each other as gongzi politely, but you wouldn’t find two beggars on the street calling each other that. and it’s usually used to address someone younger or a similar age as you. If you‘re talking to someone who is clearly your senior, use 前辈 or 先生.
Because it has the connotation of youth and aristocracy associated with it, oftentimes innkeepers/sellers may use gongzi to address male customers (particularly youthful men) because it’s a bit more flattering. Kind of like how the modern day shopkeeper calls you ‘美女’ (beauty) or even ‘亲爱的’（my dear - IDK when this started becoming a thing but if you do any online shopping on Taobao you know what I’m talking about) in China. They don’t actually think you’re beautiful/feel affection for you, it’s just a way of addressing the customer to make you feel good about yourself HA. It’s nice to be called gongzi even if you’re not actually a noble.
There’s variants of this - 小公子/ xiaogongzi is typically young master, although I think some translations just directly use the young master for gongzi. It can also mean the younger master if there is an older sibling in question here (e.g. Wen Chao was referred to as 温小公子 as he was the younger son), although you can also use 二公子 （second master), as many do when referring to Lan Wangji. It sounds a little less juvenile.
This term is used for guys - I would say the female equivalent could be 千金/ qianjin or 小姐 /xiaojie.
They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.
They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.
NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.
The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.
Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.
"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.
In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Council, said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled.
"The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right now," Russell said. "I do understand the skepticism, because it hasn't happened in the past, but I think the pressure, the public commitments and, most important, the availability of technology is going to give us a different outcome."
Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.
On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It's made from oil and gas, and it's almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.
All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled. But the public has known little about these difficulties.
It could be because that's not what they were told.
Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic.
"The bottle may look empty, yet it's anything but trash," says one ad from 1990 showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. "It's full of potential. ... We've pioneered the country's largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles."
These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.
Demand that companies stop using plastic in their products. Going plastic-free as a consumer isn’t accessible to most people, since all of the cheapest (and sometimes the only) stuff on the shelf uses plastic. And even if it were, a handful of consumers going off plastic so they can feel good about their own consumption would barely make a dent compared to all the ones who won’t pay attention + the mass amount of plastic used by big companies and industries outside of the eyes of any consumers. So start awareness campaigns, protest in front of company headquarters, form human blockades in front of factories - whatever it takes
Then, get involved with Precious Plastic if possible. It’s small-scale community-run plastic recycling, built around reducing waste rather than making profits. Even if we successfully shut down the plastic industry tomorrow, there will still be massive amounts of plastic already in the world, so we need to make sure we make the best use of that waste while also doing our best to put an end to virgin plastic use
Absolutely insane acceptance boards should be punished for behaving like this like seriously someone please electroshock these assholes till they're less pretentious make them write multiparagraph essays proving what an interesting person they are over and over and everytime you aren't sufficiently moved just zap em again.
wtf “activities related to premed” is a teenager supposed to be doing anyway?? especially one who’s already spending all her time going to school, studying hard enough to achieve perfect grades, tutoring other students, and playing in band / practicing her instrument?
imagine you’re at a convention and you’re reaching for a sasunaru doujinshi and someone else reaches for it at the same time and you look up and it’s megan thee stallion
so here in nevada we've been in water saving mode due to the drought for like 20 years and it hasn't made a difference because californian & arizonian agriculture is fucked. we use 4% of the water from lake mead / the colorado river and we are and have continued to be in free fall. CA uses 58% while AZ uses 38% due to the colorado river compact.
that white part is the "ring" which shows how far the water level has dropped. the dam which supplies electricity & water for CA, NV and AZ is going to be inoperable because the water level is dipping so that the dam will one day not work at all. big resorts are absolutely guilty of water waste but it's not just big resorts and water parks.
and i'm not going after farmers here or misrepresenting agriculture by large. it's undeniable that CA & AZ's southern money driven agricultural industry is fucking us over.
this is why i've become more and more interested in communism despite the constant barrage of fear mongering around it. independent farmers need economic security during a transitional period where we eliminate water wasting crops & practices from the region. capitalism will not do that. liberal "socialism" will not offer protections & frankly most urban people (especially urban anarchists) have no empathy for farmers despite their high suicide rate due to the poverty & debt.
i'm glad people in southern california are waking up to this but lmao we in nevada have been in this crisis for a long ass time now & it's kind of annoying to see CA people get affronted about this or try to oversimplify it as just a resort issue.
#yeah I live in SoCal and spent a year in an intensive cluster on food studies #and our agriculture module started to shift my mind and radicalize me because. for example almonds? #they're lucrative sure but the amount of irrigation they require just to grow here is RIDICULOUS #and we're able to buy meat in the supermarket so much more cheaply than in other countries because it's so heavily subsidized by the govt #so much money gets eaten up instead of supporting farmers and developing better and more sustainable ag practices
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