Tragedy Sponge

My name is Andromeda Grassbreads, and I’m here to share art and write meta. Mostly MXTX and Homestuck, along with whatever else as the mood takes. She/her.

[morethanwonderful]

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Tags:

This list is honestly for my own memory/sanity as much as anyone else's.

about andie: my personal post tag

adaptations: my thoughts on adaptations of things

archiveposting: posts from my other blogs that I've reblogged here for organization's sake

art: what it says on the tin

[fandom name] art: what it says on the tin, but more specifically

animation: art, but moving

ask: what it says on the tin. I also tags asks with "anon" or the url of the asker

audio: what it says on the tin

comics: art, but sequential

comparison: posts comparing different pieces media to one another

[character name] my beloved: posts about that character

edit: video edits

english major hours: my personal non-theory meta/analysis tag

[fandom name]: any and all posts about that thing, both my own and others'

[fandom name]posting: my original content about that thing

gifs: gifsets

jokes: funnyman content, or others' posts that I find funny

liveblog: me live reacting to things as I watch/listen to/read them

MXTX: posts about more than one mxtx novel

organization: navigational/maintenance posts like this one

others' meta: what it says on the tin

parallels: posts comparing one part of a piece of media to another

playlistposting: me assigning music to my blorbos

rebagel: my general reblog tag

self rebagel: self-reblogs

shen qingqueue: my queue tag

[ship name] or [group name] tag: all posts, both my own and others', about those characters

video: what it says on the tin

[morethanwonderful]

The new snow wine extra is so quintessentially Tai Sui. It's got an anecdote about teenage Xi Ping getting up to mischief, a scene of ascended spirit Xi Ping getting slapped with a gut-wrenching realization about social/wealth inequality and his own part in it, and a scene of extras-era Xi Ping going through the trials of grief that makes you feel like you're getting stabbed in the heart with a sharp knife while reading it.

[morethanwonderful]

Chewing glass thinking about how Xi Ping, despite being with Zhao Qindan, Bai Ling, Yu Chang, and perhaps many more acquaintances at their deathbeds, is blindsided and left behind by all three of his oldest and closest friends. Zhou Ying's consciousness fades into the ether and leaves behind a small note carved in stone, Wei Chengxiang disappears at sea, and Zhi Xiu wanders off to travel and leaves behind a note that Xi Ping doesn't find until he's long since gone.

No clean endings, no perfect resolutions, no permanence. Sometimes you simply discover that your people are lost.

[manthadraws]

“Promise me.”

[spooksier]

the chosen one is just someone you chose

[morethanwonderful]

I've been thinking a lot about the Turmoilers' plotline in Tai Sui and the way the associated themes are executed. The slow unraveling of the truth that the world of steampunk cultivation we've come to know and love over the course of the novel could not exist without the Turmoilers' suffering. The way that everything technological would topple without the constant brutal resource extraction of the Southern Mines, the way that He's land had to be destroyed and its people had to be starved, disfigured, and exploited as a result. There is no other way for the era of Moon Plated Gold to function.

Tai Sui is a novel about realizing over and over that the world you know and love and live in comfortably is, in fact, a nightmare built on a foundation of horror, exploitation, and lies. It's about peeling back what you've always known to and taken for granted to find the nightmare of the machinery underneath. It's about Xi Ping realizing in the very first arc that Heaven's Design Pavillion protects him, but it does not protect Jiangli. It's about four sets of laws in Wan: for cultivators, for nobles, for people, and for ants. It's about Xi Ping discovering Xuanyin will kill him for the Hidden Bones. It's about Zhao Qindan discovering that her family will sell her for stability and wealth. It's about Xi Ping and Zhi Xiu and Zhou Ying discovering the truth behind the laws of cultivation and the fact that the Way of Heaven leads to nowhere but to fusion with the mountains, that unique and heretical Ways still lead ultimately to "immortality" through freezing/killing your humanity and losing/rewriting yourself.

And in the midst of all that, I think the Turmoilers are the incarnation of that theme that resonates most with my own real life. You grow up privileged and comfortable in a wealthy country only to discover that every comfort you take for granted is built on the back of brutal exploitation of countless foreign strangers. This is not a flaw in the system; the exploitation is an integral cog in the machine of modernity that the whole structure, in its current form, would crumple without. What do you do about it?

Because Tai Sui is not a doomer novel. It's not about just pointing out the horrors of its world to agonize over. It's about a very stubborn group of people who discover the horrors of the world and, over and over, choose to do something to fucking fix it. If cultivation is a nightmare, find a way to change cultivation. If the machine of society cannot function without the Turmoilers' suffering, build a better machine and find a way to dismantle the old one. Fight the very might of Heaven for it if you have to.

It means a lot to me to have a story that says "Yes, the exploitative nature of the world is a feature of the system, not an accident. But yes, you can and must work with allies to dismantle that system and build something better anyway." The problems of the world are systemic and baked into the structure of modern society. They are not something that can be fixed by getting rid of individual bad actors. But systemic problems are not unfixable ones.

It's a lot more resonant to me than fantasy stories where the problems can be fixed by killing the evil king, y'know?

[theyellowmistress]

She’s Ready 🔪

[maezanilla]

Our most beloved Reverend Daughter 💀

[morethanwonderful]

Thinking today about how good Zhao Qindan is as a character. I love how priest found a way to redirect the Spoiled Young Mistress who Has To Have Her Way trope for the powers of good.

The whole point of Zhao Qindan's early appearances/arc is how sheltered she is. She's gotten to eat her cake (join HDP and consider herself generally equal to men) and have it too (be protected from the hardships of the world) her whole life because of the remarkable wealth and power of the Zhao family. She's smart and hard-working, but ultimately anything she's wanted to work for has been an open door for her, all because of her family's status. All until the Zhao family's sudden fall from grace, when she realizes how tenuous and conditional her grasp on "equality" really was.

But! Even as her arc moves on and she matures, she never quite grows past that sheltered, childish, impulsive belief that everything should work the way she wants it to. Even her personal harsh awakening to the reality of sexism and her own powerlessness isn't enough to make her stop putting her foot down and going "hey! This isn't how I want things to be!"

And the wonderful thing about Zhao Qindan is that. she puts her money where her mouth is. She cares about other people; she's fundamentally kind, and the stubbornness born of her sheltered upbringing makes her willing to insist on that kindness where others have far too much good sense to do the same. Pitting yourself against a crowd of gun-bearing soldiers alone with a single sword is a very stupid thing to do. But Zhao Qindan sees an injustice that upsets her and charges in because she Isn't Having It. She wants to have her way, is predisposed by her past to insist on it, and having her way in this instance means not letting her neighbors be brutalized by a mob of soldiers.

And her whole arc continues in a subtler form of this! Women aren't accepted or respected in the field of political debate, but Zhao Qindan is going to Get What She Wants, and that means arguing for it publicly. That means spreading forbidden education to the common people in her papers and helping Xi Ping execute scheme after scheme that challenges the status quo.

Zhao Qindan is a girl who never quite learns how to take "no" for an answer, and when she eventually runs headfirst into the impenetrable wall that is sexism, she grabs a hammer and doesn't stop wailing on it 'til she's managed to tear it down. And she joins the fight to tear down the other unjust walls saying "no" to her friends and neighbors in the process.

[discosfish]

[merniumdraws]

"Sorry."

[shrimplyghostie]

Three Of Swords

[chomplicated]

1M GO1NG TO CUT YOUR THRO4T 4ND L1ST3N TO YOU BL33D WH1L3 1 SM3LL YOU D13

[drawerbread]

the inglorious mask

[ghost-kings-court-jester]

Genuinely, one of my favourite things about book 4 and Tgcf in general is the fact that the Bamboo Hat guy was not that nice. Like he wasn’t going out of his way to be nice and comforting and selfless he was chewing Xie Lian out for spilling his rice and then when he realised how upset Xie Lian was he had like such a low level empathy response of just being like my guy it is simply not that serious, stop being dramatic and wallowing in the rain. Like, why are you soaked, lying in the street? Just put my hat on, you sad bastard and that broke Xie Lian out of genuine genocidal rage. Like truly it just shows the most basic anyone would do that acts of kindness can have such monumental changes to people at their lowest (*cough* like saving a kid from falling to death because he’s a kid and you can save him *cough*). It’s just that this man is the saviour of Yong’an. He has no idea because he probably just went home and told his family like a dramatic dude on the road tripped me. Still, when I yelled at him, he almost broke down. I hope he’s okay and probably never thought about Xie Lian again, meanwhile Xie Lian pays homage to his kindness for the next 800 years of his life.

[alieune]

canary

[indigonite]

Please…