Just so you know we have minor elections in France today and someone (@/kumayano) made a tweet with an edited picture of minilian holding you at gun point and telling people to vote and the comment section is filled with french conservatives saying they're feeling threatened because minilian is holding a gun LMAOOOO IDK WHETHER TO LAUGH OR CRY they're all so ridiculous and major W for Minilian as always
"omg Xie Lian made it to the ao3's top omegas !!" "why is Hua Cheng not in the ao3's top alphas" Doooooon't care what we NEED to talk about is the fact that YIN YU made it to the ao3's top betas of all time !! So iconic of him like. Yeah he IS the most beta to have ever beta'ed
Can't believe I didn't show you guys the tian guan ci f(l)ag
Since I haven't really been able to draw proprely for a while now (rip 💔), I've used official arts as a base, traced over them, adjusted the colors a bit and added little silly details (the red earings, the little XL on the right, which is a modified version of the XL on the left, the butterflies at the bottom and of course the text lol)
The arts I used are this one, which comes from one of the mini theater of the audio drama, and is an animation made by 超天际 (@chotinj1 on tw*tter and 黄油天际 on weibo)
And this one, which is an artwork published back in June by the donghua team, except I didn't manage to find the name/socials of the artist for this one, so please do let me know if you know it :') (and also why did no one made a list of all official artists already pls it would be so so useful 😔)
Here are a few pictures of the island itself if you even care btw!!!
(The beginning of Paradise Manor)
Mount Yujun (had to do the wedding robes myself so 💔💔 it could probably look better 💔 The museum is supposed to represent PM's abandonned temple )
A lil Mount Tonglu area :3 It’s placed in the middle of the island, and is linked to Heavens, Ghost City and Puqi village ehe (I used a statue to represent the giant XL statue HC carved in the Kiln and a mecha for JW lmao that’s a bit goofy but I like it)
Yushi Huang's area!! Not sure if it’s good theme-wise but I really like the vibe of this one :3 I chose Pekoe to "play the role" of YSH so her house is placed here too
Aaaand two other rooms of Paradise Manor (the armory and some kind of workshop :3)
asking this here bc i didn't want to derail ur other post but i've been chewing on this one paragraph a lot
esp with regards to how hc is explicitly viewed as a sexual threat to xl in cave of 10000 gods + him seeing himself as ugly/dirty in his childhood, and how the racism might intersect with the homophobia (to me it rings similar to how black men are portrayed as a sexual threat to straight white men in western media, but i'm hesitant to apply western frameworks of racism to chinese ethnicities). also how it might have played into his own internalized queerphobia, esp contrasted w how he openly wears miao attire as an adult.
sorry this is kind of a mess but i'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
hi moth!! my thoughts are also kind of (well. very) messy but: disclaimer that i am:
not a native english speaker so some of my wording may be clumsy and i simply do not have the technical terms for some things i may be saying here!
by no means an expert on this specifically re: racism, given i am a person of color in a country populated by those like me therefore i haven't really experienced that kind of racism in-person (save for a few online occasions that were more just ragebaiting ngl and the general colorism people are obsessed with that kind of just bleeds into every day life really), and therefore a minority in other ways (i.e. queer) so i'm rather basing this off my observations and the experiences of other people with the racism and discrimination surrounding that specifically
okay so you're right that while there are definitely similarities to the antiblackness imo it's not exactly a 1-to-1 application to chinese ethnic minorities, but my problem with hua cheng's design in the manhua specifically irritates me because i think we can all agree that for one thing, in media, the creators' biases are usually noticeable via skin color. for example you will often see the angrier and/or more violent with darker skin tones, regardless of whether they're actually a minority or not, while the calmer and more "righteous" ones are of fairer skin tones. it's not even usually that intentional in a lot of cases, but it's extremely telling that the people of color (asians, black people, etc.) are usually portrayed as the violent or trigger-happy ones
which leads me to hua cheng. we know he's violent. he says it himself in the banyue arc:
[placed under a cut for length + rambling messiness]
Pei Xiu seemed to have had enough of quarreling with Kemo, and he turned to Xie Lian. “So you see, there are many things in the world that simply cannot be clearly defined or resolved. You can only fight.”
Xie Lian sighed. “I’ll agree to the first part.”
San Lang, on the other hand, said, “Hm. I’ll agree to the second part.”
— TGCF Volume 1, Chapter 10 (Seven Seas Edition)
and this isn't a surprising mindset to have! he spent his childhood being beaten down and treated horribly. why would he think less of violence if that's what's gotten him where he is? he's good at what he does. the main difference is that he's not enamored or impressed by senseless violence and is usually very fair and objective in his dealings. he just knows this as a fact: violence is an effective tool that works for his purposes.
and on the topic of banyue arc: it's honestly hard to deny the racism rooted in the whole thing. i mean, a whole kingdom of barbarians? their designs? turns out they're the unreasonable in their conflict against yong'an? this isn't a new theme across mxtx's works; in mdzs, if i recall correctly, jin zixuan talks about the so very barbarous lands of the south in his attempts to impress jiang yanli, and as for svsss, well. gestures to the whole demon race. while i'm not saying mxtx herself is outright bigoted and thinks horribly of entire ethnicties, i'm saying there are pretty clear biases which is like. unsurprising. i do remember something else she said in an interview iirc but i do not have a source for that so i will not be quoting it, but i do remember hearing somewhere of the way she spoke about hua cheng's mother, in that she said something about how his mother was a foreign lady who tricked his father with her wicked charms, or something? once again, do not quote me on that, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was true, tbh
all this to say: one of the biggest problems with the manhua is how starember manages to.... make the racism worse. the designs of the banyue people were altered in a way that seriously. rubbed me the wrong way. within the novel, it's like, congrats on the muslim slash arab people who are [insert every description we get of banyue] and the manhua designs explicitly make them look arab (so does the donghua actually, and the official novel designs, i believe? but the manhua is....) i can't find the panels right now but. yeah. not to mention the people on the island xie lian and shi qingxuan crashed onto in volume 2 (7seas edition), they were very much drawn exactly the way one would imagine oh so barbarous island savages. complete with the leaf skirts lol
circling back to hua cheng and how i despise his manhua design: i can yap on and on about how starember straight up discarded all the symbolism to do with his actual canon appearance but we all know that, so let's move onto say that with all of the above in mind, him being of miao descent very specifically makes it an issue. he is violent, and he is half of an ethnicity that people consider to be immoral, wicked, and crude. in a way in canon you can read his actions and lifestyle as both a taunt and defiance to this, but within the context of hualian, it gets very.... hm.
xie lian is of full han blood, and is described to be a fair-skinned person who is both pretty and handsome and is a virtuous person who also happens to be an untouched, pure virgin (please note the exaggerated tone i'm using here). in direct contrast to the mixed-race hua cheng, who opts for violence in most situations, is crafty and cunning, and so on.
his manhua design making him so much bigger than xie lian, making his skin tone darker, especially when we know he views his desire as disgusting and blasphemous (his queerness, essentially), and considers himself to be horrible, dirty, and monstrous, which we know is because he had it beaten into him since childhood specifically re: his red eye, though it's not inconceivable to think that him being mixed-race likely played a large role in this, is both stupidly, horribly, racist, and it's literally reverting to typically uncomfortably bigoted yaoi tropes. there's something to be said here about his wealth and his relationship to... opulence, let's say? and his casual violence when directly contrasted with his helplessness and poverty as a child, i think.
this is such a mess, but i hope you get what i'm getting at here...? the fact that xie lian is depicted as a pure, waifish white-clad fairy, and hua cheng is the dark sexy icon of desire coming to save him while also very clearly undermining his autonomy in various ways and somehow this literally never becomes an issue while xie lian falls in love with him. one of the main points about hualian is that they're not interested on morally policing each other with their own separate views and actions, and neither are they interested in encroaching upon each other's autonomy, which manhua hua cheng repeatedly does. constantly. over and over again.
in the novel, with the scene where they discover the cave of ten thousand gods, we see how mu qing and feng xin view him as a sexual threat to xie lian the moment they discover the depth and intensity of his love and devotion to xie lian, and it takes xie lian himself intervening (though not after hua cheng beats them up) for them to calm down and accept that that's xie lian's choice to make. while it's entirely understandable to freak out because who the hell does all that and even though that was by far one of my favorite part of the novels purely for how entertaining it was and how this is how xie lian realizes his love is reciprocated and is enjoying how intense it is, logically speaking it's not at all out of place to be deeply concerned and unsettled.
and yet, it plays into how hua cheng knows and is deeply aware of his zealotry, so to speak. up until this point, he's been walking on eggshells because as much as he can't resist flirting with and messing with xie lian, he's truly afraid that xie lian, who had once comforted him and told him he's not unlucky and he is not a bad luck charm, would think of his love and devotion as monstrous, disgusting, and revolting. he's deeply, deeply terrified of being found out, because he does believe himself disgusting and monstrous and hideous, and is terrified of being viewed as a danger to taizi-dianxia when all he has ever, ever wanted is to protect and love him—and though it does all end well. gestures. you get what i mean.
so, when i say that the playing into the yaoi trope of small dainty uke and big dom daddy seme paired with starember's obvious racism—and i am not saying it's not present in the novel, though in lesser amounts—it's very much reminiscent of how real-life men of color, especially queer men or even, let's be real, transmascs, lesbians, butches, etc. are treated as violent and sexual threats to white people (most notably black people from what i've seen, especially those who present masculine, which is kind of a universal thing everywhere, because though i live in a country with people of mostly the same race and ethnicity as me, the antiblackness is genuinely wild—people here still casually sling around the n-slur, it's so gross), and is just. awful in so many ways.
anyone who's spent any amount of time visibly gnc and/or queer publicly can tell you why this kind of depiction gets under their skin so easily, and i imagine it's worse in places where the color of skin actually matters in that specific way. with hua cheng's internalized queerphobia that lingers throughout the entire story and how his desire and love is treated as something that is inherently wrong, horrible, and shameful—with hua cheng having grown up the way he did, it's all very much. a collection of things that irked me badly before reading tgcf, and only serves to infuriate me further now that i do understand where all of this is being pulled from.
and i guess it is personal to me in a way because hua cheng's experiences are. hm. something i understand on a visceral level.
this has been extremely messy and disorganized but that's the gist of it i think. i hope this answers the questions you have at least somewhat? thanks for sending the ask! and i would be happy to elaborate if you have anything else you want me to clarify tbh :d
and: general notice, but if i said anything insensitive or straight-up wrong here i would be more than happy to correct myself!
#There really are so many things wrong with the manhua istg#Like the way Banyue is supposed to be mixed but her skin is still the whitest white ????#But yeah ofc#she's actually an important character and she's supposed to be likeable so that means she can’t be dark skinned right#Also????that one official art done by starember where HC is portrayed as a demon and????she literally drew him with dark skin???#Thing she never did in the manhua or any other official art ever???#While XL dressed as an angel ofc still has his perfect white skin??Actually crazy 💀#And hualian’s characterization was also becoming worse and worse with each new chapter#like what was that fangxin arc?why is HC manhandling XL like he's some kind of potatoes sack or war prize#where is his devotion?his respect? HC would never do this and I can say it for sure because he actually never acts like that in the novel#but tbh when you see what kind of people say that the manhua is their favorite adaptation...yeah that explains quite a lot (via @tiny-gege)
i'm sorry offical art where What. i knew about ban yue's skin and all but. hello what the helllllll
Okay so I went to recheck the art and question and it isn’t a demon/angel design (I think got it mixed up in my head because of the lamb in XL’s arms/the wolf hears so that’s really my mistake here I'm deeply sorry for this confusion) but I still don’t indertstand what she was trying to do here, especially when you compare it to the way she draws him in anywhere else,,,,
Like
Also while we're at it, there's something to be said about how FX is getting grayer and grayer (how can you whitewash your own character design???)
asking this here bc i didn't want to derail ur other post but i've been chewing on this one paragraph a lot
esp with regards to how hc is explicitly viewed as a sexual threat to xl in cave of 10000 gods + him seeing himself as ugly/dirty in his childhood, and how the racism might intersect with the homophobia (to me it rings similar to how black men are portrayed as a sexual threat to straight white men in western media, but i'm hesitant to apply western frameworks of racism to chinese ethnicities). also how it might have played into his own internalized queerphobia, esp contrasted w how he openly wears miao attire as an adult.
sorry this is kind of a mess but i'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
hi moth!! my thoughts are also kind of (well. very) messy but: disclaimer that i am:
not a native english speaker so some of my wording may be clumsy and i simply do not have the technical terms for some things i may be saying here!
by no means an expert on this specifically re: racism, given i am a person of color in a country populated by those like me therefore i haven't really experienced that kind of racism in-person (save for a few online occasions that were more just ragebaiting ngl and the general colorism people are obsessed with that kind of just bleeds into every day life really), and therefore a minority in other ways (i.e. queer) so i'm rather basing this off my observations and the experiences of other people with the racism and discrimination surrounding that specifically
okay so you're right that while there are definitely similarities to the antiblackness imo it's not exactly a 1-to-1 application to chinese ethnic minorities, but my problem with hua cheng's design in the manhua specifically irritates me because i think we can all agree that for one thing, in media, the creators' biases are usually noticeable via skin color. for example you will often see the angrier and/or more violent with darker skin tones, regardless of whether they're actually a minority or not, while the calmer and more "righteous" ones are of fairer skin tones. it's not even usually that intentional in a lot of cases, but it's extremely telling that the people of color (asians, black people, etc.) are usually portrayed as the violent or trigger-happy ones
which leads me to hua cheng. we know he's violent. he says it himself in the banyue arc:
[placed under a cut for length + rambling messiness]
Pei Xiu seemed to have had enough of quarreling with Kemo, and he turned to Xie Lian. “So you see, there are many things in the world that simply cannot be clearly defined or resolved. You can only fight.”
Xie Lian sighed. “I’ll agree to the first part.”
San Lang, on the other hand, said, “Hm. I’ll agree to the second part.”
— TGCF Volume 1, Chapter 10 (Seven Seas Edition)
and this isn't a surprising mindset to have! he spent his childhood being beaten down and treated horribly. why would he think less of violence if that's what's gotten him where he is? he's good at what he does. the main difference is that he's not enamored or impressed by senseless violence and is usually very fair and objective in his dealings. he just knows this as a fact: violence is an effective tool that works for his purposes.
and on the topic of banyue arc: it's honestly hard to deny the racism rooted in the whole thing. i mean, a whole kingdom of barbarians? their designs? turns out they're the unreasonable in their conflict against yong'an? this isn't a new theme across mxtx's works; in mdzs, if i recall correctly, jin zixuan talks about the so very barbarous lands of the south in his attempts to impress jiang yanli, and as for svsss, well. gestures to the whole demon race. while i'm not saying mxtx herself is outright bigoted and thinks horribly of entire ethnicties, i'm saying there are pretty clear biases which is like. unsurprising. i do remember something else she said in an interview iirc but i do not have a source for that so i will not be quoting it, but i do remember hearing somewhere of the way she spoke about hua cheng's mother, in that she said something about how his mother was a foreign lady who tricked his father with her wicked charms, or something? once again, do not quote me on that, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was true, tbh
all this to say: one of the biggest problems with the manhua is how starember manages to.... make the racism worse. the designs of the banyue people were altered in a way that seriously. rubbed me the wrong way. within the novel, it's like, congrats on the muslim slash arab people who are [insert every description we get of banyue] and the manhua designs explicitly make them look arab (so does the donghua actually, and the official novel designs, i believe? but the manhua is....) i can't find the panels right now but. yeah. not to mention the people on the island xie lian and shi qingxuan crashed onto in volume 2 (7seas edition), they were very much drawn exactly the way one would imagine oh so barbarous island savages. complete with the leaf skirts lol
circling back to hua cheng and how i despise his manhua design: i can yap on and on about how starember straight up discarded all the symbolism to do with his actual canon appearance but we all know that, so let's move onto say that with all of the above in mind, him being of miao descent very specifically makes it an issue. he is violent, and he is half of an ethnicity that people consider to be immoral, wicked, and crude. in a way in canon you can read his actions and lifestyle as both a taunt and defiance to this, but within the context of hualian, it gets very.... hm.
xie lian is of full han blood, and is described to be a fair-skinned person who is both pretty and handsome and is a virtuous person who also happens to be an untouched, pure virgin (please note the exaggerated tone i'm using here). in direct contrast to the mixed-race hua cheng, who opts for violence in most situations, is crafty and cunning, and so on.
his manhua design making him so much bigger than xie lian, making his skin tone darker, especially when we know he views his desire as disgusting and blasphemous (his queerness, essentially), and considers himself to be horrible, dirty, and monstrous, which we know is because he had it beaten into him since childhood specifically re: his red eye, though it's not inconceivable to think that him being mixed-race likely played a large role in this, is both stupidly, horribly, racist, and it's literally reverting to typically uncomfortably bigoted yaoi tropes. there's something to be said here about his wealth and his relationship to... opulence, let's say? and his casual violence when directly contrasted with his helplessness and poverty as a child, i think.
this is such a mess, but i hope you get what i'm getting at here...? the fact that xie lian is depicted as a pure, waifish white-clad fairy, and hua cheng is the dark sexy icon of desire coming to save him while also very clearly undermining his autonomy in various ways and somehow this literally never becomes an issue while xie lian falls in love with him. one of the main points about hualian is that they're not interested on morally policing each other with their own separate views and actions, and neither are they interested in encroaching upon each other's autonomy, which manhua hua cheng repeatedly does. constantly. over and over again.
in the novel, with the scene where they discover the cave of ten thousand gods, we see how mu qing and feng xin view him as a sexual threat to xie lian the moment they discover the depth and intensity of his love and devotion to xie lian, and it takes xie lian himself intervening (though not after hua cheng beats them up) for them to calm down and accept that that's xie lian's choice to make. while it's entirely understandable to freak out because who the hell does all that and even though that was by far one of my favorite part of the novels purely for how entertaining it was and how this is how xie lian realizes his love is reciprocated and is enjoying how intense it is, logically speaking it's not at all out of place to be deeply concerned and unsettled.
and yet, it plays into how hua cheng knows and is deeply aware of his zealotry, so to speak. up until this point, he's been walking on eggshells because as much as he can't resist flirting with and messing with xie lian, he's truly afraid that xie lian, who had once comforted him and told him he's not unlucky and he is not a bad luck charm, would think of his love and devotion as monstrous, disgusting, and revolting. he's deeply, deeply terrified of being found out, because he does believe himself disgusting and monstrous and hideous, and is terrified of being viewed as a danger to taizi-dianxia when all he has ever, ever wanted is to protect and love him—and though it does all end well. gestures. you get what i mean.
so, when i say that the playing into the yaoi trope of small dainty uke and big dom daddy seme paired with starember's obvious racism—and i am not saying it's not present in the novel, though in lesser amounts—it's very much reminiscent of how real-life men of color, especially queer men or even, let's be real, transmascs, lesbians, butches, etc. are treated as violent and sexual threats to white people (most notably black people from what i've seen, especially those who present masculine, which is kind of a universal thing everywhere, because though i live in a country with people of mostly the same race and ethnicity as me, the antiblackness is genuinely wild—people here still casually sling around the n-slur, it's so gross), and is just. awful in so many ways.
anyone who's spent any amount of time visibly gnc and/or queer publicly can tell you why this kind of depiction gets under their skin so easily, and i imagine it's worse in places where the color of skin actually matters in that specific way. with hua cheng's internalized queerphobia that lingers throughout the entire story and how his desire and love is treated as something that is inherently wrong, horrible, and shameful—with hua cheng having grown up the way he did, it's all very much. a collection of things that irked me badly before reading tgcf, and only serves to infuriate me further now that i do understand where all of this is being pulled from.
and i guess it is personal to me in a way because hua cheng's experiences are. hm. something i understand on a visceral level.
this has been extremely messy and disorganized but that's the gist of it i think. i hope this answers the questions you have at least somewhat? thanks for sending the ask! and i would be happy to elaborate if you have anything else you want me to clarify tbh :d
and: general notice, but if i said anything insensitive or straight-up wrong here i would be more than happy to correct myself!
I really wish all those people complaining 24/7 about fics being too ooc or whatever like "I wish people would stop writing A like this/would write more about x or y" would just stfu and write their own fics already
There is really something to be said about people who contribute nothing to the fandom but still have the audacity to complain about what other people do and are only there to bully others and start the same discourses over and over and over again. Fandoms are dying because of you btw :)
Young/beginners/shy artists see your "lmao all people who write A like this are illiterates and really should stop doing this" post getting 10k likes and then decide that they won’t write/draw anymore because they’re scared that they’ll be the next one to be cyberbullied
I really wish all those people complaining 24/7 about fics being too ooc or whatever like "I wish people would stop writing A like this/would write more about x or y" would just stfu and write their own fics already
I got tagged by both @annieslytherpuff21 and @badassbiburgerbob for this meme which means I get to do 10 songs instead, right?? Thanks for thinking of me :D
🎶✨ List 5 songs you like to listen to, then tag 10 of your favorite followers ✨🎶
Red Light Spells Danger -- Top Cats
Killing Fields -- Shinedown
Queen of Kings -- Alessandra
Fall In Line -- Fozzy
Kill Me Fast -- Three Days Grace
(I went into my history to see what I've been listening to recently, and if this list were truly accurate it'd just be the entire new Three Days Grace album, Alienation... I've been listening to it on repeat, would recommend)
Thanks for the taaaggg!!! Honoured to be tagged by THE belenevolenterrancy!
Necromancin Dancin - Bear Ghost
A Westerner Walks Into The Bar - Seb Lowe
Noli - [[LUCA]]
Feel Anything - Nxdia
The Vending Machine of Love - The Stupendium
(I just dumped on a couple of my favourite songs - I can't say I know anything about Noli the character, but the song is SO fun. Nxdia is such a good singer I love them dearly, and Seb Lowe is awweessooome. Obviously, Necromancin Dancin is just Wei Wuxian, and The Supendium IS GOD.)