R.

tuor/ulmo’s message vs turgon’s response (book of lost tales version)

i am maybe just a sucker for bitchily replying with an unfavourable variation on the original speech. but there is very noticeable repetition and the variations Are interesting insight into how turgon views the valar. and the second criticism (that they hid valinor not to keep out evil, but so they wouldn’t have to hear about it) does actually fit with how manwë specifically acts in book of lost tales!

in that. there is a trend in the bolt version of manwë (who imo is a much more interesting character. weird guy) to try to prevent discord at all costs, regardless of like. fairness or actual resolution. like ‘if there is an argument it is the act of expressing discontent that is bad’ e.g. here

i think there is also smth interesting going on in the silm + bolt (cant speak beyond that because. i have not read it) wrt gondolin (which is textually an imitation of tirion) as an imitation of the failings of valinor also. specifically the combination of 'you can come to our lovely well-fenced paradise and it is very nice untillllll you want to leave. lol' and the treatment of elves who live outside / are excluded as suspicious/inferior, on racialised lines.

Listen, I'm a big nerd and I've been making a lot of Witch Hat Kitchen recipes lately. I'm also a big tea lover with an entire cupboard dedicated to warm drinks (help) (don't help) SO I want to talk about the tea in my favourite manga for a bit.

Think about it. He seems to have a twisted idea on what constitutes a easy meal to make. He dyes eggs green for what's supposed to be a simple meatloaf easy to make on his own, and individually handstamps gnocchi with a triangle for what was supposed to be a quick lunch. Is this a coping mechanism? Does the expectations he set for himself in making new, whimsical meals help keep him stressed?

And it's not just that. Qifrey constantly acts like the girls are picky eaters, but in reality, they're little angels who love everything he makes. Most professors/parents dream of children who are half as good as eating as they are. Is he gaslighting himself that they're picky to create more of a challenge?

Qifrey does not sleep in this manga. Either he has night time fun with Olruggio, or he cooks. Notice how Qifrey will wake up at 4 AM in the morning to make lunches for the girls, or spend the entire night making a bouquet of flower apple tarts to surprise Olruggio with in the morning. By using cooking as an excuse to stay up, he's exhausting himself.

Theory: "Shu he doesn't have many servants in his mansion, probably because he likes quiet as a poet and musician"

Truth: "The production has low budget so can't afford more actors"

Theory: "Shen Song is so good and charismatic, the person who played him is such a great actor"

Truth: "The production has low budget so can't afford more actors. Also he was a screenwriter, but still a good actor indeed"

Theory: "Are the other princes all dead, is that why the Crown Prince began to be wary of the Sixth Prince as his only competitor left?"

I think there's a reason Mochijun chose to have a Chasseur hit on a vampire he's fighting for the first time at the top of this Dhampir-centric arc. Dhampirs are the children of humans and vampires, yet now we see how the very people who hate them are happy to indulge in interspecies lust when it suits them. It really distills how Ogier's actions are part of this larger cycle of sexual violence and discrimination; his declared attraction is just another weapon to inflict.

After spending too much time reading questionable takes on MDL and seeing an interesting discussion with @renewedmotionforjudgment and others analyzing how certain types of "girlboss" narratives are infiltrating historical Cdramas (and the way those narratives are pandering to a certain audience), a comment someone left on one of my fanfics came to mind.

In this particular fanfic that was based on a historical drama but with a canon divergence, the female protagonist was taken as a tongfang (a bed-warming maid) by the very high-status male protagonist, the enemy of her husband. Several not-so-great things happened in this particular story (nothing too gratuitous, if we're going by the standards of history) but a commenter left and subsequently deleted a long paragraph deriding how I was always "torturing" the female lead and that she needed to have some backbone and fight back, that she couldn't believe that she was calling the male lead "master" like she's a dog, and so forth. I was mystified at the time. How would a woman with a scrap of self preservation "fight back" against this man in the logic of a faux tenth-ish century story? Why wouldn't she address her master the way all of his other servants address him?

My question is, do these audiences (especially younger women and girls) really want to watch something historical, or do they want to watch pretty people in pretty costumes therapy-speak at each other and live out 21st century relationship dynamics? MDL commenters want to crucify male leads for having concubines and jinjiang novels increasingly have this obsession with "double-pure" dynamics even in stories with emperors who have harems or noble men who are well into their twenties who would have long since been given servant women to teach them "human affairs." When people don't give historical female characters a chance to navigate their societies in historical ways, audiences are robbed of a chance to discover how female strength and resilience is more than just girlbossing, even in the face of restrictions and cultural practices that seem inhumane to us now.

FL's personality or personhood is reduced to what her body looks like

FL doesn't have personal goals and/or makes decisions that actually drive the plot

FL doesn't have a character arc, with distinct wants and needs she must actualize in order to be fulfilled as a person, and instead is written as an empty vessel that only serves the ML's character development

FL isn't granted interiority so that the audience knows and understands what she's thinking and feeling--and most importantly why?

FL isn't allowed to have vulnerability, flaws, or unlikable traits, and the writing either fails to contextualize it so the audience can empathize with her or punishes her for having them

FL is only rewarded with a "happy ending" for completely rejecting traits and interests associated with the feminine OR for strictly adhering to stereotypes

FL experiences trauma or extreme distress but its lasting impact is never unpacked, empathized with, nor revisited

Etc.

What struck me is how the authors always blamed themselves for not being cautious enough or being led astray by their financial needs, but nobody put the blame on the unjust rules and the greed of the authorities that led to their arrests - not that they would dare to. It's an utterly bizarre situation that, as a new danmei English license seems to be announced once every few days here on the other side of China's Great Firewall, within China the persecution keeps getting more rampant and the danmei community feels more and more cornered and frightened. Reality is always more surreal than fiction.

I translated some of the author's weibo posts, please see below:

“I knew I was being naïve and over-optimistic (about the repercussions of writing danmei), so I can’t blame anyone. Sometimes I want to resent society but then I’ll give up the thought. As for the criminal punishment, my view on it is still the same - I even feel that I’m different from those who engage in prostitution; after all, I made all this money by typing my stories word by word. Yet when I got into trouble, people talked about it as if I didn’t have to work for my income.” - This is from an author who wrote danmei because her family’s poor and she wanted to save money to travel. She got into a master’s programme before this and the programme kicked her out because of her arrest.

“Ever since I was little, I’ve always been the well-behaved golden child in my parents’ eyes. I had the best grades among my peers and won scholarships in both high school and university. When we visited family during New Year and other festivals, my parents were always proud of me in front of our relatives. But that day I shamed them thoroughly and the shame will always stick around...I love the characters I wrote very much, planning and creating their stores always brought me so much happiness and fulfillment. But a mistake is a mistake. I want to use my personal experience to admonish others - don’t try to go against the regulations in any way ever, don’t put yourself in the slightest bit of risk.”

“I’ve never felt this horrible in my entire life. I’ve always firmly believed that nobody in this world could be that bad. My rose-tinted glasses were broken along with my romantic expectations for the world. My values and outlook on life were shattered. When something like this happens, perhaps only the family of the author involved and the author herself would be hurt deeply! It’s just business for everyone else!”

This one’s written by the author’s sibling: “Another sleepless night. Tomorrow is the Dragon Boat Festival, and it’s been three festivals since we could be together...I’ve felt remorseful for countless times that I didn’t contact more people and I felt that I haven’t done enough. I prayed to the gods and the Buddha for more times in the past two months than in the past 30 years. Besides asking for the Heaven’s protection and blessing, what else can we do?...You supported yourself financially during university solely by doing part-time jobs. We’ve always put too much importance on money, and that’s how we allowed you to make a mistake.”