Catpeas

I’ve seen several people wondering why in fanfics Lan Wangji addresses Wei Wuxian using his birth name instead of ‘you’ because it doesn’t sound quite right in English (e.g. Lan Wangji saying “I want to protect Wei Ying” to Wei Wuxian). I find it intriguing because it does not happen in the novel or in any adaptation, either he uses ‘Wei Ying’ on its own to call/admonish him or he simply uses ‘you’. So it’s not a translation issue, it’s something that seems to have sprung from the English fandom at some point and spread from there. I’d like to share some thoughts about second and third person addressing and what they say about the speaker’s speech patterns (as always, please do point out if I made a mistake somewhere, this is mostly based on observations not on formal knowledge of linguistics).

Chinese terms of address form a very very intricate system (look upon this and despair) that evolved with time periods. People will address each other and themselves differently depending on various parameters such as their relationship and respective social status.

Addressing someone in the third person can be used as a way to convey polite respect and there are many examples in MDZS:

Ex.1

“请叔父责罚”

[33 lashes scene] LWJ: I ask Uncle for my punishment (audio drama S3E13)

Ex. 2

“咦。你怎么还在这里？”

“兄长在这里，我自然也在这里”

[WWX is about to leave] LXC: Hum? Why do you remain here?

LWJ: Brother is here so my place is here as well. (ch.49)

Ex. 3

“因为，那位秦公子说谎了。”

“魏前辈是如何看出来的？”

WWX: It’s because that young master Qin lied to us.

LSZ: How did senior Wei determine that? (ch.120)

Ex. 4

“多谢蓝宗主给魏某这个机会。” (……) “那么请蓝宗主听听看，这支曲子有没有什么古怪？”

WWX: I must thank Sect leader Lan for providing me with this opportunity. (…) I request that Sect leader Lan listen carefully if there’s anything amiss with this song. (Wei Wuxian is also using here the humble term of self-address '魏某’, literally 'this person named Wei’, instead of the first person pronoun 'I’) (ch.63)

See, it’s not only Lan Wangji, that’s something that polite characters say in certain situations and that includes Wei Wuxian as contrary to appearances, he does actually know when and how to show proper respect.

Notice that it’s always titles or honorifics (on its own or as a suffix to the family name) which demonstrate formality and deference towards the person addressed. On the contrary, using someone’s birth name indicates close familiarity (or even rudeness). So in my opinion it doesn’t make sense in Chinese to have Lan Wangji use 'Wei Ying’ as a replacement of ‘you’.

It’s noteworthy that it is actually Wei Wuxian who does address Lan Wangji occasionally in the third person by using his title, Hanguang-Jun:

Ex. 5

“不是被罚那你没事倒立干什么？”

“可以静心。”

“那究竟是什么，让冷若冰霜的含光君的心不静啊？”

WWX: If it’s not for punishment, why would you do a handstand for no reason?

LWJ: As meditation (’meditation’ is literally ‘to calm one’s heart’).

WWX: Whatever could trouble the heart of the icy Hanguang-Jun? (ch.114)

Ex. 6

“不要吃了。明天买。”

“这不是想给含光君省点钱嘛。”

“永远不用。”

[WWX takes a bite out of an apple dropped by a fierce corpse]

LWJ: Do not eat that. We will buy some tomorrow.

WWX: But this is to save Hanguang-Jun some money.

LWJ: That will never be necessary. (ch.122)

Wei Wuxian uses both ‘Lan Zhan’ and ‘Hanguang-Jun’ throughout the story. During his Yiling Laozu days, it is more to create distance than to be respectful. While pretending to be Mo Xuanyu, Wei Wuxian calls Lan Wangji exclusively by his title with the exception of two slip-ups that occur when Fairy makes an apparition (”Lan Zhan, save me!!”). After it is revealed that Lan Wangji was aware of his identity all along, Wei Wuxian routinely alternates between his birth name and his title, putting them at an equal level of casualness. However, using the title with the third person address is more like a tongue-in-cheek phrasing, it’s Wei Wuxian showing exaggerated courtesy in a playful manner.

The way I feel it, at the heart of it, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are equals and treat each other as such. They respect one another without unnecessary act of self-humbling.

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

SQ 188

Update from Tan Jiu, translated by Yaoi-BLCD.

yaoi-blcd general chatroom / Their Story fan chatroom.

Their Story Character Guide

SQ 189a

Update from Tan Jiu, translated by Yaoi-BLCD.

yaoi-blcd general chatroom / Their Story fan chatroom.

Their Story Character Guide

Update from Tan Jiu, translated by Yaoi-BLCD.

TL note:  recently china’s been obsessed with organizing the trash into the correct categories for environmental friendliness XD, i think there’s penalties for not doing it the right way  (i guess sorta like how japan sorts their trash into a million categories)

ED note: you can read about it more over here!

yaoi-blcd general chatroom / Their Story fan chatroom.

Their Story Character Guide

[source]

Been thinking a LOT about what modern hearthcraft looks like. The intersection of my practice and my politics. The celtic tradition of hospitality…

This person NAILS IT.

her arms 😍

The Sea Women of South Korea

photographs by Hyung S. Kim

“For hundreds of years, women in the South Korean island province of Jeju have made their living harvesting seafood by hand from the ocean floor. Known as haenyeo, or sea women, they use no breathing equipment, although a typical dive might last around two minutes and take them as deep as ten metres underwater. Wearing old-fashioned headlight-shaped scuba masks, most dive with lead weights strapped around their waists to help them sink faster. A round flotation device called a tewak, about the size of a basketball, sits at the surface of the water with a net hanging beneath it to collect the harvest. Some use a sharp tool to dig conch, abalone, and other creatures from the crevices on the seafloor. … “For me, the photos of the haenyeo reflect and overlap with the images I have of my mother and grandmother,” Kim says. “They are shown exactly as they are, tired and breathless. But, at the same time, they embody incredible mental and physical stamina, as the work itself is so dangerous; every day they cross the fine line between life and death. I wanted to capture this extreme duality of the women: their utmost strength combined with human fragility.” ”

Since BL and fujoshi discourse is the hot topic du jour, let’s talk a bit about gay stereotypes in Japanese manga and anime.

I’m seeing a worrying number of people not only saying that all BL and fujoshi promote homophobic stereotypes, but that BL is the primary or sole instigator of homophobia in Japanese society (excuse me, I choked on drink there).

For those who don’t know, Boy’s Love (BL) is a niche category of shoujo/josei manga that focuses on M/M relationships (commonly known in the west as “yaoi”, though that is a misnomer). It’s still frowned upon, both for being gay content and for being mainly romance aimed at women. The word “fujoshi” — used today to mean “female fan of BL” — even has seriously misogynistic origins.

So far, BL is published on specific magazines, and most anime adaptations are OVAs that aren’t aired on TV. Although it has a significant following, it’s definitely not popular enough to change the opinions on gay men of the entire anime fanbase, much less of Japanese society as a whole.

Homophobia in Japan has a long history, but one of the most impactful chapters was the Meiji Restoration (1867-68), when Japan’s isolationist foreign policy was abolished and rapid westernization began. Negative Christian views on homosexuality disseminated throughout the country and public opinion of practices such as nanshoku/wakashudou declined until they were practically criminalized and banned.

For reference, both BL and yuri had their origins more than a century later, in the 1970’s-80’s.

I find that a lot of criticism of stereotyping in BL is, unsurprising, very US-centric. The thin, androgynous, pretty and emotionally sensitive characters of BL may coincidentally fit western gay stereotypes, but this type of character just represents an East Asian beauty standard for men. Guys who fit these bishounen and ikemen types are considered desirable by Japanese women and are generally assumed to be straight. 

A handful of pretty boys from Touken Ranbu.

In the US, your idea of a stereotypical gay dude may be a metrosexual twink with a lisp and a limp wrist, but different countries have different stereotypes. In Japan, the appearance of イカホモ/イカニモ (“ikahomo” or “ikanimo”, a stereotypical gay man) is a heavy-set masculine guy with short haircut, strong face, and facial hair.

Sort of like the guys you see in geikomi, right?

Pin-ups by Jiraiya, long-time artist for G-men magazine.

But we’re talking about entertainment media, more specifically about animanga. We’ll get there soon.

Gay men in Japan are stereotyped by the general population as being camp, and using feminine clothes, language and pronouns. Those who present femininely are often referred to as オネエ (“onee”) because they use オネエ言葉 (“onee kotoba”, feminine speech), and may or may not identify as male. Many entertainers who are out use onee personas on TV to, well, entertain the audience. That may be the only exposure an average Japanese person has to a real-life openly gay or trans person.

As for fiction, media creators tend to fall back on archetypes based on prejudices for minority characters, and that includes gay men. A bit like how the US has the “fairy” archetype, Japan has the “okama”.

Now, オカマ (“okama”, lit. rice pot) is not a word used in polite conversation to refer to people. It’s a homophobic and transphobic slur, directed at people who fit the onee stereotype. If you’re not a Japanese queer man or transfem individual, you shouldn’t direct it at anyone, period. Not even yourself. Although there are some who reclaim the term, it’s still largely considered derogatory and insulting.

Japanese media has an okama character archetype, which reflects how society thinks a gay man looks and acts. You may be surprised to hear that it’s not the willowy, androgynous bishounen of shoujo manga.

It’s something more like this: