so i just started wine and gun, and already hands down one of the best things about this danmei is these characters’ names. just like “cox hendry” or “hendry cox” in dmbj, they don’t read as coherent in english at ALL, or for that matter in any other western language i know. they’re like this bizarro-world YA version of average american (?) white-person names, something an eight-year-old would make up for her stuffed animals, some wacky one-degree-over version of reality. it’s like if ebony dark'ness dementia raven way lived in pawtucket.
for starters, the main character’s name is “alberino bacchus” which i can’t even type without laughing, but everyone calls him al. THEY LITERALLY CALL HIM AL. every time the novel forces me to see both his names together i start yelplaughing. alberino bacchus should be serving as a low-level courtier under the house of medici but instead he’s a quantico-trained forensic examiner who lives and works in “westlake,” which could be—anywhere, really. it could be in ontario or utah or new south wales or spitalfields or some disneyland version of new hampshire. and what about al’s coworkers, you ask? why they’re named “olga moroz” and “bart hardy” of course. BART HARDY you cannot make it up, i keep having to put the book down to laugh in sheer delight.
equally charmingly, the ML’s name is “herstal armalight,” because “herstal” is definitely a given name for sure (in belgium) and because so many people are surnamed after semiautomatic rifles. but the best part, THE BEST PART, is that very early on (none of this is a spoiler btw, everyone’s introduced in chapters 1-2) there are brothers who are apparently important members of “a latino gang” and you’ll never guess what their names are, YOU’LL NEVER GUESS: richard norman and thomas norman. WHAT IN THE MS-13 IS GOING ON HERE (and they have the additional hendry cox advantage of being fully reversible!)
it's just so completely dazzling and wonderful to have that ongoing realization: this is literally what anglophones seem like to the average danmei author, just incoherently-named language-garbling white monsters who are basically cartoon characters, hollering and trampling around the world being implausible. i love it so much, it’s just like every time the spirealm takes a moment out of its plot to drag capitalism. like YES PLS ROAST US MY QUEENS. cf. also priest's glorious bored refusal in sha po lang to ever give "the western pope" 1) a name or 2) any kind of an ending. he's simply not that important or interesting. merely evil, in a hat, when needed, then goes away and conveniently dies (…maybe? we think? she doesn’t even really make that very clear).
extra bonus: realizing this is IDENTICAL to how all my cdrama fanfic reads, whether historical or contemporary, no matter how much research i think i’ve done into coastal fujian or dongbei or hangzhou, no matter how many baidu pages i’ve laboriously translated. i’m literally a tween from nebraska who makes up preposterous elaborate romantasy names having never been anywhere further than mall of america, who thinks people from new england have a british accent. humiliating. i am glorying in being dragged this hard. if i were dumb enough to try to write a cultivation novel it would read EXACTLY like this.
(i suppose the other relevant fact about wine and gun is it's about serial killers in love, so do with that what you will—i personally find it laugh-out-loud funny but i guess it's not for the squeamish, which i am not)
amandla
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