TheFandomPanda

Dog walker AU: Sleepover p3

Edit: I’ve decided the only possible way this could get funnier is if only Gaara time travels, but it’s a fusion rather than a full replacement of his past self, so he has all the memories and knowledge of the future but is still 100% a dumbass hormonal teenager getting a re-do on his first meeting with his man, and also his strength and ability stay level with what they originally were at that age.

Meaning every time Lee lands a hit on Gaara Gaara is just shamelessly praising him for how incredible and impressive that is, and how no one has ever managed that before, and no matter the outcome of this fight Lee is an absolutely splendid ninja. Meanwhile Lee is too flustered to breathe, red in the face before he’s even touched a single gate, learning how incredible weak he is to praise

Please imagine this fic from like. Konkuro’s perspective. No context no build-up no explanation. Just your terrifying serial killer brother suddenly seducing a kid with a bowl cut and neon orange leg warmers.

Este fue mi primer post en WordPress. Hoy lo traigo a mi espacio de Tumblr, tal como lo escribi. Nunca pensé que esto razonara con otros. Gracias por leerme.

Alguna vez has sentido querer muchas cosas pero las ganas te abruman y terminas sin saber por donde empezar?

Pues te cuento que justo ahi me encuentro yo. Tengo miles de planes, y nisiquiera he iniciado el primero. Para ser honesta, no se por donde comenzar. Aveces me despierto con la mente llena de ideas, y sin embargo, no hago nada. Me paraliza el ruido de mi mente, El de no saber cual paso dar primero o si realmente sera un exito lo que quiero hacer. Me abruman las ganas, demasiadas ideas y ningun orden…

He llegado a la conclusion de que esto es como una fatiga emocional. Tu mente ha estado sobrepensando tanto que se cansa. Y cuando estas emocionalmenre agotada, aunque tengas las ganas , no tienes la bateria interna suficiente para ejecutar. El tambien no tener a personas con quien compartir tu vision y que entiendan tus ideas muchas veces hace que tengamos mas ruido que claridad.

Nunca en mi vida me habia sentido asi…me estare volviendo loca ?

Quizas este blog sea mi forma de empezar a dar pequenos pasos, a dejar de pensar tanto en mis metas en lugar de dedicar el tiempo para disenar el sistema que necesito para ejecutar.

y a ti , te ha pasado ?

translations: wuxia 武俠, xianxia 仙俠, and cultivation 修真/修仙 (xīuzhēn/xīuxiān)

think i've seen posts on this eons ago, and i'm pretty sure there are tons of these online, but since this has been written up already let's just have another one.

wuxia 武俠

wuxia and xianxia sound similar, but basically for wuxia it is about the pugilistic world (江湖 jiānghú). It is relatively more down-to-earth, and people practice martial arts ("kungfu") in their current life -- they do not do it to become xians (仙) and gods (神) however.

Like Thousand Autumns and Faraway Wanderers/Word of Honor, it has more historical background and ties to the current court and kingdoms, because people are living in the moment and concern themselves with worldly issues.

Martial arts may seem unrealistic, but in view of chinese fantasy it would be considered "real". It consists of fighting moves and internal energy, which they call qi or nèigōng (內功), and at times you see people flying around, climbing hills and jumping across rooftops which is qīnggōng (輕功).

xianxia 仙俠

A level up would be xianxia, where characters in the story cultivate to become xians (and gods, like in the heaven official's blessing). They don't really care about earthly issues here now, because their ambitions lie beyond the current world, and cultivation, getting stronger, and an immortal life are majorly all their goals.

You may not always see them working towards that purpose, such as in mdzs they are considered a lower-xianxia society (低魔), meaning people don't go through all the steps of cultivation and only stay at the stage before the "golden core" stage.

In xianxia, characters still learn basic fighting moves aka. martial arts, but to direct the internal energy they use línglì (灵力), zhēnqì (真气), and fǎlì (法力), all xianxia terms you commonly see. "neigong" is practically nonexistent in this genre. That's why people building up their "neigong" instead of "lingli" are likely never going to be able to cultivate.

cultivation 修真/修仙

A subgenre in the xianxia category would be cultivation. Characters actively go through the stages of cultivation, and likely for the MC, because they are the main character, they successfully become a xian and exit the world at the end of the novel.

There are many stages of cultivation, usually defined at the beginning of the novel in the synopsis, and a typical example of the different levels would be this:

练气，筑基，金丹，元婴，化神，炼虚，合体，大乘，渡劫

And with a cursory search, an English translation would be something like this, albeit not with all the cultivation ranks identified.

Qi condensation (练气), Foundation establishment (筑基), Core Formation (金丹), Nascent Soul (元婴), and the names after that vary too greatly with translation and fandom so I'll jump straight to Immortal Ascension

extra info: getting into the philosophy of it all

It'd be interesting to note that the word "xiá" (俠) permeates all these genres. This is something akin to the concept of "hero", but not at all also, and I'd love to speak more on this but this post has already gone way longer than I hoped it would be, so perhaps another day.

Regardless, it is interesting to note that wuxia has a greater emphasis on "xia" than xianxia. (some joke that cultivation doesn't have the word "xia" in it, and much of that is because characters have foregone heroism and focused on gaining powers and working towards ascension instead). As a result, wuxia is more confucianism-oriented, though not without its taoism and buddhism influences.

xianxia, on the other hand, is mainly derived from "dào" (道), from taoism, which is another lengthy concept if I ever get to it.

And some may have heard of the "farming" genre, 种田 (zhòngtián). This has to do with golden fingers (mary sues) in imperialistic china, earning a wealth of money, and all that. It has nothing to do with cultivation, alike they sound in english.

that's it for now, hmu if you wish to ask/discuss!

I drew Hetalia as Mexican TV shows Ilike #1

Welcome to Stanuary, a month-long event dedicated to creating content focused on everyone’s favorite Mister Mystery, Stanley Pines!

Stanuary was created with the goal of being a fun, low-pressure event that is more easily manageable for those who may not have the time or energy to keep up with daily challenges like Inktober or NaNoWriMo, or for anyone who could use a little extra motivation to keep creating during the month of January.

Each week will have a different theme, to be suggested and voted on by followers, and you can contribute as much or as little as you want for it. If all you do is draw a sticky note doodle or write a 100-word fic drabble, that’s perfectly fine! The goal is simply to create, so you are free to skip any theme you don’t want to do, or ignore them altogether.

Anyone is welcome to participate, and any and all forms of media are encouraged: art, fics, graphics, videos, crafts, poetry, you name it! You wanna turn Stan into a literal Stancake by making a pancake shaped like his face? Go for it! All I ask is that you follow the three simple Guidelines that you can read here. And don’t forget to tag your posts as #Stanuary so others can find and reblog them!

If you have any questions that were not covered here, please read the FAQ before sending an ask or DM.

Have fun! ♥

Or, what happens when a linguistics minor procrastinates.

tl;dr probably the Qishan dialect.

Preface: Linguistics background

If you know anything about the Chinese languages, you’ll know that while there’s Mandarin, Cantonese, etc, each language - and here I will be very linguistics-minor-stubborn and insist on calling them languages, in the Sino-Tibetan language family - has its own regional dialect, or variety, which in many cases are only somewhat mutually intelligible.

With the Chinese languages, this gets even more complicated by the fact that before our buddy Qin Shi Huang Di conquer-united China circa 221 BCE, every region had its own distinct script to boot. No wonder the old man went “fuck this, EVERYONE USES STANDARDISED STYLISED EMOJIS, I absolutely refuse to go through five languages just to administer the southern provinces”.

So you can imagine why, as a linguistics minor and being very very Chinese, I went “hey wtf how are they all communicating??? answer: must be speaking a shared prestige dialect. but then, what bloody dialect???”

From a linguistics perspective, there is no inherently ‘correct’ dialect, it’s just whatever dialect happens to be the most prestigious at that point in time aka the prestige dialect. The idea of standard dialects is very modern - like, last two hundred years, if that. This ‘standard’ is usually a conservative/older form of whatever is spoken in the capital. eg what we know as proper, modern Mandarin and English was just the Beijing and London dialects once upon a time.

Do note, this isn’t necessarily a top-down, the capital says their dialect is correct and everyone has to fall in line kind of deal. People generally want to sound like they’re from a higher social status - I’ll come back to this in a second - and printers have to pick a dialect to produce their books in. Not like they can customise each book to every dialect their customers speak, with mass-production via printing. Usually the choice is to follow the elites in the capital, because they have the most money and status, and if the elites say eiern is actually supposed to be eggs - at the time, two perfectly acceptable Middle English words for eggs - then well, who are you to say otherwise?

Generally speaking, the standard/prestige dialect of any language makes you come off as well-educated, respectable, etc but not necessarily very approachable or friendly, and reversed for the nonstandard dialects (eg compare perceptions of standard US English vs really localised dialects), so it depends on what you wanna do with it. 

For a probably very bad example based off my limited knowledge of US English: you’ll see people switching between ‘perfect, could be from anywhere in the US, standard English’ when they go into a fancy office building for a job interview, because it’s more useful to communicate educated and respectable, less of a priority on friendly and approachable. Then two minutes later, they step outside and greet the dude selling coffee out of a van with the thickest drawl and ‘hun’ or ‘darlin’ you’ve heard in your life, because now it’s more appropriate to be seen as friendly and approachable. This is perfectly normal, well-documented human behaviour.

Argument

In all likelihood, either the Qishan or Gusu dialects of Mandarin are likely to be the prestige dialect of Mandarin that everyone learns, and there’s good arguments for both. Personally, I favour the Qishan argument: the 关中话 Guanzhong dialect of Shaanxi province, specifically the 西府话 Xifu sub-dialect.

The prestige dialect is usually the dialect of the capital, but the cultivation world has no singular capital. So as much as the cultivation world seems to pretty much ignore the regular world, I used the probable locations of both the mundane capitals and the known locations of the Great Sects to help me work out “okay, where is the likely, largest confluence of cultivation world and regular world power?”

There’s four cities which have spent more time as capitals than any other - the Four Great Ancient Capitals, Beijing, Nanjing, Luoyang, and Chang'an, now known as Xi’an.

Of these, only Xi'an/Chang'an and Nanjing are near any major sects: Qishan Wen, which is a county of Baoji, the city right next to Chang'an/Xi’an, and Gusu Lan, in modern-day Suzhou, which is next to Nanjing.

The Qishan Wen were the most powerful clan, but the Gusu Lan were the scholars that educate everyone. It’s really unfortunate that they’re geographically on other ends of the cultivation world and have distinct dialects, because it means you can’t have a shared Qishan-Gusu dialect as the prestige dialect (like what happened in England with the London-Cambridge-Oxford dialect becoming the prestige dialect, and then what we now know as standard English). No, it’s gotta be one or the other.

But, if I had to choose, my money’s on Qishan. It’d make sense from a linguistics and thematic POV. Before its downfall it was the most powerful clan, closest to the famous Chang'an. Like - that’s basically something like Camelot, culturally, as far as those connotations of an ancient capital, a borderline mythological, idealised golden age past.

So what dialect was historically spoken in Qishan? The 关中话 Guanzhong dialect of Shaanxi province, specifically the 西府话 Xifu sub-dialect which is spoken in Xi'an and Baoji. Also known as 雅言 yǎyán, elegant speech during the Western Zhou, when Xi'an - Chang'an - was the capital, and yes, influenced other dialects, because everyone wants to sound like the elites in the capital.

Side note, to my (Taiwanese/Singaporean Standard Mandarin-trained) ears, the Suzhou (for our purposes, Gusu) dialect sounds very - flick-y, for lack of a better way to describe it. Like it’s very smooth, until boing, it bounces off. As someone who also grew up around Cantonese, I also hear a LOT of shared sounds (unsurprising, since both preserved more sounds from Middle Chinese). 

Part of me worries that I've forgotten how. I used to write and every once in a while find a glimmer of something, with the right reflection and the right lighting. Nowadays it's hard enough for words to leave my lips, let alone my fingers.

Me, enjoying hetalia content in 2021: