SarangStrawberry

As a general rule of thumb, I avoid orufrey fics set before December 25 2025, which (I believe?) is the release date of Witch Hat Atelier ch 93. Specifically because of Qifrey characterization.

I know it's not the writer’s fault because they're just working with what info they had at the time but it just breaks my heart seeing Qifrey done like that 😭.

I once read a beautifully written Orufrey fanfic where Qifrey erases the atelier memory of him entirely, and during Olruggio and Qifrey's reconciliation with the "Qifrey erasing his memories" thing, I kept wondering what Olruggio's reaction to the fact that he came up with the memory erasure plan would be. And it never came. All the blame was put on Qifrey, which made me feel really sad. Then I looked at the publication date and went "oh".

For example, who would you hire as the cover artist, the interior artist, any chibi/animal art (think of the animal chibis on the French flaps for the last volumes), etc etc. If we’re going really fancy, then who would you choose for dust jackets, for the hardcover, the endpaper, the colored interior illustration at the very beginning, the painted edges, etc?

Like most of the Bingfan fics I’ve read are really just Shen-Yuan-transmigrates-into-Ming-Fan-so-really-it’s-Bingyuan fics, and I’ve seen plenty of Bingfan fic summaries & tags that don’t involve Shen Yuan at all, or just ship him with another character. But I’ve also seen a good chunk of fics with Evil-OOC!Shen Yuan in Bingfan fics, specifically the neglectful-terrible-bad-no-good-lazy-useless-peak-lord-and-shizun-who-ignores-all-his-disciples-and-dumps-all-his-work-to-poor-overworked-little-meow-meow-Ming-Fan-to-fake-his-kindness-to-Binghe variation. This is typically paired with secretly-a-good-teacher-tsundere!Shen-Jiu.

I think people forget about the fishermen, haha. I’ve seen one too many people who wholeheartedly believe it was the washerwoman that pulled Baby Binghe out from the river and adopted him right then and there. Even if they didn’t adopt him, give them some recognition!!! I blame the donghua for this…

I feel like the fishermen supplied Baby Binghe’s basic needs for at least a year — which is around the time babies start walking — before releasing him out in the wild, aka the streets. The first few years of a baby’s life are absolutely critical to their developing brain, so even if Binghe only spent a year at best in the fishermen’s care, I wonder how that singular year affected him.

Also. I could have sworn that I read about Binghe floating in the river for nine days. I even checked the raws, but there’s no indication of how long he’d been floating in the river before he was picked up. Does this piece of information come later in the story? Did I make that part up?? Was it all in my imagination??? Someone tell meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Live Update: I realize that the confusion may have come from someone misinterpreting, and therefore mistranslating, this part of the raws:

The highlighted part, “数九寒天” (shǔ jiǔ hán tiān), is defined as the nine periods of nine days after the winter solstice, the coldest time of the year. Basically what the English version says. The confusion likely came from someone who translated the phrase literally, as “数” (shù) means number, “九” (jiǔ) means nine, “寒” (hán) means cold (it also has strong associations with winter, such as with the phrase “寒假” (hán jià), which means winter vacation), and “天” (tiān) means day. So, the translator probably translated this as literally “nine cold/winter days”.

My confusion has been cleared. Yay!

Anyways, I also wonder if Binghe suffered any health problems from being exposed to freezing temperatures shortly after his birth… If he did, they probably went away eventually thanks to his protagonist halo or heavenly demon heritage, but maybe Airplane milked Binghe’s health problems for whump and sympathy points from his readers.