dear writer, i must thank you so much for your mirror flower - mulberry universe. i'm of chinese heritage myself and i've always wanted to read more media based on earlier chinese history rather than the later, more centralised system of power. your world is crafted with so much love. ik the amount of research that went into it must have been crazy.
i wanted to ask what inspired the clan names of the various characters? there are a few familiar ones like shangguan and chunyu, but i was wondering if any of the others have a historical reference. is there a reason they're overwhelmingly compound surnames? i love them btw. i write a bit of historical china inspired fiction as well and one of the things i struggle with is making the names flow nicely and sound distinct. which gets harder when you worldbuild too much and have a whole chart of lore characters, most of whom are dead lmao.
as much as i simp for the song dynasty aesthetics, the absolute chaos from the late spring and autumn period to the three kingdoms period is my favourite. it's insane how much the middle kingdom yearns to tear itself apart and piece itself back together afterward 😭 chu-han contention is a favourite period of mine because of how batshit it was -- like the battles of pengcheng and jingxing? how many people died in those? my poor little meow meow manchild xiang yu? my sassy and lazy king han xin? sorry to rant about it, but it's just so entertaining and chaotic i love it
and yes, i did take all of the compound surnames from historical sources! i used a combination of zh.wiki and baidu to cross-reference names, and to double-check that they were han chinese surnames, instead of names like dugu, tuoba, yelu, etc. that are taken from xianbei, manchu, xiongnu, khitan, etc. sources.
i don't really have much of a reason aside from i think compound surnames are cool? plus, they were more common in ancient china, versus modern day after centuries of people simplifying/changing their surnames. i also think it helps differentiate between the regular nobles and the royal/imperial families who hold all the power.
the names are also pretty hard for me too, especially since i'm cantonese, and names in mandarin are less natural to me. i genuinely do recommend pulling up like google translate or something and letting the text-to-voice read out the names to help with the flow of them. keeping the diacritics also helps keep the names distinct, even if it is a pain to go back and edit everything.
(also great hack is, a lot of women don't need full names. oftentimes, unless they're incredibly prominent, women are just referred to as lady [surname]. definitely helps cut down on the number of names, even if the practice is misogynistic 🤫)
