gosshhhh staticmoth is like.....so confusing to me. it's hot af and i really enjoy it, but it also gives me anxiety?? the fanart is cute but i have no desire to draw them in shippy art (beyond smut), and i tend to be cautious around the shippers until i know their thoughts about angel dust. but then, i ADOOORRRE the scene with val ripping vox's head off; that was true love and i don't care what other people say. but also the thought of them being endgame or something is like. ew no. but. YES at the same time because...the devotion....! but it's fucking valentino and i hate him, so. no. BUT....

and charlie, i hold her close like a little puppy. she is.....babie. but she sucks in season 2. i love her in the finale though, seeing her help people out of the rubble, and she looks amazing in her dress.

continuation of last ask, i also just masked a lot and i see that is zyx too and just. this fic means a lot to me and i think about it weekly. thank you so much for writing it. like it always gets me how deeply human the characters are and how much i relate to zhu yunxun and the navigation of life in your country but it's alien to you almost and the feeling that your cheating almost because you had the luxury of knowing stuff (eng) beforehand and people who didn't are infinitly cooler.

hey! sorry for the late reply, i legit have just been barely 🤏 making it through all week. thank you for such a heartfelt ask! 🥰

your experience is different than what i've experienced as chinese diaspora (i was born outside of mainland china and only occasionally visit), but it still fits. dbd is exactly about that not-quite-fitting-in experience. isekai as an analog to the diaspora and cultural...mismatch? misalignment? something.

you know more bc you've been outside, but that comes at a cost of not fitting in. and "fitting in" isn't like one is trying to conform---it comes with social advantages in the (ahem) society that you live in! so obvious but there are so many stories about how one needs to break the mold to the extreme and that's obviously one type of story that has to be told.

dbd says that there is no cheat code for "doing it right." but at the end of the day, you need to do it because you live there, and you have to try your best.

hope you're doing well and getting through it. i wrote dbd kinda as my own thing, not trying to force it bc at the heyday of mdzs fandom there were some Very Loud Voices around and those voices were needed to fight against western biases and nonsense in fandom, but idk. it was super disorienting to feel both connected and alienated to my culture in one go. i didn't feel chinese enough. but at the same time, i didn't connect with a lot of my fellow abcs online, the ones that felt like they only wore being chinese for brownie points and were more likely to make fun of their culture than actually engage it. weird place, always in the middle, always feeling alone, but surely, i couldn't be? that would be the height of arrogance, almost like solipsism, to believe that.

writing si fic is the same way. it's a very niche way to engage with fandom, if you break down fandom works by percentage. and meta, too; an si writer makes hard asks of a reader to not only buy their version of canon, but buy into a whole bunch of original content. buy into them as a person without using fandom to hide behind. si writers all read other fics; mainstream fandom rarely seek si writing.

so like, you have the cultural aspect of feeling alienated, you have the subgenre (?) alienation, you have the premise of isekai also being one of alienation