In order: asdfhakjfh, Wei Wuxian, and Yuletide

[extrapenguin]

I had an idea about what I wanted to post, but then I received an e-mail with a job offer, and my brain was taken over by AHHHH. Details of starting date up in the air, but I'll have to move city next year. I'll generate the space_swap schedule once I'm clearer on mine.

Oh, now I remember what I wanted to say originally! I am apparently very super blunt or something. On a MDZS Discord server, in response to another person saying something offhand, I posted my opinions on Wei Wuxian being called dense. (He ... isn't.) Lightly edited, mostly in punctuation and replacing potentially-vague pronouns with phrases:

Unpopular opinion, but I wouldn't call Shen Qingqiu or Wei Wuxian "dense" – they're both quick on the uptake and smart, but they're both limited by the fact that they never reassessed their starting assumptions of the love interest. They both thought "ok love interest is Like That and hates me" and it might've been valid at the start, even if not now, so they try to fit all the love interest's behavior into the "love interest hates me" mental model they have of him. They're oblivious to the love interest's advances because of that, but they're not dumb, and they have reasons for being oblivious. Basically people going "aww wifi so dense" makes me go "??? are you skipping all the scenes that aren't about the main couple being cute at each other?" since no, he's not dense about human interaction or power dynamics or whatnot at all, unlike how a bunch of people characterize him.

Alas, I can't ignore it, due to the above showing up in eg fics as an opinion the author genuinely holds, and people really widening it so that Fanon Wei Wuxian is kinda dense and dumb, whereas Canon Wei Wuxian isn't really dense: he just doesn't see himself as a valid life partner to Lan Wangji due to eg class stuff and genders, so he can't even begin to consider Lan Wangji's actions from a potentially romantic perspective. Ergo, I try to push back against it, since the "wifi so dense" thing isn't the most accurate way to phrase it, doesn't imo capture the background, and tends to engulf actual canon characterization and make for OOC fic.

(A mod thought the above was super impolite and unfriendly, and threatened modly action should any more "negative conversation" take place. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I stand by my words, and while I may have been blunt, me being rude doesn't look like that. Mostly sharing it here for the content.)

I am also going to humblebrag about my Yuletide wordcount: it is Lots! It is more than last year! I might even add to it still, with another treat! :P I have also shaken my gift, and it looks appealing.

Comments

[soundofwonder]

Congrats on the job offer!

I have always regarded Luo BingHe to be the only dense person out of all 3 mxtx pairings if one must be chosen. IMO people tend to take distill a few traits from a character and use it to define them. I'm still kind of not over how some of the western fandom characterized akashi seijurou from knb lmao.

I think some also only end up remembering certain stuff. I can barely remember the yi city arc and I'm not sure if it was because I intentionally repressed it or is it was that I finished the whole thing in two days lol.

MDZS also suffers from the 'unfortunate' categorization as danmei - the people reading danmei are usually there for the CP and not the plot. The plot may have better reception(?) if people read it as a fantasy book or something.

ETA: Upon further thinking the only truly dense mxtx character, including side characters, is this one guy from Tian Guan Ci Fu. Not sure if you have read it so I'm not mentioning the guy's name, but gdi he's so dense and I love him for it.

[extrapenguin]

Thanks! If you don't see me around next year, send Wei Wuxian to summon me back from the dead. *g*

Ah yes, the "one descriptor and 1-2 quirks" characterization! I loathe it from the very bottom of my heart, especially when the descriptor/archetype chosen is Wrong, or unrelated to the character. (Very often Wei Wuxian is comprehended only as The Uke, which leads to him being replaced with someone unrecognizable. His most-chosen quirk is also forgetfulness, when his memory isn't actually that bad, considering the trauma he was undergoing at the time. As a result, Wei Wuxian is mischaracterized as a dumb, ditzy uke, when in reality he's That Engineering Student who aces every test despite never studying. With a bunch of issues and a hero complex, too, but that'd be beyond these people's ken...) I understand not having perfect recall for canon details, but I've yet to encounter such blatant misunderstandings of the main protagonist and narrator in any other fandom!

MDZS also suffers from the 'unfortunate' categorization as danmei - the people reading danmei are usually there for the CP and not the plot. The plot may have better reception(?) if people read it as a fantasy book or something.
I have to agree. People read it only for the romance, because it's marked as Romance - M/M, but I've read stuff marked as Science Fiction that had similar, if not greater ratios of Romance to Non-Romance. If it were marketed as Fantasy ... well, it'd probably get a Hugo Award for its M/M sideplot romance and the fact it wasn't anglophone originally, since Chinese SF is quite big on that circuit, currently.

I've read the first 14 chapters of Tian Guan Ci Fu, via Sakhyulations' translation, but have yet to encounter a super dense character. I have noticed that MXTX's characters tend to be patient people and also quite willing to think, not the stereotypical "dumb ukes".

[soundofwonder]

Yeah, Wei Wuxian is definitely more complex than how most of the fandom characterizes him. I suspect that may be the case for Xie Lian too as more of the novel is translated :(

Personally I do enjoy seeing the kind of cracky fanart/fic where there's stuff like Shen Qing Qiu running away from Luo Bing He etc., but I had wished that there's an implicit acknowledgement that the characters are more than that..

Yeah, if MDZS was treated as a fantasy novel the readers may have been quite different. It's another effect of being having a novel with a M/M romance published in China - the so called 'controversial' part takes precedence over the rest of the novel. iirc the website where it's published in has a filter for F/F in their search but M/M is nowhere to be seen.

As for Tian Guan Ci Fu, the overly dense character appears quite late in the story so it's no surprise. And I agree MXTX's characters are patient. In fact, the timelines in her stories seem to be getting longer and longer lol.

[extrapenguin]

I think the Tian Guan Ci Fu fandom will be 100% based on the animation that's been confirmed for 2020, since the MDZS one is also seemingly super animation-based. Based on the first few chapters (14) and my knowledge of the general outline, I immediately picked out Xie Lian as being too weary to care. I told this to my friend who recced it to me in the first place, and she was very pleased, since the (Chinese fandom?) seems to be very much into the misconception that he's but a pure white lotus. Chinese M/M tends to attract an audience of "yaoi-seeking children" looking only for the smut and some romance, so characters seem to be slotted into the nearest archetype immediately, and any evidence for the contrary, or the fact that archetypes don't describe stuff completely accurately tends to be discarded. It's a shame – Wei Wuxian is the platonic ideal of my ideal protagonist, and all the fanfic of him is unreadable, because the fandom completely ignores all the things that make him appealing. (The animation, too, seemed to de-emphasize the intellect and caution, and nerfed him badly.)

Personally I do enjoy seeing the kind of cracky fanart/fic where there's stuff like Shen Qing Qiu running away from Luo Bing He etc., but I had wished that there's an implicit acknowledgement that the characters are more than that.
Same. It's a lot like rapefic: even if it's written to titillate, as long as it's marked as rape, I can enjoy it. If it's untagged, it's one of my worst squicks.