Anyone else watching #ALeagueOfNobleman? I saw episode one tonight and I’ve promised my irl cdrama friend to watch the whole thing, so she has an audience of at least one for her rewrite of the ending. 😅
Thoughts so far: they clearly used the entire budget on cheekbones and eyebrows for the leads (I’m fine with this); it’s so good to see Guo Cheng in a new show!
@Betty and what better way to experiment on said harnessing besides prescribing it to the masses! Let's put cocaine in teething drops for babies too, why not.
#MLCWatchParty I watched the first 1.5 episodes on the train on Thursday night and really enjoyed them. Love an epic battle on a ship! I feel like there are more ship battles in wuxia than we usually talk about. 🤔
Boys will say “reinforcements are coming” and then their dog will show up with a wholeass martial escort agency, a public prosecutor, and one of the heads of the justice bureau you keep pretending to be a member of. Awkward.
One bride wearing a wedding dress of mysterious provenance and then dying: unfortunate.
A second bride wearing a mysterious wedding dress that someone died wearing: bad judgement, or a fierce commitment to an ahistorical materialist worldview?
A third bride wearing a mysterious wedding dress that two previous brides have died wearing: it must have pockets.
I’m catching up with #TGCFReadalong! Just finished chapter one, now reading chapter two for this week.
Observations from ch1:
I’d forgotten that Xie Lian was playing the role of Jun Wu himself in the great procession, and not just a more generic heroic martial god. I also like the line about reconstructing the grandeur of the event from ancient books and tradition, as if half the characters in this novel can’t remember it personally. 😂
Everyone else has posted this quote and so am I!!! I love hualian being sword nerds together, I love the obvious eroticism of it, I love that reference to Daddy-I-mean-Jun-Wu right there.
And then Hua Cheng just falling over himself to offer gege a sword, no, the whole armoury, no, the whole Paradise Manor, no, that plus maintaining the swords himself… and somehow not coming across [to Xie Lian] as desperate. ❤️
And then! Xie Lian remembering Daddy’s warning about E’Ming and immediately asking to see it! Ah, what a good scene!
@geraineon According to Chinese wiki/forums, there are generally a few theories behind bat gua = gossip.
When tea houses told their stories in the old days, the shop was often shaped in the form of a bat gua, and eventually 'story-telling' evolved into bat gua and generalised into listening in aka keeping an ear out for gossip.
HK gossip magazines imitated Brit adult magazines and posted photos of naked women in order to increase their sales but were scared the society would spit on them too so certain parts of the photo was covered by a bat gua picture, and eventually bat gua = gossip
Just saw the hashtag #FicRecFebruary and you know what, it’s only the third, I can catch up! I kind of made things too complicated for myself with #DecRecs, so I’m going to try to keep this one very simple. 😅 @Forestofglory you might also be interested in this!
Look at that, I managed a whole month (and mostly within the month, too). Thanks to @clachnaben for making #FicRecFebruary happen! This was really fun. :ablobcatheart:
Who was it who was talking recently about giving and accepting things with both hands? I just read this passage in #APastUnearthed that mentions it.
I wonder if “in a way that showed total appreciation and gratitude” was added by the translator, to make explicit what would be obvious in the original Chinese?
Oh HEY, while I’m drunk at my work Christmas party: why do people not like amnesia as a trope? Speaking generally here, as I do like it, or at least I think I do.
My irl cdrama bff complained at length about Ultimate Note leaning too hard on it, but this might be an Ultimate Note problem rather than an amnesia problem.
@geraineon@villainousfriend Oh wow, that's so interesting! I was indeed on lj back in the day but I didn't spend any time in the RP community so I never ran into that. But it would be a fascinating look into the range of character interpretation!
Downloaded the last seven episodes of #ALeagueOfNobleman to watch while flying home—this involved installing Python 3 on my macbook air and then monkey-patching youtube-dl to make it work on 3.11, so you see my dedication!
You Huo, his uncle and his cousin are transported into a mysterious 'examination' system, where the questions could easily kill any of the examinees. Breaking the rules to test the system, You Huo gets under the skin of Invigilator 001, but the two can't get away from each other.
🧱 Xue Yang has questions
🧱 Xiao Xingchen doesn't want to answer them
🧱 Xue Yang starts to find out anyway
🧱 domesticity, violent thoughts, identity porn, #justYiCityThings
🌾 #ALeagueOfNobleman#fanfic, gen, 325 words
🌾 what to do when you’ve been plagiarised and IP law is in its infancy?
🌾 the only fic on AO3 with the tag Woodblock Printing
🌾 I know this emoji is a sheaf of rice but there isn’t a good orchid emoji
Has anyone read Death Notice by Zhou Haohui? I picked it up on impulse at the weekend and I’m nearly halfway through so far. To be honest, I’m still waiting to be gripped. It seems like a fairly standard crime thriller—but maybe I’m just out of practice at reading the genre. Or perhaps it’s just about to get good!
Also: please ‘enjoy’ some of the most egregious #menWritingWomen I’ve seen in a long while. (Sorry, no alt text, because a page is too many characters.) Mu Jianyun also likes to opine that men are scum whenever she feels no one has noticed her gender enough lately, sigh.
I hope she’s the murderer—that would be the only redeeming plot development for this crumminess.
📚 start working on fanbinding of girlfriend's favourite disappeared-from-the-internet Weiss Kreuz fanfic
📚 boyfriend shyly asks if I could bind a book for him
📚 I agree, of course
📚 boyfriend finally goes through his old hard drives and assembles the 'lost' original short stories I didn't have access to, and therefore couldn't bind as a surprise
📚 I start typesetting book
📚 boyfriend is newly excited about writing and gets fresh inspiration!
@villainousfriend it was also against school rules! Haha. Because most of them had explicit sex iirc. None of the classmates I was distributing fic to even knew the canon...
@villainousfriend funny how much random culture/buddhist stories can be absorbed kinda passively XD these are familiar stories. acceptable cannibalism 😋
i do kinda hate filial piety taken to extremes though
@geraineon yeah, it’s not something I feel too qualified to comment on because it’s one of the cultural differences that’s been made emblematic of the ‘East’/‘West’ ‘divide’, but it’s definitely the kind of principle that can get very bad if taken to extremes!
Finally started reading Qian Qiu/Thousand Autumns. I’m enjoying it so far! I only recently discovered it was set in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, one of my favourite historical periods. 🥰
Before I started reading #QianQiu, I was under the impression it was xianxia, but to me it definitely falls more under wuxia (of course, those aren’t two fully distinct genres! There’s a relationship and continuum between them). I’m having trouble articulating why, but it was a really nice surprise, haha. I guess wuxia feels like a better fit with the detailed historical setting? It’s also really fun seeing Meng Xishi’s take on various different tropes. 😄