llonkrebboj

[llonkrebboj]

Short piano arrangement for the Mo Du/Silent Reading audiodrama s1 ending theme! There are probably more proper/complete transcriptions out there, but if anyone is interested, you can download the sheet music/PDF for this here.

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worlds slowest fanfic author tries really really hard

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Putting the "I haven't seen all of them" option first to see if that stops people from voting for the only character they know

Edit: Realized after posting that "Jin" autocorrected to "Jim" but it's so fucking funny that I'm going to leave it in 😭😭

[llonkrebboj]

I find it interesting that you keep saying that Asians in Asia don't see themselves as poc. While you may feel that way, I think it's valid to note that Britain (white people) occupied and conquered what was then India (today India, Pakistan, Bhutan, etc.) There is a big difference between the fair indians and the darker indians. To be light skinned is considered beautful. Therefore, that region of Asia does see itself as poc for they were treated as second class to the gori British.

Hey, I appreciate you writing in! I’ll explain my thinking behind the term here.

I too grew up in a former British colony, so while I did have a concept of whiteness and therefore do not see myself as “white”- I want to emphasise that the term “person of colour” does have different political and cultural implications than “non-European” or perhaps “non-white”. Simply, I do not see myself as “white” because of British colonialism, but I does not mean I see myself as a “person of colour”. I see myself as Han Chinese, East Asian or Asian. “ In general, I believe the term should not be used carelessly outside the US due to different ideas of whiteness between the US and Europe, as well as other countries in the Americas, where race isn’t perceived the exact same way. I don’t believe it should be used at all in the non-Western context.

1. Person of colour is a term that specifically originated in the context of the United States’ system of colourist racism, of Jim Crow, of slavery, where the idea of “white” became a vehicle to confer privilege. I say “vehicle” because whiteness has always been a social construct. in much earlier parts of US history, several light-skinned European ethnic groups were not allowed to access whiteness, like Irish people. Today, they are seen as white. Although the term has been used carelessly by many people on tumblr, “person of colour” is first and foremost a racialised identity taken on to organise against white supremacy- in Western contexts.

2. I don’t believe it should be applied to non-Western contexts firstly, because the history of Asian colourist discrimination has actually long-predated European colonial rule. Further, it doesn’t quite just exist as a marker of racial otherness, but as a class division. Fair skin has been prized in China, Japan and Korea for thousands of years due to classism. I believe it is the case with India too- from what I know, it was very much tied to the ancient Indian caste system or other class/regional divisions. That is not to say that Western beauty standards don’t help to reinforce this preference today, but it would be inaccurate for us to ascribe this obsession for light skin all to recent European imperialism. Recognising its ancient roots is crucial: as a light-skinned East Asian, nobody has ever tried to sell me skin-whitening cream, unlike my other Han Chinese friends who were darker-skinned. 

3. As “person of colour” is an organising tool against white supremacy, I do not believe it has much relevance in non-Western contexts because we are no longer under European colonial rule. This is not to say its legacy doesn’t still affect us, but that the fault lines and tensions that matter are very often not going to centre so much around whiteness anymore in day-to-day life. I feel white privilege can be discussed there without us defining ourselves as “persons of colour”. 

Primarily, I am against the term because it posits a false illusion of solidarity that erases local oppressor-oppressed dynamics, and centering on whiteness very often becomes a tool of deflection for their own crimes (like in Mugabe’s ZImbabwe, when he appropriated land from white farmers but mostly gave it to his cronies who didn’t utilise the land properly, causing food shortages that hurt thousands of black Zimbabweans.) On another level, I don’t wish to centre around whiteness all the time because I think the fixation on it at the expense of other fault lines is in of itself a perpetuation of Eurocentic/whitecentric history and narratives.

To me, the attendant notions of solidarity underpinning the idea of POC have very little relevance when outside the Western world, our oppressive structures and systems of privileges are very often run by other non-Europeans. Whiteness is the “default” in the US, but in mainland China? It’s being Han Chinese. Han Chinese supremacy is the reason for continued racism and Sinicisation of non-Han minorities like Uighur Muslims and Tibetan. And this racism has a history in Chinese imperialism that long-predates European colonialism. To call all of us “POC” flattens the power structure and posits false solidarity between oppressor and victim- it allows the oppressor to wrongly occupy the space as the victim: as if the Han Chinese general is the same as the non-Han people he has captured for human sacrifices to the gods during the Shang Dynasty. Minorities in the Middle-East and North Africa like Kurds, Amazigh are very often marginalised by Arab supremacy- such as when Saddam Hussein enacted a genocide against Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s, using chemical weapons. The Nigerian government’s slow response to the Boko Haram crisis despite angry protests by Nigerians? The government not caring when people in Northern Nigeria, which is much more impoverished- die. For my own family history, some of the deepest grievances stem from how the Japanese mistreated my grandparents during WW2.

4. Lastly, the term “POC” outside the Western context tends to flatten the power structure between non-Europeans who live in the West or otherwise have a Western background vis a vis people from our ancestral countries. 

White privilege can reinforce Western privilege but they are not totally synonoymous: Because even people not considered white do benefit from citizenship in a Western country or a Westernised background. When it comes to global economic inequality, we are closer to the centre of the empire, to the position of those who benefit, not the exploited. People like myself benefit from speaking English, from appearing “more European” and generally Westernised. It’s the reason my friend, who is of Indian ancestry, was treated very differently by the immigration officer when his British accent became obvious- compared to Indians from India who were on the same flight as him. There would for example, be a huge power differential between an Arab-American soldier and the other Arab people in say, Iraq. I cannot in good faith say my experiences are the same as the Chinese workers who work long hours in factories, many of whom start working at 16. At 16? I wasn’t done with schooling. It was taken for granted I would get a university education, and so on. 

5. So, the term “person of colour” is meaningless to me in the non-Western context context, and I personally find it actively harmful when people lump us as “POC cultures” because it purports to create an illusion of solidarity that obscures the massive amount of racism and oppression Asians are enacting against each other till today. Further, I see it as a projection of Western race politics on a non-Western context, which is decentering from local dynamics.

In conclusion, I very much see myself as “non-white” in Asia due to growing up in a former European colony. But I do not see myself as a “person of colour” there. I see myself somewhat as a person of colour in Europe, because it is a Western context where light-skinned Europeans are the majority. Still, not entirely- because it is quite an American term and European racism has a lot of ethnicity dimensions. I tend to see myself as Han Chinese, most specifically.

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hello I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. The anonymity of tumblr means that I associate my idea/image of you with your icon and sometimes I look at people’s icons and I’m like ‘hmmm….what is that and why?’ 

so pls reblog this and comment in the tags the meaning behind your icon and why you chose it. this is a social experiment. do it for science pls.

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Oh look! It's the guardian of the lake!

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Do you actually ship them or do you want them to be trapped together in a cave-in where one of them is injured and they have to talk to keep them distracted and stay sane while they wait for help, and end up opening up about their vulnerabilities and bond and then grow desperate as one starts to slip from consciousness while the other begs them to stay awake—

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English added by me :)

[llonkrebboj]

Adding my 5 cents of context.

I started reading cnovels on the web in 2014 - not on the official sites because my Chinese wasn’t quite that functional for developing internet savviness yet, and I hadn’t figured out there were official platforms… later when I did manage to create my accounts and get them working, certain things had already become common practice.

Starting in female lead 言情 romance mainline novels before moving into danmei a year later, there were still ripples caused by net cleanup campaigns that I heard of distantly in my corners.

First, news and rumors about a fairly popular author 长着翅膀的大灰狼 | Big Grey Wolf With Wings being investigated for allegedly ‘profiting from sales of pornography’ (friends, like the haitang authors of 2024/5, she wrote books!). Three of her works - all het with female leads - were deemed as obscene by an enforcement agency, and she ended up with a suspended 3-year prison sentence in June 2015.

Link to the article about Big Grey Wolf With Wings: https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1366172

Much later (years later actually, while looking up things for the Chengdu Hugo awards scandal), I found out about the 扫黄打非·净网 2014 | Sweeping Pornography and Striking Illegality – Clean Web 2014 campaign to clean up ‘pornography and illegal content’ online. You can read about it on this blog. (The work of 扫黄打非 def continued through the years.) Pretty much every major platform like jjwxc, qidian, weibo, and even cloud storage sites got swept up in this. And jj which was a hub for romance and danmei stories got labeled a hotbed for adult content.

I have a distinct memory of bewilderment when the tag for 耽美 - I hadn’t quite figured out what that was or what it meant - suddenly turned into 纯爱 overnight on the site where I downloaded my txts. Piecing backwards from jjwxc forum questions and replies, it seems like this happened in July 2014. Not only jj, but if you check most sites now, the tag you will see for BL is 纯爱.

Danmei name-change to chunai: https://bbs.jjwxc.net/showmsg.php?board=22&boardpagemsg=12341&id=116331

As the forum moderator explained, the adjustment (rebranding) was due to much stricter checks during that period - likely related to the Clean Web 2014 campaign. Just looking at the words alone, 耽美 - carrying associations with sensuality and influence from Japanese Boys’ Love, and 纯爱 - emphasizing innocence, emotional purity, and the absence of sexual content. I guess you just have to do what you gotta do to keep the website operating.

(On lofter right now, neither chun’ai nor danmei are searchable tags. You do get a handful with 原耽 though, as a truncation of original danmei.)

Between 2015 and 2018 (I only found out the exact rough timeline looking it up for this reply, but it mostly aligns with the time I started noticing complaints, begging and funny ribbing @ reviewers appearing in authors’ notes), jjwxc formalized a “three-stage” review process for all content: First, automated machine screening; second, review by a randomly selected trio of users; and third, high-level editor approval. If a piece failed at any stage, the author would be notified to revise or the content would be removed. Around this time was when the standard of 脖子以下不能描写 | no depictions under the neck, as well as when ☐☐ came into fashion.

Moving into 2019! I think this is the year more people will start to remember because more of anglosphere fandom had been getting into cnoveland and fantranslations by this time, whether it be through the earlier novel adaptation cdrama, BL adaptations or Untamed.

Around May 2019, even qidian had whole sections of their site frozen for up to a week; books were taken down and people were losing their accounts over completely random things from puns that edged too close to forbidden words, to slightly steamy kissing scenes (although I think this mind boggling period turned out to be due to reviews via bots which flagged things indiscriminately)?

Something similar was also happening to jj, fanqie and midu in July 2019. And all of them were forced to stop updates and suspend commercial operations over a certain period during which time, they were supposed to ‘clean up problematic content, strictly enforce content review and management systems’. Of and course, fines. Fines were definitely paid. And for all the other times too.

Article for the above: https://www.zaobao.com.sg/realtime/china/story20190716-972936

[Some forbidden topics: https://www.jjwxc.net/backend/forbiddensubject.php]

More than before, writers started using clever metaphors, ancient-style language and other euphemisms to get around the filters. You might even have heard of some of the jokes made in hell like 古代文言文式开车 ~ writing smut in classical, literary language.

And it wasn’t just sexual content. Military romance, historical fantasy, real life politics, anything that touched on religion or violence—those were all fair game for censorship too*.

*People with the jjwxc app, you can go to check under public messages from 2021-06-10 ‘多部门署启动“净网“集中行动，请网站各位作者注意严控作品尺度和导向’ | Multiple departments have launched a coordinated 'Clean Internet' campaign. Website authors are urged to carefully monitor the content and messaging of their work, and look at the guidelines laid out there. A portion of it is translated (via mtl) in this tumblr reply.

Also, the elephant in the room was illegal publishing. Some authors who couldn’t get ISBNs would self-print 同人志 | fanbooks and sell them at cons or online. That was fine… until someone reported you. Like in the case of the author by the pen name of 深海先生 | Mr Shenhai, where they accused another danmei author of plagiarism, and the author clapped back by reporting them for illegal publishing. Mr. Shenhai got arrested and sentenced to 4 years in prison. And of course the MXTX arrest rumors of 2020/21 that probably were true.

All in all, I guess the shift from danmei to chun’ai wasn’t just about semantics, it really marked these 10 years as era of transition for Chinese BL, from the freedom of before to whatever state it’s in now.

After the arrests last year of danmei authors who published their works on the Taiwanese website Haitang, the authorities have allegedly arrested another 200-300 authors, many of whom took to weibo to share their experiences recently.

What struck me is how the authors always blamed themselves for not being cautious enough or being led astray by their financial needs, but nobody put the blame on the unjust rules and the greed of the authorities that led to their arrests - not that they would dare to. It's an utterly bizarre situation that, as a new danmei English license seems to be announced once every few days here on the other side of China's Great Firewall, within China the persecution keeps getting more rampant and the danmei community feels more and more cornered and frightened. Reality is always more surreal than fiction.

I translated some of the author's weibo posts, please see below:

“I knew I was being naïve and over-optimistic (about the repercussions of writing danmei), so I can’t blame anyone. Sometimes I want to resent society but then I’ll give up the thought. As for the criminal punishment, my view on it is still the same - I even feel that I’m different from those who engage in prostitution; after all, I made all this money by typing my stories word by word. Yet when I got into trouble, people talked about it as if I didn’t have to work for my income.” - This is from an author who wrote danmei because her family’s poor and she wanted to save money to travel. She got into a master’s programme before this and the programme kicked her out because of her arrest.

“Ever since I was little, I’ve always been the well-behaved golden child in my parents’ eyes. I had the best grades among my peers and won scholarships in both high school and university. When we visited family during New Year and other festivals, my parents were always proud of me in front of our relatives. But that day I shamed them thoroughly and the shame will always stick around...I love the characters I wrote very much, planning and creating their stores always brought me so much happiness and fulfillment. But a mistake is a mistake. I want to use my personal experience to admonish others - don’t try to go against the regulations in any way ever, don’t put yourself in the slightest bit of risk.”

“I’ve never felt this horrible in my entire life. I’ve always firmly believed that nobody in this world could be that bad. My rose-tinted glasses were broken along with my romantic expectations for the world. My values and outlook on life were shattered. When something like this happens, perhaps only the family of the author involved and the author herself would be hurt deeply! It’s just business for everyone else!”

This one’s written by the author’s sibling: “Another sleepless night. Tomorrow is the Dragon Boat Festival, and it’s been three festivals since we could be together...I’ve felt remorseful for countless times that I didn’t contact more people and I felt that I haven’t done enough. I prayed to the gods and the Buddha for more times in the past two months than in the past 30 years. Besides asking for the Heaven’s protection and blessing, what else can we do?...You supported yourself financially during university solely by doing part-time jobs. We’ve always put too much importance on money, and that’s how we allowed you to make a mistake.”

(link to the original weibo posts: https://x.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/1928763362541818266)

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I understand that museums have to be dark because light can destroy fragile artifacts. That said, I’m always afraid to walk around the blind corners because what if there is a skeleton

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It is 2025 and I still ugly cry over Xiao Jingyu 😭

https://b23.tv/ctVqgHO

[llonkrebboj]

And that's all they get up to? 31 eps in?

THE NOVEL IS 60% SEX OH MY GODDDDDD

(but also is there ANY reason why they are not banging at this point? They are married, mourning done, in love (and just reconfessed), in their own bedroom, WHY THE HELL NOT THIS IS BIZARRE!)

They so rarely have any sex in these shows, I want to know how is the population of drama China not extinct?

[llonkrebboj]

Caihua 彩画 "colour painting" is the traditional Chinese decorative painting used for architecture and one of the most notable and important features of historical Chinese architecture. Caihua served not only as decoration but also protection of the predominantly wooden architecture from various seasonal elements and hid the imperfections of the wood itself.

The use of different colours or paintings would be according to the particular local regional customs, as well as historical periods. The choice of colours and symbology are based on traditional Chinese philosophies like the Five Elements.

One of the most common types is Hexi Caihua 和玺彩画 “Hexi painting” or “Imperial-style decorative painting” which is the royal variation of Caihua. Historically used only on the most important buildings in Chinese palaces.

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I wonder why Ruyi is now called as Daru (大如) in China?

Sigh. (This is not directed towards you the asker but just...this "discourse" in general.)

(And I guess this is not really relevant to this blog but since you asked...)

I don't want to know the answer to this, but my social media feeds keep pushing this at me so unfortunately I do kind of know the answer to this. In the last couple? (few? what is time?) years, there has been a wave of backlash on Chinese social media against Legend of Ruyi the drama. Some say, it began as a calculated smear campaign against Zhou Xun because she was being nominated for a bunch of awards for her 2023 drama Imperfect Victim.

But for whatever reason, there was a wave of criticism against Legend of Ruyi the drama, focused mostly on how the character of Ruyi is portrayed and how Zhou Xun supposedly influenced that. Apparently Zhou Xun abused her position as the lead actress to change the entire ending of the drama so that instead of being a badass girlboss on a vengeance spree as FL in harem dramas are supposed to be, she acts the way she acts in the drama which isn't badass enough for certain people and that's bad because it's Zhou Xun wanting to play a saintly Mary Sue. And Zhou Xun also ruined Wallace Huo's career. Or something. I don't even know.

(There's also accusation of characters in Ruyi having unreasonable plot armour (either Rong Pei or Yanwan), sometimes hilariously coming from people who prop up Yanxi Palace to drag down Ruyi with absolutely no awareness/acknowledgement that Wei Yingluo is the queen of plot armours.)

The people who buy in to this "discourse" begin calling the drama and Ruyi "Daru" to mock the drama and its fan as thinking really big of themselves and as a way to signal that this is the direction that their post is going to go. (I think? I mean, this is what I gleaned from having these posts shoved into my feed, it's not like I go and look for them.)

Anyway, the discourse/cricitism is exhausting, mostly because it's made in bad faith and paints Zhou Xun as some sort of supervillian who single-handedly ruined the drama. Because there's no writer/director/producer whose job is the steer the direction of the drama with enough balls to stand up to her or whatever.

Sometimes people think a drama is bad because it doesn't turn out the way they expected it. Sometimes people can't deal with the fact that a drama subverts tropes and expectations and it told the story it wanted to tell, but it wasn't the story they wanted to hear so they throw a hissy fit over it.

[llonkrebboj]

hate when I see the comment "big news for unemployed people" on internet drama. really discounting the dedication of us chronically online employed people. does my 15 minutes in a public restroom at work scrolling online mean nothing to you...