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McCalls Lan Wangji costume pattern by Yaya Han - use as a base to customize for your fave Xianxia character. Unisex.

she has also adapted this pattern for a Chu Wanning

sizes 14 to 22 US

x

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Qianqiu (Thousand Autumns) Audio Drama S2 Ep 6 English Subbed

Hello everyone~! :)

Qianqiu (Thousand Autumns) Audio Drama S2 Ep 6~ is here!

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Our ongoing projects: >> Link <<

Our Carrd: >> Link <<

Form to request our discord server invite: >> Link <<

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Notes:

1) Please use >> VLC Player << to play the file. It is available for a large range of operating systems as well as devices.

For advanced users, I’d recommend >> K-lite codec pack + MPC-HC player << Standard version or above. The player is included from the standard version onwards.

2) Please avoid sharing these files on YouTube and other video streaming platforms. If you wish to share our subbed files, please just reblog or link this tumblr post.

3) Copper Coins, Global Examination, Panguan, Qianqiu and Mou Mou Audio Dramas are paid dramas. So please consider purchasing these audio drama if possible in order to support the original content creators. We have purchase guide linked in our >> projects << page along with the links to the original CN audio only ADs for ease of navigation.

Happy watching~! :)

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Happy Lunar New Year!

I know I’m late to the party (packing has been a bit crazy these past few days OTL) but I just wanted to pop in and wish everyone a Happy Lunar New Year! May this coming year bring you health, good fortune and happiness and may you achieve all that you set out to do!  

I was planning to do a GA to celebrate but given how terribly messy my place is because of the Jan arrivals, I won’t be able to put together any prize sets at the moment;;;

Instead I’ll be going the ‘red pocket’ route and will be handing out some gift vouchers you can use to get any current or future goodies :D

GA Details

3 winners

Open worldwide!

Each winner will receive a $25 CAD gift voucher that can be applied to any order from the Order Site

Rules

Follow + Like + Reblog/Retweet

Max 2 entries per person (1 on Tumblr, 1 on Twitter)

Optional: Reply to this post with an item you got from one of my GO’s that you really love or one that you really look forward to getting!

Deadline: Feb 15, 2022 at 9:00 PM EST

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On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions  of Gonzo the Great: Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it. 

But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?

Don’t eat their food. If human food passes your lips/beak/membrane/other way of ingesting nutrients, you will never be satisfied with your ration bars again.

Don’t tell them your name. Humans can find you again once they know your name and this can be either life-saving or the absolute worst thing that could happen to you, depending on whether or not they favor you. Better to be on the safe side.

Winning a human’s favor will ensure that a great deal of luck is on your side, but if you anger them, they are wholly capable of wiping out everything you ever cared about. Do not anger them.

If you must anger them, carry a cage of X’arvizian bloodflies with you, for they resemble Earth mo-skee-toes and the human will avoid them.

This does not always work. Have a last will and testament ready.

Do not let them take you anywhere on your planet that you cannot fly a ship from. Beings who are spirited away to the human kingdom of Aria Fiv-Ti Won rarely return, and those that do are never quite the same.

Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.

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Aloïs looked at the huge white cat napping on Philip's lap, "Is that a ragdoll?" At Philip's startled glance, he explained, "A friend's got a similar one so I thought it'd be a ragdoll."

Philip smiled, "This one? It's just a rag."

At that quip, the cat hissed lazily as if it understood the snipe against him, extending its claws until it made tiny dents on Philip's arm. Philip chuckled and raised his arm to bury his face in the plush fur, all the while whispering "I kid, I kid. You're too pretty for that."

Aloïs took an involuntary step backwards, suddenly feeling that he had intruded on an intimate moment. Which was absurd, because what kind of intimacy can there be between a man and a cat?

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I absolutely love this scene to bits. Like it has a special place in my heart 😭

Just this scene…

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The Three Laws of Fandom

If you wish to take part in any fandom, you need to accept and respect these three laws.

If you aren’t able to do that, then you need to realise that your actions are making fandom unsafe for creators. That you are stifling creativity.

Like vaccination, fandom only works if everyone respects these rules. Creators need to be free to make their fanart, fanfics and all other content without fear of being harassed or concern-trolled for their creative choices, no matter whether you happen to like that content or not.

The First Law of Fandom

Don’t Like; Don’t Read (DL;DR)

It is up to you what you see online. It is not anyone else’s place to tell you what you should or should not consume in terms of content; it is not up to anyone else to police the internet so that you do not see things you do not like. At the same time, it is not up to YOU to police fandom to protect yourself or anyone else, real or hypothetical.

There are tools out there to help protect you if you have triggers or squicks. Learn to use them, and to take care of your own mental health. If you are consuming fan-made content and you find that you are disliking it - STOP.

The Second Law of Fandom

Your Kink Is Not My Kink (YKINMK)

Simply put, this means that everyone likes different things. It’s not up to you to determine what creators are allowed to create. It’s not up to you to police fandom. 

If you don’t like something, you can post meta about it or create contrarian content yourself, seek to convert other fans to your way of thinking.  

But you have no right to say to any creator “I do not like this, therefore you should not create it. Nobody should like this. It should not exist.”

It’s not up to you to decide what other people are allowed to like or not like, to create or not to create. That’s censorship. Don’t do it.

The Third Law of Fandom

Ship And Let Ship (SALS)

Much (though not all) fandom is about shipping. There are as many possible ships as there are fans, maybe more. You may have an OTP (One True Pairing), you may have a NOTP, that pairing that makes you want to barf at the very thought of its existence.

It’s not up to you to police ships or to determine what other people are allowed to ship. Just because you find that one particular ship problematic or disgusting, does not mean that other people are not allowed to explore its possibilities in their fanworks.

You are free to create contrarian content, to write meta about why a particular ship is repulsive, to discuss it endlessly on your private blog with like-minded persons.

It is not appropriate to harass creators about their ships, it is not appropriate to demand they do not create any more fanworks about those ships, or that they create fanwork only in a manner that you deem appropriate.

These three laws add up to the following:

You are not paying for fanworks content, and you have no rights to it other than to choose to consume it, or not consume it. If you do choose to consume it, do not then attack the creator if it wasn’t to your taste. That’s the height of bad manners.

Be courteous in fandom. It makes the whole experience better for all of us.

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Happy Moon Festival everyone! I’ll be hosting a GA to celebrate so feel free to participate! Details below the cut~

Rules

Followers only! No giveaway accounts please~

Open worldwide :D

Maximum of 2 regular entries: 1 like + reblog on the GA post on Tumblr, 1 like + retweet on the GA tweet on Twitter

Feedback submissions also count as bonus entries!

5 prize packs available, 1 each for MDZS/CQL, TGCF, SVSSS, 2ha and SHL

5 different winners will be chosen via random draw, 3 from reblogs/retweets and 2 from feedback submissions

Prizes are first come, first served - if you don’t want to claim a prize, you may forfeit and another name will be drawn

Deadline: Sept 24, 2021 at 9:00 PM EST

Bonus entries: https://www.shandiango.ca/more/feedback-prizes (If you've already submitted feedback, no need to submit again!)

Prizes

Bundle #1 (MDZS/CQL): 1 CQL official tote bag (black), 1 CQL official bunny ear headband (white), 1 Montage metal bookmark

Bundle #2 (TGCF): 1 Miniso tote bag (San Lang), 1 Miniso notebook (Xie Lian), 1 Bilibili rocking standee

Bundle #3 (SVSSS): 1 Nan Man She fan bookmark, assorted Vietnamese Edition book merch

Bundle #4: (2ha): 1 Vietnamese Edition Vol 1 standee, mousepad and keychain, 1 Camphong badge set (lilac)

Bundle #5 (SHL): 1 Can Can Wenzhou charm set (#13), 1 porrok charm, 1 Keru shaker charm, 1 Yu Ying embroidered purse, 1 Concert Mini Photobook (Bingdi)

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maybe it’s just because I’m an Oldfan™ but this book I spotted at the library is absolutely sending me

CHOOSE YOUR AU

I’m

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I originally wrote this post as a Twitter thread. You can go over there and read it there if you want to.

***

One of the things that I think a lot of people are missing when they focus on the 'abortion rights' portion of the concept of 'overturning Roe v. Wade' is that the Roe v. Wade decision wasn't legally centered on the question of abortion per se but on the right to privacy.

(Before everyone crawls up my ass: I was, until my salpingectomy in 2019, a non-binary person capable of becoming pregnant. I have been pregnant 13 times, had multiple D&Cs as a result of spontaneous abortions (aka miscarriages), and had one live birth. I shouldn't have to present my fucking bona fides in order to talk about this stuff, but I'm gonna, in order to make it clear that yes, I know abortion is important, but we need to not miss the other things this can impact, and (I think) is planned to impact.)

The main argument of Roe v. Wade hinged on the right to privacy under the 4th amendment, namely the idea that a private individual has the right to engage in such medical decisions as they see fit without the state getting involved. It also hinged on the 14th Amendment's 'due process' clause. So basically, the idea here is that without 'due process,' you cannot be deprived of your liberty to make medical decisions for yourself, nor can you be deprived of your right to privacy about those decisions.

This Britannica article does a pretty good job of explaining the high-level overview of the case itself, the legal arguments made, and what parts of the Constitution they depend upon.

And if you're saying 'okay, yeah, but it's really about abortion,' maybe it is. But you know what else depends upon the constitutional right to privacy? How about the case which established that right to privacy, Griswold v. CT, which guaranteed married couples the right to legal contraception?

And if you're convinced (as I am) that the attack on abortion is not just a white supremacist attempt to solve the 'birth dearth' and make sure the US has more white babies than brown babies (more on that in a second) but an attempt to narrow our privacy expectations and protections under the law, there's a lot here to be concerned about if Roe v. Wade's Constitutional privacy protections disappear in a puff of 'but the babiesssss'. This Cornell page explains multiple cases which depend on that privacy right.

Eisenstadt v. Baird (which established that access to contraception must be legal regardless of marital status) relied upon Griswold's right to privacy, and extended that right to privacy under the Equal Protection Clause. So basically, this right was established in Griswold for married couples, and then it was extended to unmarried individuals bc the state has no "rational basis" for excluding unmarried individuals from it. But again, if we have no medical right to make our own decisions and the state's "compelling interest" can be found to extend to abortion, it can be found to extend to contraception, since these decisions are all tied together. And if you think 'oh that can't happen,' I invite you to look at the last 5 years of our legal history.

Any fucking out-there bullshit that you think couldn't possibly happen because it's just too ridiculous? It could happen with this Court, I assure you, because Trump's appointees are making decisions on ideology & not law. But wait! There's more! (Of course there's more.)

Let's consult the Legal Information Institute again. What OTHER decision relies upon this right to privacy? If you guessed 'Lawrence v. Texas,' which struck down that state's sodomy laws that essentially made queerness illegal, you're right! (And you should read the details of that case, it's pretty fucked up, actually, in that it's a case of someone's ex-boyfriend weaponizing the police against two other queer men.)

Not only do I think that this is a very deliberate target of this entire attack on our very literal freedom to decide how we live our lives and what we want to do with our bodies, who we love, etc., but I think the cases to challenge these decisions are already being set up. If these arrests aren't intended to pipe upward to the Supreme Court and challenge Lawrence v. Texas, I will be very, very surprised.

And if those arrests in particular were not planned that way, I guarantee you someone else is figuring out how to challenge it. I guarantee it. That's how this works. You have to set up a challenge to the law somehow, you can't just ask the court to overturn a precedent.

If the Supreme Court finds that the state's interest vis a vis Roe v. Wade falls the other way now -- that the state's interest IS in regulating private medical decisions -- then it can easily find that the state can regulate personal sexual decisions. And we're not just talking about abortion when we talk about personal medical decisions.

We're talking about the right to medical transition, both HRT and surgical intervention. We're talking about the right of disabled people to not be forcibly sterilized by the state. We're talking about the right to not be experimented upon without our consent, or the right to not have 'practice' pelvic exams done on us by medical students while we're asleep for surgery, or the right to end our own lives if we so choose.

If you're thinking that no dude out there right now is thinking 'but what if we could establish the legal right to experiment on prisoners again and give them new drugs though?' then you are far less cynical than I am, just saying. We have done all of those things before and some of them we still do (you can google that pelvic exam thing if you have the stomach) & the enshrining of our right to privacy is the closest thing we get to a right to bodily autonomy, which is not a phrase the Court uses often.

If we lose the right to privacy, we may lose the right to equal marriage, bc if that right to decide who we have sex with isn't a private decision but something the state has the right to regulate, the state may say 'we can't be asked to enshrine protections for illegal sex.'

Again, you can think I'm alarmist as much as you fucking want to, and I'll just point you back at the last five years of our judicial and legislative history. It's ALL under attack. This is just where it starts.

I promised we'd come back to why the abortion debate is a white supremacist issue, and I'm going to start with a video. Please watch this and then come back.

The person whose interview is being quoted in that TikTok is Jane Elliott, and I'm going to just link to her website bc you really just need to go listen to her talk and read the things she's written in general. If you read the racist encoding of the book she's talking about from its NYT review from 1987, it becomes very very clear that this is exactly what the book is talking about, if you needed any more backup for that. The people who agree with the premise of the book note that 'Western' birth rates are dropping, while other people in the article say that 'immigration' will solve the population issue.

It isn't enough for these people to have 'enough babies to be consumers.' They need to be white babies, the argument goes, because otherwise white supremacy over the country will end! So we have to end abortion and stop immigration from Central America.

And if you think I'm being facetious about the concept of concern over having 'enough babies to be consumers,' I assure you that I absolutely am not being facetious whatsoever.

So we've got an attack on the right to privacy, which amounts to a desire to force white people who can give birth to do so so there are more consumers. Rich white people will always find a way to get abortions quietly and legally -- they did so before Roe v. Wade. This means more poor white babies to prey upon as consumers and wage slaves, which suits the ideologues just fine: that's what they prefer.

Sick, right? Yeah, well. Yeah.

It also means being able to push queer people out of public life and hopefully (to them) out of existence.

It means giving the state the ability to legislate what the people who don't have the money to be able to buy their way out of whatever laws are enacted do with their bodies, in a world where Amazon already puts their drivers in situations where they have to piss in bottles.

The right to privacy is where a lot of our human dignity protected under law comes from. If you don't have the right to medical privacy and to decide what you do with your body, you lose a lot of human dignity and choice.

(I know it's a little late to say this but I swear to fuck if any anti-vaxxers come in here with their bullshit I will launch you out of a rocket into the sun. Carrying a communicable disease around and making OTHER people ill is not comparable to any of this. Shut up.)

Also, this is part of why I get so fucking angry and spun up over the way the queer community is so fucking fractured right now. Like, I really don't care what you think about the colors of a flag or the label someone else uses. I don't. All of that stuff, from kink at Pride to trying to split us trans folx off from the rest of the queer community to the intra-lesbian wars, is part of a deliberate attempt of anti-queer right-wingers to weaken our community. They've said that part out loud. It absolutely is.

So what can we do about it? Well, short of communist revolution granting control of our lives to the people living them, we can fund the people fighting the good fight. We can BE the people willing to fight the good fight.

We can be part of mutual aid societies assisting those who need to access medical care today. (Feel free to link those below.) We can fund organizations like ACLU and Lambda Legal who fight the fights in court. We can push to enshrine those rights in law so they're not contingent upon court decisions, but written out in explicit text.

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sometimes a family is you, 45,820 fandoms, and 4,000,000 registered users

🥳 Congratulations AO3! 🎉

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— Albert Camus to Maria Casarès

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at the end of the long horrible story was you

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Suddenly thought of a book series where only one word changes in the title. Like:

Drunk in a Dream

Drunk with a Dream

Drunk from a Dream

Drunk like a Dream

Drunk up a Dream

Etc. Etc.

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Crafting A Fantasy Culture, or the fallacies of using culture in the singular

The world is an interdependent place.

A lot of Western writers will look at the need to diversify their writing and try to cherry pick outside cultures to add. They then come to us with a laundry list of questions about what they’re allowed to change about those cultures because, well, they didn’t pull from a broad enough context.

The thing about researching individual cultures is: you’re never going to be researching just one culture. You’re going to be researching all the cultures they interacted with, as well.

Cultures are made by interacting with other cultures. So you can’t simply plop a singular culture into a fantasy world and expect it to work. There is too much outside influence on that culture for you to get a holistic picture by researching the culture in isolation.

Instead, you need to ask yourself, “what environments made them, and how much of their surrounding contexts do I need to add to my fantasy world to make this genuine respectful representation?”

And before you say that you can’t possibly do that, that is too much research, let me introduce you to the place you’re already doing it but don’t realize:

Stock Fantasy World 29

Aka, fantasy Europe.

It gets ragged on a lot, but let’s take a minute to look at the tropes that build this stock fantasy world.

Snow

4 seasons

Boars, pigs, wolves, dogs, pine trees, stone

Castles

Sheep

Knights

A king

Farming based economy

Religion plays a pretty big role in life

All fairly generic fantasy Europe tropes. But if you look more closely, you’ll notice that this is painting a picture of Fantasy Germany/the Netherlands, with perhaps a dash of France and/or England in there, all of it vaguely Americanized (specifically the New England area) because there’s usually potatoes and tomatoes. The geographic region is pretty tight, and it just so happens to mesh with the top three superpowers of upper North America, and arguably the English speaking world.

But let’s keep going.

They import stuff. Like fine cloth, especially silk, along with dyes & pigments

These things are expensive from being imported, so the nobility mostly have them

There’s usually a war-mongering Northern People invading places

If brown people exist they are usually to the East

There might be a roaming band of nomadic invaders who keep threatening things

There is, notably, almost no tropical weather, and that is always to the South if it’s mentioned

There might be an ocean in the South that leads to a strange forgien land of robed people to survive a desert (or did I just read too much Tamora Pierce?)

And, whoops, we have just accidentally recreated European history in its full context.

The Northern people are Norse, and their warring ways are indicative of the Viking Invasion. The imports hint at Asia, namely the Ottomans and India, and the silk road. The roaming invaders are for Mongolian Khanate. The ocean and tropical weather in the South hints at Spain, Greece, and the Mediterranean. And the continent of robed people indicates North Africa, and/or Southwest Asia.

Suddenly, stock fantasy world 29 has managed to broad-strokes paint multiple thousands of years of cultural exchange, trade, wars, invasions, and general history into a very small handful of cultural artifacts that make up throwaway lines.

Europe As Mythology And You

European history is what’s taught in Western classrooms. And a lot of European history is painted as Europe being a cultural hub, because other places in the world just aren’t talked about in detail—or with any sort of context. Greece and Rome were whitewashed; the Persian and Ottoman empires were demonized; North Africans became the enemy because of their invasion of Spain and the fact many of them were not-Christian; the Mongolian Khanate was a terrible, bloodthirsty culture whose only goal was destruction.

But because all of these parts did interact with Europe and were taught in history class, writers crafting a fantasy Europe will automatically pull from this history on a conscious or subconscious level because “it’s what makes sense.”

The thing is, despite people writing European fantasy subconsciously recreating European history, they don’t actually recreate historical reality. They recreate the flattened, politically-driven, European-supremacist propaganda that treats every culture outside of Europe as an extra in a movie that simply exists to support Europe “history” that gets taught in schools.

As a result of incomplete education, a lot of people walk away from history class and believe that cultures can be created in a vacuum. Because that’s the way Europe’s history was taught to them.

Which leads to: the problem with Fantasy World 29 isn’t “it’s Europe.” It’s the fact it’s an ahistorical figment of a deeply colonial imagination that is trying to justify its own existence. It’s homogeneous, it only mentions the broader cultural context as a footnote, it absolutely does not talk about any people of colour, and there’s next to no detailing of the variety of people who actually made up Europe.

So writers build their Fantasy World 29 but they neglect the diversity of religion and skin tone and culture because it’s unfamiliar to them, and it was never taught to them as a possibility for history.

While “globalization” is a buzzword people throw around a lot to describe the modern age, society has been global for a large portion of human history. There were Japanese people in Spain in the 1600s. Polynesians made it to North America decades if not centuries before Columbus did. There are hundreds more examples like this. 

You can absolutely use fantasy to richen your understanding of Europe, instead of perpetuating the narratives that were passed down from victor’s history. People of colour have always existed in Europe, no matter what time period you’re looking at, and unlearning white supremacist ideas about Europe is its own kind of diversity revolution.

Travel is Old and People Did It Plenty

Multiculturalism is a tale as old as time. And while some populations were very assimilationist in their rhetoric, others were very much not. They would expand borders and respect the pre-existing populations, or they would open up networks to outsiders to become hubs of all the best the world had to offer. Even without conscious effort, any given place was building off of centuries of human migration because humans covered the globe by wandering around, and people have always been people.

Regardless, any time you have a group of people actively maintaining an area, they want to make travelling for themselves easier. And the thing about making travelling for yourself easier is: it made travel for outsiders just as possible. By the time you reach the 1200s, even, road, river, and ocean trade networks were thriving.

Sure, you might be gone for a year or three or five because the methods were slow, but you would travel. Pilgrimages, trade routes, and bureaucratic administrative routes made it possible for people to move around.

And also, soldiers and war did really good jobs of moving people around, and not all of them went back “home.” Hence why there have been African people in England since the Roman empire. When you have an empire, you are going to take soldiers from all over that empire; you aren’t going to necessarily pull from just the geographic region immediately surrounding the capital. 

Yes, the population that could travel was smaller than it is now, because land needed to be worked. But Europe isn’t the be all end all in how much of its population needed to be in agriculture in order to function; the Mughals, for example, had 80% of their population farming, compared to over 90% for Europe in the same time period. That’s an extra 10% of people who were more socially free to move around, away from their land. Different cultures had different percentages of people able to travel.

This isn’t counting nomadic populations that relied on pastoralism and horticulture who didn’t actually settle down, something a lot of history tends to ignore because cities are easier to discuss. But nomadic populations existed en masse across Eurasia, and they took cultural traditions all over the continent.

Just because it wasn’t fast doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. And just because a lot of Europeans couldn’t travel because of the agricultural demands of the continent, doesn’t mean every other culture was as tied to settlements. 

Multiculturalism and Diffusion

While each individual culture is unique, and you can find pockets of difference anywhere, cultures exist on a sliding scale of broad customs across the globe. Greece and Turkey will have more in common than China and England, because the trade routes were much closer and they shared central rulership for multiple hundreds of years.

This is why we keep saying it’s important to keep cultures with other cultures close to them. Because those are the natural clusters of how all of the cultures involved would be formed. The proper term for this is cultural diffusion, and it happened all the time. Yes, you could get lots of people who had their own unique customs to set themselves apart. But they had the same natural resources as the dominant group, which meant they couldn’t be completely and totally alien.

Even trade influence wouldn’t produce the same results in two places. When Rome imported silks from China, they rewove them to be a different type of fabric that was lighter and more suited to their climate. Then the Romans sold the rewoven silk back to China, who treated it differently because they’d woven it the first way for a reason. They didn’t talk to each other directly because of how the Silk Road was set up at the time, either, so all they had were the goods.

And people automatically, subconsciously realize this whenever they write Fantasy World 29. They put like cultures with like cultures in Europe. Because even if they weren’t really taught to see the rest of the world as anything more than a footnote, they still transfer those footnotes to their fantasy.

The problem is, people don’t realize the gradient of customs. In the modern day, Greece and Turkey are different countries, with histories that are taught in totally different frameworks (Greece as an appropriated white supremacist “ancient land” that all Western European societies are descendent from, Turkey as a land of brown people that were Muslim and therefore against the Good Christian Europe), so it’s really easy to ignore all of their shared history.

People often fought for the right to rule (or even exist) in a place, which deeply impacted the everyday people and government. Ancient Persia is a fantastic example of this, because it covered huge swaths of land and was a genuinely respectful country (it took over a deeply disrespectful country); had it not been for Cyrus the Great deciding that he would respect multiculturalism, the Second Temple wouldn’t have been rebuilt in Jerusalem. 

You can’t homogenize an area that was never homogenous to begin with. Because there was a ton of fighting and sometimes centuries-old efforts to preserve culture in the face of all this fighting (that sometimes came with assimilation pressure). Dominant groups, invading groups, influencing groups, and marginalized groups have always existed in any given population. See: Travel is Old above. See: people have always been people and wandered around. Xenophobia is far, far older than racism ever will be, because xenophobia is simply “dislike of Other” and humans love crafting “us vs them” dynamics.

This lack of unity matters. It’s what allows you to look at a society (especially one with a centralized government) and see that it is made up of people that are different. It leads you to asking questions such as: 

Who was persecuted by this group?

Did the disliked group of people exist within their borders, or were they driven away and are now enemy #1?

What was their mindset on diversity?

How did they handle others encroaching on what they saw as their territory?

People do different things across different households, let alone hundreds of miles away. You wouldn’t expect someone from a rich, white area of California to behave the same way as someone from a middle-class immigrant neighbourhood from NYC. I’m sure, if you looked at your own city, you would scoff at the concept of someone mistaking your city for one five hours away, because when you know them, they’re so different.

So why do you expect there to be only one type of person anywhere else?

Cultural and Geographic Context Matters

A region’s overreacting culture (either determined by groups of people who mostly roam the land, or a centralized government) and their marginalized cultures determine the infighting within a group, even if the borders remain the same.

Persecution and discrimination are just as contextual as culture. Even if the end result of assimilation and colonialism was the same, the expectations for assimilation would look different, and what they had been working with before would also look different. You can’t compare Jewish exile from various places in Europe with Rromani exiles in Europe, and you definitely can’t compare them with the Hmong in Southeast Asia. They came from different places and were shaped by different cultures.

A culture that came from a society that hated one particular aspect of them will not form—at all—if they’re placed in a dominant culture that doesn’t find their cultural norms all that persecution-worthy. And the way they were forced to assimilate to survive will play into whatever time period you’re dealing with, as well; see the divide of Jewish people into multiple categories, all shaped by the resources available in the cultures they stayed in the longest.

You can’t remove a culture’s context and expect to get the same result. Even in a culture that doesn’t wholesale have an assimilationist agenda, you can still get specific prejudices and scapegoats that happen when there’s a historical precedent in the region for disliking a certain group. 

Once you start cherry picking what elements of a culture to take—because you’ve plunked the !Kung into Greece and need to modify their customs from the desert to a tropical destination —you’re going to end up with coding that is absolutely positively not going to land. 

Coding is a complex combination of foods, clothing, behaviour/mannerisms, homes, beliefs, and sometimes skin tone and facial features. A properly coded culture shouldn’t really need any physical description of the people involved in order to register as that culture. So when you remove the source of food, clothing, and home-building materials… how can you code something accurately from that?

And yes, it’s intimidating to think of doing so much research and starting from 0. You have to code a much larger culture than you’d originally intended, and it absolutely increases the amount of work you have to do.

But, as I said, you are already doing this with Europe. You’re just so familiar with it, you don’t realize. You can get a rundown of how to code the overarching culture with my guide: Representing PoC in Fantasy When Their Country/Continent Doesn’t Exist

Takeaways

Writers need to be aware of diversity not just as a nebulous concept, but as something that simply exists and has always existed. And the diversity (or lack thereof) of any one region is a result of, specifically, the politics of that region.

Diversity didn’t just exist “over there”. It has always existed within a society. Any society. All societies. If you want to start adding diversity into your fantasy, you should start looking at the edges of Fantasy World 29 and realize that the brown people aren’t just stopping at the designated border and trading goods at exactly that spot, but have been travelling to the heart of the place for probably a few hundred years and quite a few of them probably liked the weather, or politics, better so they’ve settled.

Each society will produce a unique history of oppressing The Other, and you can’t just grab random group A and put it in societal context B and expect them to look the same. Just look at the difference between the Ainu people, the anti-Indigenous discrimination they face, and compare it to how the Maori are treated in New Zealand and the history of colonialism there. Both Indigenous peoples in colonial societies on islands, totally different contexts, totally different results.

If random group A is a group marked by oppression, then it absolutely needs to stay in its same societal context to be respectful. If random group A is, however, either not marked by being oppressed within its societal context and/or is a group that has historically made that move so you can see how their situation changed with that move, then it is a much safer group to use for your diversity.

Re-learn European history from a diverse lens to see how Europe interacted with Africa and Asia to stop making the not-Europe parts of Fantasy World 29 just be bit parts that add flavour text but instead vibrant parts of the community.

Stop picking singular cultures just because they fascinate you, and place them in their contexts so you can be respectful.

~ Mod Lesya

[pen-and-wall]

This…this is important.

Seconds before this Yunlan says “I was born with a lack of love, it’s my fate and I submit to it, so there is no need to try.” And Shen Wei just stares at him. Until he can’t bare it anymore and has to look away. He’s spent thousands of years cherishing and loving this person in front of him. He’s come to a point where it’s no longer due to his attachment to KunLun but he’s in love with Zhao YunLan as himself. Hearing him say that he doesn’t deserve love just breaks him a little, because YunLan was the one who taught him to love, time and time again. So, he’s sad and angry and needs to take a moment. (and Zhu YiLong portrayed that beautifully)

[pen-and-wall]

Resources For Writing Period Pieces: 1800s

Ko-Fi || Masterlist || Work In Progress || Request

Major Events

Below are links to sections of a very long list of events that occurred in the century. If you are looking for major events for the specific period in which your story takes place, the links below will take you to a list that details every significant event that took place, for every single year within that decade.

1811-20   

1821-30  

1831-40  

1841-50

1851-60   

1861-70   

1871-80   

1881-90  

1891-1900

Popular Culture & Society

3 Crazes Of The Late 1800s

Ideas, Beliefs, and Culture in the 1800s

Religion In The Early To Mid 1800s 

19th Century England: Society, Social Classes, & Culture

19th Century America

Everyday Life In 19th Century Britain

Eras Of The 19th Century Around The World

Industrial revolution

European Imperialism

British Regency, Victorian era (UK, British Empire)

Bourbon Restoration, July Monarchy, French Second Republic, Second French Empire, French Third Republic (France)

Belle Époque (Europe)

Edo period, Meiji period (Japan)

Qing dynasty (China)

Joseon dynasty (Korea)

Tanzimat, First Constitutional Era (Ottoman Empire)

Russian Empire

American Manifest Destiny, The Gilded Age

Popular Names

Boys’ Names Associated With The 19th Century

Girls’ Names Associated With The 19th Century

Female Victorian Names & Nicknames

Male Victorian Names & Nicknames

Masterlist For Naming Regency Era Characters

Clothing

American Clothing In The 1800s

Ladies’ Victorian Clothing

Men’s Victorian Clothing

1830s Dress Style

1840s Dress Style

1850s Dress Style

1860s Dress Style

1870s Dress Style

1880s Dress Style

1890s Dress Style

Hats

Shoes

Men’s fashion

Mourning black

Ladies’ Regency Era Fashion

Men’s Regency Era Fashion

By Country

1800s by country

1810s by country

1820s by country

1830s by country

1840s by country

1850s by country

1860s by country

1870s by country

1880s by country

1890s by country

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