phirephox666

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A brief moment of rationality from the bird place.

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I cannot express how much fun kpop demon hunters is. also shoutout to one of the most descriptive titles of all time. they sure are kpop demon hunters.

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William Mason Brown (1828-1898) "Raspberries in a Wooded Landscape" Oil on canvas Located in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

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okay, so my question is to do with what i've observed in fandom vs what I see in shows

my impression, from having briefly learnt Mandarin as a child and watching a fair amount of Chinese media in Mandarin, is that it's not really done to refer to someone by a one-syllable name? Like, for Chi Cheng, no one would call him just 'Chi' or just 'Cheng'. You might add a suffix or double a syllable (like he does with Weiwei for Suowei), but you wouldn't use one syllable to refer to someone.

however, this is not what I see reflected in fanfic/fandom, and I'm wondering if i'm mistaken? (if you feel comfortable answering publically, i'd love to be able to reblog, but obviously no pressure!)

You are absolutely correct! Calling someone with a two character Chinese name, like Chi Cheng from Revenged Love for example, just Cheng feels...insane to the Chinese ear. Like I'm not saying there's absolutely zero precedent for in the entire span of Chinese-speaking history, but it makes my balls itch and my brain confused.

To your point, you'd double the actual name character, not family name. So it'd be Cheng-Cheng (only if you are trying to get stabbed I guess), or Cheng'er (if you're his mom or grandmother), xiao-Cheng (if you're a male family member or close family friend who is older than he is), Cheng-ge (if you're a male friend, or sometimes with an older/more senior work friend if you're already close), Cheng-gege (if you are Wu Suowei and you've done something Bad and you're trying to head off the fight by acting like a slutty dancing girl at a brothel), or like whatever -- there are a million suffixes and prefixes etc.

For people who are calling someone just a single character in text on the Chinese-speaking internet, if they're calling them by the family name, we're getting into the murky waters of netspeak. The same way that newspaper Chinese is dramatically different than spoken or normally written Chinese, netspeak is a whole other kettle of fish and designed for speed over grammar or traditional construction, so they might be just referring to a character as Chi, for example. Even then, this is relatively infrequent, since calling him something like Chi-shao, which would mean "Young Master Chi" in short form, is only one additional character. Similar to the above example, people would not be referring to them with their given name, no family name, as a single character without doing some other transformation.

As for why this is showing up in English speaking spaces or fandom spaces, my best guess is that non-Chinese speakers don't know any better. It might sound like a way to introduce a pet name or something more casual, but Chinese is not a casual language, and it's immediately jarring when you see it in use.

In English, five people can reasonably call someone by their given name and all do it the same way. If you're speaking in Chinese, realistically, five different people are going to call a person by their given name in different ways, and those five ways are going to be revealing of their relationship, relative social status, hierarchy, age, all sorts of things!

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we recently rewatched the Big Bang/San Lorenzo Jobs and one of my favorite things about Nate v Damien Moreau is that Moreau is always going "in a fair fight I'd crush you" and Nate keeps responding "probably, which is why I cheated like hell" and it works every time

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I think so many people forget making the world a better place isn’t just about having all the ‘correct’ sociopolitical opinions and beliefs and knowing all the theory it’s also hugely about actually being a good person… everyday acts of kindness and empathy, going out of your way to help others, small moments of connection in a cold world, loving thy neighbour all that

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He made it 🥺

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i was waiting the whole movie for some kind of explanation for who or what mr handsome was or why lex had a framed picture of him on his desk and they never fucking gave one. and you know what i respect that decision it's funnier like this actually

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every time i write i think about that maya angelou quote where she talks about her editor asking her why she uses semicolons instead of colons and says she has often responded by threatening to never speak to him again

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Like we have to always remember that a person with health anxiety can get ill, a person with paranoia and psychosis can be in serious danger, a person with social anxiety can get bullied, a person with RSD can get rejected, a person with BPD can get abandoned, a person with depression can have a serious reason to be upset and so on indefinitely. We cannot automatically treat every concern of a person who has been labeled as mentally ill and irrational as if it isn't worth taking seriously and investigating. Making that assumption puts people in real danger.

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i swear to god chatgbt "therapy" is going to be my actual breaking point

"god forbid people need 24/7 access to therapy to-"

THAT'S NOT THERAPY

THAT IS A PROGRAM DESIGNED TO TELL YOU WHAT IT THINKS YOU WANT TO HEAR

IT CANNOT PROVIDE YOU WITH THERAPY

*UNEARTHLY SCREECH OF DESPAIR*

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It’s 2025.

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I’m all for going about queerness with the goal of not being able to be understood by outsiders but like. you’ve GOT to be normal about aro & ace people if you do. you can’t go on about being confusing to cishets for fun and then complain about ace & aro people who go about sex and romance and attraction in ways that don’t make sense to you.