yexie

[yexie]

LAST DAY FOR CREATOR SIGN-UPS FOR THE DANMEI GOTCHA FOR GAZA

There's around 20 hours left, don't miss your chance!

ANY art is welcome: fics, art, podfic, novel scene narration, video edits, gifsets, and moodboards, or anything else ❤️

For ANY danmei that you've read and loved, whether it has a big fandom or not!! (note the only exclusions: mxtx novels and 2ha since they had/have their own events & you've got mail which is boycotted)

There are A LOT of fundraisers on offer that you could benefit:

Care for Gaza / Direct Aid For Gaza / eSIMs for Gaza and Crips for eSIMs for Gaza (who take care of the eSIM buying process) / Feminine Hygiene Kits for Gaza With the Asad Sisters / Life for Gaza / ANY verified fundraiser on gazafunds.com

SIGN UP HERE:

Follow @danmei-action for updates and the upcoming donation period!!

[yexie]

Yin Yu Appreciation Week Day 1, In which Hua Cheng quietly delivers a threat expressing that Yin Yu is going on vacation, and he does not have a choice in the matter.

Day 1 Extra:

[yexie]

“(…) When everyone spurned him and loathed him, Lan WangJi stood by his side.” [Mó Dào Zǔ Shī]

[yexie]

Hi everyone, It has come to the staff’s attention that we keep getting tagged in edits that are whitewashed, yellowwashed, magentawashed or redwashed. We would like to remind you that we will not reblog such edits, and at the same time share resources to avoid this in the future - because we love seeing and sharing your content and want to continue doing so! Tutorials:

giffing tutorial with positive and negative examples by @baijingting

guide to coloring characters of color by @mohanas

how to avoid whitewashing a POC by @dailyemeraudetoubia

how not to whitewash by @tianamulan

tips on restoring skin colour by @yutaslaugh

tutorial for pale sets by @fadenet

tutorial for pale sets by @katiemcgrath

fixing orange-washed characters by @maxchapman

how to remove/soften heavy yellow filters by @nobodynocrime 

how to prevent pinkwashing and yellowwashing by @jeonwonwoo 

how to color east and southeast asian celebrities by @blueshelp

basic tips for unwhitewashing photos by @je0nghans

antiwhitewashing tutorial by @haldi-archived

PSDs:

PSDs for skin colour restoration by @jonginssoo

anti-whitewash PSD for black and white edits by @reedrph

unwhitewash PSD by lavieenroses (deviantart)

anti-whitewashing adjustment PSD by @evansyhelp 

masterlist of poc friendly psds by @evansyhelp

Examples of non-whitewashed edits:

Kdrama by @winteams

Jdrama by @storge

Cdrama by @evakant

Thai drama by @baijingting

Indian film by @southasiansource

Sincerely,

Kareena, Renée, and Jade

Keep reading

[yexie]

“This is a sacred relic of our Nanjiang, passed down through generations of Great Shamans. In this life, only one person can be given it for safekeeping.”

[yexie]

Prompt fills for Gazan GFMs!

While there is no MXTX Gotcha For Gaza currently running, I and around 30 other creators have picked up a few GFMs to sponsor by filling prompts! It works the same way as the Gotcha for Gaza events run on Twitter over the past few weeks- you donate $5 for a SFW prompt or $8 for a NSFW one, your prompt is matched randomly to one of the creators who's able to fulfill it, and you get fic or art after a couple of months. We're currently taking prompts for MDZS, SVSSS and TGCF, and there are no content restrictions; we will reach out for an alternative idea if there's no one able to fill your specific prompt!

You can find out more here!

[yexie]

[discourse] in defiance of the author’s wishes (re: mxtx fandom)

table of contents : context  : moral arguments : addressing the legal side of things  : closing remarks

Context

on March 17, 2018, mxtx posted:

“As long as you don't split or reverse the top/bottom positions of the main couple, I won't mind what you ship. I myself have a lot of fun shipping couples in mainstream shows, and isn't reading all about finding joy? You can imagine freely or ship whoever you like, just don't break up or reverse the top/bottom positions of the main couple.”

(I realise that the 不拆不逆 “no splitting or reversing” rule might be implicit within the entire Chinese danmei fandom, so i do not wish to single mxtx out. for example, i know that Chinese 2ha fans also go around policing people who ship, say, chu wanning with shi mei — so this isn’t just a mxtx thing. although i do not know if other danmei authors have explicitly stated “no splitting or reversing” since i have not been a part of other danmei fandoms.)

Nevertheless, “no splitting or reversing” became the constitution in Chinese mxtx fandom. Fans parade around with the slogan “拆逆死“ which means “kill yourself if you split or reverse”. Since the pronunciation of 拆逆死 (chai-ni-si) sounds like “chinese”, some fans on the Chinese internet have been putting “chinese” in their bios to mean “kill yourself if you split or reverse”.

From now on I will be referring to split/reverse ships as cult ships, as Chinese fans like to call them.

There are two main consequences of the “no splitting or reversing” rule (on the Chinese internet):

You will receive permanent bans with no option for appeal if you post cult ship fanworks in the novel communities on Weibo

It is implicitly agreed upon that you are not allowed to use individual character tags, the novel tag, or the author tag when posting cult ship content on any platform. So, for example, if you write Wei Wuxian x Jiang Cheng, you are not allowed to use #weiwuxian #jiangcheng #mdzs #mxtx. The name given to this conduct of tagging only your cult ship is 圈地自萌, which means “enclose a piece of land and amuse oneself within it”. You are not allowed to step out of your land. 

However, not everyone agrees with the practice of “don’t step out of your land” — this includes people from both sides of the debate. Some official shippers believe that cult shippers should not have any land to begin with, and purposefully leave the cult ship tag unblocked so they can police cult shippers at every opportunity. Some cult shippers believe that because their ship involves the individual characters, originate from the novel written by the author, they are in the right to use the individual character tags, the novel tag, and the author tag, and that people who dislike their ship should just use the block function. 

-

Moral Arguments

There are two main types of moral arguments that Chinese official shippers make.

1. If you split the official ship, you condone cheating behaviour and that makes you a bad person.

The first argument is too trivial so I will leave the refutation as an exercise for the reader to do at home /j

2. You are not respecting the author's wishes and that makes you a bad person.

The author has wished many different things. For example:

Screenshot 1 translation: I strictly forbid any crowdfunding or fundraising related to me, my works, or my characters, regardless of the purpose, whether it be for celebration, group buying, rankings, charity, or any other named activities.

Screenshot 2 translation: Once again, I emphasize: No new social media pages related to my works are allowed, nor organizing readers in a roundabout way, whether it be for celebrations, group buying, rankings, charity, or any other named activities. Please also refrain from flamboyantly organizing any collective birthday events.

Screenshot 3 translation: I've repeated many things many times and do not wish to repeat myself. Could everyone please just listen to my words occasionally.

(A brief aside before I address the second argument, something I used to say when debating Chinese fans: “I don’t think people who violate the author's wishes mean any disrespect. I don’t think they’re shipping or hosting charity events or birthday parties out of spite, but rather, it just so happens that the author prohibits a ship they enjoy or an event they organise. Just because I cult ship, for example, doesn’t mean I hate the author.” And they would respond: “if you really liked the author, you wouldn’t go against her wishes. You do not deserve to like the author. You are a mxtx anti.” And I would say, “I like my mom a lot, but I won’t listen to everything she says, simply because I don’t think everything she says is right. Plus, I don’t think the world can simply be explained by like vs. dislike. Also, Xie Lian said this: [For instance, if you admire or like someone, you won't always treat them well, no matter what happens.]” But then the most hilarious thing happened, in the revised version, a rebuttal for that scene was added:

【”For instance, if you admire or like someone, it doesn't mean you will always treat them well, regardless of what happens."

"Why not?" San Lang questioned. "If that's not possible, it only shows that this so-called 'liking' isn't anything significant."

Xie Lian shifted the conversation, asking, "Then... does it mean that aside from liking someone, the only other option is to dislike them? Are these the only two attitudes one can choose from?"

San Lang chuckled and retorted, "Why not? Right is right, wrong is wrong. To love is to love, to hate is to hate. Why can't things be clear and straightforward?”】

… ah.)

To address the second argument for real, i believe that producers retain no moral authority over the methods by which consumers engage with their products. for instance, i believe that choosing not to follow the official “twist, lick, and dunk” method when eating oreos does not constitute disrespect towards the oreo brand. Or to use another analogy, suppose a farmer selling apples insist that you peel the apples before eating them. I believe that it does not make you a bad person if you choose to eat the apples unpeeled, despite the farmer being the one who watered and harvested the apples from their trees.

I am thinking of potential counterarguments, and the strongest one I came up with is: “but products like oreos and apples are fundamentally different from intellectual property.” And I think the main issue here is that, to employ economics terminology, the content of novels like tgcf is a non-rivalrous good (not the novels themselves but the abstract content), which means that my consumption of it does not reduce availability to others. In other words, unlike Oreos or apples wherein after I purchase them, the specific items I bought are no longer physically in the hands of the vendor; after encountering characters like Shen Qingqiu, Shen Qingqiu still exists abstractly in MXTX’s head. This gives the illusion of ownership on the author’s part. I want to be very careful here because I think it’s easy to equivocate between different uses of the word “ownership”. I am not arguing that the author fails to retain ownership in negation of all the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the creative process, i.e. their copyright. Instead, I am contending that, just as I paid for my Oreos and apples, upon my purchasing of the Seven Seas version, the paperback Chinese version, and the revised uncensored version of TGCF on JJWXC, the author does not own the ways by which I choose to engage with these fictional entities. Once a work is made public, its ontology becomes independent of the author’s intent, and in all its readers’ heads exist distinct versions of the characters, in effect making them belong to all of us.

(There. As a bonus I have also resolved the issue of not being “chinese” enough. Ah, is this a bad place to make a communism joke?)

Addressing the legal side of things

In 2022 I wrote to the legal team at AO3, and here is their response:

Regarding the “moral rights”, that’s actually a thing. Upon receiving lots of spam from 12-yr-old readers that “you are breaking the law”, I did a quick Baidu search (China’s Google) concerning the legality of splitting/reversing ships. Surprisingly, the search results yield “yes, it’s illegal”, and hence the 12-yr-olds' confidence. But that is akin to getting a cancer diagnosis from searching symptoms on Google. So I dug deeper. 

After reading tens of published papers and court cases, here are the key takeaways of what I found:

Given that intellectual property rights are a bit behind in China, they have largely based their laws on US copyright law. As organizations like OTW continue to fight for the rights of transformative works in the US, China probably will just follow suit.

The semantics of “distort, mutilate, or otherwise harm the integrity of their works in a way that harms the author’s reputation” is very vague and debatable. There are at least three ways to interpret it (I think one of the papers I read offered four). The first is that they only have to prove that you distorted the integrity of the work. The second is that you satisfy the condition of harming the author’s reputation. The third is that you satisfy both conditions (integrity of work and author’s reputation). It depends on the court. 

None of the court cases pertained to unserious, just-for-fun fan works. Usually what happens is someone makes a film out canon, for example, and sell it for profit, or someone publishes their own novel which contains characters from another published work. 

And that is for China only^ if you live outside of China, you are under another country's jurisdiction.

-

Closing remarks

I am addressing this issue because it has impacted me and my friends in many ways. "kill yourself if you split/reverse the official ship" is probably the least of our concerns, mainly because it is such a popular phrase that we've become desensitized to it. @/Eleven receives private messages on Lofter on a weekly basis of people wishing her entire family to get murdered. A hualian main friend of mine has been posted to Weibo for following me; and I had to pull a Shi Qingxuan with "hey let's not be friends anymore if being associated with me is gonna get you cancelled".

mxtx has been through a lot and i understand where she's coming from. and maybe, the people who identify as "kill yourself if you split/reverse the official ship" don't truly mean it -- maybe they're just expressing their love for the official ship.

Recently i've been seeing the sentiments I used to only witness in Chinese fandom surface on Twitter and sometimes I worry that western mxtx fandom is going to turn into Chinese mxtx fandom, with the in-group/out-group mentality -- you're either with us or against us. At the end of the day, I do like mxtx, I admire her tenacity and I think she's a brilliant author, I love her works and the characters in them. I simply do not want to be backed into the corner of "anti" due to not following every order she gives.

祝墨香和她的粉丝们平安。

[yexie]

⚫🟫 Li Dai Kun wearing arm muscles Givenchy 🟫⚫

🟤Sources: Photos: [LDK XiaoHongShu] Video: [LDK Weibo]

[yexie]

well, if you throw five martial gods at a problem, i guess you shouldn't be surprised when they jump straight to fighting it...

[yexie]

me when the blessings are heavenly and official

[yexie]

Stop ✋️😭 Why is he always so funny out of nowhere?? It's always so unexpected and abrupt, please Xie Lian I can't take it-

[yexie]

Notice: MDZS and SVSSS Gotcha for Gaza

Hello all! I haven't seen any posts about this over here on Tumblr, so here goes. MDZSaction and SVSSSAction (on Twitter) are organizing charity drives for Care for Gaza, a non-profit providing food and other necessities to displaced families in Palestine. Participants can make donations and receive fanworks in exchange or take part in the event as creators (or both)!

Note re: donation tiers—both events follow the same pricing structure of $5USD for S/FW prompts and $8USD for N/SFW prompts.

MDZS Gotcha: Rules and sign-ups will remain open here until 3/22. The main event (donations/prompt submissions) will run from 3/24 to 3/30.

SVSSS Gotcha: Sign-ups open on 3/18, and the event itself will run from 4/13 to 4/21. The event carrd is here.

For TGCF fans: the TGCF Gotcha closed yesterday, but it raised over $3.5k USD during the prompt submission period! Stay tuned for the upcoming art/fanfiction. :)

Please consider joining as a creator, submitting a prompt, or sharing this post if you can't do either! You can also check out some of the fanworks from the TGCF Gotcha here, since a few creators have already started posting.

[yexie]

Hualian's Audio drama VAs sang the TGCF AD theme song together as a reward since the TGCF AD has reached 30 million views. Listen to the full song here.

[yexie]

Guys, he’s at his limit 😔💔

[yexie]

"Taking care of you"

I never actually thought about what happens with person’s body when they are bedridden, but then I saw how my great-aunt took care of her husband and wow that was touching!! To put so much effort in someone who can’t even respond because you love then so deeply.. that's how I understand it and I hope it shows in this comics<3

[yexie]

No better place to stay warm

Submit your cute pet here | Source: https://bit.ly/3P1s1Yg

[yexie]

also ok, this is the thing -

“he stole my achievements!” says Meng Yao. “???? fuck you care about that for??? keep your head down and work twice as hard anyway,” says Nie Mingjue.

“she stole my servant’s achievements and expected to get away with it like it was nothing, just because she’s well-born!” says Jin Zixuan. “FUCK YOU SAY ABOUT MY SHIJIE, NO SHE D I D  N O T!!! *resentful energy explosion*” says Wei Wuxian.

like just. the connection between these two events is clearer in the novel, where these are both events happening under the Jin forces at the Langya front, but. it’s clear that even if the ideal is to be competent and hard-working and do good for others without expecting recognition, it’s still a big fucking deal to take recognition for someone else’s work, and it’s an insult to accuse someone of doing that when they hadn’t. worthy of throwing hands over, at the very least, in fact! especially, funnily enough, when there’s a power differential between the one doing the work and the one claiming credit.