山河令 Concert D2 in a Nutshell

Where all the older men in the cast ship WenZhou and GJ/ZZH are worried about whether they’d be allowed to broadcast

About yifu and yizi

It seems there is some confusion because of the English translation of Word of Honor, so I’d like to note that yifu 义父 (how Xie Wang refers to Zhao Jing in Chinese) and yizi 义子 are neither father and son, nor even foster father and foster son.

The Chinese word yifu 义父 is often translated as “adoptive father”, or “foster father” but this is not entirely correct. An adoptive father is yangfu 养父: a person who adopts a child, takes care of their upbringing and daily needs, and performs other duties of a father. Foster father is the same, except in case of fostering the commitment isn’t permanent.

And yifu is smth like a “named father”(?): a person who, as a sign of great respect, is sort of put on a par with the real father (which is a huge deal in a culture based on the Confucian principles: father is the most important and the most respected person in anyone’s life ever). Unlike adoptive father-yangfu, in the case of yifu, various paternal responsibilities are not implied. The keyword is “respect”.

The existence of yifu (and/or “named mother” imu 义母) does not mean that yizi has no living parents - same as having godparents in Christianity doesn’t mean that the person in question is an orphan.

Baidupedia says that if a person has a sworn brother (结义) then for that person’s children, their sworn brother becomes yifu.

What do the words yifu 义父 and yizi 义子 actually mean? Let’s start from the end: 父 - father, 子 - son (in this particular case).

义 yi: 1) justice, righteousness; 2) human ties, relationship. In the case of yifu, the 2nd meaning is the one that applies. In English, it is often translated as “sworn” or “oath”: 结义兄弟 jiéyì xiōngdì - sworn brothers, oath-brothers, 结义 jiéyì - sworn relationship, 义兄 - older sworn brother, 义侄 - son of a sworn brother, “sworn nephew”(?). 

It can be said that 义 means close social quasi-familial ties that are based on some kind of a two-sided agreement. 义 isn’t perceived the same as blood ties, or as family ties that arise as a result of adoption. It’s more about how much one looks up to someone else, about adoration, respect, trust, mutual understanding, etc.

I hope I’ve more or less explained the concept of 义. Now, back to yifu.

In general, yifu is a person whom you respect very much (like your own father), and for whom you have great reverence. In turn, yifu has the responsibility to be a mentor, a moral guide for his yizi - somewhat similar to godparents in Christianity, except that you can choose yifu yourself when being old enough to make a conscious decision, and not have him assigned to you by your parents without your consent, as in the case of godparents.

Yifu doesn’t necessarily belong to the same generation as the real father: in the main pairing of Sha Po Lang yifu, Gu Yun, is only a few years older than his yizi, Changgeng. Also, Changgeng has both parents - a mother and a stepfather. This is actually a nice example that demonstrates that 1) father and yifu are completely different roles; 2) yifu-yizi relationship isn’t considered incest.

I wonder, when Winner is King (the adaptation of Sha Po Lang) will be released, will the English translation also make Changgeng refer to his yifu as “Father”, as they did with Xie Wang and Zhao Jing in the Netflix translation of Word of Honor?! (It was even worse in one of the Russian translations of Word of Honor where not only yifu was translated as “father”: the translators also made Zhao Jing always refer to Xie Wang as “son” - instead of his name!)

To translate yifu as “father” is misleading and absolutely incorrect. The same goes to “adoptive/foster father” variant: adoption and fostering carry a familial relation while yifu does not. Such translations automatically move yifu-yizi relationships into the category of incestous and “problematic” pairings, while in fact they are not intended to be seen as such (definitely not to the father-son incest degree!)

I think a better translation would be smth like “mentor”, or other respectful term that can be applied in English to an older and respected male person. Or just leave it as yifu, since there is no adequate English translation (also it’s shorter which is important when translating subtitles).

How To Name Your Chinese Characters: 

1) LAST NAMES: 

I’ve pasted the Top 100 common last names in alphabetical order, and bolded the ones that appear in CQL:   

B: 白 Bai C: 蔡 Cai ; 曹 Cao ;  常 Chang ; 曾 Ceng ;  陈 Chen ;  程 Cheng ;  崔 Cui ; D: 戴 Dai ; 邓 Deng ; 丁 Ding ; 董 Dong ; 杜 Du ; F: 范 Fan ; 方 Fang ; 冯 Feng ; 付 Fu ; G: 高 Gao ;  葛 Ge  ; 龚 Gong ; 顾 Gu ; 郭 Guo ; H: 韩 Han ; 何 He ; 贺 He 洪 Hong ; 侯 Hou ; 黄 Hua ; 胡 Hu ; J: 贾 Jia ; 蒋 Jiang ; 姜 Jiang ; 江 Jiang ; 金 Jin ; K: 康 Kang ; L:  赖 Lai ; 李 Li ;  黎 Li ; 廖 Liao ; 梁 Liang ; 林 Lin ; 刘 Liu ; 陆 Lu ; 卢 Lu ; 路 Lu ; 吕 Lü ; 罗 Luo ; M: 马 Ma ; 麦 Mai ; 毛 Mao ; 孟 Meng ; N:  倪 Ni  ;  牛 Niu ; P: 潘 Pan ; 彭 Peng ; Q: 钱 Qian ; 秦 Qin ; 邱 Qiu ; R:任 Ren ; S: 邵 Shao ; 沈 Sheng ; 史 Shi ; 石 Shi ; 施 Shi ; 宋 Song ; 苏 Su ; 孙 Sun ; T: 陶 Tao ; 谭 Tan ; 唐 Tang ; 田 Tian ; W: 万 Wan ; 王 Wang ;  汪 Wang ; 魏 Wei ; 吴 Wu ; X: 邢 Xing ; 夏 Xia ;  蕭 Xiao ; 谢 Xie ; 徐 Xu ; 许 Xu ; 薛 Xue ; Y: 阎 Yan ; 严 Yan ; 杨 Yang ; 姚 Yao ; 叶 Ye ;  余 Yu ; 于 Yu ; 袁 Yuan ; Z: 张 Zhang ;  赵 Zhao ; 郑 Zheng ; 钟 Zhong ; 周 Zhou ;  朱 Zhu ;  庄 Zhuang ;  邹 Zou ;

Above are all single character last names, but there are some double character Chinese last names, seen below (list not exhaustive): 

独孤 Du’Gu ;  公孙 Gong’Sun ; 南宫 Nan’Gong    欧阳 Ou’Yang ;  司马 Si’Ma ; 上官 Shang’Guan ; 宇文 Yu’Wen ; 长孙 Zhang’Sun ; 诸葛 Zhu’GE ; 

2) GIVEN NAMES/COURTESY NAMES

《Elements》: 

* some “Light” words overlap in meaning with words that mean “sun/day”

《Nature》:

* I didn’t include a lot of flower names because it’s very easy to name a character with flowers that heavily implies she’s a prostitute. 

《Virtues》: 

《Descriptors》:

《Jade》: *there are SO MANY words that generally mean some kind of jade, bc when ppl put jade in their children’s name they don’t literally mean the rock, it’s used to symbolize purity, goodness, kindness, beauty, virtue etc*  琛 (chen), 瑶 (yao),  玥 (yue),  琪 (qi),  琳 (lin)

《Spirituality》

《山河令》 Word of Honour (2021) ⌘ Episode 31

note: 拐走 (guai3 zou3) which is what ah xiang says in the first gif, literally means “kidnap” or “abduct”. when used in a romantic context as in “x 把 y 拐走了”, it can also mean y has fallen for x and y’s heart has been “taken by” x. I’ve translated it here as “escape together” so that it’s slightly more in line with the literal meaning of the word and makes more sense with the following clause, but the figurative romantic meaning absolutely works too!

like father like daughter 

@mdzsnet‘s wen yuan | lan sizhui event 

happy birthday to my favorite root vegetable 🐰💙

@mdzsnet‘s lan sizhui birthday event

@mdzsnet’s event: Happy Birthday Lan Sizhui!

When the author deletes your favorite fanfic:

Gather around, children. I’m about to tell you a story of ye olde fandom. (Real life fandom friends, I’m sorry. You’ve heard this story a thousand times, I know.)

Long before Disney bought Star Wars, long before the new trilogy, before even the prequels, and themselves predating the “remastered” versions of the original trilogy, Star Wars experienced it’s second renaissance in novel form. And comic book form. Skim the pages of the dozens upon dozens of Expanded Universe (”EU”) novels and you’ll find lots of foundations for the things you see on screen these days. Ben Solo, for sure, has his origins there. 

But it was also a different era for the fandom. The 90′s saw the transition from fanzine culture to online fan fiction archives. The programming ability and computing power you needed to make a fan fiction archive that the authors could edit themselves did not yet exist in an accessible way. Series based archives popped up, mostly hand curated by webmasters posting .txt files of chapters and stories that they’d received from authors via email. Or usenet. Or mailinglists. I spent many of my teen years on Gossamer, the X-Files archive, and Fanfix.com, my favorite Star Wars archive. I remember haunting a Babylon 5 archive at the time, too, but it’s lost to history. 

I read everything. Everything. But, by far my favorite fan fiction of all time was, and I will always remember this, “As Simple and as Complicated as All That” by Xia Sang Li. It was epic. Four novels. NOVELS. Dozens of chapters. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. It follows Luke Skywalker’s decision to finally throw caution to the wind and fall into bed, and in love, with Mara Jade. Written in the sweet spot after her character was introduced and explored, but before permission was given to the licensed authors to marry Luke off, it was an amazing indulgence. And, it was epic in scale and scope. The great plot twist in book one was that, spoiler alert, when Gaeriel Captison died, leaving Luke to look after her orphaned daughter, she didn’t tell the whole story. You see, Luke and Mara had indulged each other before, had a secret love child, and this brief period of time was erased or minimized in their memories. Slowly, the two come to realize, through their haze of lust and passion, that something is conspiring to keep them apart, and that this little girl isn’t who she seemed. Themes of family, and duty, and passion, and trauma. Force visions, original characters, and sex sex sex. It was amazing. 

Epic right??? Right?? Wanna read it?? 

It’s impossible. The Fanfix.com archive zipped the textfiles, so the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived them. The Geocities page went down before the Geocities archive was published after its closure. And, the original author’s blog, not updated in a decade, features only a few chapters of a rewrite, an AU of her original epic. 

But it’s not dead.

Starting in 1998, my teenage self printed the whole fucking epic. I did one chapter at a time. It took more than a year. I had it all saved, too, on a 3 ½ inch floppy that got destroyed. Beyond the author’s own hard drive somewhere on this green earth, I think this might be the only copy. 

Every few years, when nostalgia overtakes me, I reread it, from front to back. The gender politics are very different. The interpretation of Luke, too, vastly different from modern fandom’s take. Sometimes I wish I could find the author, buy her dinner, and tell her how important her work was to me. But, that’s probably impossible. Sometimes I think about re-digitizing it and, like a different kind of pirate, putting it back into circulation. But, that’s just a wish. A whimsical dream. The notebook is at least 3 inches thick, with front to back printed pages of text. It would take… years. Certainly it took years to write. But, it was part of the floating world of fandom. And, it faded away. Stuff like this should never fade away. 

Fan fic authors… I implore you. Never delete your work. 

You can’t know the impact you make. You might think it not good, embarrassing, or irrelevant. It’s not. Not to someone. Not to me. 

Seriously. You have no idea how many fanfics I had wanted to print and bind just so that I can keep it in my personal library to read. Some fics are so damn GOOD that they deserve to exist binded as a physical copy. Save them please!!! All fics matter to someone

PUT THAT BOOK IN A SAFE BOX OR A MUSEUM (is there a fandom museum? we should make one)

It’s not quite a museum, but there is the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which is a join venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s a place to preserve hard copies of fanworks and fandom memorabilia. 

(Though it seems likely that @mizunocaitlin would like to keep a beloved fanfic.)

Dear fic readers: Save it before you lose it! authors have pleanty of reason to delete their shit, sad as it is, but you can still have it!! do what that person did, use https://www.lulu.com/ like i did for my faves stuff (tho already archived on gdrive by someone else), but find a way to PRINT IT OUT if you love it so much. dont just rely on digital copies because shit happens.

This is my current printed library of fanfics. This way works best for fanfics up to 20000 words, but I’m learning basic bookbinding for the longer ones (an experiment of that can be seen in the right side of the picture - “This, You Protect” by Owlet), because I LOVE HOLDING THEM WHEN I READ THEM and also, what will I read if the power goes down? Exactly.

@jambonsama thought you would like that

Thanks, I do !

If someone could tag that person who did the gorgeous binding of @senlinyu‘s magnificent Manacled… I mean the book is awesome, and the book binding ? Gives it justice. Also I think that the person who did the binding  has made / is making other bindings? Maybe? I can’t quite remember?

@armoredsuperheavy might be an interesting read for you

I feel so vindicated in seeing this post, and knowing I’m not the only one who has “probably-the-only-extant-copy” fanfics from the late 90s in binders.

I took probably the most ridiculous and difficult route, hand bookbinding. Here’s an example of an earlier-era fic I’ve bound for archival purposes.

And some Bookbinding resources if anyone wants to join in the efforts!  Rock on, fanfic hamsters!

as an archivist (a real one!) and a fanfic author, this post speaks so hard to me. SAVE YOUR STUFF, AUTHORS

In high school my best friend and I were known as the book printers. At the time neither of us had access to the internet beyond school so we did the only thing that made sense, printed everything. We would spend as much time as we could after school, usually on fridays, huddled around the library computers printing fics we wanted to read. The librarians didn’t mind, one of them actually thought it was charming and christened us her book printers.

I owe so much to authors, the early ones who showed me that it was ok to think up grand worlds and fill them with my favorite characters as well as characters of my own creation, and especially the new authors who quickly became my found family and have taught me that finding yourself through your writing is perfectly acceptable, and losing yourself to an indulgent plot line is fine too.

If I’ve learned anything in the decades since I offered to pay the school for the gross amount of paper we used, it’s that you should never forget your roots, and always remember you might just be the one creating fertile grounds for others to put down roots of their own.

If you ever have the chance, do it, print the pages and bind them. The story already holds a special place in your heart, isn’t it only fair that you hold it close as well?

i’ve been contacted a few times by people who have bound my fanfic into print: it never stops being a delight and an honor to see that some stuff i wrote for online consumption meant enough to someone that they wanted to keep it in their actual home, on their actual bookshelf.

@mizunocaitlin if you’re interested in having it converted to digital format for posting online, consider scanning it and using a converter like Dolphin to change from a PDF to a readable text document!

There will be some errors which you could correct based on the scanner itself, but we use the software for textbook conversion where I work! It converts pdf scans of books to a print material that a screen reader can handle!

@thatbluemerm Actually, a kind person reached out to me, thanks to this post, with a pdf compiled of the original text documents. I uploaded it here: 

http://wildmushroomland.com/asaacaat/

husbands! twitter | ko-fi

Aziraphale and Crowley in the style of the Late Renaissance Mannerist Agnolo Bronzino. This is a special order I accepted from a curious antique bookseller on Twitter as a new year gift to his friend who is apparently a giant snake. *ahem*

I really wanted to capture the unique finish of Bronzino’s oil-tempera blend paintings. I think him, along with his contemporaries like Holbein, started the colouring process with tempera and then painted on top with very thin layers of oil, so the finish is pale and delicate to the point of being porcelain-like. Meanwhile, no real painting is ever digital-level smooth. So I scratched my head for a bit on how to create realistic smooth surface with a reasonable amount of “patina”.

I also made a mock-up based on an interesting 1540-1570s tabernacle mirror frame with double shutters from the MET Collection. The idea is basically one shutter on each side holds one portrait, while the mirror sits protected in between. In this way, both portraits can be displayed at the same time. They’ll be a pair forever :D

P.S. If you’re somehow interested in antique frames, I highly recommend https://theframeblog.com/

P.P.S. HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!!!

WENDY I WILL THROTTLE YOU

Very, very disappointed that none of the Star Wars comic book artists ever drew Luke Skywalker lounging around in Mark Hamill’s golden jumpsuit. Always the boring Jedi robes.

fan art by Lars Catson

it all belongs to her

Incorrect Good Omens [23/?]

Based on this post

Happy Holidays everyone 🎄🦌🎁✨❄️🥳