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a musing,
personal

Sticky: press and hold for ten seconds to restart

Lots of people have talked about the big twitter fandom burnout--or fandom cease-fire, or fandom-"we're all sitting in our respective corners, waiting for the next thing to erupt all over our timelines"--thing better than I could. That is why I'm here though.

I spent the last three days poking at dreamwidth. I'm too young to remember livejournal, "joined" fandom (such as it was) in 2011-ish but mostly on non-English speaking platforms. I didn't get a tumblr until 2013. I didn't really start posting on it until volleyball sports anime (Haikyuu, the best times, really) hit me like a high speed freight train in 2014 and didn't let go for 3 years or somesuch.

This is trying to be an introductory entry as well as a blanket apology for whatever inevitable blunders I will commit as I figure out how to find and follow and make content here. I'm fundamentally a pretty awkward person, best consumed somewhere in the in-between stages of acquaintanceship and close friendship where I can be funny and entertaining without accidentally spilling my feelings everywhere.

Do people do statement of intents here, or something? What do I want to do? Post my art in peace, mostly, and ramble on about the novels I'm reading (danmei, a lot), and just try to be myself as much as possible without the incessant Twitter Anxiety (tm).

Everything you wish to know about me and what I do, find below.

( Below >> )

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I am writing a thesis on Binghe \ It’s a cutting edge field, and my mind is blown

$(A graphic for a fanfiction on AO3, title and summary as follows) I am writing a thesis on Binghe \ It’s a cutting edge field, and my mind is blown | It’s about the theater girl. The musical theater girl. There is a difference, or maybe there isn’t, Shen Yuan isn’t sure—she is roped into helping out with wardrobe for the graduating class only because she mistakenly walks out of the library building just as Shang Qinghua stumbles past, shoelaces untied and his arms quivering under the weight of two IKEA bags full of stuff.$

bingqiu | F/F | 4k | E

🎻 musical theater au
🎻 except shen yuan doesn't know ANYTHING about musicals (her field is science fiction thank you very much)
🎻 does that stop binghe? not at all.
🎻 oh and they're lesbians

-> On Ao3

Current Mood: hyper

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fru's epic musical brainrot ft shen yuan and luo binghe

Okay so I know NOTHING about musical theater, and have only a passing knowledge with opera (thanks 10+ years of classical music education and the amount of highly dexterous dodging I needed to do to avoid it at music school at all costs) but now I'm rewatching super vocal with Mari, which--okay it was a mistake on MANY levels and only one of those is my sudden whiplashed yeetage into a certain rpf corner of the internet--

ANYWAY wow that is a sentence all right djkfhgkdf, so I'm writing wlw bingqiu musical theater au while consuming Mari's crash course on musical theater on spotify

i'm fully losing my mind

( fic excerpt )

Current Mood: pleased

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reading list 2021, ~ danmei edition ~

Maybe I compartmentalise my reading a little bit too much--there is reading for work (scholarly), reading for work (nonfiction) and reading for work (fiction); then there is the chaos that is my free time reading, mostly taken up by webnovels of varying lengths and genres interspersed with fic and published fiction for flavour. But I do like having work-reading and free time-reading separated. Insert meme about some ADHD people being overcompensating compartmentalisers. (Yes, my desk is cluttered by a million different organisers and my paper journal is colour coded. No, I still can't seem to be able to get anything actually done. Shut up.)

I started methodically and purposefuly reading danmei firstly because I enjoy BL fantasy literature, broadly; and secondly because I wanted to build up enough (danmei) genre literacy to be able to have well-founded Thoughts (tm) on the entire business. Clearly I'm not allowed to even consider thinking about 2HA and its commentary on class and culpabilty without having read basically everything else vaguely related that I can get my hands on right? ...right...?

(CLEARLY academia is already rotting my brain dfhgjf. Chill out, Fru. This is not a grant application.

At the same time how am I supposed to write the sequel to the meatbun/priest rpf fic if I don't have a better idea about how exactly priest would pick apart meatbun worldbuilding her political landscapes? ANYWAY--)

--without any further word vomits allowed, let me dump the danmei readings of 2021 here for 1) my own reference (please god I need to stop putting these on post it notes, my memory is so bad) and 2) possibly for others' enjoyment (???).

(Note: I read English translations, so if you're looking for recs here and wondering if any of these are available to read and finished, they are unless I mark them otherwise.)

( Finished Reading )
( Currently Reading )( On the List )

I expect all this will keep me occupied for a while. In the meantime, I might as well get some work done while I'm waiting for some of the translations to finish.

This post was brought to you by my newly discovered blogging energy, and the desire to END my "oh I want to read that!!" post-it generator lifestyle. (Save me. And the trees.)

Current Mood: excited

Entry tags:

a silent reading

An image of Fei Du, a character from the novel Mo Du/Silent Reading by priest. He is lying on a sofa, the cat Luo Yiguo culrled up on his chest. He is playing a nintento switch.

I finished Mo Du/Silent Reading by priest a little while ago, I started it around January as part of my exploratory priest binge post-finishing Sha Po Lang and found myself so hooked, I inhaled 90% of it in like a week. See--before I was anything else, I was first and foremost an incorrigible murder fan. Like, the true crime podcast, serial killer research and murder mystery novel consumer kind. Crime fascinates me. (I'd blame my early exposure to my mother's crime novel collection, but I'm not here today to psychoanalyse myself.)

So: priest. After finishing Sha Po Lang (which is excellent, I can 100% recommend it if you're even a little bit into wuxia/xianxia and steampunk respectively), I desperately wanted to know what else this author had done, where her popularity comes from and what else is in her massive, massive brain. (Speaking purely from 1) personal preference--her characters are so deeply my thing, it's delightful--and 2) possibly, perhaps, some thirst. ((There were these pictures floating around on the cursed bird website a while ago which may or may not have been taken of priest's arm post-gym, and I am only human.)).) Mo Du yoinked me in not only because, well, priest, but also because the summary promised everything from my first love: crime! Murder! Explorations of the Human Psyche (tm)!

That was the expectation.

What I got in the end--in addition to all of the above, thank you jiejie--were, in order, 1) my favourite danmei relationship to date (what am I going more feral over? Fei Du and his big mouth? Luo Wenzhou's house and the layers of home-ness it represents? Guh) and 2) the best fictional cat in existence one can ask for. (Luo Yiguo, darling boy, this one is for you.)

Bonus: the translation is really good. Like really good. I'm not a native Chinese speaker--duolingo is not fast enough to keep up with the volume of content I consume--and I'm in a constant battle with finding truly great novel recs and not being able to read them. English fan translations also don't always make for a pleasant reader experience. (No shade for free content and labour! I still read them--some of them do stand out as especially good though.)

A monochrome digital pencil drawing of two men, Fei Du and Luo Wenzhou, from the novel Mo Du by priest. There is also a cat!

In summary: read mo du, and when you're FINISHED reading mo du, come and talk to me about it please.

(Tiny sidenote: my stupid researcher brain that never shuts up finds the like... mechanics of fan translations and translation timelines in relation to film or animation adaptation releases, and fan translations in relation to other fan translations is fascinating!! I have a spreadsheet. I think about this a lot.)