Just Finished The Cover For 2024 MXTX Food Zine!

And they were tombmates 🪦

i’ve never actually published a fic, but recently i thought of the idea of calamity!ywh and physician god!sqs and it’s been keeping me awake at night,, does anyone think writing this would be a good idea 😭😭

Sweet talk 🍬

hi tumblr peepee can i give u a scrap from my twitter

mxs weibo extras

mxs weibo extras

all meng xi shi’s weibo extras

hello im back with another carrd

i made this because i was having a hard time finding these, and i wanted to help my fellow qian qiu enthusiasts

Please rant to me

sure lol, i’ll rant about one of my many grievances with some parts of the danmei fandom.

some people in the danmei fandom, to an extent, fandom in general, need to realise its ok when other people have interpretations of characters that are different from yours, and that’s ok! they may have different ships, that’s fine too! no one deserves to be attacked for a ship they enjoy or a certain headcanon.

if you disagree with a way a person interprets a character/relationship, engage in respectful discussion.

if you can’t find it in you to be respectful about it, just scroll away or block.

of course, this works vice versa, if people ask about why you interpret a character or relationship a certain way, either tell them the reasons politely, or just don’t engage.

on the internet, it’s your job to facilitate your interactions with other people so you can have the best experience. crucifying other people for what they enjoy in fiction and blindly hating on them gets you absolutely no where.

also no one person’s interpretation is more right than another’s. it pays to be polite and respectful when engaging in discussions. fandom is all about meaningful interactions over shared interests, not necessarily agreeing on every aspect of how you interpret characters/the media as a whole.

also please don’t try and insist your headcanons are canon and they should be accepted by all as law.

wow this rant was longer than i anticipated, i hope it satisfies you anon!

dont play defense

People really read Scum Villian and think Shen Yuan as Shen Qingqiu doesn't care about any of the people around him?

Yeah he struggles to see them as actual people at first but that changes over the years! Long before he realises it!

And saying that he doesn't care that Shen Jiu was abused? He literally yells at Airplane for creating his backstory and putting him through it!

He does feel for Shen Jiu and mourns that he wasn't there to hear Yue Qingyuan's explanation and apology

However! He doesn't let Shen Jiu's trauma justify him abusing Luo Binghe in the same way which is correct!

Yes what Shen Jiu went through was horrible and deserving of of sympathy but he also regularly had a child whipped bloody!

He didn't just bully Luo Binghe he abused him horribly and broke his spirit

The abyss didn't really blacken Luo Binghe in PIDW, Shen Jiu did. The abyss was the final act of Shen Jiu in the process

Thats why while SVSSS Binghe is blackened its not nearly as much. Because there were gaps between Shen Jiu and the abyss where Shen Qingqiu was loving and kind because he was Shen Yuan

They spell it out! Shen Jiu is a complicated villian, he is sympathetic but he's still a villian. (And I say this as a Shen Jiu fan)

And Shen Yuan pretends he doesn't care, that he's seperate, as a defense mechanism. But his actions are the opposite

He saves Liu Qingge so Liu Qingge can protect him later and then repeatedly puts himself in danger to protect or help Liu Qingge

He goes running towards Cang Qiong when Luo Binghe is laying seige to protect everyone and because he's realised Luo Binghe loves him and has accepted that even though he's still struggling with what it means for him

He repeatedly abandons attempts to run away and protect himself in favour of protecting others

In fact in Sha Hualing's raid on the sect after he's poisoned (that happened because of an action he took to instinctively protect) he was fully prepared to self detonate right then and there to protect the sect

So from really quite early on he was already treating them as more than characters

Just how can you read Scum Villian and think Shen Yuan doesn't care?

(yes this is about that one post. No I'm not responding to it directly to save my sanity)

[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。