I Feel Like This Performance By Zhou Shen Isn’t Talked About Enough. I Mean, Yah It Has Over 2M Views,

The portraits of Yiling Laozu

The sweetest scene ever ❤️

Your name engraved herein (2020), dir. Kuang-Hui Liu

This is most affirming thing I’ve ever read.

I am very grateful for this (amazingly funny and honest and raw and did I mention funny?) analysis of Why This Story Changed My Life.

okay love this tor dot com article exploring writing craft through the lens of the untamed fucking slaps and why 

Quick Links

latest state of the hunxi: here

current project: PL translations

masterlists:

linguistic meta

historical/worldbuilding/cultural meta

moment-specific meta

thematic meta

character meta

other links

chaos sideblog / hunxi-after-hours: here

ko-fi: here

皮皮/pipi is one of priest's nicknames!

having a preference is totally understandable! i just think it's maybe a little unreasonable to accuse the 7s translators of missing/deleting sentences/paragraphs when they've stated upfront that the manuscripts that they're working from are different from what's been posted online. after all, it's not like they can go and arbitrarily add in the stuff that pipi deemed extraneous enough to delete while polishing her manuscript. 😅

I will fix my typed-annotations right now. Thank you!

I watched that movie of Journey to the West! It was good. It didn’t register at the time that I was watching mpreg. But now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

Ah? What do you mean mpreg is built into the setting of MDZS?

I mean exactly what I said. It's part of the setting. Mpreg is part of MDZS setting.

Or rather, mpreg is part of any and all xianxia or Chinese fantasy settings. Mpreg is not impossible... or even truly rare... in xianxia setting. There are at least three different regular ways for men to get pregnant in this kind of setting, even for low xianxia like MDZS.

Xianxia is Chinese fantasy. Cultivators cultivate until immortality. The upper level of cultivation, an immortal becomes a facet of reality and bends the world to their will. Some can even create an entirely new world wholesale. What's getting pregnant compared to that?

Sure, the setting of MDZS is low xianxia. But we know at the very least a lot of MDZS cultivators are at the Jindan stage. Do you know which stage comes right after the Jindan stage?

元婴 Yuanying. The common English translation for this stage is Nascent Soul. But its real meaning is nascent / origin child/baby/infant.

How does yuanying come about? Well, a cultivator at the end of Jindan stage will go through tribulation. If they pass through tribulation successfully, the jindan (golden core) in their belly will collapse and out comes a baby. This baby then takes over the task of the jindan, circulating the cultivator's chi and feeding off of it. The baby will grow alongside the cultivator's progress, eventually maturing and potentially becoming a separate person should the parent allows it.

(Game interface from a Chinese cultivation game)

This stage is very well documented in actual real-world ancient texts by Wu Liupai, dating back to the 16th century. It's not a modern concept made up for entertainment. It's part of actual real-world Daoist practices and beliefs.

...And xianxia is the brought up to eleventh fantasy version of real-world Daoism. Think about it.

So in truth, every single high-level Jindan stage cultivator in MDZS is just one stage and one successful tribulation away from getting preggo whether they want to or not. (Yes. Every single one of them. Not just Wei Ying or Lan Wangji, but also Jiang Cheng, Lan Qiren, Lan Xichen, Xiu Xingchen, Song Lan, Nie Mingjue... if he didn't die, etc... Not Jin Guangyao, though. He's too weak to get pregnant. Jin Zixuan, maybe)

You don't even have to be a cultivator or in a xianxia setting to get pregnant (whether you are male or female or whatever). Artificially induced pregnancy has been a thing in Chinese folklore since the Summer and Autumn period (BCE). Several different classics mention a fruit called 孕果 yunguo (Lit. Pregnant Fruit). This fruit bestows the ability to get pregnant to anyone who eats it, regardless of gender. Sexual activity with a man is still required, though. Can't make something out of nothing.

And the most famous and widely known in Chinese folklore: water from the River of Mother and Child 子母河. Anyone who drinks this water becomes pregnant, regardless of gender (or even species, actually). You know the most famous person who drank it? The monk Tan Sanzang... and his disciple Zhu Bajie (a male pig), and Sha Wujing (a male fish). It's been made into several TV series and movies. In one of those movie adaptations, Tang Sanzang even carried the pregnancy to term as he wasn't willing to terminate a life and saw this as an opportunity to experience the female side of life.

In the same story, Journey to the West, a rock was pregnant with Son Wukong and gave birth to him.

You have to remember this. Ancient Chinese didn't really think of pregnancy as a biological process requiring sperm and eggs like we do today. They thought of it as a concentration and condensation of qi (breath of the world) until the 'mother body' was saturated with fetal qi and gave birth.

Real-world folklore texts are chockful of such instances where things got pregnant with the breath of the world and gave birth. And that's just regular folklore, not the brought-up-to-eleven version that is xianxia.

Stars of Chaos 杀破狼 Vol 1, Notes 5

By Priest. Translated by 7 Seas.

Pages 249 - 281

Cultural and translation notes.

Yah. Gu Yun is being his usual, trying to be cute and naughty and a good dad all at the same time.

As for that word “catch” vs “trap/cheat”: there is no good connotation to the word 骗. 😝

More under the cut.

The first time I read 光棍 I thought it was some obscene joke. Then I saw that it’s just the casual, colloquial way to refer to single men. Hmmmm.

I love 妖 ♥️。

难看 sometimes means ugly, and other times it just means that the person doesn’t look as happy and healthy as usual. Gu Yun is never “unpleasant” to look at!

大师 Dashi is a title. Just a title. Liao Ran is nobody’s “master.”

Nothing about Chang Geng is nauseating! He’s just… a little clingy of late.

I got confused for a moment if “old” meant “in the old days” vs “old people.”

It means “old people” here.

Shen Yi is respectful to Gu Yun the way a best friend and work-partner is respectful — intimate and deep (and full of nagging advice)(and wary of getting punched in the nuts at any moment); not distanced and absolute in the way that Military Chain of Command usually requires.

Nearly everyone calls Gu Yun by his title, 大帅 dàshuài = commanding general, commander-in-chief, “Big General,” Highest Military Leader in the Land. But where everyone else means it sincerely, the Shen Yi in my head always says it half-sarcastically (unless they are in battle. Then it’s sincere). They’ve been best friends since they could read and write. There is no distance between Gu Yun and Shen Yi.

Stars of Chaos - All The Notes List

All The Seven Seas Books Masterlist

魔道祖师 Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation

Book Annotations

I am reading MDZS trying to pretend that I do not speak Chinese and have little to no knowledge of Chinese culture, while at the same time matching what I feel when reading MDZS in English to what I felt when reading MDZS in Chinese. Any time I see something that doesn’t flow well or that doesn’t match my original feelings, I make a note.  Any time I encounter something that I think will trip up my non-Chinese friends (师叔 shishu?), I make a note.

I love this story, and I don't expect my non-Chinese friends to remember the 5+ different things that Lan Xichen is called, so I have made a lot of notes. Here they are:

Book 1

Notes 1, pgs 1-65

Notes 2, pgs 87-147

Notes 3, pgs 148-209

Notes 4, pgs 210-263

Notes "7," pg 239

Notes 5, pgs 264-341

Notes 6: on the Appendix

Book 2

Notes 1, pages 1 - 86

Notes 2, pages 87 - 160

Notes 3, pages 163 - 198

Notes 4, pages 199 - 279

Notes 5, pages 280 - 318

Notes 6, pages 321 - 351

Book 3

Notes 1, pages 1 - 90

Notes 2, pages 92 - 217

Notes 3, pages 219 - 312

Book 4

Notes 1, pages 1 - 49

Notes 2, pages 51 - 88

Notes 3, pages 89 - 151

Notes 4, pages 152 - 174

Notes 5, pages 175 - 208

Notes 6, pages 210 - 234

Notes 7, pages 236 - 266

Notes 8, pages 267 - 288

Notes 9, pages 293 - 309

Notes 10, pages 310 - end

Book 5

Notes 1, pages 1 - 45

Notes 2, pages 53 - 131

Notes 3, pages 133 - 190

Notes 4, pages 193 - 267

Notes 5, pages 343 - 375

Notes 6, pages 383 - end

MDZS Volume 4 Annotations

Part 6, pages 210 - 234

More anti-slang, and a couple more clarifications.

More under the cut

Ok, so. This is weird, not because it’s incorrect, but because it is correct (but I don’t like using the word “strumpet” here).

The direct translation of “满身风尘” is “whole body wind dust,” implying that you’ve been outside for quite some time and are probably tired and dirty, most probably because of travel -- travel fatigue. Makes sense.

But 风尘 also refers to when women are driven to prostitution, likely because society is unstable or dangerous (like in times of war)(or just when times are hard). 风尘女 is another way to say “prostitute.”

So now I’m not sure whether MXTX was trying to say “besides the fact that the woman looked travel-worn,…”; or if she was saying “besides the fact that the woman looked like a prostitute (who hadn’t worked in 11 years?)(and is in normal clothes?)(and isn’t trying to beguile any new customers, either?),…”; or if she’s just conveniently using a word/phrase that means both at the same time in Chinese.

I don’t know why the translators chose “boy.” The Chinese is 少年, which is pretty obviously “youth” or “young person” or even “teenager,” but is definitely not a child.

I just replaced my computer because it was at 100% disk usage 90% of the time 😫

windows 10 is garbage so every time i boot up the computer i have to run command prompt and enter

net.exe stop “Windows Search”

so that the shitty goddamned search/cortana feature that i never fucking use stops running in the background taking up all my fucking disk space