Happy Mask Collector

An action sequence from the Chinese opera 白蛇传·情/Tale of the White Snake, which showcases Chinese opera water sleeves (水袖) and spear kicking (踢枪)

WIP Game!

I was tagged by @e-n-t-r-o-p-i-c-f-r-o-g. Thanks!

Rules:

Make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder.

Let people send you asks with the title that most intrigues them, then post a snippet or reveal something about it.

Tag others to continue the game.

I'm going to provide a little more information besides the titles, because otherwise, picking one feels too much like a shot in the dark.

UNPUBLISHED:

In Memoriam: MDZS, postcanon. Wei Ying is asked to pretend he's Mo Xuanyu and bid farewell to the former nanny of the Mo family, so she can pass away in peace.

Scars: MDZS, postcanon. Wei Ying asks Lan Zhan if, given the chance, he'd erase the scars left by his punishment.

First night: TGCF, missing scene. During the first night he spends in Puqi shrine after meeting Xie Lian on the ox cart, Hua Cheng ponders about what kind of life the prince has lived the last eight hundred years, and about the function of his second shackle.

Clarity: TGCF, canondivergence. Hua Cheng comes back from his second dispersion early, but he's barely there, unable to move or speak on his own. Afraid of exposing his beloved to any malignant actor while in such vulnerable state, and tormented by how much and in how many ways he missed him, Xie Lian locks them both inside the Mt. Taicang's shack until he can come up with a solution.

Pearl Memories: TGCF, postcanon. Xie Lian decides to learn how to style hair properly, and in return, he learns about what happened to the lock of hair he tied around Hua Cheng's finger during the land of the tender incident.

Haifisch: TGCF, mermaid AU. To unwind from his gruelling job and difficult circumstances, Xie Lian has got into the habit of screaming underwater while he swims at the bay, unaware of the fact that his sorrow smells like blood in the water for Hua Cheng, a siren that feeds from despair.

The Newcomer/King of the Ghosts: TGCF, postcanon. A new earth master ascends and immediately accuses Hua Cheng of having stolen his auspicious fate in marriage and use it for himself in order to marry Xie Lian. Seeing in this a chance to free herself from her bureaucratic prison, Ling Wen offers to take care of the case.

The Secret Garden: TGCF, postcanon. Xie Lian is a tireless worker, and while Hua Cheng deeply admires that of him, he's also desperate to make him settle and rest after so many years of struggle. Perhaps making Paradise Manor feel like a real home could do the trick.

Picture perfect: TGCF, modern AU. Hua Cheng begrudgingly agrees to participate in a photography project of his fellow uni student He Xuan, under the condition that he won't have to remove his eyepatch. However, when he arrives to the studio and meets Xie Lian, an incredibly charming man who's missing the right leg, he fears he might be persuaded into exposing his own scars.

The fantasy creatures pitches: SVSSS, MDZS, TGCF (but they aren't crossovers). Chinese mythology AUs. I wrote six pitches for the Tails And Scales fanzine, two for each novel. They picked one from TGCF, but I can talk about the other five.

Fairy Boy: Zelda BotW, missing scene. The story of Link growing up and how he ventured into the Lost Woods to find the Master Sword at age 12. It's entirely told in rhymes, like a children's bedtime story.

ONGOING:

Heavenly Damnation: TGCF, modern AU, metal music. After eight years of taking on awful gigs to stay afloat, Xie Lian is forced to confront his past when issues with the registration office bring him back to the capital. The difference? Hua Cheng, who has been his biggest fan since the beginning, is now ready to help him out of the hell Bai Wuxiang put him into.

Treasure Hunting in the Clouds: TGCF, modern AU. Hua Cheng bought a first class couple's pod to fly back to London after a business trip to the USA, but the airline forced his hand at the last minute and shoved a stranger in the other half of the bed. Hua Cheng hates this at first, but he changes his mind when he sees who's his impromptu pod mate.

Within Reach: TGCF, canondivergence. During their long walk towards Mount Tonglu while Hua Cheng is in his sealed child form, he and Xie Lian encounter humans who tell stories and legends of Crimson Rain Seeking A Flower, and decide to make a game out of it in order for Xie Lian to learn more about his secretive companion.

The Perfect Gift: Zelda BotW, post canon. Unauthorized sequel of the orphaned fic "A Most Convenient Marriage". On a mad race to eliminate the new threat looming over Hyrule, Link comes to terms with his strained relationship with Zelda and the blooming love he shares with Prince Sidon.

This... is hella lot more than I expected to have, lmao. Feel free to ask about as many titles as you want. I'm just now starting to use Tumblr again, so I'm sorry if I'm being inopportune with the tags: @ardenrabbit, @edenwolfie, @peachylixir, @callmefoxypepsi.

Answered questions:

The Newcomer/King of the Ghosts

In Memoriam

Treasure Hunting in the Clouds

Within Reach

Clarity

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

Preorders are open for Tails And Scales, a MXTX fantasy creatures zine! It's packed with beautiful art inspired in Chinese mythology and the wonderful stories of Scum Villain Self-Saving System, The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation and Heaven Official's Blessing. It also features fanfiction, and one piece was written by yours truly, as you can see above. This is the first time I join a fanzine, so I'm pretty stocked! I hope you like my take on Hualian and dragons~

Get your bundle at tailsandscalesmxtxzine.bigcartel.com. There's time until December 1st!

Chapter 3 of "Rotting Waters", the second fic of my TGCF metal music AU series "Heavenly Damnation", is up!

To celebrate, let me share with you this portrait of Bai Wuxiang with his legendary eight-string guitar, Zhu Xin. Art by the equally legendary @ilymir_EZGbora, thank you so much!

Read here:

The flow of time is always cruel.

Say hi to Manfred! I made him as a birthday present to my dear friend @tiiracotta, who's a big Dragon Age fan.

I had a blast working all the little details on the 40cm tall skeleton base I got in a Halloween clearance sale. All the other materials came from my stash, including the eyes, which were originally part of my prop sword sheath for my cosplay of Kusuriuri from Mononoke. The ornaments have been falling off through the years, so I recently replaced a few, and it was by noticing how similar the green crystals are to Manfred's eyes that I had the idea to make the whole doll.

I've always loved puppets, dolls and miniatures, so I hope I can make more projects like this in the future!

If you see this, reblog and put in the tags what extremely niche research topic you've found yourself derailed by while attempting to write fanfic. Bonus if it was supposed to be PWP.

RESOURCES FOR POSES

Line of Action

JustSketch.Me

PoseManiacs

Human-Anatomy-For-Artist.com

MagicPoser

MIXAMO

Pose Archives

Bodies in Motion

Posemy.art

ReferenceAngle

CroquisCafe

A short comic I made about my experiences as a seasonal worker, and the way places change you.