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[ID: Scum Villain sketches of Yue Qingyuan and Shen Qingqiu dressed in peak lord regalia with slightly aggrieved expressions, captioned "I'm depersonalization" and "I'm derealization" respectively. Above them, flame text in all capitals: "The dissociating brothers!" END ID.]

and vice versa, of course.

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IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!!! In honour of it, I present you two things - the promise of another AU that I plan on telling you about where He Xuan AND Wei Wuxian clash and I can't wait for it. AND I present you a snippet of the He Xuan and Shang Qinghua crossover - what would happen if He Xuan hadn't been there to take Shang Qinghua's face.

For context, Yue Qingyuan is the first person that visits Shang Qinghua after He Xuan has disposed of the fake body. If you're interested, just know that I am 13k into this oneshot and I don't even know if I'm halfway through yet!

There was no sound of movement bustling around inside.

That should have been the first warning sign, the first hint that something wasn’t right within Shang-shidi’s office.

Instead, Yue Qingyuan had been so blinded by his own sheepish guilt that he hadn’t even thought to consider it, just raising his hand to lightly knock on the door.

There was no sort of reply, no indicator that anyone had even registered his knock inside.

He didn’t think too much of it; Shang-shidi did sometimes get so immersed in his work that he forgot to attend meetings or even leave his office for days on end, so he just knocked harder, pairing it with a “Shang-shidi?” this time.

Nothing.

Now he started becoming concerned, brow furrowing as he reached out with his senses to listen out for any sign of life beyond the door.

There weren't even any sounds of breathing.

Just a quiet, consistent drip.

All courtesy went out of the window and he found himself throwing the door open, panic shooting through his chest and hoping desperately that he just wasn’t in, that he was with his disciples, that he had gone to do paperwork outside, it was a lovely day after all-

But no.

No, he could never be that lucky.

The metallic scent of blood was the first thing that hit him, thick and cloying and suffocating with every breath he took as he stared at the scene with this quiet, almost numbing sort of pain filling his chest.

His shidi - mousy, quiet, not that strong but so smart, so efficient and thoughtful - slumped over at his desk, a knife buried into his back and more dark splatters upon those blue robes that told him this was not a quick death.

Shang Qinghua had suffered before he died.

Ink splashes that once endeared his martial siblings were now stained down his chest and his arm, that steady dripping sound coming from a mixture of ink and blood that had spilled over the side of the desk.

Empty eyes stared towards Yue Qingyuan, where a closed door would have stood in that moment of panic and fear, the sight depicting nothing but a desperate, hopeless plea for a saviour that would never come.

He couldn’t breathe, hands numb as they reached into his sleeve and practically crushed a talisman that would alert Mu-shidi that his presence was needed as he dripped spiritual energy into it, before dropping it to the floor and dragging himself forwards to carefully sit Shang-shidi up.

He didn’t, however, wipe the ink from the man’s face, because Shang-shidi always had a smear of ink on his face.

Looking around, he noticed a used talisman laying nearby, the cinnabar markings revealing the imitations of a teleportation talisman that demonic cultivators usually used.

It was another blow.

The demonic cultivators, the ones who had run from the fight just that morning, had come back for revenge.

They couldn’t get to the sect leader for obvious reasons, so they had taken all of their frustration and spite out on Shang Qinghua - Shang-shidi, mousy, quiet, not that strong.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, gently holding Shang-shidi in his arms and staring at the talisman scrap, before Mu-shidi came rushing in and there was this small gasp filled with utter anguish that sort of forced him back into his own body and all he could really do was whisper “I just-I just found him,” his voice breaking slightly at the memory.

Mu-shidi rushed forwards to take Shang-shidi from him, uselessly checking the body’s pulse while he just sat there and gazed down at the blood on his hands, the blood on his robes.

If he had taken initiative to apologise to Shang-shidi earlier, he could have been there to save him.

But he had been too late.

He was always too late.

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curious anon-do you have any go-to language/terminology references for your fics?

Yes, definitely. Here's a mostly complete list: if I remember a few more, I'll add them in later. If you find this post through a reblog chain, please keep in mind that the version on my blog will be updated from time to time, so click back for additional references if the reblogged post contains broken links or doesn’t have what you’re looking for.

Masterpost of references for the MDZS/CQL fandom (re: terminology, look here for naming guides and a list of familial terms. You'll also find information on wedding and funeral customs, cultivation lore, MDZS maps and sect history, and novel/audio drama summaries.)

Click here to find the "40 Q&A's" interview with MXTX.

Detailed glossary/explanations of concepts in wuxia, xuanhuan, and xianxia novels. Look here for a guide to weapons, martial arts, more cultivation lore, and a few units of measurement.

Guide to the martial family. You can also find a separate guide through the masterpost.

Guide to modern/historical titles. This is a Wikipedia page and most likely incomplete, but came in handy after the guide in the MDZS masterpost was removed. 

Guide to Chinese nobility. Look here for basic information about the peer ranks of various dynasties.

For a guide specific to the Qing dynasty (aka, the one I used for Flowers in the Palace) click here.

For a guide to marriage, concubinage, and social mores and customs for women, try Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society.

Guide to Chinese clothing, by @ziseviolet. Click here for information on historical fashions, hairstyles, accessories, and so on. Try this link for clothing/textile references for other countries/cultures.

List of mythological creatures. This is a Wikipedia list of individual pages and is most likely incomplete.

List of Chinese fairy tales and folklore (not comprehensive).

Brief overview of Chinese musical notation and guqin musical notation. Not detailed, but provides a fair explanation of how written music was recorded.

Color terms you're not likely to find with google translate, by @linghxr. These include translations for colors like cyan, indigo, luminous white, etc.

More about colors and their symbolism here.

Timekeeping. Wiki article about the dual hour, fifteen daylight hours, etc.

Traditional calendar. I bookmarked this page for the phenological month names used in TMAAF, but there’s a lot more information here. Look here for a list of traditional Chinese holidays.

For food: someone on Twitter made a detailed guide to the dishes that the characters in MDZS would have eaten, but I’ll have to go looking for it. In the meantime, try these links.

Hubei cuisine (Yunmeng): 1, 2

Hebei cuisine (Qinghe)

Shaanxi cuisine (Qishan)

Shandong cuisine (Lanling)

Jiangsu cuisine (Gusu)

(Note: most of the recipes in the Twelve Moons and a Fortnight verse are from The Woks of Life and Made with Lau.)

For individual words and characters: try hantrainerpro or its full dictionary index. Given a word/character, you can find its definitions, synonyms, other words that contain the character, and a list of different words pronounced the same way. I also use Written Chinese to look up the individual radicals within a character, but there are several better dictionaries out there.

For a mobile Chinese dictionary, try Pleco.

For help choosing Chinese names, click here.

Rhyming in Chinese:

Mandarin rhyme finder by chinese-word.com. To use, replace the “ang” in the URL with the word ending you want: e.g., iao for words that rhyme with xiao, ing for words that rhyme with ying, and so on. If this generates a 403 error, wait for a while and try again.

Wikipedia article about yùnshū (rhyming dictionaries)

Mandarin rhyming dictionary tool by daddehs1

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airplane/Shang Qinghua is described as handsome in a sleazy car salesman sort of way, but fanart usually has him looking kind of baby? probably to better contrast with Mobeijun the Man Wardrobe, which is a perfectly honorable purpose, but i still wish we had more Sleazy Merchant SQH out there. so here's my personal attempt at sleazy car salesman shang qinghua

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piplup grain entrapment

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For the Doodle request: Yue QingYuan gets hit with truth serum and the whole sect gets to hear just HOW crazy he is for SQQ.

Tfw you're just trying to get through talking about the monthly budget but your Sect Leader just starts saying the wildest shit about his crush. Thanks for the rq!! :D

[ID: A Scum Villain Doodle. The top half has a wide-eyed and slightly flushed Yue Qingyuan resting a hand on one of his cheeks as he says "I would commit vast amounts of murder for Xiao Jiu. I would level Huan Hua if he asked." The bottom half has Qi Qingqi looking towards YQY with questioning surprise. Shang Qinghua looks on with nervous shock as he clutches paper in his hands as if he was mid-presenting with a speech bubble connecting to him saying "...". Lastly, Mu Qingfang face palms with a sigh as he says "...I'll get the medkit." End ID]

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I’m obsessed with him bc of this LOL. Also MAN I CANT GET ENOUGH OF YOUR SQH DESIGN

"dude i'm like. the only peak lord i made cis. system loves its dramatic irony, right?"

as i have it for right now, airplane and sy never meet in the wick remains main plot. but it'd be really fucking funny,

[ID: A sketchy black/white comic of Yue Qingyuan, as hosted by Shen Yuan, walking through a forest with Shang Qinghua. Shen Yuan starts out by musing, "So you must've really been on a 'Palace Conspiracy' kick, huh? You even made Yue-xiong a eunuch." to which Shang Qinghua laughs and exclaims, "Ahhh, could you imagine? Oh, Yue-shixiong. All he'd have to do is glare and everyone would just be stumbling over themselves to apologize!" on a panel with the proposed Yue Qingyuan eunuch design telling off a couple of silhouettes.

Shen Yuan anxiously holds his sleeve up to his mouth muttering "Right..." while Shang Qinghua walks on with his hands behind his head, still laughing about it until he realizes Shen Yuan's silently walking off, which makes him stop in place and evoke a little shock emote. He catches up to him, asking nervously, "Bro... for real?" to which Shen Yuan folds his arms and replies, visibly flustered, "Well? What else could it be, Airplane?"

The last panel is a chibi of Shang Qinghua exasperatedly thinking "Oh man. Oh man." with a trans flag as the background. END ID.]

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Folks, I need/want to write a wedding in the MDZS universe but I don’t understand

What’s with the bowing/kneeling?

What’s the clothing called?

When Jin GuangYao threw off the veil on Qin Su, was that just a flare, or is that required?

What’s the dealio? Give me the low down, share your knowledge with me.

I could Google it but I don’t have enough basis in knowledge to even know what period I’m looking at, let alone if my sources are any good. Plus I find people on here are more eloquent and easy to understand than articles would be

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You’re never gonna get an angel bound in human form that isn’t some sort of fucked up. You’re cutting it off from all sorts of metaphysical senses, extradimensional perceptions, and biologically impossible physiology all at once. That’s like if you pancaked a human down to 2D and took away all our senses besides touch and smell. You’d be pretty weird too.

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trauma therapy has been swell

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Teach your children how to deal with emotions in a constructive way. I wish I had done this with my children.

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I love it when the little kids I’m teaching online have complete and total misconceptions of what’s going on. So far, I’ve encountered the following:

1. I had been teaching a little girl for several months, when one day she said to me: “My mother says you’re a real person, not an app. If you’re a real person, show me your husband.”

2. I was about to end a class, but the little girl I was teaching didn’t want the class to end. She turned to her mom and asked if she could please watch one more episode. Turns out she was under the impression that I was a very interactive TV program.

3. I couldn’t find my marker in class today. The boy I was teaching was like, “What’s your apartment number? I’ll come up and help you find it!” The boy lives in China and I live in the United States. I guess most people he knows live in the same building as him, so he assumed I did too.

4. I had been teaching a kid for quite some time when I mentioned my age in class. She was like, “Wait, you’re an adult????” She’d thought I was twelve.

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"it's concerning if university students are genuinely struggling to read full adult-level books for class" and "don't overstate the reporting of a single news article" and "if this shift is genuinely real, it's reflective of broad curriculum changes in lower education levels, probably at least in part due to remote schooling during COVID, and doesn't mean the new generation is being willfully Stupid and Vapid" and "when reading for personal pleasure people should read whatever they like without shame" and "reading from a broad variety of genres, styles, and authorial backgrounds will improve your understanding of both literature and the real world" and "actively mocking people for their tastes in books does not encourage them to become more adventurous you're just being mean" and also "but seriously adult books are not just boringly pretentious nothingburgers padded with pointless sex scenes, and claiming they are just shows how little you've read" all can and should co-exist.

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"it's concerning if university students are genuinely struggling to read full adult-level books for class" and "don't overstate the reporting of a single news article" and "if this shift is genuinely real, it's reflective of broad curriculum changes in lower education levels, probably at least in part due to remote schooling during COVID, and doesn't mean the new generation is being willfully Stupid and Vapid" and "when reading for personal pleasure people should read whatever they like without shame" and "reading from a broad variety of genres, styles, and authorial backgrounds will improve your understanding of both literature and the real world" and "actively mocking people for their tastes in books does not encourage them to become more adventurous you're just being mean" and also "but seriously adult books are not just boringly pretentious nothingburgers padded with pointless sex scenes, and claiming they are just shows how little you've read" all can and should co-exist.

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Welcome to danmei! We have:

- Guy who’s in love with his pet fish

- Guy whose boyfriend has been dead for 16 years

- Guy whose boyfriend nearly committed genocide

- Guy whose boyfriend actually committed genocide

- Luo Binghe

- Guy who accidentally fell in love with the dude he intended to manipulate into villainy & evil

- And more!