#Without context cql is dang funny lol

[add1ctedt0you]

Nie Huaisang & Meng Yao & Lan Xichen

[tonyglowheart]

responding to an anon about salt, under a cut for your sake and mine :’)

why the heck not my ire is up, let’s talk about some salt

anon, this is the big dang mood lol. So many MXTX antis I see, I would probably hazard a guess that they HAVEN’T read any of her other novels, and also aren’t thinking about the fact that they’re? reading translations? of her work? It’s so funny bc ppl go like “mxtx is a filthy fetishizer who ONLY writes rapey romance and pregnancy kink” and I’m like nah that’s just wangxian, and also like. yeah why CAN’T we get a lowkey bi Chinese protag with a rape kink. You don’t know what the genre as a whole looks like, sit down. Even for me as a Westerner, though, do you know how mind-blowing it is to me that a danmei (m/m) media has gotten such mainstream attention? Like sure the donghua and CQL had to be censored, but come on, when has ANY m/m media gotten this kind of mass market appeal in the US? And doubly amazing to me that it’s in China? Plus, as an Asian American, how fucking cool it is that this novel (and related adaptations) has gotten so big? 

people who comment on writing quality in English are automatically disqualified from having an opinion. People who try to argue that MXTX is a “filthy fujo” who “fetishizes” m/m, based on their bad faith/strawmen reads on wangxian? I hate, lol. And like, right now another pet peeve is Westerners who co-opted the term “fujoshi” to make it a pejorative, when it’s like. are you a woman? do you like m/m? ‘grats, you’re a fujoshi. you’re not better than people out there pejoratizing “slash fans” lol. But like, the purity wank crowd doesn’t care about that, anyone who ships wrong is a “fitlhy fetishizer” or a Problematic person to them 8). Honestly tho, I think some of the tendencies to try to make “fujoshi” a bad word in EN spaces, is like... same energy as mainstream fans who denigrate the “filthy shippers,” ya know?

But yeah lol, I mean, some ppl have tried to argue with me that wangxian does have yaoi tropes, but I’m like, fam it’s danmei not yaoi, and does it have tropes? sure, it’s fiction. are you trying to argue that tropes are bad lmao.

other arguments I’ve seen of ppl calling mxtx “homophobic” have been similarly ridiculous to me, I’m like. are we talking about theoretically women writing danmei at all? bc I’ve seen this kind of conversation before surrounding the m/m romance genre, and I guess we can have some discussion there, BUT I think also, like, it’s a romance genre that’s not strictly “LGBT media,” and there’s complex sociocultural reasons women engage in m/m media? But the ppl who aren’t saying “all shippers are bad, just the ones I hate,” I think their arguments are bad and dumb lol, and bad-faith readings on translations of a 2016 interview with mxtx. but like. who is surprised lmao.

plus also it’s like.... the thing to me is this: mxtx is writing within the context of: (1) for a Chinese audience (2) as a Chinese person. so the entire cultural contexts is different, and like, you don’t know the prevalence of certain tropes vs not, probably! I don’t either, I’ve done some basic research and read some things, but it’s hardly exhaustive!

Like, can we talk about how MDZS’s world does have some elements of homophobia to it? Sure we can. But it doesn’t automatically mean MXTX is homophobic for writing that lmfao, the real fucking world is homophobic. I’ve talked to people who actually LIKE that it acknowledges that, instead of writing a more idealized kind of world where gay stuff is okay, either explicitly or tacitly. (Actually, CQL does this, bc they can’t talk about it overtly? so they create a sort of world in which it’s tacitly okay, but also in a really... don’t ask don’t tell kind of way :/ so.)

But yeah like. ppl have cited Wangxian’s rape kink to me as “this is an example of how it’s yaoi tropes,” but like it’s very much not, lol, and you can just say you’re not into it without making it a value judgment/erroneous value judgment while denigrating another genre you’re not 100% familiar with the actual sociohistorical context of either.