#cmedia

[2700lagostas]

A Moment But Forever (Nian Wushuang) - Episode 01

[pangzi]

Hou Minghao for PowerCircles

[999-roses]

aight I finally sat down and finished watching live action Hikaru no Go and I kind of lost it when I saw the status under 褚赢‘s 围达 Online Go profile read ’你是我的眼‘ after 褚赢 disappeared forever/right before 时光 deleted the profile 😭😭😭😭😭 also 时光 sings a lil line out of that song too 💔

[mistiwysteria]

I just watched the 2013 movie 我想和你好好的 (love will tear us apart) after finding it for free on youtube. I’d never heard of the movie before and knew nothing about it besides a few comments saying how unexpectedly the movie progressed, but I loved it. I liked how liang liang and miao miao weren’t presented as anyone special, they were both just normal young people who made do with what they had, who happened to come together and came apart again. 

but what I really like was the fact that they didn’t villainise miao miao for her attempts to control the relationship. sure she tried to control liang liang, she was paranoid and borderline abusive but neither was her behaviour completely unfounded; her job as an actress contributed to her insecurities and liang liang did sneak around her back instead of confronting her behaviour in a honest and constructive way- and then later went as far as to meet up with his ex on the regular. while this does not excuse her abusive behaviour, it humanises her. 

maybe I haven't been watching many movies recently but I was actually quite surprised how fast paced it was. the speed in which liang liang and miao miao’s relationship went hurtling downhill was quite jarring and a little exaggerated but to be honest I actually quite appreciated it for what it was. it’s like that idea in literature where you highlight the fact that the piece of literature is actually just a piece of literature in order to emphasise the point you’re trying to make. what I took from the movie was how easy it was for what seemed to be a totally normal relationship to become so toxic, that abusive behaviour is not the evil rootless thing that it’s often presented as- it is awful, but it’s never totally black and white- miao miao at the end of the day is still a human being. 

[blorbocedes]

if anyone is curious, nico's leaf jacket is LV and 2000 euros 😭😭😭

you just know he's stunting on the rest of the commentators at sky in their office wear

as per dug up by @legobrickcow

[renshengs]

with the way some people talk about chinese media you can like. smell the whiteness.

[tianshiisdead]

All the Chinese American movies being about trad mom VS westernized daughter is crazy where is my mom who wants western approval/to fit in/for her daughter to fit in VS annoying China obsessed daughter who hates white people and LARPs as mainland Asian online

[999-roses]

omg the animation clips/proofs of concept they've put out are amazing!!

Artworks by chinese artist Yu QIuyang for his "You Ming Zhi" global project (animations / illustrations / comic books).

[2700lagostas]

Martial God Asura (Xiuluo Wu Shen) - Episode 08

[pangzi]

Hou Minghao for PowerCircles

[999-roses]

奔跑 - Run the cover artist is 林童学 Lin Tongxue ; the original artist is 黄征 Huang Zheng & duo 羽泉 YuQuan

[lanliingwang]

Genuinely think people need to realize it's not. Bad or makes your love of a media less if you criticize its instances of racism and other problems -- if anything, we should all strive to be critical of those instances in general (regardless of it being largely amongst ourselves and our friends or out on public social media)

[miyamiwu]

Why does CMedia always make it a point to not use other countries’ names in stories? In cnovels I’ve read, they always use Country A, Country B, etc. instead of the actual names.

In Link Click, staff also used a fictional name for London even though it’s very obvious from the art and trailers that the setting is literally just London. Who are they trying to fool? The censors???

The ones they came up with aren’t even that creative...

Bridon is just British + London.

In Chinese, Yingdu is just Ying (UK/English/British) + Du (capital)

agdjfhsdkjf

[jingyuanyuan]

When the anglos who consume cmedia and danmei can’t even spell the characters names right in pinyin… we already anglicized it for you that’s what pinyin is

[renshengs]

hmm i do think that danmei and dangai (censored danmei cdrama adaptations) being many non-chinese fandom people's first impression of chinese media has given them some misconceptions about mainstream chinese media, and it shows in a way that i find very frustrating when seeing discussions about cdramas on here. dangai dramas aside, even if government censorship didn't exist, the chances of your favorite cdrama gay ship becoming canon is about as high as the chances of any of those iconic homoerotic male friendships in a western TV show becoming canon. which is to say: extremely low.

what i think is that internationally huge danmei fandoms like mdzs and tgcf and drama adaptations like cql and shl have really fucked with people's conceptualization of danmei, in that they're using it as this reference point when analyzing relationships in all other forms of cn media, including cdramas and chinese games, which then manifests into people making very bold, very dubious claims about "queercoding" because 2 characters from a random cdrama reminds them of the one or two danmeis they'd encountered that shaped their entire perception of chinese media. basically it's this meme:

many people here need to understand that cdramas and chinese films are obviously mainstream forms of fictional media in china, just like how the mcu or the doctor who franchise is mainstream in the US and UK, or like shonen is mainstream in japan. not to burst your bubble of happy ignorance, but homoromantic relationships such as qingming/boya from the ying yang master are—for lack of a better term—fujobait. they are fujobait. bromances, because those sell well and everyone knows it. popular ships like bakudeku were not actually made canon in mha because shonen is mainstream, and in most industries geared toward maximizing capital, having full-on gay people front and center is considered a monetarily risky move. which sucks, of course, but china is absolutely no different. i promise you that if the govt removed their censorship laws for TV broadcasts, your favorite gay ship from mysterious lotus casebook or the blood of youth or fangs of fortune still wouldn't be canon. they might be allowed a bit more intimacy due to the lack of restrictive filtering, but they are not going to be sucking face for the same reason that gojo and geto from jjk didn't suck face.

danmei is still widely considered niche and risky in china, and if you haven't seen the recent news, authors are still getting arrested for writing it. assuming that chinese fiction, mainstream chinese fiction in particular, operate like dangais where the two guys with the most gay tension would be made explicitly canon were the censors to be lifted, is frankly pretty ridiculous. dangai dramas are adapted from danmeis, which are stories centered on a gay romance and narratively depend on the two guys falling in love. non-dangai dramas are very much... not that, hence why people shouldn't watch them expecting a censored danmei and then forcing assumptions of "my ship would be canon if only it weren't for censorship" on them.

it's very clear when someone who knows absolutely nothing about the actual situation with danmei and queer existence and mainstream TV censorship in china is trying to push their, if i put it crudely, "boss baby meme" perspective onto cmedia. fandom is all about poking at interactions between your favorite characters and giggling and speculating, but i think lots of fandom people (many of them safe in the pockets of their more progressive areas) view govt censorship as this big abstract dam that, if broken, would result in the canonization of all their favorite ships, which is not only an incredibly naive belief but also one that shows how much they view TV censorship as more of a personal inconvenience that's preventing their favorite ships from kissing on screen instead of the looming, deep-rooted issue depriving mainland chinese people of creative freedom it actually is. with cmedia fandoms there's a specific widely popularized "they're so gay omg how did censorship not notice" gag when there's any perceived homoromantic undertones in a story that's both rather insensitive and also ignorant, and many dangai and cdrama fandoms in particular (donghua fans too, link click shippers i'm looking directly at you) could really use some more education and sensitivity regarding this.

i've been in danmei & cdrama fandom spaces for years and post-pandemic this kind of nonsense has definitely gotten worse, especially when you compare shipping discussions here to shipping discussions in cn fandoms. here every 2 seconds someone makes an off-color censorship joke about tgcf donghua and over on douyin they are straight up commenting under the nezha sequel announcement post if there's going to be an oubing kissing scene. granted i obviously cannot see or know everything going on in cn fandom spaces because they are incomprehensibly enormous, but in all the spaces i've been in i've never seen a single censorship joke from anyone. why do people here absolutely insist on making them?

anyway. fandom be normal about chinese media challenge!

[jiangwanyinscatmom]

It’s funny that ‘tiger moms’ are viewed as such a default thing when they’re very much tied to the whole ‘China just came out of the century of humiliation, the civil war, the cultural revolution, life sucks but if you work hard you can get a better life’; it’s why it’s so common in diaspora/immigrant families. If you’re rich, chinese parents tend to be pretty lax as long as you’re not an absolute embarrassment.

Also the stuff people are complaining about in mxtx writing is funny because like most of that is just normal cn writing stuff. Truly people need to watch more cdramas than cql

It's so tiring to see this as some major default when it's very much a generational thing. And why die on this hill of normalizing fictional abusive adults with this take when the novel is reiterating the exact opposite

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

And as you said this is all very common material in cdramas or any other cmedia. There are entire warnings about CP materials and only featuring said canon CP's for such things because the fans do not pay to see side pairs they want the canon ones and what is expected. Just look at the mess of romance gatchas and the uproar if devs even hint of a side character with a main from a CP. As well as the reason as to why the Untamed got what it got and had been an out of the norm production the fans fought to get.

For all the complaints of tags, web novels have those in order for readers to find what they want and don't want for original publications. You get what you get upfront and if you want love triangles, side ships it will be upfront with that, if you bother to look yourself and I dunno... bother to navigate a novel site yourself for once?

But ahhhh so many rants with some of this and the supposed fandom etiquette that just is not the same as the western sphere and shouldn't have to be because it's not from that base to begin with and authors shouldn't have to cater to American fanbase expectations.