#cmedia

[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 💔

[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).

[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

[xieliansbignaturals]

I just published an interest check for a Trans Joy Week! Quick summary: "This event is for fanworks where a trans character experiences joy."

Please go fill it out if you're interested! There are 4 questions. None of them are required. One of them asks whether this event should be limited to danmei and/or baihe or not.

Edit: I’ve gotten TWO suggestions for “cnovel” or “cmedia” instead of “baihe and danmei”! Nice. I wish I’d thought of that! I’ll definitely go with that if the popular vote is against a *general* trans joy week.

[tavina-writes]

I’ve kind of had this post/a version of this post brewing for two weeks or more now, but like, last night I left a discord community I’d been a part of since the pandemic, where I was one of the first and founding members, over something that I guess could be considered “not that big a deal” and that was definitely…something that stung certainly. Typically, I’m not exactly a “pack up it’s time to hit the bricks” sort of person, and overall I think I can say that I’m fairly? okay/open to talking about things in a way that’s meant to be explanatory/educational especially as it comes to be Chinese Diaspora.

Yet I also think that at this point it was impossible for me to stay because at this point I am so sick and tired of the rampant Sinophobia that exists in fandom spaces, especially ones that demand that CMedia caters to their sense of aesthetics regarding pretty gay men while fetishizing/refusing to engage with the very real problems that Chinese Diaspora/Chinese Nationals face, especially when we try to point things out.  

In this case, this particular discussion was brought about re: a discussion about Falun Gong. which is a cult. And when I pointed out that saying “only China and Russia will be happy about a decrease in US hegemony on the global stage” was uhhh pretty Sinophobic of them (admittedly, not politely and perhaps too emotionally for people to take me seriously), they responded with “It’s my right to criticize whatever country I want actually even if it’s one you like and you can’t just accuse me of -phobia or whatever because of this” along with some other stuff that basically amounted to “I have 0 empathy about a number of very personal issues that you’re currently facing because I’m not American and your country sliding into fascism is your own fault wah wah cry harder.” 

Given that I’d known this person for going on four or more years now, this was…really a “ah, we’ve completely lost you to multiple brands of Kool Aid here” moment. And instead of staying to argue my point, or to try to explain that maybe this server that was primarily about anime with a smattering of cdrama on the side really shouldn’t be so chill with this sort of talk (After all, how often is it that someone prefaces their love of anime with: oh but don’t worry! I don’t support anything that the Imperial Japanese Government Did or anything they’re currently or have done in the past to Ainu people!) I decided to leave. 

In some sense, I feel like I’ve overstayed my welcome. I’d become this sort of killjoy, you see, because there’s only so many times you can point out a problem to a person or a group without starting to becoming that one person that’s too serious or always stomping on other people’s fun or policing them for “incorrect” expressions of their thoughts or whatever. 

And this brings me to the like “what is a killjoy?” part of this thought because so much of life is about those sorts of battles: when do I think it might be safe to express an opinion? When do I think it’s okay to say “hey that wasn’t a great statement to make, cut it out” ? How often do I think I might be supported or heard when it comes to something like that? Who am I creating pushback for — the person who said something shitty or the other people who might not realize or not know what to say in response to something shitty? 

So much of the time, I err on the side of trying to explain that Chinese people, ethnically Chinese diaspora, Chinese nationals, whatever are people who gasp! Have thoughts and feelings and possess a modicum of intelligence perhaps like you do, instead of just saying “oh fuck off” or fucking off myself. So much of the time, I debate whether it’s polite to mention that this thirst to see pretty gay Asian men combined with this blanket rage at “censorship by the evil government” (as if censorship regarding queer subjects does not exist in the English speaking west) or “government propaganda” (as if, laughably, governmental propaganda does not exist in the English speaking west) is in fact, actively alienating to those who are ethnically Chinese. 

Or if perhaps, by stretching and bending and purposefully misunderstanding the customs of Chinese characters and erasing their names and traditions and refusing to engage with our holidays and substituting your own is a form of microaggressive violence towards those in your fandom community who are Chinese. 

After all, if I do point this out, it’s a matter of “Tav, literally we just want WangXian to celebrate Christmas, it’s harmless.” (We will refuse to learn about new years traditions beyond Gong Xi Fa Cai and exaggerated bows and we will refuse to engage with Qingming or Mid Autumn or ancestor worship or filial piety if we even know what those are because those aren’t sexy and familiar as decorating a fucking Christmas tree after all.) 

As for exactly what this particular longtime acquaintance had said was my own fault re: America’s slide into fascism — my youngest maternal cousin died two weeks ago, and my mother is too terrified of leaving the country to go to his memorial service because she’s afraid that as a green card holder, she won’t be able to make it back into the country to ever see her husband or daughters again with the way this current administration is handling things. 

He was twenty four years old and his parents’ only child. 

But yes, perhaps I was impolite in my expression of what I was afraid of.

[markiafc]

boy's love / yaoi / danmei & dangai are not queer representation and queer art. or to be exact, it's more complicated than that; asian queer movements in real life express themselves and make their statements through other channels unrelated to fandom. the rise and increasing acceptance of danmei & dangai media isn't a brave push against censorship, it's the age-old story of pink economy exploitation; you just don't know how censorship states function. supporting actual queer asian peoples is not the same as loving and supporting yaoi.

not to be completely disillusioned and cynical. but the c-media circle on tumblr and every single eng-speaking site is so dreadfully racist. (us/uk) chinese diaspora are most guilty of this behaviour while also being the most vocal about racism against chineseness. how many times do i have to witness a racist post made under the guise of "fandom is just for fun!!!!"

[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!

[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

[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.

[ge]

what do you like about rotmhs? like what draws you in?

GAHH IM SO GLAD YOU ASKEDDD at the top of my head thhe top three things i felt really drew me into and made me fall in love w rotmhs is the found family/bonds before blood narrative, the action/fight scenes, and the comedy..

rotmhs is not a romance and i feel like that really pushes people away from reading it, especially folks who were first introduced to east asian novels through bl (specifically mxtxs novels like mdzs tgcf etc etc) which i feel is incredibly disappointing because yallre missing out on a certain depth of writing and nuance you otherwise wouldnt get in a romance focused novel. (orv is another extremely popular knovel with no romance.. if you like orv PLEASE give rotmhs a shot)

rotmhs is about a dead man resurrected a hundred years into the future having to come to terms w the fact that everyone he loved is dead and that the only home he ever had was destroyed, its inhabitants and centuries worth of teachings burned to the ground, and that it was partially his fault these things happened, so in order to prevent a future catastrophe he knows is on the horizon, he trains the youth of this new generation and finds a new home surrounded by ghosts in the wreckage of his home of his past

⬆️…very dramatic but somewhat accurate barebones synopsis of rotmhs which is fairly faithful enough methinks.. rotmhs doesnt make a point of going ‘heyy these guys are family nowww theyre brothers and sisters and love each other like familyyy’ LOL the growth is very subtle and before u can really blink ur like ‘oh man.. chung myung would kill for these kids. obliviously though. i dont think he knows he even likes them’ all the while hes still aching w the loss of his loved ones before.. if we’re being really really honest chung myung, the mc, truly is the star of the show and a character i got attached to incredibly quickly.. hes so stupid but so smart he has so many issues i want to hit him with my car then nurse him back to health just to hit him again

chung myung himself is a whole other thing i could get into but he has so many layers.. so much depth.. on the surface ud look at him and think what a punk but look a little closer and then ud think oh this punk has depression ptsd survivors guilt hallucinations etc etc LIKE DAMN.. I THIUGHT HE WAS JUST A FUNNY LITTLE GUY WHYD I GET SUCKER PUNCHED

what was i even talking about. OH right romance. please please dont let the lack of romance dissuade you, imo it is soooo refreshing to read something that isnt focused on romance like i love yaoi like the next bl reading bitch but damn.. ive always been into found family and while the bl novels i have read did always have a little hint of it, i always wanted more and rotmhs fills that void

(that being said i cant stop yall from shipping if yall want LOL im guilty of shipping charas too despite everythiing i just said… if yall want yalls yaoiyuri fix may i direct yalls attention to the ‘doomed by the narrative, tragic best-friends-to-almost-lovers tangchung’ & ‘love at first sight sweethearts iseolsoso’ ….. :SMILES: I LOVE TANGCHUNG..!!!!!!)

NEXT, the action and fight scenes in rotmhs, even in written text form, are sublime to say the least.. my fail cis dudebro trait is that i love crazy insane adrenaline rushing heart pumping shounen-esque battles so much that i could typically care less for the rest of that specific piece of media as long as the fights are good.. FORTUNATELY FOR ME rotmhs is crazy good at balancing its comedy, action, and otherwise more ‘mundane’ scenes together so harmoniously that its such fun read even when theres no swords crossing or heads being beaten in

also important to note, despite being a knovel w korean naming of characters/places, rotmhs actually takes place in ancient china in a wuxia setting so jumping head first into it wont be all that confusing for first time readers/cmedia fans and u can use ur knowledge of cnovels to fill in the gaps.

theres not really much more i have to say on the topic of fighting, im just personally a huge fan of the crazy spectacles rotmhs brings to the table.

saved this for last but THE COMEDY…!!!!!!!! after being soo dramatic w all my previous points and comments ur probably thnkng rotmhs is heavy and somber w no breathing room.. WELL YOURE WRONG. ROTMHS IS FUNNY AS HELL quips and jokes and simple funny actions and scenes litter nearly every page. i mentioned this novel balances its action and comedy well and im NOT LYING youd think maybe the heavy action and light comedy would awkwardly clash but u cldnt be more further from the truth.. rotmhs wears action and comedy like a pair of twin gloves

rotmhs handles its action and comedy in equal doses and it all fits together like matching puzzle pieces, like i really cant stress enough how fun it is to read. not every fight scene is somber, most of the time its chung myung oneshotting someone by hitting them across the head so hard they pass out..

unfortunately im not really the best at listing instances so its be better for u to go read it for urself but this scene from one of the later chapters is soo funny every time i read it i start giggling

(LIGHT/MINOR SPOILERS FOR THE NOVEL it probably doesnt even matter u wont even remember this when u start reading)

right so i think thats most of it.. too lazy to read through everything i just wrote so if nothing makes sense… well. …well!

rotmhs deserves to have the same amount of fame as ORV and MDZS and TGCF have and it is my civil duty as one of the oldest mxtx novel outlets on tumblr to put yall on it..

my thumbs hurt from typing so im done now but if u have anymore questions PLEASE ASK IM SO DESPERATE TO TALK ABOUT ROTMHS ok byyyeeeeeeee