#i think i posted abt this b4 but whatever. more lore for u

[saphushia]

speaking of fucked up hermits. i made up a chronic illness for redstoners 👍

most of the other hermits have enough other fucked up shit going on with them that cancels out the redstone poisoning, so tango and etho are the ones with the worst of it. zed is susceptible to redstone poisoning too but he's a good boy and washes his hands so he's okay

[wafflesandkruge]

I always see maps like the grishaverse as “the country this is about still hasn’t figured out all the continents and doesn’t know as much as they think they do about the world” Shu Han doesn’t make any sense because it’s named after the ancient Shu province which is now Sichuan province, so you’d think it would be based off China but the kuwei and Ehri are the only ones with East Asian names (afaik) but that means Ehri is German or Japanese which doesn’t make sense if Shu Han is fantasy China1/2

so that would mean fantasy Japan has taken over fantasy China? the way I see this it means Ravka and the Shu Han have been in isolation for so long so the information is dated and inaccurate also if Leigh’s gonna make fantasy Japan in charge of fantasy China she should talk about that more and have characters dealing with it/overcoming it? I’m not reading gv that much any more bc so much of the international politics she writes are based on real stuff and badly handled except for maybe Kerch 2/5

capitalism but that makes sense cause Kerch is based on the Netherlands but it reminded me a lot of the avi books about Victorian New York also she puts more effort into western/European worldbuilding and I read soc b4 the trilogy n I thought “king Nikolai” and Ravka was based on like 20th century post war dictators bc I was learning abt that in school with like power vacuum split country militarization+drafting teenagers (which goes against his trilogy morals btw) and I thought he was like 3/5

Descended from the original Nikolai lantsov till I read the trilogy and remembered that scene w sturmhond and kaz so I was like oh and I think Leigh wrote him badly cause he reminded me of the dead emperor of Renee ahdieh’s books the flame in the mist set in feudal Japan so much that when u read his perspective I thought he was gonna b a main character like Nikolai anyway about names it makes sense for tolya and Tamar to have Russian names because they’re also Ravkan but the Russian name is 4/5

is Tamara not Tamar and Tolya literally means from the east which is a really bad name to give one of your only two loosely East Asian coded major charachters especially when the shu han is such a worldbuilding mess and all the Shu people are written really stereotypically 5/5

Okay first of all, a disclaimer. I’m first-gen Chinese-American and not super well-versed in Asian history pre-1900s so pls feel free to correct me if I said something wrong.

Leigh definitely didn’t put that much into the worldbuilding of the non-western inspired countries (check out @zemenipearls zemeni extended universe!). Personally, I don’t think the royal family of Shu Han is supposed to be the equivalent of Japan bc see 500 years of colonial beef. (Search up the current controversy about Japan’s rising sun flag not being banned at the olympics bc Yikes) Like the equivalent of fantasy japan conquering the rest of fantasy east asia is kinda uh,,,,🤢

I was actually talking to @farahmeanthappiness about Shu Han’s “lore,” and we had a few interesting ideas? Like we headcanoned Shu Han as being like comprised of smaller, warring nations that were eventually unified under Queen Taban. (so like imagine if the Mongols had actually conquered Asia). So Shu Han is still comprised of different countries/kingdoms/states with their own borders, but they’re all ruled by the Taban family if that makes sense. The countries don’t necessarily like each other, but they’re not warring anymore. And if Queen Taban’s unification of Shu Han happened in whatever’s the equivalent of the 1100s/1200s, then we don’t have to deal with japanese imperialism which was/is a whole mess. 

(Also, why does Shu Han have no rivers or islands like wtf. I’m just gonna say that the maps in the book are from Ravka and they’re just guesstimating bc Shu Han looks horrible geographically. China was a cradle of civilization because of the Yellow River, how can there not be any rivers ugh)

Leigh’s Shu characters in tgt were definitely problematic, because all we had was like Botkin- a martial arts instructor- and Tolya and Tamar (which I guess are kinda problematic from their name’s etymology, but I’ll take your word for it) The whole reputation of them being scientifically obsessed to the point of human experimentation with the Khergud (is that their name idk) and the whole jurda parem thing is also not a great look ugh. She did say she was gonna explore Shu Han more in KoS2, so I have maybe,,,some hope? Also more Ehri and Mayu, which will be nice.