#jiangzhu

[thejourneyofwan-fanproject]

Happy Pride! 🏳️‍🌈

Once again, pose and concept credit goes to:

@snootyfoxfashion

@likeacatcrafts

[supportingasianactorsactresses]

Quan Pei Lun weibo update

08/03/2023 Source: 权沛伦 (weibo) Post: 分享今日份雪陵仙尊，有喝到雪陵仙尊亲手调制的一横绛珠果吗？ 腾讯北京总部大楼 Share today’s portion of Xueling Xian, have you had a glass of the Xueling Xian’s hand-crafted one crossed jiangzhu fruit? Tencent Beijing Headquarters Building

[folklorin]

it just occurred to me how zuko and aang are sort of the antithesis of kyoshi and yun. zuko and aang started out as enemies but eventually became friends whereas kyoshi and yun started out as friends but ended up being enemies.

also zuko's fever dream where he dreamt that he was the avatar? it would have been a nice parallel if yun had a scene similar to that but instead of kyoshi it could be kuruk's face that he sees as he had always been the one that people compared him to. jiangzhu claimed that yun is the avatar because he plays pai shao the same way as kuruk which started the whole ordeal.

zuko dreaming abt aang bc he wants to caputure the avatar and yun dreaming abt kuruk or kyoshi bc he yearns for his avatarhood.

[veliseraptor]

Thoughts on how the cultivation world (at large) would have reacted to a-qing if she had gotten to live and interact with it? Either as xiao xingchen's disciple or something else, if you have ideas that might put her in contact with the jiangzhu

oh boy I wanna say the jianghu wouldn't know what hit em but maybe that's just because that's how they should feel. though actually they don't deserve her. unfortunately I feel like in actually a-Qing would probably not fare all that well out in the broader cultivation world, generally speaking.

she’s...got a lot of strikes against her, in terms of society: she’s a girl, she’s from the underclass, and at least in novel canon she’s “deformed” (her eyes look white) which is not going to serve her well with most people.

it would definitely help if she had Xiao Xingchen there standing over her shoulder claiming her as his disciple, but I think there’d still be a fair amount of side-eyeing and treating her as an outsider - Xiao Xingchen is weird and kind of eccentric but he has the clout/reputation to get away with it, and while that could spread to a-Qing by proxy I think it’s more likely that she would be perceived as either a mistake on his part or an object of pity on his part.

is this going to bother a-Qing? probably not a whole lot - she is, if nothing else, very used to people looking down at her and not thinking much of her. she doesn’t like it, and it is still...upsetting sometimes, but I think she has a pretty thick skin for it and a pretty practiced ability to go “whatever, they’re wrong and I have my daoshi so nyah” about it. is it going to bother Xiao Xingchen? oh, very much.

(stay tuned to witness Xiao Xingchen getting really, really, really indignant about the way someone treats a-Qing and giving them a thorough and public dressing down that’s not vicious but is still very painful, because having a famous folk hero stand there and tell you how disappointed in you he is and how he hopes you plan to apologize is just not an experience that’s going to be anything but excruciatingly humiliating.

a-Qing is going to enjoy this.)

in another situation where XIao Xingchen still dies (:() but a-Qing survives and gets away from Yi City...I think her life is even harder, actually. I know there are AUs out there with her getting adopted by one of the other sects (usually the Lans), but that is a scenario that I think is confined to a few very specific possibilities, constrained by the combination of (a) someone having to find her during that period of time and (b) that someone to be inclined to want to take a traumatized teenager home with them.

and I just don’t think there’s a long list of candidates there - and even if one does come along, she’s likely to run into at least some of the same kind of problems as above. 

the cultivation world is just really fuckin classist, you guys. and also sexist, which are two things that are not gonna add up very well for a girl of a-Qing’s background. 😕 having powerful backers would help, but in the case of Xiao Xingchen or Song Lan there’s only so far that status extends beyond them themselves when they’re already kind of outsiders, and in the case of someone else (Lan Wangji? I think I’ve seen that AU?) people would be nicer to her face/in his presence but...not so much otherwise, I don’t think.

I think it’s important to note that our major “adoptees from sketchy circumstances who manage to gain any respect” characters are Wei Wuxian, who is taken in as a young child and is dogged by the problems of his status throughout his life, actually; Lan Sizhui, who was also taken in as a young child, and Jin Guangyao, who...was not taken in as a young child and we see how that goes. I just don’t think “homeless teenager without any powerful preexisting connections” is going to have an easy time getting accepted in cultivation society; the example we have that’s actually that is Xue Yang and, well. I don’t think you could say that he’s exactly respected and I’d wager not all of that is down to his personality.

I feel like this got very grim for a “so what if a-Qing survived and got to have nice things!” question but unfortunately sometimes that’s what I do with happy AU concepts. I poke holes in them.

in a happier AU just across the board though, however one constructs that, I do think about her and the juniors. and the thing is specifically I think about the fact that she is actually older than the juniors despite looking the same age (by virtue of her having been dead for a solid chunk of time by the time they’re crossing paths) and the fact that she is now the cool older girl with this gaggle of baby cultivator (mostly) boys, and please consider that for a moment and tell me it’s not hilarious.

just. certified romantic Ouyang Zizhen, ca. 16-18 or whatever, attempting to flirt with a-Qing, ca. early 20s. she would be so merciless. that boy’s going home writing heartbroken love poetry.

[dreamofasupernaturalchamber]

Dabb's Dream of a Red Chamber: Dean, Sam, Cas, Jack, and the roles they play

In my last post, I explored how Dean starts off as Qin Keqing in S14 but becomes Lin Daiyu later on in the season. The transition point is 14x13-- the 300th episode. I always found it funny that Dabb chooses the Ruyi Baozhu to start this episode. It's a Buddhist item, and of course, SPN becomes very Buddhist toward the end (which is why everyone hates the finale). What I want to talk about today is Baozhu as both a pearl and a name.

This name appears in Dream of a Red Chamber. Who is Baozhu? One of Qin Keqing's maids who volunteers to be adopted by her after her death so she can play the role of the daughter during the funeral. She then becomes a nun after the funeral-- fitting, no, considering her name? Let me tell you this: a monk (and this gets interesting, but I'll get to that later) arrives at Lin Daiyu's home when she's young and says the only way she'll live a long life is if she becomes a nun. Obviously she doesn't choose this route. But going back to SPN--Dabb twists the Baozhu into another Buddhist message-- so why not use some other artifact from Buddhist lore? Why Baozhu?

I think it's because Baozhu is the combination of the Bao from Baoyu's name, and Zhu, which means pearl. The emphasis is on the pearl, which makes sense-- Dabb isn't going to involve yu, or jade, when Cas (the character corresponding to Baoyu) is secondary in this episode. Dean is the one who makes the wish, and so the treasure is going to represent him.

So who is associated with pearls in Red Chamber? Qin Keqing, for one-- she has maids who carry "pearl" in their names. And Lin Daiyu, who is the reincarnation of the Jiangzhu (Crimson Pearl) Fairy. She's also associated with the Jiling Pearls, which foreshadow the Jia family getting dragged into the royal family's power struggle.

But Dean is nothing like Lin Daiyu, readers might say! He's not sickly. We'll get to the sickly part later-- let's first talk about Lin Daiyu and what she represents.

First and foremost-- Lin Daiyu represents rebellion. Not literal rebellion (although if I'm not wrong, the Jia family gets into huge trouble for aligning themselves with the wrong princes), but rebellion against societal conventions and patriarchal feudalism. The last thing Baoyu wants to do is take the imperial exams and become an imperial bureaucrat-- but this is exactly what his family wants him to do. This is what Baochai, Shi Xiangyun, Xi Ren, and all the girls want him to do-- except for Daiyu. Daiyu tells him, "You should do what you want." And so they think of each other as zhiji, which I suppose can be translated as soulmate, but really means "a friend who knows me." A zhiji is a friend who knows your soul.

And this fits Dean and Cas-- Dean is the one who encourages Cas to rebel against Heaven. Dean is the one who asks Cas what he wants. Dean is the one who bucks convention; he's the subversive one, the one who represents free will.

(And as a side note, Qin Zhong, the younger brother of Qin Keqing, is another one of Baoyu's more subversive loves-- he dies just as Baoyu's oldest sister is made the highest ranking imperial concubine, which indicates that Baoyu's attempts to buck against feudalism are destined to fail and foreshadows Lin Daiyu's death. Qin Zhong, Qing Zhong-- his name tells us that Baoyu is a lover.)

Dean doesn't die from what looks suspiciously like TB, which is how Lin Daiyu dies in the last forty chapters of Red Chamber-- however, we know that those chapters are ghostwritten and doesn't fit her panci, or the poem that foretells her fate, the hints that she's married off for political purposes, or Zhiyanzhai's footnotes which indicate that she dies of a broken heart. Zhiyanzhai is very likely the coauthor of Red Chamber, and their notes indicate they were there for most of the events of the story (Red Chamber is thought to be a retelling of how the author's family fell upon hard times-- of course, there are other interpretations too, which I will talk about in a separate post). Dean dies from a broken heart two times. The second time takes.

Now let's talk about Cas and Baoyu. Baoyu is usually considered the reincarnation of Shen Ying Shi Zhe, who is a heavenly monk in another dimension. He waters the Crimson Pearl Grass every day, and she becomes a fairy as a result; it's hinted that he falls in love with her, which threatens his cultivation/enlightenment, so he runs off to the human world to gain more enlightenment, and she follows him and decides to repay her debt by crying all of her tears for him (the lyric "don't you cry no more" comes to mind). Yes, Lin Daiyu is the fairy this blade of grass becomes. Yes, Shen Ying Shi Zhe is responsible for giving her life, much as Cas is responsible for lifting Dean from perdition.

Cas also falls from Heaven to experience love, but up until Dabb took over, this was usually framed as a positive thing. I'm-- not quite sure Dabb actually frames it as a positive thing. Cas's ending calls to mind the endings of the gods/fairies who fall from grace because they fall in love in Chinese folklore-- they either become human, or they become enlightened and regain their standing in the heavens. Baoyu's real ending is unknown, but it's not hard to guess that he becomes enlightened and goes back to being Shen Ying Shi Zhe-- which would match nicely with Cas's ending.

There's another version of Red Chamber (there are multiple versions-- again, remember, this is a work of metafiction, and this will come into play later) where he's considered to be one of the rocks Nuwa was going to use to patch a hole in the sky, but was discarded. We usually interpret this rock as the piece of jade Baoyu was born with, but I do want to point out this version, because Cas, given his performance in the later seasons, also fits this description.

Then there's Sam-- he contains shades of Baoyu (he marries someone after Dean dies, but he's never happy, which is what happens to Baoyu; this is foretold in a song Baoyu hears in Bo Ming Si), but I'm going to argue that he is Baochai. Who is Baochai? The other girl in the love triangle-- Baoyu loves Daiyu, but marries Baochai instead (this plays out differently here). What does she represent? She represents money (there's the gold radical in chai, and it's often said that her union with Baoyu is a marriage of gold and jade, and her family is exceedingly wealthy). She represents adherence to tradition. She and Daiyu are like "sisters" at one point, but that falls apart because Lady Wang hates Daiyu and wants Baochai as her daughter-in-law instead. And even though Baochai and Daiyu top the first volume of the beauties, they share a poem that foretells their fate; all the other women get their own poems. And what's Baochai's fate?

It's a one liner-- a gold hairpin (chai) buried in snow. I've seen all sorts of theories flying around that she's supposed to die in the snow, but honestly, I think the ending in the ghostwritten chapters is probably close to what was planned for her. She marries Baoyu, but he leaves to become a monk and she lives alone in the Jia family. In the ghostwritten ending, she also has a son. Her room at the Jia's mansion (she lives with them)? It's compared to a Snow Hole; she's a minimalist when it comes to interior decoration.

And let's look at Sam's ending. He basically lives in a shrine to the dead with his one son, and it's clear his marriage was short-lived (no pictures of the wife). His ending is a perfect match for Baochai's.

And then there's Jack. I compared Jack to Baoyu in the previous post, and again, if you look at the stories of Shen Ying Shi Zhe and the rock (especially when you consider that Jack was born to stop the apocalypse/make the world a better place), you can see the similarities. But he also represents other characters-- Daiyu and most likely Prince Beijing, who's the head of the four princes, or the old guard; those two characters are connected through Baoyu, which makes for a nice trio of characters.

How does Jack represent Daiyu? There's the way he's not entirely welcome in his own home (Lin Daiyu lives with the Jia family, and Lady Wang dislikes her immensely.) There's the way he dies in 14x08-- from what looks suspiciously like TB, just as Daiyu dies in all the TV adaptations and in the ghostwritten chapters. He changes identities after this death -- he becomes the prince.

Let's finally talk about Prince Beijing. He's young-- under twenty. The Jia family is close to him. He clearly plays a role in the power struggle-- if we're going off the real prince he's based on, then he should be in the faction against the dowager emperor, which means he's loyal to the emperor, but most analyses claim that he's not loyal to the emperor. One piece of evidence for the latter viewpoint: he attends Qin Keqing's funeral in full regalia, which is considered disrespectful, and hands Baoyu a bracelet of Jiling pearls that the king gave him to symbolize their brotherhood. That's-- not what you do with what the emperor gives you. It's just not done. (That being said, I can see the real prince getting away with that, because he was the real emperor's favorite brother.) Baoyu then hands Daiyu those pearls, and she throws them away. Later on, Baoyu will hand Daiyu the prince's straw coat and she tosses it away again. She doesn't accept anything from Beijing until she's forced to. We can interpret this as Daiyu disapproving of Baoyu's alliance with Beijing (and there are other interpretations that assert Beijing is responsible for marrying off to distant lands, but since the last forty chapters were never written...).

This fits Jack. He's TFW's only hope against Chuck, who is both the emperor and the dowager emperor in this story. Cas has faith in him, just like Baoyu likes Prince Beijing. Dean doesn't have faith in him, just as it's implied that Daiyu doesn't have much faith in the prince either. This is where the meta gets very interesting, because who is Chuck? The writers? The network? What does it mean if he's both the emperor and the dowager emperor? I'm going to talk about this next in a post on the meta structure of SPN and Red Chamber.

What I want to point out before I end this post is that it's very likely Dabb planned these very controversial endings for Dean, Cas, and Sam-- I doubt censorship had anything to do with it. SPN may have been a story about a fight between the writers and the network, or it may have been a Buddhist story, but either way, I'm pretty sure SPN ended exactly as Dabb meant it to end.

[grad604tg]

Research of ‘A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains’

The Painting of a Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains is a silk on panel painting by Wang Ximeng of the Northern Song Dynasty, now in the Palace Museum, Beijing. The painting is painted on a single piece of silk, without the author's mark, with a poem inscribed by Hongli (Qianlong) of the Qing dynasty and a postscript by Cai Jing of the Song dynasty, with an inscription by Li Pu Xian of the Yuan dynasty on the end paper. The scroll is opened at the head of the wrapping, and several vermilion seals are visible at the head of the scroll, as well as the poem inscribed at the head of the scroll. The opening of the painting is straight into the clouds at the top of a high mountain, followed by rolling hills and steep hills, with a change of scenery and a gradual improvement. The artist's brushstrokes are a natural adaptation of nature's magic, starting with the village in the foreground and painting the peaks from across the river, with the two wings stretching out gently, opposite the rising mountains, playing an exquisite role in taking over. A bridge spans the river at the bottom left of the peaks and connects with the next group of scenes. Over two hills you can see deep mansions and hermits dressed in white everywhere, walking and stopping, seemingly writing poetry or composing music, moving on to another bridge, this one with a small span but with a pavilion on it. If you continue, you will be on the river. The view is like a fairy tale, with its vast, rolling hills. Once on the shore, the cliff path twists and turns leading to a deep courtyard. Waterfalls cascade from the mountains and flow back into the river. The view is fascinating, from high up to far away. At the gentle end of the mountains is a magnificent bridge across the river. The bridge across the river leading to the second section of beauty is spectacular, with wooden structural girders, thirty-two stirrups underneath and a palatial two-storey pavilion built in the middle, like a rainbow. The frequency of the rhythm of the peaks in this section is clearly intensified, followed by a swirl of peaks to the left and a flat slope stretching straight into the river, stretching out the momentum to Qiongdao, and then painting a close view of the mountains and the fishing village of Jiangzhu connected to Qiongdao. Connected to this are the pavilions of the peaks, and the poem inscribed on the front of the volume is a small, quaint bridge over a village in the mountains with a pavilion, clustered around the peak of the volume, which seems to plunge straight into the sky, reaching its climax. The peaks to the left of the peaks, with the twists and turns of the river deep into the painting, play a rotary role and become the conclusion of the second paragraph. A walk here is endlessly rewarding. From the bridge across the river you step onto the shore, with buildings lining both sides, over the mountains, down the valley and up the mountains to a plain with a patchwork of villages and houses. The cliffs at the edge of the plain are quite dangerous, but the mountains on the other side give the village a sense of security. However, the village appears to be isolated and does not lead to the next place, so return to the original path and enjoy the walk. The village in the valley, the fishing boats on the river bank, and the relaxed seclusion beckoned the boatman to continue on his way. The boat is in the water, and the two mountains echo each other across the water, as if they were cowherds and weavers across the Milky Way, trying their best to lean towards each other but hardly touching. On the shore a green flat land is alive and well, and the fishing boats dotted along the shore seem to carry the shouts of the fishermen. It took a trek over the mountains to stand below the summit. It is difficult to have the courage to climb despite the feeling of climbing. In the third stanza, the tension of the previous stanza is turned around and the tempo is calmed down, instantly removing the tension. The painting shows a small island, with a fishing village spread out beneath it and fishing boats dotted about, making the momentum of the opening turn downwards and serving as a follow-up. In the lower left of the painting, the sloping shore in a close up scene is connected to it, serving as a segue. At the end of the left-hand side of the painting is a rising peak, which extends upwards over the river and the distant mountains, thus concluding the momentum of the opening and concluding the whole volume.

A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains - Panoramic view

A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains - Partial view

Colour pallet 

For the initial concept, I extracted the colour palette from the Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains as the colours for the poster and DPS, using the traditional Chinese colour scheme to create a cultural collision sense poster.

[runephoenix6769]

I was saying this to a friend the other evening.

It would be very interesting to see Bryke explore a 'bad/evil' avatar using the position for thier own gain.

There is bound to be atleast one somewhere in that long line. (obv before bean counting Szeto because we have every avatar since him accounted for.)

Remember in ROK, Jiangzhu was waffling on about needing to find the new one before nefarious people got hold of them and used them for thier own agenda? (The irony)

This implies that somewhere in Avatar history this has occurred.

Imagine a rag tag group of people from the other nations have to band together to fight a nuke flinging Pope?

Not all of them need be Benders either. This could be the reason for the creation of the proto White Lotus?

Help set up why Szeto chose to put his nation and accountancy degree before the needs of the world as a whole.

It could be a conscious choice in order to reinstil faith in the avatar? That heeeyyy, they just like you or me, but the potential to be a WMD.

All avatars suffer the sins of thier predecessor.

Does the central message of the show apply to every character except Azula?

There's an entire episode that hammers the point home ("The Avatar and the Fire Lord").

Toph: It's like these people are born bad.

Aang: No, that's wrong. I don't think that was the point of what Roku showed me at all. [...] Roku was just as much Fire Nation as Sozin was, right? If anything, their story proves anyone's capable of great good and great evil. Everyone, even the Fire Lord and the Fire Nation have to be treated like they're worth giving a chance.

And Aang makes good on that by extending an olive branch to Fire Lord Ozai while he's literally burning the Earth Kingdom to the ground ("Sozin's Comet Part 3: Into the Inferno")

Aang: Please listen to me. We don't have to fight. You have the power to end it here and stop what you're doing.

This central message that everyone deserves a chance no matter who they are or what they've done applies to everyone, but when Azula fans want to see her grow, change, and find peace and happiness, suddenly there's all these reasons why this message doesn't or shouldn't apply.

OK, fandom.

[askmeaboutmyobsession]

Look at this cutie! TBH, when I think of porpoises I think of this. Which is weird because I never really knew this subspecies existed, but here it is. This is the Yangtze Finless Porpoise and they are dying fast.

Yangtze is a river in China that is now home to only this cetacean (aquatic marine mammals). There used to be another dolphin subspecies called the Yangtze river dolphin, or Baiji, but they were declared extinct in 2007. They were the first large vertebrae forced to extinction by human activity in 50 years. The finless porpoise, also known as jiangzhu, will follow within 14 years if nothing is done to safe them. They are declining at such a fast rate (6.4 percent/year) that they are actually rarer than China’s giant panda.

Incidentally, the finless porpoise are called the “underwater pandas” due to their smile and cuddly personalities.

The jiangzhu can grow to 6 feet and weigh 100 pounds. They are a gray color, except at birth, when they are black. The color fades gradually until they are fully gray at 6 months old. 

Unlike other marine mammals, these porpoise haven’t been hunted since the 1900s. Their threats comes from getting caught in fishing nets, noise and trash pollution, collisions with boats, and the building of dams that block their reach of the river.

China’s regulations are not as strictly enforced as the United States, for example, but they do have regulations on fishing. The types of fishing that threaten the porpoises is snaring and long-line fishing. The illegal style of electrofishing claims porpoise lives as well.

China is doing what they can to help, by taking some from the Yangtze and moving them to preserves and places where humans won’t interact with them. It is connected to the Yangtze seasonally by late-March, so they will still be able to roam the rivers further away from cities and hopefully return to their new home each time. 

Here’s hoping that conservationists working with local fisherman can help save these beautiful animals!

KK (10-14-17)