#mxtx said feelings >>>>>>>historical conventions

[winepresswrath]

I have been reading through your JC asks for literally about an hour. Your metas and takes are just *chefs kiss* as are your tags. And because it feels like a lot of CQLblrs have closed and/or moved on to the next (not sure how as I have been consumed by CQL for the best part of 2 years!), I was wondering whether yiu might be able to answer a language question or point me towards someone who could? I can't find an answer anywhere - close but not quite. I get the seniority naming convention when applied to siblings or sibling shaped demonic cultivators. What happens when you toss in cousins (with a different surname) and martial siblings? (Yes I am thinking specifically giving jc a Yu cousin). Which one trumps which if as a disciples WWX is head disciple so da- and jc is er-but the cousin is older? Does jc being SMJ automatically make him more senior even if he's biologically the younger cousin? I just have thoughts about wwx coming back and jc being like reluctantly yes this is my emotional support ?biaoge? he stops me from murdering things. Why are you sad? You didn't want to do that did you?

Anyway I'd love to hear your thoughts (on the scenario as much as the language question!)

Aw, thank you so much anon! I am not the best person to ask about this but I can give it a try! My go to for this kind of thing is drwcn's tumblr, and while I didn't find anything exactly on point I could very easily have missed something and she generally has a bunch of great resource posts. The rules governing martial sects are kind of a mashup of genre convention and whatever the author thought would work for their story, and I basically know just enough to be aware that I know very little, so please take the following with several grains of salt

As far as I know, martial siblings and maternal cousins exist in parallel seniority universes which do not impact each other unless the streams cross by virtue of both of them being disciples of the same clan, so neither of them would really trump the other. Wei Wuxian is still Jiang Cheng’s Da-Shixiong and hypothetical Biaoge is still Jiang Cheng’s Biaoge but they’re not officially anything to each other so they don’t impact each other’s ranking. If Wei Wuxian had been officially adopted, then he’d slot in between Biaoge and Jiang Cheng in cousin seniority. If Biaoge had joined the Jiang as a child for some reason, then since he’s the oldest of the three of them he’d be Da-Shixiong and Wei Wuxian would be Er-Shixiong.

Social standing isn't the same thing as seniority, though it does affect how seniority is expressed in practical terms. Sect Leader Jiang might have a lot more clout than his cousin and that might impact their relationship in a million ways but his seniors are still his seniors, the same way Jin Guangyao is Chief Cultivator but Xichen is still Er-ge.

Since it sounds like Biaoge isn't around much until the second life, I presume either

Jiang Cheng has a friend who is also his maternal cousin and that has no impact on the seniority naming convention so you can proceed straight to the messy feelings

Jiang Cheng's cousin has joined the Jiang Sect as an adult, in which case I've got very little for you. If Biaoge has become Jiang Cheng's disciple and Wei Wuxian gets officially reinstated, then I think Wei Wuxian is his shishu despite the age stuff, in the same way Xiao Xingchen is Wei Wuxian's shishu. What I have no idea about is how a fully trained adult disciple fits into the hierarchy of a clan they joined later in life. Presumably if he's learning Jiang techniques from Jiang Cheng then Jiang Cheng actually is his teacher, in which case I return to you an error message! I don't know how that works.

When it comes to Yu cousins, my feelings are:

Jiang Cheng seems pretty isolated in canon and the Yu are conspicuous in their absence after the burning of Lotus Pier. A powerful maternal family would presumably be a great source of support for Jiang Cheng and Yanli, but they're nowhere to be seen. It makes it hard for me to believe that they both survived as a clan and any of them have a close relationship with Jiang Cheng.

0 fucks given I love the idea of Jiang Cheng being friends with his Yu cousins and I hope you link me when you finish, because the particular angle you have going is fully of delightful knives. I’m always a sucker for Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian being jealous and feeling like they have no real right to be jealous and then awkwardly displacing their misery before they hug.

[tonyglowheart]

Youtube recommended this video to me and it’s quite fascinating and good. The video essay discusses hard worldbuilding (worldbuilding via facts transparency and creating a world system & explaining it & fitting the story into the world, e.g. Lord of the Rings), and soft worldbuilding (worldbuilding by which things are NOT always explicitly explained and which world rules are more flexible and character beats can be prioritized vs trying to fit the story to the world, or having to explain the world’s rules).

I believe a general difference in the priorities of “hard” worldbuilding is to create an other world which feels realistic because it has internal rules & logic which are constructed, presented, and explained, and things that happen in that world fit into those patterns of rules/logic. Whereas "soft” worldbuilding creates an other world through the foreignness of the world conventions to the reader/viewer, which are normal and common to the inhabitants of the world. To the inhabitants of the world, there are things that DON’T need to be explained (i.e. everyone knows where Punt is, why would someone need to explain it; we’re just going to talk about Punt). The priorities and techniques for each type of worldbuilding are DIFFERENT, but one is not “better” than the other.

As the video sums it it, Hard Worldbuilding vs Soft Worldbuilding:

In the context of fandom & fandom interpretations, I suppose this is interesting to me because I can see this happening to EN fandoms with “foreign” medias, where some things would not need to be said bc they’d be a cultural understanding to the target audience, but which become “soft worldbuilding” in creating an “Other” world. 

But at the same time, I see a lot of ppl trying to create, ascribe, or assign hard worldbuilding aspects where they might not necessarily exist. Being as I read MXTX’s TGCF postscript where she talks a bit more about her approach to fiction (i.e. she prefers to invent settings & not set things in a particular historical period so she has more freedom to create, as well as having to do less research XD), I feel like I have a better idea of how she might have approached the world for MDZS, and I do think you see a lot of that in MDZS as well. Some of it, I do think we can draw on historical precedent and references to fill in some of the blanks. But I don’t think the world was necessarily constructed to HAVE a set system, so there WILL be “inconsistencies” that fit character beats more vs the characters being made to fit the world. (But I also do think some people also have misinterpretations - or interpretations rooted in other priorities or which might not be the full picture - of the source culture & and of historical precedent in terms of how they approached constructing the “hard” worldbuilding for mdzs, but that’s a separate topic)

As Hello Future Me says about soft worldbuilding:

The fewer requirements to rationalise soft worldbuilding choices means you can prioritise and be more flexible with meaning you want to imbue your world with.

And I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind in terms of approaching more “literary” analysis in terms of interpreting media for fandom. That not every piece of media has or starts with a world construction that it’s fitting itself into; that sometimes, the world is built around the story and the characters, and that’s fine and it doesn’t HAVE to have a set world construction with a prescribed internal logic in order to be valid.

[ohnobjyx]

so, i am from the west and before cql it never crossed my mind to check out c-ent (i guess that's almost universal for white people over here) but i started watching cql because there's a lack of lgbt media in the world and now i got interested as a consequence in the rest of c-ent and learning chinese, so i wonder if it could happen in ten years or so that the government realizes they can export lgbt content, suck people into c-ent, get money & so they might relax on censorship, could that be?

Hi, anon! Just for your info, your ask made me think a lot in the past few days. I’m happy to see that there are more people hooked on c-ent! If I’ve to be honest, I consume much more c-ent than western. There’s a certain beauty and poetry that it’s really different from western dramas.

Okay, there are several parts in my answer, so I’d like to tackle them one by one:

Background and language

LGBT content and public stance

Money (I strongly recommend you to read this one and the next, this is your answer, anon)

Success

If any of you are interested, click to see below the cut!

Disclaimer: except actual numbers (some are from official reports, others from articles), the post does have a heavy coating of “my opinion”. Beware.

1. Background and language

If I’m not mistaken, anon (if I am, I’d like to be corrected), you may have watched only CQL and maybe The Guardian, which is another fairly popular among int-fans (I haven’t watched it yet, no spoilers, please!).

These two had a combination of factors that made it easier for int-fans to accept them: fantasy world + well-received lgbt subtext (wangxian!) + less amount of poetic and lyrical language + the plot is surprisingly good (at least CQL from my knowledge). But it’s not the case of the rest of the dramas, and it may not be of the future BL dramas.

When I say “fantasy world” (c-fans often debate in which historical period CQL is based upon, but mxtx never bothered too much with that kind of details), I mean specifically that there isn’t a preexisting set of rules that the viewer may not know about. It’s often commented how CQL never explained how their world works (so a lot of it is fanon) and that viewers had to learn the niceties and the conventions of the world by watching the show.

It’d be a slight problem if the show was set on a historical period and even in a modern setting. C-dramas in general, since their target audience is Chinese, never bother introducing any kind of background or cultural convention. This would be just a little problem, after all, if watching tv shows contribute to our knowledge, we get an unexpected gain. But for many people, if the background or the references are difficult to understand, they may feel discouraged to keep watching it.

(And the rythm of the c-dramas is often extremely slow for western standards, since you have 40-50 episodes to develop a single story, instead of one season of 12 episodes). 

The main problem I see is the language barrier. Something I (and mostly c-fans that speak English or int-fans that speak fluent Chinese) marvel everytime I think about it is how people could stand the subtitles. I’ve yet to find good subtitles (though the ones from the official Youtube channel do a passable job and I’ve heard that on viki the subtitles are good too).

The meaning is often twisted (if not outright reversed sometimes), the poetry is lost, the difference between levels of formality is also blurred, the way Chinese people address each other is also not respected (I’m looking at you, Netflix subtitles). So you can’t ignore the damage the language barrier does to the reception of a tv series.

You’ve said it yourself, anon, that CQL made you interested in Chinese as a language. Chinese, from my point of view, is a fascinating language, but it’s so difficult to translate.

Among other things, the main language barrier is the use of 成语 (cheng yu). They are traditional idiomatic expressions, usually consisting in 4 characters, and originated from ancient literature. Commonly they are created by succintly paraphrasing or summarizing the original text, so they convey information a lot more compactly than normal speech or writing.

From what I know, there’s a logistical problem: a cheng yu of 4 characters is often read in around 1 second, but if the translator wants to include the most complete translation, that get all the nuances of the phrase, it can often end up in a long phrase that take quite longer to read (I saw once a cheng yu literally translated and well... 无语).

This use of chengyu spreads from historical to modern to fantasy tv dramas. CQL’s dialogues use less of them (the novel was plagued with them), making it easier to sub. They also make less use of poetry and literature references that so often appear in historical dramas (just the reference, no context whatsoever, I despair sometimes too), thus making it easier to convey to int-fans.

2. LGBT content and public stance

You wrote at the end: “the government realizes they can export lgbt content, suck people into c-ent...”

This would be assuming that the government acknowledges it is lgbt content. Which they don’t. 

When they were making the adaptation from the novel to the tv script, they were very carefully thinking of how they would introduce the series to the regulation department that controls everything that gets aired in China. In fact, the target audience they specified was “teenagers and youngsters” because of its xianxia themes, its fantasy world and the whole adventure after WWX’s resurrection (but we know that the real target audience was female and mainly in their 20s).

So officially, even though it’s based on a BL novel (and the general public knows it), the government only acknowledged it as an xianxia drama. Even if someone points the BL elements out, they are ambiguous enough that they can avoid the questioning. And since it brings money, as you say, they may turn a blind eye to the people who points it to them now.

There’s another point of your ask I want to highlight: “if it could happen in ten years or so...”. Ten years is a lot of time. I trust their society to take steps in a much more lgbt-friendly direction in our globalized world, and maybe things will be different in a decade’s time, when the younger, more open-minded generation starts to take over the control. Censorship will one day be relaxed or even disappear (from my pov, this is possible with more time and a great change).

(We can’t forget about the propaganda here... so I’m unsure of how this issue will develop in the future).

However, I don’t think the change will come from the government realizing that it is very profitable, and this is the last point I wanted to talk about.

3. Money

Disclaimer: it’s difficult to find out how much a tv series makes as a profit, since they keep making money to this day, this minute, this second. It’s also difficult to find the information, since I don’t work in the industry so I’d to make due with what I have.

I won’t lie, anon, when I saw your ask the first time, I thought: they have no need. You talk about the government realizing that they can earn money with lgbt series, but the reality is, CQL, while one of the highest earning dramas from 2019, it’s not the only one capable of that.

Recently it was issued the list of the Top 10 Most Influential TV Dramas of 2019, in which CQL was top 7. “Not bad!”, one would say.

I’ve taken the data from a few others so you can make a comparison in their profit.

A c-drama usually earns money by selling the license rights to different platforms, commercials and merchandising. In the case of CQL, you can add the concerts, fan meetings and the different events and articles.

Top 1 in the chart was 都挺好 (All is well, I really recommend this one, it’s one of the best dramas I’ve watched). This drama was aired from March 1 to March 25 in 2019. The data from April 3, 2019 is a copyright profit of 667,000,000 ¥ (a total of 14,500,000¥ per episode, the total of what 2 tv stations, Tencent, Youku and Aiqiyi paid for license rights).

Around the time CQL was finishing airing (on Tencent), the copyright profit was around 156,000,000¥. For transparency: this data is from August 20, and CQL finished airing on August 25, while All is well data is from a week after the finale. However, I doubt that in a week CQL could reach a profit of 500,000,000 ¥ to match the profit of All is well (I don’t know how much Netflix paid them for licensing rights, but it may be a similar sum).

Top 5 in the chart is 庆余年 (Joy of Life, in this one XZ had a secondary role). This was has a fanbase too in int-fans, though smaller than CQL’s. The company that’s the main stockholder for this series made a profit of 4,420,000,000¥  in 2019, approximately 48% is copyright profit. The series that brought more profit was Joy of Life, though, of course, they produce more series.

By the time they finished airing, CQL had made a profit of around 400,000,000¥ (estimated), with predictions of it getting to 800,000,000¥ (taking into account license, commercial profit, merchandising and the concerts). I haven’t been able to find how much they made in the end, but it must be around 900 millions to a billion yuans.

I know 800 millions it’s a lot of money (more than what I’ll ever see), but if you take it and compare it with the 667 millions All is well made with just licensing the series, one can understand that a series like All is well is much more profitable than CQL.

However, there’s no need to rank in the top 1 to get this kind of profit. 如懿传 (The legend of Ruyi), a series from 2018 that was the continuation of a drama that had been wildly succesful in 2011. It ranked 5th on douban, but didn’t make it to the top 10 chart of the most influential TV dramas (in spite of a superb leading actress and supporting actors, the plot and the poor production didn’t get it as high as it could have been).

BUT. Just license rights to 3 platforms made them earn 15,000,000¥ per episode. For a show that wasn’t as successful as people had predicted it to be, their profit is quite decent (the production cost was also quite higher than CQL’s, so maybe the net profit wasn’t so high for a 90-episode drama, but they didn’t fail in this investment).

Nonetheless, not everything revolves around money. In my opinion, more than direct economic profit, for CQL their main gain was the fanbase they amassed, that has skyrocketed the actors’ careers, let them make a lot of profit with merchadising and the concerts, and the series still profitable to this day. They have also contributed greatly to the increased presence and popularity of Asian content in the West, which isn’t a small acomplishment.

(As I’m writing this, I’m also watching last week’s episode of TTXS. Guys, the garlic commerce in just 1 county made a profit of more than 9 billion yuans in 3 months. Just so you all have a reference.)

4. Success

Nothing guarantees that a BL drama will be successful. Though there isn’t a lot of BL dramas, The Guardian and CQL aren’t the only (nor the first) BL novels to be adapted into tv series.

In fact, just in 2019, there were 59 BL media (novels, games, manhuas) to be adapted into TV series. Of them, 3 have finished filming and have been aired. Of the 59, I had only heard of Winter Begonia, which has a historical setting and the two male leads are famed actors (one of them is YZ, dd’s motorcycle friend). So just the BL theme doesn’t ensure the success of the drama.

And yet, we haven’t caught news of it here. I didn’t know there were so many (for a country that has a strict censorship, 3 BL dramas in a year is a lot) until I was getting information for this post.

That’s why, in my opinion, if someone said “hey, let’s relax a bit the regulation, since CQL was so liked by the fans”, others may say “but out of 6 BL dramas, only CQL was successful... so it must not be the BL theme after all”.

CQL has many many factors that makes it as good as it is, wangxian being one of the main reasons I fell in love with CQL, but it’s true that it isn’t the only key to its success.

In summary

(I appreciate it if you have been able to read until here).

CQL (and The Guardian, in a lesser degree) had a very distinct set of factors and conditions that made it possible for it to have great success with int-fans. However, there is a trend: only dramas that have been highly rated in China to start with were able to stand out in western countries as well. In my opinion, that’s because people aren’t so different: what the general public likes is very similar, no matter if it’s eastern or western countries.

In fact, CQL has been more successful among the same kind of public everywhere: mainly female, from around 15 to 30 years old.

Moreover, this target audience is very restricted. It’s just a matter of numbers that a drama like All is well, which target audience goes from mainly females from 20 to x years old, is more likely to be successful (yes, at my home, all of my aunts, my parents and I have seen the drama, while only I have watched CQL).

I think I sometimes ramble a lot, so I’ll write down my point here: the entertainment industry is profitable just with the Chinese audience. If a good drama ends up getting famous Western countries, is just 锦上添花 (“adding flowers to the brocade”) or “the icing on the cake”.

CQL is the exception, not the rule. As a drama last year, it broke a record, going on hot search for 49 days on a row in China. It’s a incredibly rewarding show, and, because of that, incredibly lucrative as well. However, since all its accomplishments are very rare, I don’t think this boom will be easily reproduced with just any other drama.

So, to answer your question about whether the profit they can gain with BL dramas would make them reconsider the censorship issue... why would they?

(I’d put everyone to farm garlic).