#name kerfufflery

[hunxi-guilai]

Hey, I have two questions. First, I saw an ask that said you had reblogged a “dark SiZhui” post and I’ve been trawling your blog looking for it because I can’t imagine what that looks like, but I have to get back to work. Can you link it? My other question is that I just read a post where you say that Song Lan and Jin Ling “prefer” to go by their birth names. Can you talk about that a little bit, and what it would mean if Jiang Cheng does too, with his rank as sect leader? I assumed that 1/2

(found dark!Sizhui via a combination of my tags ‘mdzs fanart’ and ‘Lan Sizhui,’ here you go!)

ahh, I’m eating my words today, because another anon popped into my inbox with some very good points about your questions!

In my haste to answer asks, I completely forgot that courtesy names are often linked to age (which, historically has been age 20 for men, but another anon who’s actually read the novel mentioned maybe seeing the author mention something about everyone getting their courtesy name at 15 in the CQL world), in which case, Jin Ling is either 1) not old enough to have his courtesy name, or 2) just barely old enough to use his courtesy name. Anon up in the screenshot also points out very good in-character reasons for both Jiang Cheng and Jin Ling to put their respective feet down on going by a courtesy name that evil incarnate, Yiling Laozu Wei Wuxian selected.

Again, a lot of the courtesy name/personal name worldbuilding in CQL is pretty nebulous (let’s be real what part of worldbuilding in CQL ISN’T nebulous, my Brandon Sanderson main blog is crying), so it’s difficult to say there are hard-and-fast rules about what you’re allowed to do with the dynamic between personal and courtesy names. My guess was that Song Lan preferred to use his personal name -- Xiao Xingchen introduces him with it, he doesn’t object to anyone else using it, and his courtesy name ‘Zichen’ is kind of a special name shared between just Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan. 

w/r/t to whether or not Jiang Cheng (or any other character) could choose to go by their personal names rather than courtesy names in public society is kind of up in the air; I find it hard to imagine that people would actively be like “uh, no, I’m going to keep calling you by your courtesy name” (unless it’s like, Lan Xichen or Lan Wangji, who are both Brought Up Right and it would physically pain them to be less polite than normal) if Jiang Cheng were like “skip the courtesies, just call me Jiang Cheng.” That being said, I’m limited by my imagination; maybe that’s totally off-base.

A lot of these cultural/tonal questions about when to use personal/when to use courtesy names are difficult to answer because courtesy naming was a practice that was phased out during the 20th century (shout-out to the Cultural Revolution, except no, that wasn’t nice, anti-shout-out to the Cultural Revolution) and isn’t widely used in modern society anymore.

what might be an interesting case study in the opposite direction (someone choosing to go as exclusively by their courtesy name as possible) might be Lan Wangji -- I think Wei Wuxian is the only one who calls him Lan Zhan (but boy does he yell Lan Wangji’s personal name a lot), whereas Lan Xichen, y’know, the closest person to Lan Wangji in existence, calls his brother ‘Wangji.’ Is this a personal Lan Wangji preference thing, or a Gusu Lan politeness thing? Alas, we’ll never know, because there are no rules in this world rip MXTX please

(this post is a general follow-up to these two posts)