Team Black Could Never Serve This Much Cunt...

The vast majority (around 80%) of Chinese characters are made up of a radical (the general meaning) and a phonetic.

Radical 女 nǚ (woman) and phonetic 馬 mǎ (horse) = 媽 mā, mother (your mum sounds like a horse).

But a small minority are pictograms, that is to say a picture of the thing they represent.

Pictograms are the earliest characters, thousands of years old, but many are still used every day.

If you look at the oracle bone script for rat, tiger and elephant you’ll see they are clearly pictures of the animal they signify.

But if you look at the modern versions, you’ll notice something odd, they’re all rotated 90 degrees onto their sides.

Why? Why are all these characters written with the animals balancing on their tails?

Well, it’s for a straight-forward, practical reason.

For a couple thousand years before paper was invented writing materials were limited. We had silk (expensive), bronze (expensive and impractical), and oracle bones (religious use only).

And one more…

That was cheap, plentiful, durable, and easy to erase and rewrite characters. The wonder that is…

Bamboo!

It was cut into strips, and tied into books. Long thin strips of bamboo contributed to the Chinese custom of writing vertically, from top to bottom (and right to left).

But it also meant that it’s much easier to write some characters length-ways so that they easily fit onto the strip.

So that’s it, mystery solved. That’s why a lot of Chinese picture characters are written at a right angle.

Ewan Mitchell as Aemond Targaryen House of the Dragon 2x08

his majesty's faithful dog

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What even is a Draco in Leather Pants?

Look, I really like the Television Tropes website. It’s fun and you can spend a lot of time reading it. The tropes it has formulated are, for the most part, the tropes you can actually discern and find quite often in fictional works, and the descriptions are usually quite witty and well supported. The examples and their justifications can be…questionable, since anyone can provide them, and may lead to a debate between contributors (i.e. anyone who has bothered to register and post), but still, usually the majority of examples make sense and more or less fit with the description provided at the top of the page. 

But not always.

There’s supposed to be a trope called Draco in Leather Pants, which I had been vaguely aware for a while (basically, that it had something to do with people in the Harry Potter fandom stanning the character of Draco Malfoy and thinking he’s hot), and have been recently reminded because I’ve recently seen at least a couple of mentions of “leather pantsing”in various comments in fandom discussions, or links to the Television Trope page for said trope (for instance, a link to that page was provided in a page of a podcast about Jaime Lannister… who isn’t even among the examples listed on that page, BTW). So, it seems that this is supposed to be an actual trope and that people know what it’s supposed to be about.

Well, since I’ve actually looked at the above mentioned page, read the description and looked through the list of examples from various media given on that page, I understand even less what it’s supposed to be about. If anyone has a better understanding of it, please help me.

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