Tbh, I Think If You Read An Mxtx Novel With The Expectation That The Story’s Hero Is Meant To Learn

Five of Cups for the Song of Clarity MDZS tarot deck

A short comic I made about my experiences as a seasonal worker, and the way places change you.

Last Line Game

Tagged by @e-n-t-r-o-p-i-c-f-r-o-g weeee

The last line I wrote:

The sight is so that Xie Lian concludes he’s still dreaming. The proportions of this person are mythological. How tall can he be?

If you're reading this and want to join, feel free!

WIP Game!

I was tagged by @e-n-t-r-o-p-i-c-f-r-o-g. Thanks!

Rules:

Make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder.

Let people send you asks with the title that most intrigues them, then post a snippet or reveal something about it.

Tag others to continue the game.

I'm going to provide a little more information besides the titles, because otherwise, picking one feels too much like a shot in the dark.

UNPUBLISHED:

In Memoriam: MDZS, postcanon. Wei Ying is asked to pretend he's Mo Xuanyu and bid farewell to the former nanny of the Mo family, so she can pass away in peace.

Scars: MDZS, postcanon. Wei Ying asks Lan Zhan if, given the chance, he'd erase the scars left by his punishment.

First night: TGCF, missing scene. During the first night he spends in Puqi shrine after meeting Xie Lian on the ox cart, Hua Cheng ponders about what kind of life the prince has lived the last eight hundred years, and about the function of his second shackle.

Clarity: TGCF, canondivergence. Hua Cheng comes back from his second dispersion early, but he's barely there, unable to move or speak on his own. Afraid of exposing his beloved to any malignant actor while in such vulnerable state, and tormented by how much and in how many ways he missed him, Xie Lian locks them both inside the Mt. Taicang's shack until he can come up with a solution.

Pearl Memories: TGCF, postcanon. Xie Lian decides to learn how to style hair properly, and in return, he learns about what happened to the lock of hair he tied around Hua Cheng's finger during the land of the tender incident.

Haifisch: TGCF, mermaid AU. To unwind from his gruelling job and difficult circumstances, Xie Lian has got into the habit of screaming underwater while he swims at the bay, unaware of the fact that his sorrow smells like blood in the water for Hua Cheng, a siren that feeds from despair.

The Newcomer/King of the Ghosts: TGCF, postcanon. A new earth master ascends and immediately accuses Hua Cheng of having stolen his auspicious fate in marriage and use it for himself in order to marry Xie Lian. Seeing in this a chance to free herself from her bureaucratic prison, Ling Wen offers to take care of the case.

The Secret Garden: TGCF, postcanon. Xie Lian is a tireless worker, and while Hua Cheng deeply admires that of him, he's also desperate to make him settle and rest after so many years of struggle. Perhaps making Paradise Manor feel like a real home could do the trick.

Picture perfect: TGCF, modern AU. Hua Cheng begrudgingly agrees to participate in a photography project of his fellow uni student He Xuan, under the condition that he won't have to remove his eyepatch. However, when he arrives to the studio and meets Xie Lian, an incredibly charming man who's missing the right leg, he fears he might be persuaded into exposing his own scars.

The fantasy creatures pitches: SVSSS, MDZS, TGCF (but they aren't crossovers). Chinese mythology AUs. I wrote six pitches for the Tails And Scales fanzine, two for each novel. They picked one from TGCF, but I can talk about the other five.

Fairy Boy: Zelda BotW, missing scene. The story of Link growing up and how he ventured into the Lost Woods to find the Master Sword at age 12. It's entirely told in rhymes, like a children's bedtime story.

ONGOING:

Heavenly Damnation: TGCF, modern AU, metal music. After eight years of taking on awful gigs to stay afloat, Xie Lian is forced to confront his past when issues with the registration office bring him back to the capital. The difference? Hua Cheng, who has been his biggest fan since the beginning, is now ready to help him out of the hell Bai Wuxiang put him into.

Treasure Hunting in the Clouds: TGCF, modern AU. Hua Cheng bought a first class couple's pod to fly back to London after a business trip to the USA, but the airline forced his hand at the last minute and shoved a stranger in the other half of the bed. Hua Cheng hates this at first, but he changes his mind when he sees who's his impromptu pod mate.

Within Reach: TGCF, canondivergence. During their long walk towards Mount Tonglu while Hua Cheng is in his sealed child form, he and Xie Lian encounter humans who tell stories and legends of Crimson Rain Seeking A Flower, and decide to make a game out of it in order for Xie Lian to learn more about his secretive companion.

The Perfect Gift: Zelda BotW, post canon. Unauthorized sequel of the orphaned fic "A Most Convenient Marriage". On a mad race to eliminate the new threat looming over Hyrule, Link comes to terms with his strained relationship with Zelda and the blooming love he shares with Prince Sidon.

This... is hella lot more than I expected to have, lmao. Feel free to ask about as many titles as you want. I'm just now starting to use Tumblr again, so I'm sorry if I'm being inopportune with the tags: @ardenrabbit, @edenwolfie, @peachylixir, @callmefoxypepsi.

Answered questions:

The Newcomer/King of the Ghosts

In Memoriam

Treasure Hunting in the Clouds

Within Reach

Clarity

It’s that time of year. Reblog with how many you’ve heard of.

Consider: TGCF... but metal.

Written by: Yabanned. Art by: Tiiracotta. Beta-read by: Leonidskies.

Read Withering Lotus (part 1 of 3) on AO3.

Summary:

Xie Lian is a talented multi-instrumentalist who had a meteoric rise as a metal star when his band, White Lotus, released their first EP and got the attention of the prestigious label Immortal Records. When he became the youngest artist to sign with them at the age of 17, he felt that he had the world in the palm of his hand. Three years later, though, a song he wrote tore everything down: he lost his contract, his career, his friends and his family. Vetoed and blacklisted, he was forced to live on the move, as far away from the offices of his old record label as possible, picking little odd jobs related to music in order to survive.

After eight years, a bureaucratic nightmare forces Xie Lian to come back to the capital. He tries his best to go unnoticed, yet he receives two unsettling requests upon arrival: a man in red wants his permission to cover a song he wrote, and a man in white wants him to inherit his mask.

Part of the TGCF Minibang 2022.

my toxic xennial trait is that i believe something should either be software (in which case after i download it i shouldn't need to be connected to use it) or a web page (which shouldn't require me to download anything to use it, however badly, in a browser). fuck your mandatory single function constant connection apps

Happy Chinese New Year, the year of the dragon!

This is the mighty ghost dragon Hua Cheng, whose rain is made of blood. He turned into a dragon after accidentally swallowing the red coral pearl he stole from the prince. Since then, he's been seeking the lost god to give him his pearl and blessing back.

culture isn’t modular

I did a thread (actually several) on Twitter a few years ago about Christianity’s attempts to paint itself as modular, and I’ve been seeing them referenced here in the cultural christianity Discourse, and a few people have DMed me asking me to post it here, so here’s a rehash of several of those threads:

A big part of why Christian atheists have trouble seeing how culturally Christian they still are is that Christianity advertises itself as being modular, which is not how belief systems have worked for most of human history. 

A selling point of Christianity has always been the idea that it’s plug-and-play: you don’t have to stop being Irish or Korean or Nigerian to be Christian, you don’t have to learn a new language, you keep your culture. 

And you’re just also Christian.

(You can see, then, why so many Christian atheists struggle with the idea that they’re still Christian–to them, Christianity is this modular belief in God and Jesus and a few other tenets, and everything else is… everything else. Which is, not to get ahead of myself, very compatible with some tacit white supremacy: the “everything else” is goes unexamined for its cultural specificity. It’s just Normal. Default. Neutral.)

Evangelicals in particular love to contrast this to Islam, to the idea that you have to learn Arabic and adopt elements of Arab culture to be Muslim, which helps fuel the image of Islam as a Foreign Ideology that’s taking over the West.

The rest of us don’t have that particular jack

Meanwhile, Christians position Christianity as a modular component of your life. Keep your culture, your traditions, your language and just swap out your Other Religion Module for a Christianity Module.

The end game is, in theory, a rainbow of diverse people and cultures that are all one big happy family in Christ. We’re going to come back to how Christianity isn’t actually modular, but for the moment, let’s talk about it as if it had succeeded in that design goal. 

Even if Christianity were successfully modular, if it were something that you could just plug in to the Belief System Receptor in a culture and leave the rest of it undisturbed, the problem is most cultures don’t have a modular Belief System Receptor. Spirituality has, for the entirety of human history, not been something that’s modular. It’s deeply interwoven with the rest of culture and society. You can’t just pull it out and plug something else in and have the culture remain stable.

(And to be clear, even using the term “spirituality” here is a sop to Christianity. What cultures have are worldviews that deal with humanity’s place in the universe/reality; people’s relationships to other people; the idea of individual, societal, or human purpose; how the culture defines membership; etc. These may or may not deal with the supernatural or “spiritual.”)

And so OF COURSE attempting to pull out a culture’s indigenous belief system and replace it with Christianity has almost always had destructive effects on that culture.

Not only is Christianity not representative of “religion” full stop, it’s actually arguably *anomalous* in its attempt to be modular (and thus universal to all cultures) rather than inextricable from culture.

Now, of course, it hasn’t actually succeeded in that–the US is a thoroughly Christian culture–but it does lead to the idea that one can somehow parse out which pieces of culture are “religious” versus which are “secular”. That framing is antithetical to most cultures. E.g. you can’t separate the development of a lot of cultural practices around what people eat and how they get it from elements of their worldview that Christians would probably label “religious.” But that entire *framing* of religious vs. secular is a Christian one.

Is Passover a religious holiday or a secular one? The answer isn’t one or the other, or neither, or both. It’s that the framing of this question is wrong.

And Christianity isn’t a plugin, however much it wants to be

Moreover, Christianity isn’t actually culture-neutral or modular. 

It’s easy for this to get obscured by seeing Christianity as a tool of particular cultures’ colonialism (e.g. the British using Christianity to spread British culture) or of whiteness in general, and not seeing how Christianity itself is colonial. This helps protect the idea that “true” Christianity is good and innocent, and if priests or missionaries are converting people at swordpoint or claiming land for European powers or destroying indigenous cultures, that must be a misuse of Christianity, a “fake” or “corrupted” Christianity.

Never mind that for every other culture, that culture is what its members do. Christianity, uniquely, must be judged on what it says its ideals are, not what it actually is. 

Mistaking the engine for the exhaust

But it’s not just an otherwise innocent tool of colonialism: it’s a driver of it. 

At the end of the day, it’s really hard to construct a version of the Great Commission that isn’t inherently colonial. The end-goal of a world in which everyone is Christian is a world without non-Christian cultures. (As is the end goal of a world in which everyone is atheist by Christian definitions.)

Yet we focus on the way Christianity came with British or Spanish culture when they colonized a place–the churches are here because the Spaniards who conquered this area were Catholic–and miss how Christianity actually has its own cultural tropes that it brings with it. It’s more subtle, of course, when Christianity didn’t come in explicitly as the result of military conquest.

Or put another way, those cultures didn’t just shape the Christianity they brought to places they colonized–they were shaped by it. How much of the commonality between European cultures is because of Christianity?

It’s not all a competition

A lot of Christians (cultural and practicing), if you push them, will eventually paint you a picture of a very Hobbesian world in which all religions, red in tooth and claw, are trying to take over the world. It’s the “natural order” to attempt to eliminate all cultures but your own. 

If you point out to them that belief and worldview are deeply personal, and proselytizing is objectifying, because you’re basically telling the person you’re proselytizing to that who they are is wrong, you often get some version of “that’s how everyone is, though.”

Like we all go through life seeing other humans as incomplete and fundamentally flawed and the only way to “fix” them is to get them to believe what we believe. And, like, that is not how everyone relates to others?

But it’s definitely how both practicing Christians and Christian antitheists relate to others. If, for Christians, your lack of Jesus is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed, for New Atheists, your “religion” (that is, your non-Christian culture) is a fundamental flaw in you that needs to be fixed. Neither Christians nor New Atheists are able to relate to anyone else as fine as they are. It’s all a Hobbesian zero-sum game. It’s all a game of conversion with only win and loss conditions. You are, essentially, only an NPC worth points.

The idea of being any other way is not only wrong, but impossible to them. If you claim to exist in any other way, you are either deluded or lying.

So, we get Christian atheists claiming that if you identify as Jewish, you can’t really be an atheist. Or sometimes they’ll make an exception for someone who’s “only ethnically Jewish.” If the only way you relate to your Jewishness is as ancestry, then you can be an atheist. Otherwise, you’re lying. 

Or, if you’re not lying, you’re deluded. You just don’t understand that there’s no need for you to keep any dietary practices or continue to engage in any form of ritual or celebrate any of those “religious” Jewish holidays, and by golly, this here “ex”-Christian atheist is here to separate out for you which parts of your culture are “religious” and which ones are “secular.”

Religious/secular is a Christian distinction

A lot of atheists from Christian backgrounds (whether or not they were raised explicitly Christian) have trouble seeing how Christian they are because they’ve accepted the Christian idea that “religion” is modular. (If we define “religion” the way Christians (whether practicing or cultural) define it, Christianity might be the only religion that actually exists. Maybe Islam?)

When people from non-Christian cultures talk about the hegemonically Christian and white supremacist nature of a lot of atheism, it reflects how outside of Christianity, spirituality/worldview isn’t something you can just pull out of a culture.

Christian atheists tend to see the cultural practices of non-Christians as “religious” and think that they should give them up (talk to Jewish atheists who keep kosher about Christian atheist reactions to that). But because Christianity positions itself as modular, people from Christian backgrounds tend not to see how Christian the culture they imagine as “neutral” or “normal” actually is. In their minds, you just pull out the Christianity module and are left with a neutral, secular society.

So, if people from non-Christian backgrounds would just give up their superstitions, they’d look the same as Christian atheists. 

Your secularism is specifically post-Christian

Of course, that culture with the Christianity module pulled out ISN’T neutral. So the idea that that’s what “secular society” should look like ends up following the same pattern as Christian colonialism throughout history: the promise that you can keep your culture and just plug in a different belief system (or, purportedly, a lack of a belief system), which has always, always been a lie. The secular, “enlightened” life that most Christian atheists envision is one that’s still built on white, western Christianity, and the idea that people should conform to it is still attempting to homogenize society to a white Christian ideal. 

For people from cultures that don’t see spirituality as modular, this is pretty obvious. It’s obvious to a lot of people from non-white Christian cultures that have syncretized Christianity in a way that doesn’t truck with the modularity illusion. 

I also think, even though they’re not conceptualizing it in these terms, that it’s actually obvious to a lot of evangelicals. (The difference being that white evangelical Christianity enthusiastically embraces white supremacy, so they see the destruction of non-Christian culture as good.) But I think it’s invisible to a lot of mainline non-evangelical Christians, and it’s definitely invisible to a lot of people who leave Christianity.

And that inability to see culture outside a Christian framing means that American secularism is still shaped like Christianity. It’s basically the same text with a few sentences deleted and some terms replaced.

Which, again, is by design. The idea that you can deconvert to (Christian) atheism and not have to change much besides your opinions about God is the mirror of how easy it’s supposed to be to convert to Christianity.

Human societies don’t follow evolutionary biology

The Victorian Christian framing underlying current Western ideas of enlightened secularism, that religious practice (and human culture in general) is subject to the same sort of unilateral, simple evolution toward a superior state to which they, at the time, largely reduced biological evolution, is deeply white supremacist.

It posits religious evolution as a constantly self-refining process from “primitive” animism and polytheism to monotheism to white European/American Christianity. For Christians, that’s the height of human culture. For ex-Christians, the next step is Christian-derived secularism.

Maybe you’ve seen this comic?

The thing is, animism isn’t more “primitive” than polytheism, and polytheism isn’t more “primitive” than monotheism. Older doesn’t mean less advanced/sophisticated/complex. Hinduism isn’t more “primitive” than Judaism just because it’s polytheistic and Judaism is monotheistic. 

Human cultures continue to change and adapt. (Arguably, older religions are more sophisticated than newer ones because they’ve had a lot more time to refine their practices and ideologies instead of having to define them.) Also, not all cultures are part of the same family tree. Christianity and Islam may be derived from Judaism, but Judaism and Hinduism have no real relationship to one another. 

But in this worldview, Christianity is “normal” religion, which is still more primitive than enlightened secularism, but more advanced than all those other primitive, superstitious, irrational beliefs.

Just like Christians, when Christian atheists do try to make room for cultures that aren’t white and European-derived, the tacit demand is “okay, but you have to separate out the parts of your culture that the Christian sacred-secular divide would deem ‘religious.’”

Either way, people from non-Christian cultures, if they’re to be equals, are supposed to get with the program and assimilate.

You’re not qualified to be a universal arbiter of what culture is good

Christian atheists usually want everyone to unplug that Religion module!

So, for example, you have ex-Christian atheists who are down with pluralism trying to get ex-Christian atheists who aren’t to leave Jews alone by pointing out that you can be atheist and Jewish.

But some of us aren’t atheist. (I’m agnostic by Christian standards.) And the idea that Jews shouldn’t be targets for harassment because they can be atheists and therefore possibly have some common sense is still demanding that people from other cultures conform to one culture’s standard of what being “rational” is.  

Which, like, is kind of galling when y’all don’t even understand what “belief in G-d” means to Jews, and people from a culture that took until the 1800s to figure out that washing their hands was good are setting themselves up as the Universal Arbiters of Rationality.

(BTW, most of this also holds true for non-white Christianity, too. I guarantee you most white Christian atheists don’t have a good sense of what role church plays in the lives of Black communities, so maybe shut up about it.)

In any case, reducing Christianity–a massive, ambient phenomenon inextricable from Western culture–to the specific manifestation of Christian practice that you grew up with is, frankly, absurd. 

And you can’t be any help in deconstructing hegemony when you refuse to perceive it and understand that it isn’t something you can take off like a garment, and you probably won’t ever recognize and uproot all the ways in which it affects you, especially when you are continuing to live within it. 

What hegemony doesn’t want you to know

One of the ways hegemony sustains and perpetuates itself is by reinforcing the idea not so much that other ways of being and knowing are evil (although that’s usually a stage in an ideology becoming hegemonic), but that they’re impossible. That they don’t actually exist. 

See, again, the idea that anyone claiming to live differently is either lying or deluded.

There are few clearer examples of how pervasive Christian hegemony is than Christian atheists being certain every religion works like Christianity. Hegemonic Christianity wants you to think that all cultures work like Christianity because it wants their belief systems to be modular so you can just …swap them. And it wants to pretend that culture/worldview is a free market where it can just outcompete other cultures.

But that’s… not how anything works. 

And the truth of the matter is that white nationalist Christians shoot at synagogues and Sikh temples and mosques because those other ways of being can’t be allowed to exist. 

They don’t shoot at atheist conventions because there’s room in hegemonic Christianity for Christian atheists precisely because Christian atheists are still culturally Christian. Their atheism is Christian-shaped.

They may not like you. They’re definitely going to try to convert you. They may not want you to be able to hold public office or teach their kids.

But the only challenge you’re providing is that of The Existence of Disbelief. And that’s fine. That makes you a really safe Other to have around. You can See The Light and not have to change much.

What you’re not doing is providing an example of a whole other way of being and knowing that (often) predates Christianity and is completely separate from it and has managed to survive it and continue to live and thrive (there’s a reason Christians like to speak of Jews and Judaism in the past tense, and it’s similar to the reason white people like to speak of indigenous peoples of the Americas in the past tense). 

That’s not a criticism–it’s fine to just… be post-Christian. There’s not actually anything wrong with being culturally Christian. The problems come in when you start denying that it’s a thing, or insisting that you, unique among humankind, are above Having A Culture.

But it does mean that you don’t pose the same sort of threat to Christianity that other cultures do, and hence, less violence. 

Dinghai Love Week 2023 Day 2: Side character / Death.

Xie An, the man, the legend, who I didn't expect to like but here we are. I based his design on his first description on the novel. Also, spoilers without context, I guess.