#I esp love fictives who joke about it.

[troublehotel-sys]

Serious talk, I love the Eddsworld fandom? Everyone has such cool ideas and it's very welcoming of fictives and shit (for the most part, it's mostly good treatment or "idk what that is but I respect u"), plus I get to look at my source in a positive light

I especially love all of the more "classic" fans because. Yeah we all have the same sense of humor, we respect each other, we're all mentally ill in some aspect and queer (I was gonna say "or an ally" but actually no I've never met an ew fan who didn't end up queer), we're all just. Chilling in the same space.

Fictives? Great. You relate to the show? Welcome. You're interested in the angst? Come in. You're more interested in the humor? The key is under the doormat. Nobody gives a shit about where you came from or what you look like or identify as or what's going on in your head, you're here and you're welcomed

Not to mention the fictives themselves. Fictives who engage in fandom? And fictives who make their own aus? Fictives that talk about their source memories? Fictives that make jokes about it? God it's all great

Anyway I think that's the end of my ramble that's all I think you're all really cool and I enjoy interacting with the fandom in general because of you all

#🕷️tord #I esp love fictives who joke about it. #yk tord w the needle proxy? #he's from the redemption au. very cool guy #and he goes by RDR. as in Red Dead Redemption. that's fucking hilarious #and kyle! or tom. the one with the skateboard proxy #but he and I listen to music together and he's like. my best friend #the one who suggested I try to speak to more singlets and told me to be more confident interacting with other people in general #and matt with the flamingo and knife proxy. very cool #hes helped me a lot too with dealing with my source memories and reframing my views on things in a positive light #i appreciate you guys a lot #anyway I'm done being all gross and soft #sorry abt that

[knuckle]

I'm not really sure what video game you were talking about, but I read those articles about sworn brother/sisterhood in China anyways and they were so interesting. It was esp interesting to me how the article on sworn sisterhood had some focus on romantic/sexual relationships, whereas the sworn brother article mainly focused on political/economic relationships and status based relationships, including outside the sworn brotherhood. Anyways sorry for rattling on but I was wondering if you've been able to find anything that has more information about sworn brotherhoods as romantic like the article about the sworn sisters did. The whole thing reminds me very loosely of like the concept of blood brothers in the US that I'm familiar with, but also very different? Idk I definitely want to do some more reading about everything but thank you for the initial resources, this is a really interesting topic that i was pretty unaware of before :)

Hey the video game in question is Dynasty Warriors, a Japanese reinterpretation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. What I remember reading is that fans were making jokes that Liu Bei (often considered the “main” character of Romance of the Three Kingdoms) must have had stronger feelings for Guan Yu than just “brotherhood” because of how affected he was by his death. Then the more established fandom descended on them to explain how they were like real brothers and how their sworn brotherhood was essentially adoption so any romantic shipping of their sacred bond was akin to incest. Personally from reading it, their feelings for each other don’t read as romantic. However, the conditionality of sworn brotherhood even within the novel is really clear. Additionally, Liu Bei actually adopts a son and there is even a real succession question that arises from this so acting as if sworn kinship is an analogue and equivalent for adoption when adoption really did exist on its own (including in the novel here) is a bit simplistic.

Here is a lengthy source on “the penetrated male” in the Qing Dynasty. I would send a better looking copy link but I think you’d need institutional access for page numbers. If you ctrl+f for “a 1762 case from Hubei.” It doesn’t exactly go into the dynamics of sworn brotherhood here but this case is a quarrel between three sworn brothers and the whole affair is exposed to a magistrate who is most scandalized that one of the dudes (30) let another dude (24) top him which led to his ex (31) murdering the 24 year old in jealousy than he is about some notion of incest. Of note as well is that when the third moved in with them, he immediately swore brotherhood to them, perhaps to legitimize their living together and being so close all the time. (TW: there are implications from the 30 year-old that he was coerced into a nonconsensual relationship with the youngest even though he was in love with the oldest - the article also talks very deadpan and suddenly about other possible rape or sexual assault if you read more of it).

However, elsewhere, there are clear punishments of male-male sexual relations when they are incestuous. Another quote from the book that’s important to note (for the Qing dynasty anyway: “The consensual relationships found in legal cases often coincide with some form of resource-pooling, co-residence, and fictive kinship (sworn brotherhood, master/novice ties). Sexual bonding seems to play a partly functional role, as one element of multifaceted alliances in a world hostile to individuals on their own.”

Study of this field is also complicated by the fact that “sworn brother” is often conflated with the entire Chinese tradition of “fictive” kinship which will include apprenticeships; also English language translations often leave out the “sworn” part and just speak of brotherhood. The term 契兄弟 qì xiōngdì clearly refers to sworn brothers here with the addition of 契。 The author here, simplified the term by simply referring to it as “brothers” and described it as “bond brothers”  in the footnotes. Mandarin Wikipedia talks about the homosexuality of the term as well and especially how it basically evolved as shorthand slang for gay men in Fujian based on Shen Defu’s Ming Dynasty accounts(google translate is pretty wonky but you can get a gist). The association with homosexuality is so strong that here is a Baidu article explaining how qi xiongdi were originally  synonymous with  结拜兄弟 jiébài xiōngdì (just a different term for sworn brothers) but it turned homosexual. Below here’s an English language source recounting this a bit:

I’ll just link to the li/b/gen it’s easier, and I can’t find an alternative. Basically here the author explains how qi xiongdi were essentially like marriages in that families would support one another as if for a hetero marriage in full awareness that their kids were in a romantic/sexual relationship anyway.

It IS true that in some cases sworn brothers truly considered themselves as familial brothers and would even argue this in court; it’s equally true that courts would often throw this out. It’s a complicated subject lol, but clearly gay people have been using it as a cover as well for hundreds of years.

Unfortunately, it’s a hard subject to study. Many Chinese scholars, especially of male-male relations simply note that in ancient China having sex with men was not exactly frowned upon especially if it was relatively discreet, you were bisexual, and/or not “obviously” effeminate. This makes it difficult to find scandalized tales of gay men or a deep dive into the “true” nature of men who “knew each other completely,” were sworn brothers etc. simply because it wasn’t something of special note or importance in many cases, and in many cases, close friends would just have sex with each other while having a wife and kids. For most of Chinese history, policing women’s sexuality was much more the focus than policing men’s.

Also sorry if you wanted this answered privately. I’ll delete the ask and copy this via DM if you prefer.

#long post #leoxpika #anyway once again disclaimer i'm not fluent in mandarin and i'm sure this would be easier to answer if i was lol #ask #anyway the intensity and ambiguity of historical m/m relationships are part of why dangai escaped censorship to the extent it did for a bit #mdzs #romance of the three kingdoms