#the last section is so nuts idk how i even wrote it guys i think i was possessed

[seventh-fantasy]

li xiangyi, yin, and femininity

we all know that li xiangyi is a character of fractured identities. and li lianhua is an unreliable narrator to his own story. these make him not the most straightforward character to study. but I've believed in treating li lianhua as a part of li xiangyi, rather than separates. and there must be a common thread that ties all of him together. thus, I offer what I have found to be the most useful lens to use to view him as a cohesive whole, regardless as li xiangyi, li lianhua, or any other identity he may reinvent into: his 阴 yin qualities. (yin of yinyang)

this framework suggested by the drama's text itself has helped clarify to me his strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and struggles. by identifying this constant, too, makes it so much easier talking about what has changed in him.

[to the, hopefully growing, boli lhl hivemind @markiafc @ananeiah]

-

there are some notes on the concept of yinyang and chinese conceptualisation of gender I have to preface with.

[disclaimer: of course, I'm not even trying to cover a tip of what experts have extensively studied and debated in a depth it deserves. all I'm doing is try to parse the broad, fundamental ideas that are needed to explain my blorbos through my own spotty brain filter. so there bound to be nuances I've overlooked or some degree of my own interpretation. pretentious but needs to be done.]

阴 yin and 阳 yang are concepts characterised by passiveness, darkness, gentleness, femininity etc, and proactivity, light, toughness, masculinity etc respectively. a very key and handy concept to have in mind is their relationship to each other - which I'll not attempt at explaining better than literal scholars have:

Yin and yang exist only in relation to one another internally as the way warmth-coldness only exist relative to one another. Furthermore, when using yin-yang as an organizational schema, achieving balancing harmony is always the goal, not domination nor subordination of one to the other. [x]

while yin and yang can be symbols of femininity and masculinity, it doesn't mean all female are yin and all male are yang. it's certainly not a strict 1-to-1 equation. the concept of gender in chinese context is more social than biological. this suggests room for fluidity, and shaping of identities, often through social rituals as one journeys through life. it also means that there can be femininity in the masculine, and vice versa - in fact, that's only healthy because you need a good balance of the two worlds. no one part is better than the other. if you think of the two components as relative to each other, they are always interacting and affecting each other, rather than being strict and inert binaries. simply put, it needs to be kept in mind that there are greater nuances in applying yin and yang to the definitions of gender, and to avoid at all cost a simplification of this framework into a binary.

sure, the show has implied that lxy's powers and energy are yin-coded. but femininity is only one of the multiple attributes of yin. so how are we extending lxy's yin to femininity specifically? it's in the text that substantiates and qualifies lxy as feminine. dead women being used as proxies to his character. being literally dressed as a woman in order to put himself into their shoes and feel what they've felt. adopting a name that happens to be very, very feminine - 莲花 lianhua (lit. lotus flower) (it must be caveated that chinese names are NOT gendered. but there are just some names that are more feminine than others.) him coming to lead a life revolving around traditionally feminine, domestic things as li lianhua. him having interactions with the women around him like he's in his own element - no pressure and tension at all, unlike with all the other men.

as such, I'm more willing to use yin and femininity interchangeably in discussing lxy (while it's not necessarily applicable to every point that will be mentioned albeit there being some degree of implied association). and it's for the sake of elucidating what I feel is an intention or very plausible reading of the canon text in parsing feminine experiences in lxy's character. and thus, his queerness.

one last note is that taoism is going be mentioned quite a bit as well because of how much it as a philosophy honours the yin quality. its key tenets include valuing passiveness and inaction as a form of action, and submitting to the nature of things. and we will see how those come up in lxy's life too. (though I'm not gonna attempt to deep dive into it here beyond broad strokes of it.)

-

a huge part of li xiangyi's yin actually manifests in him being a passive person. this applies not just to li lianhua, but also li xiangyi. I know. ok wait hear me out. the idea of yinyang is after all components that can change and are relational to each other: thus, there were points in li xiangyi's life when he was less passive than other points, but they ultimately don't match up to the degree of aggression displayed by other men around him. so relative to their display of proactivity and aggression, he can be considered as passive. the best example is that of shan gudao proposing to launch an offensive on jinyuan alliance, while lxy - as much as he was arrogant about it - was standing his ground on not taking action in favour of peace.

it has already showed up in his childhood as well. he wasn't a particularly competitive child: 从来都没有谁要和你争 nobody has ever thought of competing with you over anything, he told sgd as he recalled of their times growing up. it was in fact sgd who was desperate to control and override lxy's presence. baby lxy did not hesitate at all over giving up on winning in favour of protecting his only rare few close relationships left in the world (given how hard-earned relationships are when they're non-familial !!!!). as much as I resent the one-dimensional writing of sgd, he has served as a very strong marker to highlight on lxy's yin.

-

I've harped on it several times before but this is the time I finally get to explain it proper: my own theory is that li xiangyi became an unparalleled swordsmaster because of his yin/feminine quality, not in spite of it. an interesting point that had been out in the open unclaimed until it was brought up in our friend group is that, li xiangyi does not actually fit anybody's conventional image of a 武林盟主 wulin mengzhu (ie. ruler of wulin). it would most likely have been some burly, muscular, ultra-masculine dude. even if they don't look like the demonic monk, it should be someone more like di feisheng. but. it's li xiangyi, the boyish, delicate-looking kid, who came to the top. (no wonder people - mostly men - love or love to bully hate him like weak men hate powerful women??)

"why didn't they cast someone who looks more like a wulin mengzhu (read: traditionally manly)?" no, no that's precisely the point. nobody said wulin mengzhu have to look manly. and also who is to define the manliness required to be in a place of authority? (or in my other meta, we would ask, who is to define anybody gets to have the authority over anyone else at all?)

by taoist ideal, gentleness is the most refined form of strength. li xiangyi has been haunting and distracting me in my chinese calligraphy practices lately because I'm thinking about how this must be the closest to what it felt like lxy becoming the best swordsman in jianghu. (so pretentiously brainrotten of me, I know, BUT IT'S REAL and I'm suffering.) mastering a chinese art is essentially about mastering a delicate balance between force and gentleness; being able to draw force from softness 柔中带刚 and an ability to maintain this balance. a beginner will instinctively hold a brush for the first time with brute, unrefined force. some fairly reputable contemporary calligraphers, according to my teacher, can be seen as being either too soft or too forceful - but are still able to pass off as good enough. it's then, the master of masters who will have the sophistication of a firm yet flexible control of the brush with the appropriate use of gentleness/laxness that produces a harmony of strokes. this idea extends to any other sort of chinese craft or practice including traditional chinese medicine, and I believe, swordsmanship too. I'm taking a fucking leap of faith here to say this because I practise NO sort of (chinese) martial arts, I must caveat. (someone who does may want to say something...) but theoretically that should be how it works.

it is not for no rhyme or reason, or *handwaves* that lxy emerged to the top AND is almost undefeatable. among a competitive, forceful (ie. yang) wulin, li xiangyi stood out with a power and energy defined by yin (ie. gentleness and stability) that led him to create his signature 扬州慢 yangzhouman. it is characterised by 慢 slowness (my calligraphy teacher says to us all the time to take it slow), and also described by dfs as 中正绵长 - which I would best describe by painting a picture of a steady and stable stream. these precisely speak of the essence of a mastery of gentleness as strength to me.

conversely, dfs's way in mastering power is very largely premised on taking action because he literally had no other choice in the environment he grew up in. both of them develop in opposite ways. it was the case of gentleness for lxy clearly because he grew up in a safe, nurturing environment that had allowed him to be slow and steady at his own pace, drawing on his natural gifts.

-

now top of the wulin world at 17, li xiangyi founds sigu sect. li xiangyi, the boy before becoming menzhu and li xiangyi the leader of sigu sect are not the same.

how then did a (relatively) passive boy like lxy end up founding sigu sect. this lxy is the one who was fostered into competition - though not in an abusive, twisted way. in fact he was raised in a rather taoist way by his shifu: to be honest with yourself and respect your opponent. so he honoured whatever powers he had been bestowed with by nature. he gives into it. even so, at another level, I just have a sense that shifu and shiniang's competitive marital spat had an insidious effect on the boys...though the detrimental effect was more on sgd than lxy. baby lxy feels like a sweet-natured kid who was just in his own zone, you know - some (aka sgd) would say, too much of him even, to have not realised what was wrong at all with his shixiong for years.

that's not all of course. I've always gotten the vibes that his attitude behind forming sigu sect felt more like, this is what all the good men of jianghu do and I will have to do it now especially that I'm the best. it didn't feel particularly personal to me, but rather what would have been expected of him by the social climate of wulin jianghu (eg. lxy saying to 光耀师门 bring honour to his teacher). it's definitely not an expectation from his shifu, who explicitly told him that he was never expected to become a noble figure of any sort, but just to be alive and contented. as concluded by the man himself as li lianhua: "有些人入了江湖是为了立心，而有的人入江湖为的是立命。我却不知道自己真正想要的是什么。some people enter jianghu for the cultivation of the mind, others for a cultivation of a meaningful life. but I never knew what I truly wanted." he was ultimately, unwittingly a passive player in his own story of becoming the great sigu sect leader.

(at this point, as a side note, I do wonder if there were any other similar sects or alliances that function the same as sigu sect that came before it. because I'm damn well sure there must be something, as likely as there must have been generations of wulin legends who came before lxy. but of course, this is not what the story is concerned with at all and I'm ok with that.)

it's crucial to point out that, even despite this being the phase of his yang in the display of taking action and enacting firmness, lxy had still done sigu sect with the sole purpose and manner of upkeeping peace and order (in the way of the pro-universal love, anti-aggression mohist 侠 xia leader of the people). he's still very characterised by yin in my books, especially when vis-à-vis to sgd.

a li xiangyi full of himself and made himself too useful to the people was only bound for a great asteroidal fall, in the concept of 物极必反 - or in taoist lexicon 反者道之动 (ie. anything that has reached its limit will only start developing in the opposite direction). if you think you're above all, you can only go down.

this manifests during the next time he took action - and it was one so forceful that it overpowered even his opponent, dfs who ended up being the passive, receiving party in this case - was in initiating the battle at donghai 10 years ago... and gee oh boy. it didn't end well - for both of them, but even more so for lxy. (dfs was like 'tis but a scratch (shrugs)' as compared to him being ripped off his tendons by jiao liqiao like nezha did to the dragon prince. truth is he had to go into a 10-year healing retreat served by his entourage. :p) ok, I digress.

xiao zijin was quick to attribute sigu sect's fall to lxy's arrogance - in turn setting the stage for lxy's 10 years of self-hatred and the framing of lxy as a villain? irresponsible figure? by jianghu. (god forbid girls do anything! ok for legal reasons, this a joke.) lxy lost his mind in ways I believe he never had in his life there and then upon seeing his shixiong dead. so, you could say he led the jianghu world to ruins out of love (using this term loosely). but it feels inaccurate to say it's due to arrogance. he did not do that out of self-importance or ego, especially when the revenge for sgd was a collective decision made by sigu sect as we know from the flashback. so when llh pinned all fault on himself for being arrogant in the past, it is with caution to take his words because that's the unreliable narrator in him speaking.

-

anyway, it's precisely li xiangyi that is capable of bouncing back from such a fatal crisis, equipped with his yin and a mastery that gave him the power of flexibility.

it's extremely vital to re-establish that literally the only thing that was keeping li xiangyi alive, physically, as li lianhua is yangzhouman. (monk wuliao literally said that to lxy even though he did facilitate in saving him.) it's the yangzhouman that was drawn from lxy's mastery of yin. without yangzhouman, li xiangyi would not even have the chance to become li lianhua and undergo any needed process of transformation. without li xiangyi, there would have been no yangzhouman. no li xiangyi, no li lianhua, get it?

the point is not to deny the change li xiangyi wants to make and has made. but to acknowledge that change isn't about complete erasure and destruction. something from you survives. something in you had kept you alive to have you come so far, regardless of all the bad bits that you want to denounce of. you've always been worth it.

bringing back the thing about his new name: the distinction must be made that he did not pick it because it was feminine but it just so happened a feminine name had resonated with him. (read: he didn't necessarily identify as a woman but identified with femininity. at least within the parameters of canon text.)

he also made an interesting choice to retain his surname for someone who was desperate to sever ties from his past. hmm. or maybe he wasn't that desperate? when li lianhua says li xiangyi is dead, I believe it meant that li xiangyi the sigumen menzhu is dead rather than li xiangyi as an entirety. li lianhua is a returning to the path lxy could have gone if he did not establish sigu sect, the path that shifu wanted him to take. when he walked to the doors of sigu sect in the aftermath, nothing was actually stopping him from going back (people were still around and alive, instead of all dead people, you know)... except for himself. taking that action would have been too much for him. so he went with the flow of life giving him a chance at rebirth and walked away. there, inaction as a form of action.

zhan yunfei and qiao wanmian have said to li lianhua, oh that doesn't sound like li xiangyi at all. but has it been considered that, maybe it was sigu sect's lxy who wasn't the real lxy? sigu sect lxy was one big performance of the values of masculinity and heteronormativity that llh had came to an awareness of, and eventually struggle with again and resist against in the final year of his life. there had only been some glimpses of his true nature allowed (validated by fang duobing talking about lxy at his altar).

imho, most flashbacks of lxy during that period felt impersonal and more like a template of a hero expected to marry his girl at 18. going through all the motions and steps of a normative life even before he was old enough to grasp and explore his own identity and what it meant in the world. no wonder he denounced so much of what he had done as lxy including liking girls. walking away then also meant a walk away from those duties and expectations. li lianhua is li xiangyi liberated from masculine duties and heteronormative performance.

in doing that, he had the opportunity for the first time in his life to explore what he truly wanted, at least within the parameters of what he could afford to do at that point. he could go on to build a domestic, feminine life within the space of jianghu (as I've established here). it's a kind of feminine lifestyle that doesn't quite exist in mainstream society - being a woman there meant to stay put in a domestic space without much room to move socially. nor did it exist in wulin jianghu because even the women there like shi-guniang and jlq were expected to be masculine, aggressive, competitive. so building a mobile home in the space of jianghu is his way of defining the life he wants and can have. li lianhua is the extension of femininity in li xiangyi - and one that can be free.

it's also worth talking about in my opinion what is one of the most important and a favourite dihua moment: when dfs said to lxy that his greatest weakness was to like being a hero. and a swordsman should be without weaknesses. I'm forever wrapped up in how many layers this can be read in. was he mad at lxy for liking to be a hero or having weaknesses, or both? if the former, it was dfs criticising, based on lxy's public reputation, lxy's oversized illusions about being a hero - a figure of masculinity with an unrealistic sense to uphold noble goals eg. saving the world etc. that is actually perfectly logical coming from dfs, the straightforward, no-nonsense, morally neutral guy with no illusions about heroism (in this case, he feels more like a yin). but at the same time, we should understand that lxy's motivations behind the donghai battle are more personal than noble. if any, it was actually the opposite of noble - it was like he was acting out of the role of a caretaker of his family, and at a cost of the peace and order of jianghu he was set on guarding(!!) dfs also knew that lxy was there just for his shixiong. and so, dfs, who happens to be the epitome of yang, can be read as a symbol of masculinity disapproving of lxy for being sentimental and emotional; for having the "feminine" desires to simply want to defend his family (not saying those are exclusively feminine traits but they have been conventionally associated as feminine). I think both layers of reading are correct and should work together to contribute to the complexity of their characters. (we can see how it contributes to lxy and dfs being the perfect yinyang halves to each other, which I will come back to briefly touch on later.)

-

for 10 years he lived a life of seclusion and staying-in-his-own-lane a taoist would be proud of. he knew he was dying and has always been ok with dying, as he claimed. but did he want to die? to think of it, it was the opposite. because in those 10 years when he could have 100% just taken action to take his own life, he didn't. in fact, he lived on and took care of himself in the way shifu wanted him to. he had simply preferred letting nature run its course. if bicha didn't take him, he wasn't gonna do anything. but if he died one day very soon, he would be ok with it too. sure, he was maybe banking on a lead to sgd's whereabouts to appear during his last years alive but that clearly wasn't the only thing on his mind for NINE years because he didn't actively go out seeking for that either. this is basically him telling dfs that he would just lie in the sun and wait for the sweet release of death, if dfs were to force him to fight. not even the mortal threat from dfs was enough to move him into action of fighting back or killing himself.

time and again, lxy as llh was dragged into fdb's cases but not only that, he also maintained an impersonal distance with them. it's starkly different from the usual (wuxia) hero archetypes (for eg. fdb) who would be more impassioned and personally invested in the plight of the victims- or unlike most seemingly aloof protagonists who would somehow grow emotionally invested over time. one of the many things I love about llh is that he never tries a second time to persuade people out of their decisions he finds unwise (eg. him just wanting to move on in response to the girls in 女宅 insisting on staying behind with their slave master at first.) he will not interfere in other people's choices made in their own lives. it's not his business. he didn't even want to be there, to be honest.

however as the story progresses, more and more people - especially men, his past, and the leads to the truth came back to demand and taunt him into doing something. they vary from well-meaning people without any harm intended such as fdb intruding upon his private space completely uninvited and qwm wanting him back; to dfs merely seeking him as a mean to an end initially (eg. I only need him to live long enough to have one last fight); and finally, on the other end of the spectrum, outright aggressive and hostile people like sgd and xzj who wanted him to die. under all this pressure, he tried his best to deflect, but he does waver especially when it comes to matters concerning the people he cares about aka his obsession wish of 10 years of looking for sgd's remains that had lied low until fdb entered his life, and then later on taking revenge for his shifu.

looking for sgd became his final bid at taking action. he was operating on a slim chance of getting some emotional closure from finding out his shixiong is dead for real, yes. what a good plan. but objectively unnecessary. or surprise! uhhh...finding out his beloved shixiong is actually alive and would strangle him for one corn chip? AND OH NO IT GOT WORSE- uncovering a devastating truth about his shifu's death that he could have totally gone on with life fine without knowing if he had continued not caring.

but it is sometimes just impossible not to care - it is only human to care. and he is human, not an icon in the image of a hero. so he took a chance, once more, and it killed him in unprecedented ways. it's donghai all over again. things in life don't go as planned. you fuck around and it fucks you back. finding out the truth behind his shifu's death and his family background from the past did nothing for him as li lianhua living in the present.

it's no wonder that this lxy decisively relinquishes the desire to take action in the end. he goes back to letting nature run its course. and this time, stands firmly to it despite everyone begging him otherwise. wangchuan flower could only give him a recovery (or survival?) rate of 30%. there's a 70% chance of failure and even in the 30% he was not sure what he was to become. in comparison, dfs took a 10% chance game of survival in a heartbeat, and it pushed him to new heights. that's how they differ: he thrives by taking risks and action while lxy the other way round. so, something like that has happened before and he wants none of it again.

-

he leaves lotus tower, only taking his horse and a sack - relinquishing almost every other material belonging he had - and sets off on a journey. before xzj interrupted...where to was he going?? I wonder. we don't know for sure, I think? and are we allowed to know? that makes the scene he had with xzj an understated inflection point in the very last part of his journey. yes, he was already on his way to...maybe die? but not necessarily. you don't have to travel distances with your belongings for that, right? or speak to dfs personally about not wanting to fight? (borrowing one of @ananeiah's takes.) regardless, he was definitely leaving behind jianghu - not only wulin jianghu (he already did that 10 years ago), but also the jianghu space he had carved out in the last 10 years.

what sparked the decision to jump off the cliff in him was dfs's words from the night of their wedding 10th donghai anniversary: 横扫天下容易，断相夷太剑不易 conquering the world is easy, breaking xiangyi sword is not. in the original context, dfs was talking about defeating lxy being harder than conquering the world. but when it came to this scene, it was to lxy about forsaking the very last worldly possessions he had after already giving up on lotus tower and hulijing (including releasing his horse), especially his only connection left to swordsman lxy.

perhaps it had dawned on him that, wanting things at all was bad for him. in the last 10 years, he lived a life of seclusion, wanting very little. but he had still wanted things. there were still things he couldn't let go of that had led him to this state. despite having lived on an identity inspired by a buddhist teaching for 10 years, maybe it was only at this point that he was finally the closest to reaching an understanding of it. (I wish I was knowledgeable enough right now to dive into the possible buddhist reading here but alas. I'll leave it to our resident expert @markiafc)

it doesn't quite matter in the end where he was going after all. what mattered was that he literally went where the water took him and we're not supposed to know where it ends. I'm not seeing this in a bad and pessimistic way though. I think the relief in all this is that he had tried his best to within his abilities. also it's a form of enlightenment in relinquishing a desire, an obsession, a need to take any more action in order to live well. thus his ending felt to me relatively tender, empowering, and kind - albeit bittersweet and heartaching - than other possible kinds of ending, in a story where it was very possible for him to have died under the knives of his opponents or bicha at any moment, outside of his control.

-

if you've come so far in this post, congratulations! but also a reveal is that... you're not immune to the dihua propaganda threaded throughout this post. :P

as mentioned, other men like sgd and xzj in lxy's life were incredibly hostile to him. their yang nature overwhelmingly powers his yin. but dfs is different. dfs is the yang counterpart that fits perfectly to his yin.

dfs's yang is one that contains yin, that mirrors lxy's balance of yang in yin. it was suggested in text they are yinyang-coded meant to complement each other, given that whenever wangchuan flower's yin vs yang properties were discussed, the two men were always spoken about in the same breath. more importantly, as with the above few analyses of dfs's words playing a big role in shaping of lxy's choices with multiple meanings - as well as their day-to-day interactions - we can see that they constantly play off each other.

dfs's yang energy has been used to help lxy prolong his life (though not saving him entirely), while lxy has used his yin energy to save dfs and subsequently helped him attain his breakthrough. dfs has also helped lxy in his breakthrough of yin but not in the same way as dfs's cultivation of his combative powers, and rather, it's for lxy an understanding of his own path to take in life - a cultivation of the mind (both times 10 years before and after). given how significant dfs is in the shaping of lxy's realisation of the yin path - alike his shifu has, it's no wonder that they were the only two people lxy had imagined in his last sword dance of a farewell to jianghu.

with each of them coming together to form the perfect yin-yang model, they're a harmony of yin and yang representing the cosmos. what I also love is that they didn't start out as a perfect fit, but only towards the end of the story was the harmonisation completed, which makes sense for two components that are always in a flux influencing each other. the fact that they were number 1 and 2 of wulin, and being the only ones capable of understanding each other in a level nobody else could... it all reinforces the cosmic sense of their relationship. they're the halves to a whole, fitting in a specific way nobody else can.

(I mean. technically this is going into the space of extrapolation based on a tangential interpretation of canon text, so do take it with a pinch of salt. but of course this pinch of salt can do wonders for a shipper's feast... :P and this certainly could have been a meta of its own expanding on dfs's side of the analysis, but this is it for now in this context.)

-

to think of it, li xiangyi has actually died more than that one time that turned him into li lianhua. first was a death of him as a nanyin royalty - I resent having to bring up nanyin like it should hold any weight to the narrative as far as I'm concerned, but the point being that he had a completely different (familial-based) life before that still stands. then he had a rebirth as li xiangyi, disciple and swordsman to his shifu and shiniang, and later died again when li xiangyi the sigu sect leader took over. lxy the sigu sect leader died at sea in the battle 10 years ago and came back as li lianhua. (just like nezha, died after battling at east sea and rebirthed from the lotus) li lianhua then dies by the end of the drama.

there can be a myriad of interpretations as to what exactly happened to him, including the possibility that he's still alive. regardless, we can agree that li lianhua as an identity has ran its course, and he had to evolve again. but into what form?

in the line of thought of yin and femininity, and how his transformation has been in an increasing degree of presentation of femininity - even way back when I was watching the show, I had the idea of him living socially as a woman post-li lianhua. I don't know what he would be realistically doing or what could be practical for him in such an identity. but conceptually it was sensible and compelling to me before diving deeper into the details. (I have more elaboration to do on this that I won't be talking about here publicly but it is in the same strain of idea as this other comparative meta I wrote.)

I think the next possible identity lxy can assume - alive in the material realm or not - is one that will be beyond a material being. a nameless entity. once you've gone through the phases of life - from not knowing to knowing, and perfecting knowledge, then to the surpassing of knowledge - you surpass all worldly existence, and become one with the cosmos.

I end this off with an excerpt from Tao Te Ching's Chapter 41 (I'm not pretending to have read the whole book ok but I couldn't resist including this):

明道若昧，进道若退，夷道若纇 [...] 道隐无名 The bright path seems dim; Going forward seems like retreat; The easy way seems hard [...] The Tao is hidden and without name. (x)

the character translated into "easy" is the same 夷 yi of li xiangyi's name. somehow this seems to encapsulate the journey of his life: one that seems blessed and smooth-sailing but ending up to be rocky and turbulent. but at the end of the day, after all that he had been through, he will become hidden and without name.

#莲花楼 #mysterious lotus casebook #lhl #lhlmeta #my posts #a big win for the inaction fandom. lxy would have been patron saint #this inevitably turned into a 'lhl is a taoist and buddhist story if not a very chinese story' meta hbhjbjhbhjjb #the last thing i do before going to sleep is write this meta. the first thing i do after waking up is write this meta. #i feel so insane writing this. it kept growing like a monster. do you think this is a joke it's like my part-time job now #but it's one of the few times in my life i have confidence in my insanity. so. #crazier thing is. this meta is approaching 6k words yet i still think there must be things i haven't covered. #the last section is so nuts idk how i even wrote it guys i think i was possessed #it's also like the most pretentious way to put that he's dead in this world ok hjbjhbhjbhjbjbh #to be clear iirc the drama didn't say LXY'S POWER/ENERGY IS YIN in the same way it literally said dfs's energy is yang #but it's definitely implied by the explanation of the flower's healing properties for both of them. on top of yangzhouman #also fuck. another reason he didn't choose to save himself was so dfs could have the yang flower which he believed was what dfs wanted #thank u frens mark and ana for indulging my brain in the first time i brought the lxy as woman thing up. for it to have come this far #ofc disclaimer is that a lot of this is my own reading. it doesnt have to be agreed by everyone #i would be very happy though if any part of it resonated with anybody #also a good part of the analysis is based on my memory of the show. though i did revisit parts selectively to verify. sooooo. yeah.

[lizzybeth1986]

Quick Thoughts on The White People Waambulance, Chapters 18 and 19

• Sorry this QT is coming out so late, guys. I regret to say my heart wasn't really in this one...and it hasn't been with regards to my QTs for a while. This one might be my last, unless we count me finishing them off for the (not rewritten) Book 1. It's been two years since I began, and the last two books made the process honestly really exhausting.

• I clubbed the two finale chapters together because I really couldn't be bothered to do separate ones for both.

• In fact...I won't be doing any of what I have been doing for my QTs so far. I'll be honest to you: I usually do multiple replays, the last few in tandem with the other routes on YouTube. I go through the scenes one by one. I keep note of differences and variations and carefully choose screenshots that will reflect the gist of the scenes.

But I couldn't be bothered to do any of that this time. I pressed the "continue" and then the "end book" buttons as soon as I finished my first run of those chapters. I'm drained, guys. And I don't think I'll be coming back to the TRH series at least, not even for Liam or Hana or Kiara. Maybe my mind will change by the time the second book comes out (update from present-day Lizzy: no it didn't) but I'm not counting on it. And you'll probably know why by the time this QT ends.

• TW: Discussions on racism, both fandom racism and from within the narrative. The last section of this QT is going to be...pretty heavy, guys.

There's also going to be a lot of anti-Drake, anti-Olivia, anti-Madeleine and anti-Penelope content here, so if you like any of those characters...well, you've been warned.

The ensuing post is going to be LONG, and I know a lot of you have good reasons not to deal with long posts, so here's a tldr:

1. The TRR writing team stick to their weird obsession for jobless whiny white men.

2. Read this book once and you'll feel like you're drowning in an ocean of white tears.

3. WOC continue to get scraps from the writing team, even as they boast of being diverse and inclusive. In fact, they're regularly treated as mere tokens, exotic eye-candy or non-entities, while their behaviour is measured on standards that are very different from their white counterparts (this happens in other books as well).

...okay I wasn't expecting for the tldr to be long too 😅

• Me @ my QTs then:

Me @ my QTs now:

• I'll probably be finishing off my TRR Book 1 QT series when I'm a little less burnt out, but for now this is where it ends, I guess.

• So...here is to summarize the last two chapters: Accident happens. LIs mad. Paparazzi sad (but largely get away scot-free). MC and baby safe. At the Council meeting Kiara slam dunks the murderer of Liam's mother with the style and elegance this fandom still refuses to acknowledge her for. The MC is nice to her for like half a second. Last Apple Ball. New clothes for everyone as if they had a Diwali bumper sale the week before or something. Godfrey is somehow responsible for the security (who thought this was a good idea) and seeing the Auvernese Royal Guard outside our doors is SO not-creepy.

We get to see if we impressed our Auvernese and Monterriso allies enough. Bradshaw compliments Kiara for like half a second. Olivia sees the dude from the Q&A session (Jin) at the Ball and (if you pay) you get to see her catch, interrogate and lowkey flirt with him.

Leona and Bianca make it to the ball (where is Bartie Sr. Where are Xinghai and Lorelei. Where is Regina) and this time the narrative makes sure to shoehorn a plot element into their presence here: Leona is there so we can do something about the reveal that she constantly ratted us out to the press for money. ("oh look! Walker Ranch was plot related after all! We have a reason (albeit a flimsy, paper-thin one) to set 9 whole chapters in Texas. Even though we had to literally come up with this bit in the last minute, because really - all we wanted to do as a writing team was nut collectively over Drake Walker")

(I also can't believe that between the time I wrote this line and the time this QT finally came out - they literally found a way to re-fucking-write Book 1 so they could nut collectively over Drake Walker earlier)

• Why were we required to dress down in Texas for these assholes when they couldn't even bother to dig up their Sunday best for this ball??? Oh right, they're Walkers. Hypocrisy runs in the family.

• Good thing is you can choose to banish Leona if you want. She's angry about it for a second then accepts it and leaves. But like what is the point of banishing her when she hardly even bothers to come there in the first place? She's not going to be bawling her eyeballs out saying "boohoo, they threw me out of this country that I spent like five minutes in and never even wanted to visit in the first place".

• Bianca is present at the end of Chapter 18 mainly to deliver to us a plot point at the very last minute: a clue about where we could find proof about Queen Eleanor's murder. Bianca mentions conversations Jackson had with her, and a secret room somewhere. Her leaving the palace and abandoning her children is addressed, and the MC gets to berate her. It's...short.

• Why this important piece of information was given to Bianca when idk LEO could have pitched in and spoken about it, no one knows. Oh wait. I keep forgetting. Bianca is Drake's mother. That's why.

• Okay so Amalas valiantly found out about Leona's involvement in this and gave us tangible proof via photographs. But we're kiiiinda forgetting that the scrutiny and privacy invasions were happening even before we hauled ass to Walker Ranch? Who was responsible for those? Who was the "source" that the Chapter 17 paparazzo was referring to, the one that mentioned they would triple the price for more photos of the Queen/Mother of the Heir (Coz like why would she do that. She's already broke)? How did Amalas come by this information so easily and why was she really that invested? Why is no one asking these questions? Why isn't the group asking these questions? Why are they stupid. Jesus, they're all so stupid. HOW ARE YOU SO STUPID, SQUAD.

• Shortly after they get rid of Leona and Bianca, the rest of the group give the happy couple a choice of toys for the nursery - and that's our final nursery purchase. You can either go for the corgi - which is on brand for the series by now I think - or the lion, which is seen as very Cordonian.

• More party shenanigans. We're nice to Kiara for another half-second. Kiara arranges a photoshoot for us. The team can't pretend to give a fuck anymore about its fans so they will ask us to pay for an edit that I've seen millions of edit-creators in the fandom do wayyyy better. Like let's be honest - compare the engagement shoot pics (messy as they were) to the shoots we eventually got this book. You can see the difference. You can tell which one required more work.

• Anyway, if you choose this scene you wind up going back to the ballroom, dance with your spouse, aaaaand it's time for another diamond option. This time your spouse gives you something you've been craving (mousse parfait for the Liam MC, chocolate chip cookies for the Hana MC, handmade chocolates for the Maxwell MC and a choice between bacon and a veg version of it for the Drake MC. Damn, team TRR. Your favouritism is showing). The couple also writes a letter to the baby that the child can read growing up, in a bit of a parallel to Eleanor's letter to Liam that we see at the end of the chapter.

��� After this, Liam reveals he has been pondering over what Bianca said, and wants to find out where they could find that secret room. Cue Liam's own flashback scene for free. Godfrey bringing to Queen the same goblet that the RoE MC found in a flea market in Book 2 for Regina (or perhaps just a similarish one). Liam and Eleanor reciting a rhyme that turns out to have clues for the secret room.

• To give the team credit, they seem to have (finally) put some thought into this. Like this actually feels like Liam's scene. Not one that delivers information about his family but is really about another character. They seem to incorporate all the things Eleanor seemed to be known for - things that were hardly addressed in the books when it came to talk of her. She is shown with a love for books given that books and poetry form an important part of the clues she leaves for Liam. One of the books is about foraging, which is unsurprising considering her love for gardens that was established in Book 1 of TRR.

• So...like...nice job but why was practically everything about Eleanor (including the way she'd stand up to Constantine, her displeasure at the sound of Godfrey and Bartie's names, her nature that Liam not only inherited but also learned) left only for your finale? Why no buildup? Why was I seeing you lot constantly pandering to Drake's family the entire time? Why do I know way, way more about Jackson than I do about Eleanor whose story this WAS? Why is she and her son suddenly getting this burst of attention at the tail end??

• They still manage to push young!Drake into a scene focusing on Liam and Eleanor, so we can see how Eleanor's teaching of how to be a responsible royal began to make inroads into Liam's way of thinking. It's the ultimate irony, that Liam took his mother's advice so much to heart that he lets Drake stay in his home, eat his food, and complain about those dastardly nobles to his heart's content for free.

Poor Eleanor in her grave is like

• Very fitting, how Constantine's proposal to Eleanor happens in the hedge maze, very much like Liam's first declaration of love in Book 1.

• If you're married to Liam, you get an extra letter that's addressed to Liam's future wife. She clearly knew her days were to be numbered by the time she gave birth to that second child at least.

• Lmao @ how the team somehow managed to remember that Eleanor would have been Leo's stepmother too. He's mentioned a couple of times. They didn't have enough time to develop a sprite for young!Leo but somehow had all the time and resources to make one for young!Savannah who had literally no purpose in Drake's flashback scene? Hmm. Hmm.

• They somehow manage to find the twin to the RoE MC's gifted goblet that Godfrey gave Eleanor the night she died, and Liam reveals that he's been obsessed with poisons enough to know that it wasn't the drink that was poisoned, it was the cup itself. Everyone is shook.

• Love that extra little detail about Liam's obsession with learning about poisons and how it's a sign of how deeply Eleanor's death affected him. But tell me honestly if you remember this plot point coming up even once before in any significant way. Even during the one time a person is poisoned in the previous book (by the laws of karma, the victim in this instance is Godfrey's only daughter) Liam shows very few signs of this "obsession". At a time when he has also lost a father. Convenient how something that could have added more depth to Liam is kept aside until there's a scene where his knowledge is required. Convenient indeed.

• I kind of understand why Liam acts on impulse, okay. The man just discovered who murdered his mum, at least some amount of irrationality is allowed (esp considering he hardly got to express ANYTHING when his goddamn father died). But you'd think Liam's friends would hold him back and help him think this through? Convince him that there are more effective ways to confront and get a confession out of Godfrey who after is in charge of security at the moment? You seriously think charging into the ballroom and suddenly stripping this man of his titles is going to actually work??? You couldn't figure out how to make him vulnerable instead so that he wouldn't be able to escape???

• I mean like, sure, one could always rationalize it all as "well see Lizzy, they needed a dramatic end to this story and they needed to wrap this mystery up quick". But there were other ways they could have spread it out than make it all sound so...so random. And you bet we all know why the narrative had to scramble around last minute to solve this. It's because we spend half the damn book in a dilapidated ranch with a shit family!

• Anyway, Godfrey escapes...and the MC tells her spouse that she's going into labour after...two contractions? Um. Okay.

• So. That ends Book 1 of this new series. And with it my QTs, for this series at least. My QTs for Book 1 (the OG, not the rewrite) might continue, but I'd need to repeat my failplay again because I lost most of those screenshots 😭

General Thoughts on the Book:

• So far, this is what I can see as happening in the next book:

- The birth, obviously

- Any extra perks from our purchases (ie. the nursery and the garden)

- Subplots involving the LIs' conflicts regarding parenthood and their own childhoods

- The mystery behind Eleanor's death isn't quite over yet, nor is the truth behind the constant paparazzi presence in TRH. Leona was the scapegoat this time around, but how did Amalas get all this information so quickly?

- Where is Eleanor's other child? Olivia's investigations may or may not lead to that answer. I'm pretty sure Jin might be involved as well.

- Another possibility is that Madeleine may give us important information since she was potentially aware that Eleanor was pregnant at the time.

- The mystery behind Jackson's death and what he knew regarding Eleanor's condition.

- What part did Bartie Sr have to play in all this? How involved was Constantine in the murder (if in fact he was)? What more dark secrets will we learn about Constantine, Godfrey and Bartie Sr during this time? What ultimately caused the breakdown in Constantine and Jackson's relationship, since Drake mentions Jackson being around when Regina was Queen as well?

- Speaking of Regina, how involved was she in any of this? We know she was Godfrey's cousin-in-law and Bartie Sr made a comment on her during the announcement about the heir, and that she married Constantine a couple years after Eleanor's death, but was she aware of any of this or was she largely out of the major plot and brought in later to cement Godfrey's position and power?

- I'd mention the possibility that Lorelai could know something, but they didn't really give anyone connected to Hana any time at all, so I have my doubts.

- Operation Swan, and possibly a visit to Monterisso. Liam's younger sibling must be in one of these places but my guess is on Monterisso.

- I'm guessing the team will write a nice wedding for Penelope and Ezekiel next book, while Kiara continues to get scraps from the same team.

- Drake and Olivia will continue to eat into the plot. Madeleine will join this unholy trinity as well because they've set the stage for her to have plenty of angst.

With that over, these were my thoughts once this book was finished:

WHERE ARE THE DUCHESSES?

Remember how, back in Book 3, we all marvelled at the number of women in this country who were in positions of power? Adeleide and Emmeline were powerful duchesses while their husbands were secondary figures, and Joelle though married into a noble family is an influential artist and - according to Liam - the embodiment of King Fabian's values. It seemed like, despite the underlying sexism and racism in the story, women were at least at the forefront of Cordonian politics.

This is virtually gone in TRH1. Godfrey (who wasn't even interested in Krona in the first place, much less Cordonia) and Landon (whose only concern seemed to be Penelope, leaving Emmeline to manage the duchy) have a seat in the Council. In fact we never even see either of these woman in the book. I can maybe understand the logic behind not appointing Adeleide, but the fact that Emmeline is passed over for her far-less -qualified husband is a mystery to me!

Also, has anyone noticed how white-male-centered the whole Eleanor story is? Notice how we never see Eleanor's friends, besides Jackson? We never see any of the courtly ladies of that era? She's the Queen. She'd have her own court. I find it impossible that Eleanor would have no interactions of importance among her own goddamned court, that Joelle, Emmeline or Adeleide wouldn't even be mentioned in her story thus far. It's fascinating that forget being part of her story - these women are largely forgotten in the book itself.

(Note: It's also important to add that none of Kiara's family - besides Zeke - makes an appearance this book. At all. One member of Penelope's family and one member of Madeleine's family is in the council, but we never really see or hear anything from Kiara's, even though Hakim was Constantine's old friend and Joelle could have easily been connected to Eleanor, given that Eleanor was exactly the kind of ruler Joelle would have loved and respected.

While we're on that subject, Lorelai could have been connected to Eleanor as well - considering that we know next to nothing about her years in Shanghai. There were ways Hana's story could have been tied into the overall plot as well that were largely ignored. The fact that both the main and secondary WOCs presented opportunities for better plot and story, and despite that they were largely ignored in the books...I think that says a lot. But I will get into more of that in detail in a different section).

LI SPACE AND STORY

• Now...as we all know, The TRR/TRH series is primarily a romance-focused book first, with an underlying plot about royalty and politics. So it makes sense to evaluate the book based on what it gives its love interests. That includes the number of scenes they get, and the kind of focus their story is given. So...here's the rundown of how that goes in TRH Book 1:

Liam: Overall, not too bad. He gets one individual scene, a free and paywalled childhood scene (though the free one is essential for the group's realization of who killed Eleanor). The letter his mother writes to Liam includes an extra section towards the end, meant for the MC who marries him. However, we must note that a lot of this "attention" was thrust into the very final chapter of this book, and 99% of the same book didn't exactly make an attempt to explore his inner thoughts on anything - his mother's death, the dealings with the foreign countries, his political activities. Eleanor being pregnant came from a scene that made Olivia the center of attention, the MC had the opportunity to ask him how he was feeling only once or twice, and most of the time the narrative relegated it all to "the matter is still being investigated". It's a slight improvement from the absolute lack of concern the MC and the narrative showed about Liam's emotional state post his father's death in Book 3, but not much.

Variations wise, the team did step up on the basic ones for most of the LIs, so clearly we've moved past the days of seeing cut-paste scenes and the likes of Liam and Hana saying "I'm so dumb in love with you". However, in playthroughs where the MC is Liam's wife and Queen of Cordonia, her lack of genuine concern for her country and lack of curiosity about the place she's ruling, sticks out like a sore thumb. The fandom loves to highlight how the plot is "written for Liam" or is "easier in Liam's playthrough", but besides his own child being the heir, nothing else from Book 3 onwards seems like it was particularly written with him in mind.

Drake: Hoo boy. So 2019 was clearly the year that many people didn't believe me about Drake eating up space, and the year they had to eat their words because in TRH it was too obvious to be ignored. On an overall scale you cannot avoid the extra perks even his LI scenes got - his Valtoria scene in Chapter 4 was longer, set in a different place and he was allowed to expand on his decision to say yes to Liam's request in a way Hana and Maxwell never were. We learned way more about his familial relationships and dynamics than all the LIs combined. His childhood scene was the first to be given variants depending on whether the MC was his wife or not. His sister's wedding takes up almost half the book, leaving little to no space for either the intrigue, or even the pregnancy that was supposed to be THE most important part of the book.

An insane amount of retconning was done to emphasize strongly on the "marshmallow" part of his personality, having him state time and again that for the MC he can even "sport a tutu if you said you had a thing for the Sugar Fairy". Part of these changes could be attributed to the backlash the team got for having him call a pink cake "girly".

There is a strong possibility that Jackson might be explored further in the second book, and it's no surprise considering that he's the one parent that is most talked about in the series. The book looks like it was truly written with Drake in mind, with a heavy dose of Olivia, and everyone else was added as a bit of an afterthought.

Maxwell: Pretty awful treatment for a character that the head writer of the team claims to like. He has no individual character scenes, and one childhood scene where his older brother Bertrand is given more focus. Ironically, Maxwell was more wary of Bartie Sr in TRR Book 2 than Bertrand was, but somehow they changed this little detail so that Maxwell could be written out of his own story.

His LI scenes were also not given much effort - some were badly written, and some scenes (like the free ones) showed little to no variations between the friendly and romantic playthroughs. One that comes to mind is the baby announcement photoshoot, which was so poorly done it added nothing of value to the character or the relationship.

Like the last book, Maxwell isn't allowed much development in TRH1, and he's still forced into a largely "court jester" role in the story. This reflects very poorly on him in certain situations, such as the chapter where we finally get glimpses of his book. The aim was to be humourous and light about the events of the series, but he comes out of it sounding thoroughly insensitive towards his friends, none of whose consent he took to write this self-centered pile of garbage.

However, there is hope that they might do things a bit better for him next book, if the rewrite of him in TRR 2.0 was anything to go by. However, it would be awful if they tried to do a better job of him and then left out Hana. Speaking of which...

Hana: I'm going to begin this section with a comparison to another character, someone who should have been treated as a secondary character - Olivia.

Olivia in this book has 2 character scenes (they're very plot driven, but they also explore her outside of her friendship with the MC and dynamic with the group). The spy scene with Auvernese royalty, and the scene with Jin, the Auvernese spy. An entire chapter is spent in her duchy (by now we've seen Lythikos four times and I'm now sick of the place), and she winds up taking over Maxwell's Q&A scene as well.

So that's technically 2.5 scenes AND a childhood scene that revolves around her even though it's about Liam's mother. In addition to this, Olivia also gets her own mini-book, The Royal Holiday, that revolves (again) around her duchy and has the group clamouring to give her attention when no one else wants to.

Here are the stats for Hana, who by virtue of being an LI, is also a potential co-protagonist in the series:

Nothing.

Zilch. Zip. Zero. Nada. Nothing.

She has one childhood scene that is part of the group's scenes - a beautiful, heartbreaking one that serves as a slap in the face to anyone who'd dared to be dismissive of what she went through earlier - but none after that, and no individual scenes either. The team - in one of their most offensive choices this book - force a storyline where she has fertility issues just so the MC can be the one carrying the child, and the same MC can opt(!!) to ask about her well-being after two days. The same MC has the chance to whine about not getting pregnant soon enough in front of Hana.

There have been a few efforts made to make the MC appear more caring towards Hana: she can angrily defend Hana against Isabella's jibes, and she can make Hana relax for once during the baby shower (unlike the wedding reception where the same MC treated her like a bridesmaid). The MC even gets to tell her wife that she should never consider herself secondary or unimportant.

All of these are nice, but at the end of the day they're all scraps. I'd equate it to how we're allowed to give Kiara compliments on the final two chapters, but the white women around her still get a far bigger chunk of space, story and attention dedicated to them. The team have a pattern of adding these tiny tidbits that will temporarily satisfy stans while still maintaining the status quo, and that's precisely what's happening here. Its important for us to understand this. Underneath all this surface concern and all these scraps, Hana is still getting dust in place of actual story and characterization. And given that they made ZERO major changes to Hana's scenes in TRR 2.0, I'm not expecting that to change.

As for the book in general...I don't have to go into why this book is a mess, do I? We all know. We've all witnessed how disproportionate the writing has been and while I'm glad more and more people recognize what I've been seeing since Book 3, it's sad that it took 9 whole chapters in Walker Ranch for so many to understand exactly how much space Drake has been eating up for no good reason.

BLACK HOLES AND WHITE TEARS

I'll begin this section by talking about Drake Walker. He's the most prominent sign of the larger problem.

Drake Walker is what I call a Black Hole LI. And yes I mean black hole as in the one that exists in space (Beckett from TE also fits into this category). He is the kind of LI that sucks up everything. Love. Light. Joy. Common sense. Other characters' spaces.

He is the kind of love interest that will have Liam's traumatic experience centered around him. The kind of love interest for whose problems - largely created by his mammoth ego - we have to resolve in Shanghai, the home of the lone female LI. While that same female LI gets nothing, and then disappears in a subsequent chapter. The kind of love interest whose love confession can take precedence even over the MC's own issues (remember the Beaumont House chapter in Book 1? The one that took place the day after Tariq nonconsensually kissed the MC? 98% of the dialogue revolved around Drake's feelings. Not about the faulty lock, not the possibility that the MC's security had been tampered with - Drake's feelings). The kind of love interest that was given an entire extra wedding and artwork for his mother in Book 3 itself - none of which were given to any other LI.

A Black Hole LI is totally the kind of LI that would get 9 whole chapters in their home while we have never even visited the homes of the others since the early books of the previous series.

This wasn't something that began just this book. It's been a constant since Book 2, and you can even see signs of his story gaining way more importance in Book 1. It's also not something we can - in all honesty - blame simply on finances and fan popularity: the writers confirmed Drake to be one of their favourites, and attempts to give his scenes additional perks (eg plot elements pushed into both the Whiskey scene and the Beaumont Office scene) happened long before they could make any conclusions about his popularity. I bought the Beaumont Office scene to find out more about that family. I bought the Marshmallow scene so I could find out more about Liam and Hana's conversation post Coronation (remember - Hana was never even allowed to speak about her return to Cordonia because that scene was given to Drake). I bought the Italian Restaurant scene to learn more about Liam's assassination. The funny thing about all these three is that these were their stories to tell, yet Drake is the focus. Quite a few of Drake's initial scenes sold because the team consistently made the effort, consistently ensured that the information from his scenes would benefit us in the long run. The narrative allowed for Drake to have his own story, and additionally let aspects of his story overshadow that of the other LIs' (see the examples I've given above). Even though he has very little of value to contribute to the larger story (no job, his friendships are shallower than a wash-basin, and no genuine communication with any commoner in the story - only endless whining).

The treatment Drake gets that no other LI does, is a problem in itself, but it also is a small part of an even bigger issue. He isn't the only white character who gets this sort of attention and detail to his story.

Take Olivia, for example. Started out as a rival to the MC, before her sad sad childhood and her genuine love for Liam was revealed in the Book 1 finale. Over the course of the story, her role changed from petty rival to Warrior Duchess to reluctant bff. Over the course of the original series, Olivia became one of the most prominent characters in the story, on par with the male LIs. I'm not sure how many people realize that Lythikos is the ONLY duchy in the kingdom we've seen thrice (four times if you count Holiday). To give you an idea of how big a deal that is, here's how many times we've visited other duchies besides the capital and Applewood:

Fydelia - 2

Portavira - 1

Castelserraillian - 1

Ramsford (the home of our sponsors!) - 1

Hana's mother's home - Never.

Lythikos has a detailed familial and cultural history, and I wouldn't be lying if I said we know more about this one region than we know about the entire country of Cordonia. And honestly for me, the obsession with this one duchy has reached saturation point. Lythikos is not Cordonia. Lythikos is not all there is to Cordonia or even the only place that should matter. Yet it seems the team is more than eager to flog that horse until there's nothing of interest left.

Olivia is the only character who gets an entire mini book that revolves around comforting her and making her feel better about her background and origins. I don't think we've ever given Hana this much attention when she left her home for us. Or when she was being bullied by Madeleine. Or when she was the other bride in that grand wedding. Or when we received the news that carrying a child to term would be dangerous for her body. Or --

We were given an entire mini-book to comfort Olivia - the woman who continued to call Hana "damaged goods" and " a failure" for not marrying a man, while Hana's friend/wife stood by and watched. The woman who didn't have to think twice before making snide remarks about an equally skilled courtier who never did her any harm, only because she could get away with it. Istg when I heard that most of the court snubbed her during that first event in Holiday, this was my reaction:

Like girl I feel bad for you but at least now you know how it feels to be held responsible for shit beyond your control!

Hana, in the meantime, is forced time and again into situations that would break most people - but with very little payoff. Her arc with her parents was given a resolution that confirmed that Hana could only be considered worthy if she was useful. She was made to interact time and again with the woman who harmed her with such glee in Book 2. The MC - as a friend or as a wife - is at best neglectful of her issues and at worst someone who uses and discards Hana as she sees fit. And now...in her romantic playthrough she's given a storyline that doesn't allow her to bear children easily, and the MC spends less than two minutes to actually check on her. Hana is one of the co-protagonists, yet a side character given the treatment she should be getting. One could technically blame finances for the way she's being treated too, but keep in mind that the bad treatment goes as far back as the Applewood chapters in Book 1. Technically a time when she was bringing in money.

I get it. Olivia is a fan favourite. Many in the fandom wanted her to be an LI, the writers didn't, so they carved out this middle path where she'd have a major portion of the story anyway. But keep in mind that a lot of this attention came - and is still coming - at the cost of Hana. The team pretty much gave Olivia what they'd been refusing to give Hana all along.

On a smaller scale, you see similar patterns with the secondary characters - especially the women of the court. Madeleine and Penelope had elaborate backstories designed to make people forgive and sympathize with them, and Kiara - even though her backstory in Book 1 was inherently tragic and deserved to be handled sensitively - was given validation with great reluctance from the team, and with no consequences if we treated her cruelly. Even now, the team has only tossed Kiara a couple of scraps in the final chapter, while already setting the stage for Madeleine to get her own tragic "patriotism" arc for TRH Book 2, and a possible wedding for Penelope in the near future.

The difference here doesn't just lie in who gets attention and who doesn't. It lies in how the MC is supposed to view these women as well. A lot more sympathy and understanding is automatically extended to the white women, and the MC faces consequences if she fails to acknowledge their pain. Far less sympathy is offered by default to the black and the Asian woman - the MC may be friends with Hana but a huge chunk of their relationship is mostly about the MC benefiting from Hana's skills without giving much in return.

Even though their misdeeds are acknowledged and spoken about, both Madeleine and Penelope are written in such a way that the problems they're currently facing matter more than anything they've ever done in the past. Hana is made to sweet-talk Madeleine despite being bullied by her in a previous book. The MC herself never gets ANY opportunity to directly address what Penelope put her through in Portavira, because what the MC went through matters less than Penelope's condition.

Compare this to the relatively small scale of Kiara's "misdeed" (being honest about not continuing with an alliance - I'm surprised people think this is an actual thing to be offended about!), and the way the MC is allowed to mistreat her sans consequences afterwards. We're even allowed to call Kiara a snob in the books - which isn't at all true if you look at any of her scenes in canon - and constantly make fun of her desire to learn (in fact, if anyone in the series could be called a snob, it would be Olivia). If I were to sum up how a woman of colour is spoken about in the books, vs a white woman - this screenshot would do the trick:

(Notice how none of the options to speak about Penelope allow us to speak rudely of her, yet in Kiara's case we're allowed to make judgements on her as a person. In Hana's case, while we don't exactly drag her the way we can drag Kiara - we get precious few opportunities to actually defend or support her when others talk rubbish about her).

When you explore the series overall, it's impossible to ignore the casual racism that makes disrespecting people of a certain race/colour easier than on another. It's impossible not to see where the narrative chooses to give consequences to an MC who treats a white woman badly, and where it allows the very same MC to suspect, and then (optionally) gaslight, a woman of colour a couple chapters later. It's impossible not to see which people are meant to be respected despite their bad behaviour, and which people can still be treated badly despite their better behaviour. It's impossible not to see a pattern emerging.

This is not even a problem that plagues only the TRR series. From TCaTF to ACOR to Platinum to even MoTY, there is an ongoing pattern of discrepancies between the way white people and people of colour - particularly women - are treated. Many POC characters are placed in situations where it's easier for them to suffer/die/be shown disrespect, than it is to show them kindness or mercy. MOC are regularly either exoticized (Prince Hamid is the most glaring example of this) or placed in very traumatic situations for which the payoff isn't always going to be that great (I know this happens to Dallas, but I don't know about the payoff for Syphax).

WOC particularly suffer quite a bit in a lot of PB novels, in comparison to their white counterparts. Rowan Thorne of TCaTF, as a character, didn't deserve for her death to be made easier than her survival (in contrast to Diavolos, who was given far more opportunities AND will live simply by virtue of allying with Kenna), any more than Kiara deserved to be interrogated by the people who should have been concerned for her safety or Xanthe deserved to be shipped to slavery. All this, while a Vanessa (who is in a position of power and who plays an active role in rendering the MOTY MC financially helpless) gets a diamond scene where she "explains" her situation and a Madeleine doesn't even have to hear about her bullying from her victims.

The fandom, too, has contributed to this on a number of occasions. Speaking specifically of TRR, how many times have we seen Hana being dragged on Olivia posts? (also, if we were really measuring Olivia by the impossible standards that we held for Hana's characterization, Olivia would appear pretty damn one-note too: after all, 80% of her characterization consists of knife jokes). How many times was Hana being looked at with disdain for either her niceness or the poor writing for her, while the same fandom would regularly coo over a nice-presenting Penelope (whose characterization is one of the most inconsistent in the series)? How many times have we seen Kiara being called a creep/obsessed for merely looking at a man, while almost no one judges Olivia for kissing a man without his consent? How many times have people forgiven a traitorous Penelope and hated on a far more innocent Kiara in the same breath? How often did the fandom hate on Liam for accepting the MC's advances after she rejected him, yet not say a word when Drake did the same thing? How many times has Maxwell been loved for his humour and childlike nature while people of colour with a similar personality (Lily from Bloodbound, for example) were hated on instantly? Clearly, there have been more instances of people in the fandom sympathizing automatically with the white character, than with characters of colour. Time and again, brown and black characters - particularly women - have been required to match up to impossible standards (if they're nice they're boring. If they don't like the MC they're <insert every gendered sexist insult you can think of here>). The standards are far more relaxed for white characters, and they're often given more breathing room and to most of what they want without the constant judgement that black and brown women get. The standards set up for both are grossly different.

Racism is a beast that assumes many forms - and not all forms of racism will appear obvious to some, especially when such stereotypes are so normalized in media and popular fiction that we almost accept it at first. Almost. To get to the root of why there's such an imbalance in this series - among others - we need to first acknowledge the sexism and racism that are such a vital part of its narrative, and that its fandom regularly buys into and (sometimes unwittingly) promotes.

At this point, it's important to understand that having queer characters or characters of colour simply exist in the books isn't enough. Token rep can be found in PB's books by the dozens, but at the end of the day it means nothing if there is a constant reluctance, over and over and over, to treat those characters with the same care and sensitivity that they treat their white ones (or their "exoticized brown" ones).

• Like I mentioned earlier, I won't be playing TRH from this point forward, but I do hope to finish my TRR QTs soon. I have a LOT of thoughts! If you'd like to be tagged on those, do tell me!

#long post #tw: racism from pb #tw: fandom racism #trh quick thoughts #trh qts #king liam #hana lee #maxwell beaumont #anti drake walker #anti olivia nevrakis #anti trr madeleine #anti trr penelope #trr kiara

[psi-psina]

05/09 Niigata LOTS

SE 詩踏み 咀嚼

蜷局 腐海 理由

New song (zankoku ?) New song (omae) 輪郭 THE BLOSSOMING BEELZEBUB

Ranunculus 人間を被る Punk song (GO MAD) Ash Revelation of mankind

EN 鼓動 The inferno THE IIID EMPIRE Beautiful Dirt 羅刹国

Same as yesterday, I wrote this last night before passing out after eating 3 fish taco’s and 3 glasses of red wine so this may have effected my memory a bit but I hope it is somewhat readable :)

Today was absolute FIRE. The setlist yesterday was better (my fave) but the guys were WAY more into it today, especially Kyo. I am so shit at outfits and I am really sorry. Today I only remember Kyo and Die's because I was closer to kamite in front of Shinya today. (it was so nice!!!) Die wore the outfit from the album promo photoshoot, Kaoru was definitely not wearing his (full) photoshoot outfit and I don't think? Toshiya was either but I can't remember anything else, I am sorry. Kyo's outfit was fantastic, he wore a white sleeveless blouse and his black skinny jeans with the ripped knees and over that his giant alice auaa...suspenders? It’s a big rectangular skirt that he can put his arms through as well, they are fucking awesome and he made WAY better use of them than he did when he wore them in Osaka *__* He wore his rosette badge again, on the front of the suspenders. And he wore his headgear from mode of DSS, with a black hair extension down the right side of his face and his white contacts. He was also wearing his new mac lipstick & gloss combo. I'm not sure if he had his grill in but I think he did? Damn it looked so good! I'm not usually a big fan of headgear on Kyo because I really prefer to be able to see his expressions more freely but even though this gear covers most of his face it actually enhanced his expressions. It just really....suits him? He wears it really well, I love it.

The whole front section of the set was very atmospheric. Niigata's response to Soshaku wasn't quite as lusty as Osaka's was, but ahh people were moving so much during Toguro and just feeling it SO MUCH. BLISS. Fukai was a stand out tonight, I caught Die's eye near the start of it and we looked at each other briefly, I smiled at him and he smiled back <3 he's so lovely. Die got my attention during Fukai today, I'm sorry Kaoru (ILU). The Fukai mosh was also Bliss. Kyo got us to sing a LOT, he called on us in the first chorus and other parts of the song, he screamed for more and ripped his monitor out so he could hear us better and we GAVE IT TO HIM. ❤️ Riyuu got lots of movement as well today, and went down even better than yesterday. Then I think it was during this interlude that everyone was pretty quiet, and then Kaoru sidled up in front of shimote with that cocky swagger of his and there was this sudden ROAR for Kaoru from shimote which got everyone in the middle shouting for him as well 😂 Then Kyo came back to the front and tilted his head back in that demented snarl-grin he's doing lately and everyone roared at him. Then it was time for the new songs again and it was much the same as yesterday, I can't remember much because I was going crazy. >.< They are just too good.

Kyo made the fox 🤘 at the end of Rinkaku when he was calling the demon. Beelzebub was FANTASTIC today! The flatness of Kyo's mood yesterday had a big effect in Beelzebub, but today was completely different. He was a lot more intense. After he bundled up his cord-intestines and dropped them, he was looking down at them sullenly and kind of waved at them. He deeply growled 'kyou wa kono mama nemuri ni tsukitai' in this transfixing pose...it was fucking Amazing (it's really stuck in my memory) and again after 'ugoku kometsubu ni...' he was trying to stomp on some phantom creepy-crawlies again. He went to town on his mouth towards the end, he did not drool everywhere today but rather uh, deeply fingered his mouth and played with his tongue. He was brazenly eyeballing people up on his crate while doing this, he looked right at me and it was UNCOMFORTABLE.

The interlude between Beelzebub and Ranunculus was really...intense? Idk, legit, no one even moved, the place was so enchanted and thick with anticipation it was just...magic. Ranunculus was also more emotional today than it was yesterday, there was a fair bit of movement from the fans and Die was very passionate during the chorus. Then Ningen was up, oh man...Those moments of stillness as Ranunculus closes out and you are absolutely SODDEN with 5 million emotions and could literally just die and then those deep melancholy chords open up Ningen and Kyo steps forward and raises his hand and calls out and everyone calls back and you can FEEL THE INTAKE OF BREATH as the riff comes crashing in and then !!!!! AAAHHH!!!! IT IS BURNED INTO MY MEMORY!! I know a lot of people did not like Ningen but fuck it is so good live, it is SO emotional and the dynamics just COME ALIVE. I really like the sound of the studio ver but it is flawed, and in some ways hampers the song a bit.

The punk song came next and fans were GETTING DOWN, there was DANCING and so much jumping. God it was so much fun and I could see how satisfied Kyo and Toshiya were with the response. <3 Ash was MESSY. Kyo got us to sing excessively and spent a lot of time at the edge of the stage monitor-less which just makes everyone go crazy. The ending thrash was epic, someone behind me grabbed my shoulders and was going so hard they were shaking me (NO COMPLAINTS JUST GIVES ME MORE MOMENTUM). When the song ended they were kind enough to disentangle from my hair without pulling it 😂 Then Revelation oh my god. Revelation is a song I didn't enjoy at all right through 2015 but amazingly it has grown on me and I now enjoy it even though it is still too chaotic and dissonant and exhausting. It's so brutal as a set closer I kind of wish they would just open with it laskdjf. I best remember Kyo shrieking "NIIGATAAAAAA" and at some point someone getting their arm in my mouth asflkjs idk what happened but I definitely got like the sweat of 5 people in my mouth then. Gross. And lol at Kyo making us sing "michinaki michi o" like lkajnfl yes Kyo, stretch us to the very limits of your ridiculous vocal range. The ending thrash was, again, absolute filth and when I emerged all I could see was Kyo towering up there on his crate with this MALEVOLENT look on his face. He turned and left the stage and the other guys followed promptly.

The encore was BEYOND. Kaoru, Toshiya and Die all came out wearing the white goat tee with the sleeves cut, And Kyo changed into a plain black blouse and removed his headgear. I could see at the end he had red and black eye makeup on. Shinya was wearing the white tee with the patches all over it I think. Then Kodou just completely set everyone on fire. skjdnffa. Kyo pointed right at me during Kodou, what even. I clapped eyes with him and Die a few times tonight (it's just where I was) but he really took me by surprise ;_; at the first chorus of Kodou as he was walking around his crate to stand at the edge of the stage Kyo put a hand over his heart and lunged forward pointing right fuckin at me looking me in the god damn eyes as we sang 'KOE KOROSHITE ME O FUSAIDE' together. It was like being ATTACKED. Dazzling. Unbelievable. 😭 He stood right at the edge and ripped out his monitor and sang his heart out going mic-less here and there and looking at people HARD and screaming more more more. Kodou owns my entire soul.

I lost my damn mind again during The inferno, someone had grabbed hold of the back of my shirt and was using my back for support and fuckin growling and I was straight up just snarling and shaking my fist at Kyo every time I surfaced from thrashing. Kyo was having some trouble with his mic tonight (the sound was dropping out a fair bit) but during The inferno it completely died. He turned back to the sound guys gesturing at the dead mic then threw it down and turned back to the crowd and snarled at us without it, gesturing wildly and smacking himself and going down in a crouch and fans went NUTS. And a moment later one of the guys had restored his mic and after a tentative moment (he was shy of the mic for a moment as he tested to see if it was working....it was...Cute  lakjsnflgkadf) he was back in full force. All happened VERY quickly and by the end he looked WELL pleased.

My part of the crowd almost collapsed during IIID it was heaving and bouncing so much and the guys started going EVERYWHEREE. Idk if it was during IIID or Beautiful but Kaoru came over to stand right in front of us and the crazed snarls of "KAAAOOORRRUUUUU!!!!" and wordless howling actually made me LAUGH because he totally DEADPANNED us like "Ehh? Is that it??" Then he smirked and went further over to kamite. BITCH. (Eta, pretty sure it was Beautiful actually) Is2g i am lucky my shirt didn't get ripped during IIID because it was insane and Kyo kept shouting for more more more more until he got drowned out by the screaming. I got a bit of nausea/stomach pain briefly towards the end like whelp going a bit TOO hard rn. My throat and the right side of my ribcage/right shoulder blade feel bruised as hell idek what happened. Feels like I pulled the muscles.

Then straight into Beautiful Dirt which was just as fuckin relentless alkjsnf Kyo swooped over to shimote during the second verse and showered them with some attention because Kaoru was over in kamite quite a lot and Toshiya and Die had come to the centre. Even with Kyo right over on Kaoru's side everyone kept screaming "SAIKOU NO BARAADO O OKUROU" with no encouragement every time alskjnf. Had a great moment with Die, he was right in front of us at the very edge and he was looking at everyone with such affection. Such a warm expression and I couldn't help it I just went 'DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE' and flailed at him and was surely smiling like a fool and everyone around me was calling out to him as well and his face just GLOWED lALKJSNFA he smiled at us again and bowed and flipped his hair the way he does and then moved away ;3; Kaoru and Toshiya joined forces at some point, Kaoru lounged on the edge of the crate briefly. I don't know what Kyo was doing after he came back from shimote, it was the roughest part of the song and I was thrashing. I totally get why Kyo gets us to sing "saikou...." every damn time because it's BEYOND EXHAUSTING. He LOVES making us struggle ksdjgnklf.

Kyo's MC at the end was a lot more enthusiastic tonight, he called twice to the men and women, shouted without the mic and did the usual riles and pounded on his chest. He got shirtless for Rasetsukoku tonight and...yeah, it was crazy. I'm struggling to remember anything it was just solid thrashing and roaring from all involved and giving my all took every ounce of energy I had I HAD NOTHING LEFT FOR OBSerVATION. I can't actually remember how it ended or what Kyo or any of the guys were doing until the post concert gift-giving. I did see Kyo's new tattoo very clearly tonight though, it looks good! Kyo stayed back, which was nice. He showered fans with a couple of bottles of water and wiped off all his makeup onto a towel and threw that in. He then got the bucket of water and DUMPED the whole thing onto one guy on the rail in front of him and tossed the bucket in too. He crouched down and slapped hands with the fans on the rail as well <3 I heard him sing out 'bye bye!!' as he straightened up again and i love the way his face scrunches up with emotion as everyone sings bye bye and waves back to him. He left with a couple of fox kisses. <3

Kaoru and Die threw a lot more picks today and I FELT Die's pick in my fingers but it escaped me 😭 A girl behind me just kept screaming thank you thank you thank you all of them. ;__; Shinya and Kaoru were fucking adorable, Shinya came to the front after he threw all his drumsticks with the uchiwa and fanned us! It was! Adorable! Then he threw the uchiwa to the Kyo pit. Kaoru was eyeing him as he strutted around and after Shinya left he took his own uchiwa and fanned shimote with it and BLEW ON THE FANS lksdhfnl he is such! a dork! I love him oh my god. As Die finished up his gift-giving he stood just in front of us and just looked at us, his eyes looked really glassy at the end? I was like, did you cry?? And man he looked tired, and really emotional. But he was just looking at us and clapping and smiling and we started a chant for him and he just looked so....overwhelmed and thankful oh my god. Sweetheart. 😭Kaoru was the last to leave again and he kept stopping and lingering to get that last little bit out of us....GAH. Then we all wobbled out.

To cap this experience as I was going to cloak I stood near a little girl while fumbling for my ticket, who saw me and turned to me, absolutely THRIVING, and said ‘KONNICHIWA’ with the most beautiful smile on her face and I was just like alksjnfliaj OVERCOME and said “konnichiwa sweetheart!!” to her and she like...squealed and just stared at me and her mum was laughing. Her mum said hello to me as well ;3; Fans with kids are the absolute best. The little girl wasn’t wearing a tour shirt but she was proudly sporting the hanged-man muffler towel and was just LOVING LIFE skldjfn. I love her ;___;

Niigata...thank you for these memories. I will always treasure these nights. ❤️

#dir en grey #tour18

[canaryatlaw]

Today was....ugh. I mean it was mostly fine but I'm just in a rotten mood right now because of a few circumstances. But we'll start from the top (like we always do). Alarm goes off at 7 am, I manage to get out of bed even though it's gross and rainy and literally my least favorite type of weather, it's not like I really have a choice at this point. Gotta get those damn hours in. So I make it to work without incident (I came very close to getting through the metal detector without it going off....I swear it was like a second delayed. One day) then when I got up to my office I quickly finished off the timeline I was working up for the polish kidnapped twins (I'm not gonna take the time to explain that right here, so Tuesday night's post if you'd like to know more) mainly just adding the doctors report, then gave that to the lawyer, and then was effectively out of work. So I told everyone that and just like, hung out for a while to make sure they knew haha but nobody really had anything for me so I shrugged and said okay, I'll work on trial ad, which was a good move. I never really know where I'm gonna go with these things when I sit down to write them, which is true for a lot of the things I write. Some of it is basically done for you if you have a deposition transcript or something similar, but crosses are still different and such. So I got the direct and cross mainly hammered out throughout the day and I'm pretty satisfied with them. The case is being charged as first degree murder, and the defense is putting up a justifiable self defense defense, but the facts of the case very much indicate that it's actually a second degree unreasonable self defense case (which is when a person has a genuine belief their life was in danger, but that belief was objectively unreasonable). But we have to argue our side and why it shouldn't go to the other, so it's interesting. But yeah, I messaged my partner back and forth for a while and we got some good stuff done. I also had some inspiration to go to the stans donuts website and write to them about the incident I witnessed there about 3 weeks ago now. The inspiration came from a Facebook friend who wrote into the "not your mother's" brand of hair products about how their labeling saying "you have so much shopping and everything to get done how would you have time to shampoo your hair??" and pointing out the people really in need of the products are those that don't have the time to wash their hair because they're working very hard to make a name for themselves, and the company actually loved the idea and are now changing the message on all of their products, which is like, super awesome. So it somehow gave me the idea to report the incident. I tried to make it very clear that I did not want to get any fired or in trouble here, and that I genuinely think the male workers just didn't know any better, and that's the issue I have. So I told them what happened and how disturbed I was by it, and how I very strongly felt that if there was a female employee present there is no way in hell she would've let them kick the girl out. So I really just encouraged them to share this kind of stuff with their male employees so they can actually recognize this kind of situation and not throw someone out because they were "causing trouble" when really they were the victim of harassment and you just threw them out right to where their abuser was. So I felt good about that. Somewhere in the afternoon I got an assignment to look up cases and statutes in an old motion they were using as a template for a new one, and wanted to make sure all the case law and statutes are still valid law (the legal term for this, for some strange reason, is called "shephardizing"). So I basically went through and came up with a detailed list of the cases their cases had cited to and such, and I thought it was pretty well done. Around 4 I heard we were getting a TC in right now because our courtroom was on "duty" week, which means they stay up all afternoon to handle any cases that would've gone to a different calendar but that one is down for the day already. It was just a stip because the mom couldn't get her lawyer there, so it without TC without prejudice (meaning they can re-litigate it in the future, but they have to take TC within 48 hours of taking PC so it's somewhat frequent to do it that way). The petition was something alright, it was like, substance abuse, BITING YOUR CHILDREN and a bunch of other bizarre things that the correct legal term for is "yikes." She also messed up her children's birth dates when going over them with the ASA....whoops. So that was mildly entertaining at least. So when that was mostly over I went back upstairs and put the finishing touches on what I was working on and sent it over before heading out. Oh, I forgot to mention, my back has been insanely killing me for the past 24 hours or so, to the point where I had to take my heating pad to work with me today because I knew there would be no way I could even function without it because it's just so damn bad. Ugh. So for that reason I did not go to kickboxing, which of course I already expressed my annoyance at the other night, so I just went to Starbucks instead and started typing up my opening statement. It's so funny, cuz I sit down at the computer and just type "opening statement" as the title with no idea what I actually want to write, but then my brain just goes, and a couple minutes later I have some well-crafted paragraphs with a solid theme running through. The whole thing about this case is the victim was this bigger guy and the defendant is smaller, so you know the defense is gonna be all about how much bigger he was and how much he feared for his safety, so I decided the best way to rebut that narrative was to turn it on its head and go with the "big lovable teddy bear" persona instead. I decided that instead of being called "William Jones" his friends called him "Willie" and will proceed to only refer to him as that for the entire trial, just because I know that kind of shit endears people and it works very well, lol. So I got this whole thing worked up about how the defendant thought that just because of his size he had to be a threat to him, and he was a threat he was going to eliminate, by any means necessary. I think it's a fairly good way to flip the other narrative to make it work to our advantage. I almost wished I could've brought race into the problem, but none of the races of the parties were specified and I think it would've been wayyyyyy stepping over the line to pull out of thin air that the victim was black and the defendant was white so I could make my narrative about prejudice against the "big scary black guy" who was really just a big sweetheart. I recognize that that would've been way out of bounds though so I didn't go anywhere near it. A little past 7 I start walking over to church for small group, only for one of my small group leaders to pull up to the curb in her car and drive me the rest of the way, lol. We had a bit of confusion at the beginning because the church is like going nuts getting ready for Easter (I shit you not, they have a like, 8 food tall paper mache carrot in the kids section and I have no idea why) and the rooms were being cleaned so we got shuffled around a bit but eventually ended up in our regular room. The guy I was talking about last week was there of course, and we didn't get to talk quite as much, but there was definitely an undercurrent of something going on there, and I started like teasing him lightly and just kind of laughing and idk, it's just nice. Like if it doesn't go anywhere I won't really be disappointed, but it would be cool if it does. I just don't want to get my hopes up over nothing, not this early at least. I had like, a really hard time focusing in small group today for some reason I can't identify, but we talked about the similarities in the stories of Cain and Isaac which I thought was interesting because you never see Cain portrayed through any sort of redemptive arc, and he never really achieves redemption in the story, but God does give him another chance. And we talked about why God would've liked Abel's sacrifice and rejected Cain's, and all I could think of was that I was definitely told as a child in Sunday school it had something to do with God wanting sacrifices in meat, not fruit and vegetables and that's not exactly in the bible haha so that was interesting. It was a "knowing God" week which are great of course, but I really love the "loving others" weeks because you know that's kind of my thing. But anyway. We ended, I walk down to the blue line station and get onto the train, anddddd here's where everything starts to fall to shit. As soon as I sit down I'm aware I'm being watched, but I just ignore it and try to do my own thing, but pretty soon this guy is trying to get my attention, and just how he's looking at me makes me immediately uncomfortable. I knew, unfortunately, where this was going. So he starts telling me how pretty I am and I try to just be like "thanks" and turn back away but then he starts saying how he doesn't see a ring on my finger and I was like "uh no, I'm not married" at which point he takes it upon himself to move into the seat right next to me and is literally inches away from me and okay I am VERY uncomfortable at this point. So I go with my one tried and true excuse, and just blurted out "I do have a boyfriend though" (which, of course, I don't). But, thankfully, that did the trick and he backed off, but he made it VERY clear that was the only reason he was doing so, because he didn't want to cause any trouble with my "boyfriend," otherwise we could be together. And I'm just sitting there so ridiculously uncomfortable and while all of this is happening, there are other people in the car. I make eye contact with a few of them when he's right next to me and I'm certain the panic was very clear in my face, but not one even batted an eye to do anything about it and I just.....god, I hate that so much. I hate that I have this picture of myself in my mind telling any guy to fuck off if he tries to do anything, but then when something actually happens, I turn into a scared little girl who just tries to appease him in the easiest way to get out of the situation. Like goddammit, I should be better than this. I'm a feminist, dammit. I shouldn't have to resort to telling a man I have a boyfriend to get him to back off, I should assert that I'm not interested and that's enough. But I didn't, and I kind of hate myself for it. Next time, maybe. It depends on the context too of course, how many people are actually around, so if the guy decides he doesn't like my answer he can't somehow grab me without anyone seeing. The other question it brought to my mind has to do with intersectional feminism, and it is admittedly something that's been brought to my head on several occasions lately- that when a man makes me uncomfortable, does it have to do with his race? It's not like white men never make me feel uncomfortable, they do plenty of the time. But sometimes when a black man makes me feel uncomfortable I feel a stab of guilt somewhere that that probably has to do with a racist view I have somewhere deep down, but like, I don't know, I don't think race is the determining factor but it might be there?? And of course I don't want that. But then I'm faced with situations like tonight where the man who was harassing me was black. What does a white feminist do while being harassed by a black male? How does intersectionality work here? This is me genuinely asking, because I'm just not sure how I'm supposed to feel about any of this. Like should I not have as much feelings of misogyny about the situation as I would if it were a white man? I'm totally convinced I would've been just as uncomfortable if it had been a white man. I just....I don't know. I don't have any answers, just lots of questions. Sigh. I was going to switch compartments at the next stop but thankfully the guy got off instead and I breathed a big sigh of relief (while sparing a glare for those who sat through the incident and did nothing). When we make it to my stop, the bus is "delayed" 2 miles ago like it was two weeks ago with no telling how long it'll be delayed, and after all that I was like nope fuck this shit, so I just get a Lyft home because I'm tired and upset and my back hurts and I just want to go home, dammit. When I did get home I watched the episode of powerless I had recorded while I was on my computer and shortly after started getting ready for bed, and that was my day. I'm just......gah. I'm so frustrated. With men, with society, with myself for not being as strong as I pretend to be. I'm just so frustrated. But anyway. Sleep is definitely needed about now, so I'm gonna go do that. Goodnight my dears. Rest well.

#daily journal #April 2017

[pressstart5atbh-blog]

Day 1: Try Again?

For a while we walked together as a big group until the paths started to split. Within 5 minutes I was exploring the map alone with Namjoon.

I looked over at him and some of his stats popped up over his head. Heartbeat a bit higher than normal.  Missing 10% of his health. No Shield activated. I couldn’t see anything equipped.

“So..you downloaded this game for fun?” He asked, out of the blue. I didn’t answer right away, but opened up the random door that appeared to the left. The room was empty, but it filled out another section of the map.

There weren’t any dialogue choices for me to choose from. “Yeah. But if the rest of the game is going to be as glitchy as the NPCs, i’ll have to call customer service.” I commented, half to myself.

“We didn’t see any NPCs. And we’ve been stuck in here for two days. Where did you see the NPCs?”

I didn’t see how this conversation related to what we were doing at all, so I chose to ignore it. The map A progress bar was slowly increasing. 5% ...7%.....10%....

“I’m not an NPC.” Rapmon said. “We need to work together to get out of here alive.”

Yeah duh, that’s the point of the game. To work together. I opened up my inbox and wrote a new message to Devon.

BryAnna created the chat.

Devon joined the chat.

BryAnna: Yo ur NPCs acting funny?

Devon: Idk what the difference is, sooo.

BryAnna: Did they mention being real people?

Devon: ………..

The icon that she was writing a response wouldn’t disappear. I minimized chat. Our path had ended and we had to go through a door. It was unlocked so I just went ahead and went through. It opened to a dark room. I felt for a light switch but there was nothing. The door shut behind us, leaving us in utter darkness. Not even emergency lights to help out.

I reached out my arms and took baby steps until I felt the wall. I heard a thump and a groan. He must have just walked straight, without thinking about anything. “What did you run into?” I asked.

“It’s dark. How am I supposed to know what it was?” Yikes. The NPC is a little grumpy. I moved away from the wall in the direction that his voice came from. I took small steps. My foot caught on what could only have been NamJoon’s outstretched arm as he sat on the ground. I fell forward, putting my hands out to catch my fall. My knee slammed against the crate that he tripped on.

“Ow….” That hurt. A lot. More than it probably should for a game. I rubbed my knee and silently cursed when I noticed that my health bar fell a few points. “Damnit.” When I tapped the top of the crate with my palm it sprung open. A dim menu popped up above it. A Night Vision mod.

I sent it Namjoon’s way. He was so fricking clumsy it would help if he could see things. “Here you go. Feel free to lead the way.” The light from the crate disappeared as soon as we accepted the loot. I was back in utter darkness. Namjoon’s hand settled under my elbow and he helped me up. I let him guide me to the other side of the room. I heard him open a door and I squinted at the brightness of the next area of the map.

Exploring the map was becoming tedious. “Where are we now?” I asked myself as I pulled up the map. The progress was at nearly 80%. The others must have moved quickly because it felt like we didn’t move very far at all. The time was at just under 40 minutes left. That wasn’t much time at all. Seriously hoping if we miss the time limit we won’t have to start over.

We moved through our remaining rooms, not finding anything useful. The room we wanted to get to eventually was the safe room. It was in the middle of the map with 4 doors leading inside. We thought it was perfect to split the map into quarters and sneak past the guard at each of the doors with our team, knocking out the objective all at the same time.

Rapmon and I finished filling our part of the map with 15 minutes to spare. That should be plenty of time. We backtracked towards the Safe Room’s checkpoint. At the last turn we stopped to make our plan. There was only one enemy in front of the door. Rapmon leaned over to peak past the wall. It made me a lot nervous to let him be the one to tell us when to move. I tapped my foot, impatient.

“We have to get past him AND crack the code before he notices us.” Rapmon whispered. “And his back is only turned for 10 seconds…”

10 seconds? That’s not enough time, even if we had Liz’s hacking mod. I thought about it for a moment. “Do you think we can kill him?”

“Kill him?” He sounded a bit shocked.

“Uh..yeah. The objective it to get by undetected. If we can kill him when his back is turned, like a sneak attack, he won’t see us and we’ll have enough time to unlock the door.”

“You want to Kill a guy.”

“Jesus, that’s the point of the game.” I equip my staff, making sure the blade was out.   He looked back at me. “Maybe because you’re a…”

“For the last time. I am not an NPC. This is not a regular game. I know that’s hard to believe.” His voice was hushed, but full of urgency. I huffed disbelief. Yeah okay. He shook his head. “Jeez, you're more thick headed than Yoongi-hyung.”

I ignored the statement. “You’re smarter than I am, so how about you take care of the lock. While you do that, I’ll take out the guard. I’m almost positive it’s possible. If not, well I guess we try again.” I didn’t wait for him to answer, just trusted that he’d follow my lead.

The guard paced back and forth. When he turned around, I ran across the hall. I touched the lock to wake it up and then focused my attention on the guard. Crouching, I snuck up close behind him. When there was only a yard between me and his back, a pop up choice appeared on my monitor:

Preemptive Strike?

Yes

No

Knew it. I clicked yes and my body moved with the in - game combat muscle memory. I swung my leg out from my crouch and tripped the guard. He landed on his stomach. Within a second I was on his back and the blade on my staff came down right between in shoulder blades. Already i felt that this was different than when we took out the skeleton monsters. Before there was a fantasy feel to it. No resistance, the bodies didn’t even seem real. This was different. I could feel the resistance of bone and flesh as I stabbed him. It was difficult to pull it out.

The blood pooling from the wound was hot to the touch. The body didn’t dissipate as soon as the health bar reached zero. My heart rate skyrocketed.

Ok this was to real. This VR was nuts. It was time to quit. “Logout.” I said, standing up. I wiped the blood off of my hand, smearing it on my pants. I took a step back. The logout screen popped up.

Log out?

Yes

No

“Yes. Logout.”

LOGOUT FAILED. TRY AGAIN?

“Logout.”

LOGOUT FAILED. TRY AGAIN?

Beeps from the lock disengaging resounded in the otherwise quiet hall.

I pulled up my messenger and opened the group chat.

BryAnna: Everyone. Logout now.

Devon: ????

Liz: busy right now

Brianna: it won’t let me.

Rapmon grabbed my arm, and I pulled it free. “Come on, We gotta go in. More are coming.”

I checked the map. Green dots indicated that the rest of my friends are almost done with their objective. They were working on getting past the guards. More red dots were coming at us at a surprising speed.

“Wait, I should go get them.” I started to walk away, but he grabbed my arm again and opened the door. “Stop!” I tried to shake my arm out of his grasp but he was stronger than I was. He pushed me through the door and it locked behind us. I couldn’t see anything in the dark room. “Logout!”

LOGOUT FAILED. TRY AGAIN?

#d1

[kogareviews-blog]

ANCIENT PINK MIST LP: Track-by-track commentary.

hullo, imma just give u guys sum comments and words about my album Ancient Pink Mist, released on November 20th, thru PEDICURE RECORDS.

Ancient Pink Mist

So this track right here is the intro, but it was done when I was half-way making the album. This track is actually a mix of, like, three loops I made for fun, over my signature gabber-like kick lol. I decided this track to be the intro (and the title track) just because it is a warm welcoming to the album, kind of in-your face, kind of chill, the best of both worlds.} 

Lemon Tea

Lemon Tea was one of the first songs made for this album, when it had no name and like 3 tracks. It took me like a month to wrap up and mix especially the break beat! This was planned to be a single (if I wanted to lmao) Also, the vocal samples in this track (and all of the songs I guess) are my voice! I just recorded myself singing syllables in C, and made myself a bank of my voice.

First Abstract (with BEV)

This song is one of my personal favorites, and I made it with my friend Beverly. We made a remix/thing track in the past – a spin on Bitch Better Have My Money (a certified bop) so I knew what she can do, and gave her a demo of a grime-y and hard hitting bass with some FX. After like three months she came back with this monster. I was blown away, BEV dominates this track in its entirety (which I have no problem, I love sum Beverly). I loved the 8-bit-like lead riff in the start so I re-utilized it in the outro, because why not.

Fun fact: I am a sucker for Kandinsky, so I named this song with the name of one of his paintings! The song lives up to its name. 

Cerulean Boy Gang (with Abrakadaniel)

When the album was half done, I had this demo of 2 minutes of mallets, pads and some guitars. I tweeted that I was struggling with it and Abrakadaniel DM’d me offering to work on it. Part of me was grateful because I really needed help, and the other part was starstruck! He said that he wanted to give it a ‘Xiangjiao’ approach, and it is evidenced by the drop (Abrakadaniel going crazy), he really made the track to have this bossy feel lol. I made a little outro as well, more chill and with more Koga voices, which he added some cool effects to the mallets. Very thankful with Daniel, we made this bop and he teached me sum slang lol. I ended up making a remix of this which I played in my IR-COVENANT mix. Shout out to Kuranes btw, he loves this one.

Bleu Brawl

At one point this was the album’s fastest song with 203 BPM I guess. This track had so many names but Bleu Brawl is more violent, cooler in my opinion. It samples ‘Warrior’ by Ke$ha in a very unconventional way lol. I am very proud of this song because it uses a sub from the SOPHIE sample pack, and it worked. Besides this song, every other kick and sub was made by me, so yeah.

Yellow Nuts (with Soriphen)

Soriphen is one of my best friends, we worked in the past in a song by the moniker of Dee L Dough (very subtle) so I obviously needed him on the album. I remember having the demo of Yellow Nuts, which was made in the early stages of the album, and I sent it to him. Weeks later, we were voice-chatting in Discord, while making the song. He was in Japan at the time, and he told me he did work on the song while he was in Tokyo’s metro, which is cool. He added some cool Death Grips samples, and the whole outro. Shout out to my dude. Shout out to the Nümu group for making fun of the song title lol.

Red Cloak (with yettz)

I met yettz thanks to Abrakadaniel, because they were friends and stuff happened lol. I asked him to collab on something and he said yes, so I sent him Red Cloak, a pretty rough demo lol. He made magic with it, even though I gave him like 6 versions of a section with different synths lol. At this point I still don’t know how he handled the chopped vocals of JME, the kicks, the mallets and everything else I sent him. Someone said this track was like post-gabber, which I liked. I think post-gabber is the right way to describe this whole album tho.

Chalk Egg

I guess this track was the first one to be made for the album! At the time I was very into Iglooghost (I still am, luh ya) and wanted to make something like his style. So I made Chalk Egg! It is a very straight up solid track, and it has a special place in my heart <3.

Rococo Féi

This one was featured in my EP ‘Moss Tunes’, released a few months before. I ended including it in the album because I really needed a chill moment after all of the fast maniac tunes lol. I wrote this one in my piano I remember, with another song called Woodhammer, featured in another EP ‘Sorcières Tunes’.

Xīn Xao

A song I really like! I think this was the last song made for the album, when I was kind of ready to send it to Myles (side note: JEL recommended me Pedicure when I was looking for a label, so I DM’d Myles and he was like ‘I was gonna contact you as well’), and it became one of my favorites right away. It samples two tracks: ‘Fern’ by me lol, and the opening theme of Neon Genesis Evangelion! It took me weeks to wrap it up, but I really enjoy the final result.

Divine Dodge

Probably, in my opinion, the best song I have made. I was finishing the album and I felt that the album needed a big closing track, something people would be like wtf or omg lol. This track was easily the hardest to make, it took me two months! The original version is like 17 minutes long but it was kinda off with the album, so I made it 6 minutes long. It samples the intro track and a Skepta song, and it features me rapping (!). This whole song is very busy and idk, I think this one has my best production, alongside Xīn Xao. I really love this song man, it is my favorite! Also! I wanna thank Daniel and Ben for mixing their tracks, and Myles for accepting to release it in Pedicure! Also BEV and Soriphen for being real g’s and yeah, thanks to everyone that liked this album that took me like 4 months lol. One of my biggest fears night now that I am doing the next album (!!!) is that I will not do something as good or better than this album, which is good I guess lol. The next album will be more good, that is what I want, but without outshining Ancient Pink Mist. But I don’t know, time will tell…