Name Generator Serendipity

     So, still working on this MDZS fanfic I've been working on since, like, late spring.  😅  (At this point, I think it would take a miracle for me to finish it before NaNo, so I guess it'll be what I'm working on in November, too...)

    In the process of working on this, I've been forced to come up with names for additional characters, because while the original novel has a lot of characters, there aren't all that many from within any given clan, particularly not outside the main family of any given clan.  (All the more so considering that more than half of the novel takes place more than a decade later than this fanfic does!)  I've gone through a lot of different methods in trying to name them:  for a cousin of Lan Wangji, I decided to look at the names in The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System and try to find him a good name by picking and choosing from names there.  (I probably need to rename him, though; I didn't end up liking any of the meanings of the characters' names for a member of the Lan Clan's main family, so I ended up naming him after Shen Qingqiu's sword, but the more I look at that as a character name, the more I feel like it's somehow off.)  For a few later additions to the cast, I looked at the names of all the playable characters available in one of the Dynasty Warriors games, and picked given names from there, but that was still pretty limiting.  To give a courtesy name to a character who only had a family name in the novel (the head of the Ouyang Clan in the novel's present), I picked a character trait of his, came up with a few ways to spin it positively and ran those through Google Translate until it gave me a result that felt like it could work as a name.  (In my defense, since then Seven Seas Danmei has added descriptions for some more novels they've licensed, and one of them has a character with the same given name, so at least I stumbled onto an actual name.)

    Finally, in looking at the reference works on AO3, I found a link to a name generator that was highly recommended, and which always provides the meanings of the names to go with them.  So far I've felt maybe its list of names isn't quite as voluminous as I'd like  (I feel like I keep getting the same names often) but it's definitely the best option I've come across so far.

    And today I found myself wanting to name a minor Jin Clan asshole who was going to show up a few times, so that I wouldn't have to just keep calling him things like "that guy who did that thing and pissed everyone off."  (Okay, so I would neve have used quite that phrasing, but you get the idea.)  I only had to hit the "Generate names" button once or twice before this screen came up.

    Not only is there a perfect sarcastic name (ie one with a meaning completely antithetical to this guy's character), but it had actually generated with the Jin family name attached!

    Obviously, a sign that I was meant to use it.  😆

    (The fact that right above it is Xue Yang backwards is also kinda wild, but somewhat irrelevant. 😅 (Xue Yang, so far, has not appeared in this fic, though he's been talked about on several occasions.  He'll be showing up in the not too distant future, though, which is always a challenge, because it's hard for me to get a good handle on his behavior and speech.  Though I was really proud of one of his interactions with Jin Zixuan in "A Hidden Road."))

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Meng Yao?

     Well, I am thrilled to say that getting over the block about how to have the heroes win the battle to take Yueyang let me actually cross over the threshold and finally finish the freaking Sunshot Campaign.  Yesterday, in a single day of nearly 6,000 words, I got them from the siege of Yueyang to the death of Wen Ruohan.  Of course, there is still a battle going on in the streets of Nightless City (as per CQL canon), but that won’t take long to clear up, and then I get to move on to the drama as the Jin Clan immediately proves itself to be composed of 96% solid assholes.  😅

    But that also leaves me with a greater question, as referenced in the title of the post:  what in the world am I supposed to do with Meng Yao?

    Since this time I thought I’d make Jin Guangshan the villain, that means I have to figure out whose side his illegitimate son is on, and how much to lean into CQL’s version or how much to restore the novel version.

    Okay, well, technically, I already decided going in which side Meng Yao would be on, but there’s still the dire question of how to characterize him, because in the novel he’s a complex three dimensional character, and in CQL he’s pretty much evil from the word “go”:  it’s like the actor was told “okay, any time you’re not flirting with Lan Xichen, make sure to look as evil as possible!”  Which is more than a little frustrating to deal with as a fanfic writer, especially one who prefers the more nuanced version from the novel.  😅

    Just look at the difference between his timelines (up to this point in canon)!

    Novel version:

1. His mother dies (around the time he turns 15, probably), so he goes to Lanling to present himself to his father, only to be kicked down the stairs
2. He tries to make a living on his own (I’m wanting to say as like a clerk or an accountant?)
3. He encounters and assists the fleeing Lan Xichen
4. The Sunshot Campaign begins; for some reason he joins up with the Nie Clan
5. Hearing his men mocking Meng Yao because his mother was a prostitute, Nie Mingjue promotes Meng Yao dramatically
6. Soon after an incident where none of the others at a meeting are willing to drink tea Meng Yao serves them except for Lan Xichen, Nie Mingjue gives Meng Yao a letter of introduction/reference/recommendation so he can meet and serve his father
7. Gap in Meng Yao’s personal timeline here that can potentially be filled in a few ways (as I’ll discuss below)
8. At the conclusion of a battle in which the Nie and the Jin fought side by side, Nie Mingjue encounters Meng Yao murdering a Jin Clan officer using a Wen Clan blade and technique; Meng Yao explains that the man was his commanding officer and was constantly taking all the credit for Meng Yao’s accomplishments, thus preventing Meng Yao from ever obtaining a position where he could gain his father's acceptance; when Nie Mingjue is not buying that as an excuse, given how thoroughly Meng Yao seemed to be enjoying killing his tormentor, Meng Yao stabs him and runs away
1. Timing of the above scene is unclear, but there has to have been at least a year left in the war, possibly a year and a half, because the next step would take a lot of time
9. Meng Yao journeys to Nightless City and climbs through the ranks of the Wen Clan (partially by acting as head torturer in Inferno Palace) until he is at such a point where he is allowed to act freely at Wen Ruohan’s side when normal members of the Wen Clan are expected to remain on their knees in his presence
10. Secretly, Meng Yao sends periodic letters to Lan Xichen with information on the Wen Clan’s military plans
11. When Nie Mingjue is captured at Yangquan, Meng Yao kills Wen Ruohan in order to save his life
12. This act wins him acceptance by his father, and also earns him a sobriquet and a place as the sworn brother of Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen (despite that Nie Mingjue doesn’t trust him an inch, and in fact insists on some very violent language in the sworn brotherhood oath, regarding what should happen to he who breaks the oath (most of which Jin Guangyao eventually does to him 😰)); the sworn brothers oath is the first time we see him with Xue Yang, but it is not their first meeting, though we don't know the timing of that first meeting

    Now, about that gap.  There’s an incident that happened at some point during the Sunshot Campaign--if Jin Guangyao’s speech in the final confrontation can be treated as honest (but actually I think he’s smart enough to lie as little as possible because it’s easier to not screw up that way, and he already knows he’s finished at that point, so I’m not sure he’d bother lying anyway)--in which he either spoke directly to his father or received a message from him.  Either way, what Jin Guangshan told him was either to kill Wen Ruohan personally or to act as a spy to leak Wen Clan information to the allies.  (Though I think it’s more likely to have been the former, since he didn’t send the information to his father, but to Lan Xichen, one of the only people who has ever treated him nicely.)  Now, the logical time for this to have happened is when Meng Yao went to Lanling during the Sunshot Campaign.  But the intriguing thing is that he’s listing this among the awful things he did to win his father’s favor, and he lists it as “betraying Sect Leader Wen," (Seven Seas translation, volume 5, page 89) which implies that he had initially gone to the Wen Clan just because he had nowhere else to go, rather than with the express purpose of being a spy/assassin.  That’s probably just a translation thing, but it's an intriguing thought, isn't it? If we're to take it that way, then Jin Guangshan had to somehow learn that Meng Yao had become highly placed in the Wen Clan and somehow sent a message to him saying that he would accept Meng Yao as his son if he turned on his new master. I'm not going with that as an explanation, because that would need to be the center of its own fic in and of itself, but it would be fascinating! (Especially since in one of the versions of canon (I can't recall atm if it was the novel or CQL) there was some speculation around the time of the indoctrination camp that if open warfare erupted the Jin Clan might actually side with the Wen Clan. What if Jin Guangshan was actually stirring up the Sunshot Campaign to make it easier for Wen Ruohan to get rid of those who opposed him, and only decided to actually rebel against him after he learned his eager-to-be-accepted bastard had become Wen Ruohan's new right hand man? That would make an epic fanfic, but I think it would be outside my abilities to write it.)

    So, ultimately, there needs to be one more thing on that list in novel canon, wherein Jin Guangshan orders Meng Yao to "betray" Wen Ruohan in one way or another, but I couldn't add it since it's not 100% clear where it fits in the order. (Though it does probably fit in the time after Meng Yao left Qinghe for Lanling.)

    On point 1, also, there is the interesting side note that Meng Yao is probably younger than Nie Huaisang, despite that following the sworn brothers oath the latter starts addressing him as an elder brother. Meng Yao is specified to share the same birthday as his half-brother Jin Zixuan, but also to be younger than Jin Zixuan, but it's not made clear if they were born hours apart or a year apart. (Given how young everyone is in the Sunshot Campaign, it's probably not possible for it to be more than a year apart; Jin Zixuan is only about 18 when the Sunshot Campaign breaks out (in the novel), so if Meng Yao was too much younger, he'd be too young to fight!) But what does that have to do with Nie Huaisang's age? Well, the start of the flashback sequences is when Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng arrive at Cloud Recesses to study. We're told (again, just in the novel here) that this is something that the promising pupils of the various clans do in the year they turn 15. Among the other students there to study that year is Jin Zixuan, so he and Wei Wuxian are both about the same age. Nie Huaisang is also there, but he mentions that he's been studying there for three years. So rather than being the same age as Jin Zixuan, Nie Huaisang could be three years older. Or he might have started studying there early, because his brother and Lan Xichen are such close friends, plus Nie Huaisang really doesn't fit in among the Nie Clan, and it might have been hoped he would fit in better with the Lan Clan. (Or that Lan Qiren would be able to force him to start behaving properly.) So, strangely enough, in the novel it's possible than Nie Huaisang is actually three (or four) years older than his "san-ge" Jin Guangyao. Which just sorta strikes me as funny all around. (Maybe that's just me.)

    Anyway, so that's the novel canon version. But in this fic I'm working with CQL canon, in which Meng Yao's timeline (up to the end of the Sunshot Campaign) is quite different.

    CQL version:

1. His mother dies (timing unknown, but as I recall they use the same actor for the flashback) and he goes to Lanling to present himself to his father, only to be kicked down the stairs.
2. He goes to work for the Nie Clan
3. When Nie Mingjue overhears his men mocking Meng Yao for being the son of Jin Guangshan and a prostitute, he promotes Meng Yao (timing is unclear, but probably before the next item on the list)
4. He accompanies Nie Huaisang to the lectures in Cloud Recesses, where he meets Lan Xichen and they both appear to be instantly taken with each other (seriously, the drama ships those two so hard it's palpable); he does not remain in Gusu, however, and leaves soon after the lectures start
5. He meets with Nie Huaisang in Yueyang (for some unspecified reason, despite that Yueyang is quite far from Qinghe, and extremely close to Qishan) and takes charge of the captive Xue Yang; there is an exchange of glances between Meng Yao and Xue Yang that approaches conspiratorial, but is not technically explained
6. The Wen Clan army attacks Qinghe to reclaim Xue Yang and the piece of Yin Iron he has; during the attack, Meng Yao murders a Nie Clan officer who had been verbally abusing him; Nie Mingjue witnesses the killing and is outraged, but in the argument following the murder, a Wen Clan soldier takes them by surprise and Meng Yao takes a blow in Nie Mingjue's place, saving his life; after the battle is over, it's discovered that Xue Yang has escaped; Meng Yao makes several claims regarding why he had killed an ally, including claiming that the man had freed Xue Yang, that Xue Yang was the one who killed him, and that the man had perpetually taken credit for Meng Yao's achievements (which made sense in the novel, but does not make sense here, lol); in the end, Nie Mingjue cannot bring himself to kill Meng Yao for the murder, since he owes Meng Yao his life, and merely banishes him from Qinghe
7. Following the attack on Cloud Recesses, Meng Yao assists the fleeing Lan Xichen
8. Meng Yao enters the service of the Wen Clan, quickly rises to a position of considerable influence and trust
9. Secretly, Meng Yao sends letters to Lan Xichen with information on the Wen Clan's tactics, particularly a map outlining where exploding cairn traps have been set up. (It's weird, don't ask.)
10. When Nie Mingjue is captured, Meng Yao seems delighted to assist Wen Ruohan in tormenting him. The confrontation in the throne room is broken up by the arrival of the allied army in Nightless City, and Wei Wuxian using the Yin Tiger Tally to disrupt the power of the Yin Iron pieces in Wen Ruohan's control. Wen Ruohan rushes outside and begins...basically Force-strangling Wei Wuxian. 😰 Meng Yao murders Wen Ruohan, saving Wei Wuxian's life.
11. His actions win him his father's approval, a sobriquet, and a sworn brothers oath with Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen, which has much more tame language than the one in the novel.

    Part of the "pure evil" framing the drama gives Meng Yao/Jin Guangyao is that it's implied that he sets Xue Yang free, which makes zero sense unless we're to believe he was already in the Wen Clan's employ...though even then it wouldn't make sense, since Xue Yang does not return to Qishan, but simply absconds with the Yin Iron piece he has, not to be seen (by the audience) again until it's time for the Yi City arc. 😅 It's pretty much a certainty that he's the one who convinced Jin Guangshan to (briefly) protect Xue Yang in the drama, even though that doesn't really make much sense from any angle, considering he had murdered the Chang Clan (and several other small clans, according to Xiao Xingchen) before the Sunshot Campaign started, and therefore should be viewed as evil by everyone. It's implied that Jin Guangyao is the one who brought Xue Yang to the Jin Clan's attention in the novel, as well, but we aren't given any further context as to how they met. (Again, that could make for some interesting fanfic material: did Wen Ruohan seek out demonic cultivators to counter Wei Wuxian's devastating techniques in the novel, and thus end up bringing in Xue Yang, so that he and Meng Yao already knew each other from their time at the Wen Clan court? Not something I could ever write if it was to be the basis of the fic, but it could be used in all sorts of interesting ways.)

    So on top of the drama's version of Meng Yao having a harder past to explain logically (why did he murder that guy in the open inside a hallway? why did he then save the life of the sole witness? was he the one who released Xue Yang? if so, why would he do that?), various of his later crimes are made worse in CQL (especially the death of Jin Zixuan, which instead of being just sending his half-brother into a dangerous situation in the hopes that it might get rid of him, he outright controls the situation, literally causing his death (because the drama was obsessed with keeping Wei Wuxian's hands as clean as possible, part of the reason I suspect Chinese TV follows a policy similar to the Hays Code)) suggesting that he's all around a worse person in this version, and the claim that his father had prompted him to turn on Wen Ruohan was omitted from the final confrontation. (Though I'm not even sure if that particular change makes Meng Yao/Jin Guangyao better or worse as a person...) The drama is even sort of wishy-washy on his killing of Nie Mingjue: on the one hand, they make it out to be considerably more pre-meditated than it was in the novel (especially in the Fatal Journey spin-off movie), but they also give him less motivation to commit that murder. Wait, no, that's not wishy-washy at all. That's just totally spinning more into the "Jin Guangyao = evil" equation that's just so boring.

    It's very awkward to try to deal with, because it's impossible to just ignore the character, but how am I supposed to deal with him? One of the major problems of CQL as a work is how ineffectively it blends the material straight from the novel with the original material, and Meng Yao/Jin Guangyao's actions particularly reflect that, especially where Xue Yang is concerned. After they moved the massacre of the Chang Clan to before the Sunshot Campaign so that Wei Wuxian and company could all be there for the capture of Xue Yang by Xiao Xingchen, they should have entirely removed any mention of Xue Yang ever working for the Jin Clan, because that no longer makes sense, and yet when it's time for the Yi City arc, they still talk about how Xue Yang became a guest cultivator of the Jin Clan and how Jin Guangshan insisted on protecting him until Chang Ping eventually recanted his testimony against Xue Yang. Thing is, Jin Guangshan protecting Xue Yang made sense in the novel, because Xue Yang was already a guest cultivator of the Jin Clan by the time he massacred the Chang Clan, instead of him having become a guest cultivator more than a year later, when he should be widely known as a dangerous psychopath. It doesn't make sense to knowingly hire a madman, y'know? More importantly, there was no reason for Xue Yang to have briefly been working as a guest cultivator of the Jin Clan in CQL; there was no need to describe his character or his past in that manner, because the audience has already met him personally and seen his glee at the slaughter he had wreaked.

    For that matter, we don't even know how old Meng Yao is in CQL. I mean, there's probably still a reference in there somewhere of him being younger than Jin Zixuan, but as the sole method we have of comparing ages--the lectures at Cloud Recesses--is different in the drama, that's not useful, because we don't know how old Jin Zixuan is, either. Unlike in the novel, where the students are all supposed to be fifteen, the lectures in the drama are specified as being a relatively unusual event, as Lan Xichen tells Lan Wangji that "many" of the students will be "about your age," making the lectures a rare opportunity for Lan Wangji to make some friends, suggesting that the last time these lectures took place, Lan Wangji was significantly younger than the students who had come in for the lectures. For the fic, I've gone with the assumption that the lectures take place every five years, and that anyone who has turned fifteen since the last lecture is eligible to attend (if they're from a prominent clan, ofc), and that all the students are therefore in the 15-20 range...which means Jin Zixuan could be the same age as Wei Wuxian or he could be the same age as his future wife, Jiang Yanli, who is also studying at Cloud Recesses in the drama because they wanted to give her more screen time. 😅 So in the drama, even if we assume that Meng Yao is still younger than Jin Zixuan, that could still make him older than Wei Wuxian and company. (We know that Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng are still teenagers at the time of the Sunshot Campaign, because Jiang Cheng is specifically described by Jin Guangshan as a "teenage hero" so the maximum age he can be at that time is 19, despite that the actors are all clearly in their 20s.) We do at least know that Meng Yao is still younger than Lan Xichen who is younger than Nie Mingjue, but that's particularly meaningless, since CQL's Nie Mingjue seems to be significantly older than Nie Huaisang (like at least 10 years), and Lan Xichen also seems to have a larger age gap with his brother as well (given a line he has early on that makes it sound like he had personally raised Lan Wangji following the death of their father (who wasn't even dead yet at that point in the novel, but oh well)), so...yeah, I have no idea what to do with that, either. (And it doesn't help that it's very hard to search a fifty episode show for every little line of dialog that might reflect on things like character age and such. I did take notes when I was rewatching it before I started writing this behemoth, but some things I didn't really expect to come up, and also it was easy to get caught up in the show and forget to write things down. 😅)

    .

    ..

    ...

    ....

    Yeah....I've totally lost the thread of whatever I was trying to say.

    TL:DR version is that now that I've reached the point where Meng Yao is actually on screen (as it were) in my fic, things are getting more complicated, just because I have no idea how to characterize him. 😰

The Weird Way My Brain Works

     Normally, I'd be finishing up my writing day about now (just after dinner, that is), or would have finished it a few hours ago, depending on when my enthusiasm/momentum/procrastination petered out.  Today, I haven't quite started yet, because when I finished up yesterday (not long after lunch), it was with the depressing realization that I didn't actually know what happened next.

    I mean, I knew what had to happen:  the characters are embroiled in a war, which will be over as soon as they assault the enemy's capital, but before that they had to defeat another town, and my plans had not included any mention of just how they were going to do so, or even what, precisely, that entailed, as this is a war between cultivation clans, so they do not, technically, own or in any other way control the land they're fighting over.  (It doesn't make any sense to me, either.  This may be a genre thing that I'm too ill-versed in the genre and setting to understand.)

    So today I was just like "eh, I'll give my mind a break and just play games all day."  (Sole advantage of being unemployed...)  Yesterday I had taken a few notes in my "Continuing the current fic" file on Google Docs (which I use for jotting down notes and just writing extensions to wherever I happen to be in whatever I'm working on), and shortly before dinner I was looking over them, and then adding to them, just sort of brainstorming in text form.

    I wanted to share that, because I find it kind of funny that this broken process is coming from an allegedly functional brain.  (Rather than copy-paste the text, I decided to use a screen-shot.  Because.  It is unedited except that I blurred out the swear words because I don't like to swear on my blog for some reason.  But I did not go in and fix the grammar, punctuation, or the fact that I don't typically bother with capital letters in this sort of brainstorming session.)

        I suppose it's basically the same kind of process that idea bouncing involves, only there isn't a second person involved so I'm just bouncing the ideas off myself? 😅

    So, yeah.  My brain is a demented place, but at least I know how to get my fanfic through this last bump in the road of the Sunshot Campaign so that I can finally get to the political drama on the other side. 🤔  Since getting into writing MDZS fanfic, I've been writing about so many things I would normally avoid like the plague...  😰

    (BTW, word count on this monster fic will hit 180k today.  I shudder to think how long it's going to be in the end.)

Writing and Mapping and (Fandom) Stuff

     I've had a weird half-week or so.  The major street that my street is off of has been undergoing road construction for about two years now, and they've been working on the section directly by my street for what feels like forever, but I suppose it's just been three or four months.  Every so often they end up doing work at night as well as during the day, and my house sadly is not noise proof.  (Or rather, it's great at keeping my noise in, and rubbish at keeping everyone else's noise out.)  And four days in a row I was losing sleep as they were doing super-noisy work from about 8:30 at night to about 3:30 in the morning.  I have noise-cancelling headphones, but they don't work perfectly, and I have trouble sleeping in them.  (I should get Bluetooth ones so I wouldn't have to worry about the cord, but those things are really expensive, and I don't need the headphones that often.  Although they would presumably allow me to use them for things that don't have a headphone jack, like my TV...)

    Anyway, because of that, until I had a good night's sleep last night, I was sorta the walking dead and unable to get much accomplished.  (Well, technically I got a lot accomplished yesterday in the video game I'm playing, but...that's sorta different...)  But this morning I was well rested and decided to sit down and write to try and, you know, accomplish something.

    At one point, I glanced down at my word count and found myself taking a screen shot to capture the moment:

    Terrifying thing is, there's still so much more to go!  (And by a half hour after that screenshot was taken, the number had already gone up to 174,367, placing no dent in the remaining story whatsoever.)  What I'm working on is an MDZS AU fanfic, based on The Untamed (CQL) instead of the novel (for reasons), in which I'm having to cover the whole Sunshot Campaign...and also trying to make it a little more like what little we got of the war in the novel, rather than what was in the show, a four month long conflict that Wei Wuxian took almost no part in.  He's not even the lead of this fanfic (for reasons), but I still let him do more in the Sunshot Campaign than CQL did.  (Not as much as in the novel, because part of the AU in this is that he never develops his demonic cultivation techniques, but he's still vital to the war effort, instead of just contributing on two occasions.)  Anyway, I'm still not done with the Sunshot Campaign at this point, though they've passed through a point of no return moment (not that they recognize it as such) so the war should only be about a month longer, but...yeah, writing that month is not going to be any faster than any of the rest of it.

    And then once the Sunshot Campaign is over, then we get to the political drama as Jin Guangshan tries to take over the cultivation world by attempting to discredit and turn the other clans against the Jiang Clan.  (Among other tactics.)  This thing is going to be truly monstrous by the time it's done. 😅

    But that's part of why I wanted to have maps so people can see where everything is and what the current situation is in the war.  Every so often, I refine the map a bit further, adding things here or there, and since the last time I posted about it, I added a filter to try and do something about how blank the edges of the screen seem.

    Overall, I think it's a great improvement, visually.  (Helps that I added more filters than just the vignette effect on the edges.)  With the slight problem that the filter also impacts the label in the corner. 😰  I can change that in GIMP after the fact, but eventually I may join the map-making site's Discord to ask if there's a way to keep that filter from impacting the label.  I did a mock-up of what it would look like unaffected by it:

    I think it's a definite improvement. 😄  The other alternative would be to move the label to the center of the bottom of the map, where the vignette filter would have minimal impact on it, but I feel like that would look pretty weird.  (Though I can definitely think of historic maps that have their legend/title in the center, so maybe?)

    In other writing news, I got to have a fun moment of a character exposing his own sheltered, misguided world view today.  For reasons, Jiang Yanli ended up meeting a bunch of homeless children, who she has decided are going to be taken back to Lotus Pier and raised up as Jiang Cheng's disciples, no matter what he has to say in the matter.  He, of course, does not want homeless orphans for disciples, but due to his sister complex he has trouble arguing with her directly.  Eventually, he tries to convince the children that they wouldn't like joining the Jiang Clan, and would surely much prefer that his sister find local families to adopt them.  After he's given them a description of the rigors of cultivation training, he's stunned when not one of them prefers to stay where they are and be adopted by a farmer/shopkeeper/what-have-you.  In reflecting on it in horror, the narration says this:

Jiang Cheng was at a loss for words.  Had he really miscalculated so badly?  How could that be?  How could jiejie have been right that these boys would honestly prefer the hard life of studying cultivation over a simple farm life?

    He totally exposes what a sheltered, privileged young master he's been his whole life, and totally doesn't even get that that's what he is.  (I don't even want to know what he thinks is involved in growing food if he thinks it's an easier life.  Probably thinks you just plant the seeds and forget about them until it's time to harvest them...)

    Jiang Cheng is such a fun character to work with, though.  He's so broken but thinks he's totally normal, and he's so co-dependent on his loved ones (which is, of course, why he's so awful in the novel's present, when he's lost all his loved ones) without even realizing it.  I don't think my fic is so far managing to capture just how broken he really is (his temper is certainly not as bad as it ought to be), but I always enjoy it whenever I manage to get close to doing justice to his many, many issues.

Blogger and "Total Pageviews" ~ A Mystery

     Okay, so since I posted "A Hidden Road" on pages here on my blog (following my somewhat questionable decision to delete it from AO3 because of one truly upsetting comment), I've been paying more attention to the "Total Pageviews" number when you visit the blog (or, in my case, hit the "Preview" button from a post or page in the editor).

    This is because in that time it's gone up, a lot, while the number of views for the individual posts and pages have not gone up much at all.

    Meager photographic proof:

    (Wow, that partial screencap turned out to be enormous.)  This was what it said at 8:05 yesterday morning.

    This is what it said at 7:30 this morning.  (And as of about two minutes ago, that number had gone up to 7,834.)

    However, if I just add up the number of visits to the pages and posts, the total is only 1,435.  (Yes, I actually went through and added them all up.)

    Before I added the fic (and a link to the blog in my profile on AO3, in the hopes that someone would click on my profile, wondering where my fic had gone, and then follow the link to find it here, which might have happened once, but I'm not sure about that (even if it did, they didn't finish reading it, because the pages that had gained a view stopped a third of the way through)) that "Total Pageviews" number was somewhere in either the high 4,000s or the low 5,000s.  I think the latter, but I'm not positive.

    So where the heck did all those extra views come from, when most of them don't represent a view of a post?  (Especially considering that when I click "view post" from the post management screen, that makes the post's view counter go up one, so a lot of the 1,435 are actually me.  (Though it sounds like maybe I can turn that off, which would be sweet.  I need to look into that as soon as I'm done with this post.))

    Now, admittedly, just following the link to the blog will take you to a landing page that shows the full posts without counting on any of their view numbers, so some of that may be people clicking through from the Insecure Writer's Support Group and then not clicking on any individual posts, and the spike could (conceivably?) be something the whole IWSG has been experiencing, with some bot going through all the links on the IWSG's page, but then not leaving comments, or not leaving them on my particular blog because the landing page doesn't have a comment form, and the fact that it happened since adding the fic is coincidental.

    The only other theory I have is that maybe when a search engine grazes the page, that counts as a pageview even if the person who ran the search didn't actually visit the blog.  Given that I've been posting more and more about MDZS (which is very popular worldwide), that seems possible?  But it's weird to imagine that Blogger counts a search engine as a pageview.

    Obviously, none of this actually matters, since worrying about how many views my blog has gotten is 100% empty vanity (well, maybe not "vanity" exactly, but something akin to it) but I have to admit that it's weirding me out that my total numbers have gone up so much so fast (it's been like a month and a half, maybe?) compared to how much they went up in the preceding two and a half years.

    Anyway, that was just sort of sitting on my brain and bothering me, so I wanted to let it out.

    I may try futzing around with the settings to see if I can make it so the total only goes up in accordance with the posts and pages, but I'm not sure if that's possible.

    EDIT:  I just had a look at my stats page (lol, should have done that first!) and I can confirm from what I saw there that it is definitely a bot.  (Surprisingly, according to those numbers, the numbers shown on screen should actually be higher, which suggests that Blogger started cottoning on to it being a bot and stopped counting it after a while.)  The bot is using Mobile Safari on an Android device (weird in and of itself, considering Safari is the Apple browser!) and coming out of one particular country, but I feel like I'd be insulting the country if I said which one, so I won't.  The bot accounted for almost 5.5k pageviews.  There's also the possibility of a bot elsewhere for the "Other" views that were around 1.7k pageviews.  The ones that actually seem to be genuine views account for about 500 of the new views over the last month.  In itself that's already an unrealistically high number, imho, but not quite as shockingly so.
    (This makes me very glad I've never attempted to monetize my blog, because I would totally feel like a thief if I was getting paid because some bot is glitching out and loading my blog repeatedly.)

Writing Style Alignments (+ awkward shilling)

     So, not too long ago, someone posted this "Writing Style Alignment" chart in a Discord server where I (mostly) lurk.  I thought it was something interesting(?) to talk about, so...

    What really strikes me about this is how I don't fit in any of those boxes.  I have elements of "Lawful Pantser," "Lawful Plantser," "True Plantser" and even "Neutral Plotter."

    So, let's look at those in sequence here.

• "Writes everything in order"
• This is 100% me.  If I try to write things out of order, it just doesn't work.  In the past I used to write little snippets as they came to me and then sew them into the narrative when I got there, but I eventually had to give up on that practice because it pretty much never worked out well.  Because so many little details change as I'm going along through the story that by the time I get to whatever scene I pre-wrote, various things no longer worked about it. 
          This is also why I hate having to go back and add in stuff to a scene later on, because the flow gets terminally wrecked by the addition.  For example, on "A Hidden Road," I realized belatedly that I needed Wei Wuxian's faith in his relationship with Lan Wangji briefly shaken by something someone had said to him (in order for it to be strengthened by a reassurance, of course), but I had gotten to the end of the first draft without ever having that moment, so I had to add that in on the second draft, and the only good place for it was in a late night conversation they already had on a different topic.  So I had him lying awake worrying about their relationship...and then had him want to talk about it, but try to start out on a "lighter" topic that ended up preventing his intended topic.  Which is to say they ended up having the same conversation they did originally, and it just started for different reasons.  Awkward af.
• "Uses the flashlight method to get to the end"
• I have no idea what the "flashlight method" even is.
• "Ends up in strange places"
• Nope.  I usually have a pretty strong idea of where I'm going by the time I actually start writing.  I may pass through some pretty unexpected places on the way there, but I typically get roughly the ending I was always aiming for.
          Though sometimes some things change.  Like on "A Hidden Road" I ended up changing who the villain was because as I went along I realized that the villain I had planned on using didn't really have much motivation to be villainous left after a few of the details I added in earlier scenes, so I made the henchman into the villain and the original villain into more of a red herring.  Or in "Scions of Troy," a character who started out as a minor role became one of Ariadne's potential future girlfriends.  (Which is to say that she's obviously interested and Ariadne seems a little interested.  But she's not scheduled to show up in any of the later books...though given the way I write, that could always change...)  But the larger picture of the ending in both cases (which can be summed up as "heroes triumphant") remained the same.
• "knows random details no one else cares about"
• Um...probably?  But really that sort of applies to the main story, as no one cares about what I write in the first place.

• "Knows the ending, writes towards it"
• Yup, this is absolutely me, 100%.
• "loves to worldbuild"
• Enh, not so much.  I like making up a few trivial details about the world, but mostly that requires a mind for the medium picture that I don't possess.  (Y'know the saying "misses the forest for the trees"?  That's totally me:  I see the trees and I see the continent, but I don't see the forest.  Can't, in fact.  It's part of the same mental block that prevents me visualizing things, I think.  (But I'm not sure about that.)  Hmm.  Actually, maybe it would  be better to say that I can see the forest and the leaves, but not the trees?  Well, you get the gist of what I'm saying either way, I hope.)
• "uses character bios/has definitely taken personality tests for their characters"
• Nope.  I've sometimes tried character bios, but I can't think up enough of the needed details on command for them to be useful; I kinda have to just summon up those details out of the ether as I write. 😅  I may have tried personality tests once or twice (probably for Atalanta and Ariadne), but typically I don't know enough about my characters' weird details and/or too much doesn't apply to them, so it would be wasted effort.  (For example, a common question on those sort of things is something along the lines of "how do they take their coffee?"  Which I can't really answer under any circumstances, 'cause I don't drink the stuff, but I might be able to make a half-hearted guess for someone in a modern setting, but for someone in an ancient setting?  Atalanta and Ariadne have never even heard of coffee, so how could I possibly answer that?  (The same would apply to the entire cast in any MDZS fanfic, outside of a modern AU.))

• "Starts an outline"
• Yup, often the case.  Or rather unless it's gonna be super-short, I'll at least have a paragraph or two summarizing what I want to do in the story.  Sometimes it gets expanded into a proper outline, or at least the early portions, and sometimes that doesn't happen for a while.  My outlines generally are more detailed at the start and eventually peter out into vagaries like "the war happens" "they win" "epilogue i guess?"
• "goes off script and ends up in unexpected places."
• Enh...sort of?  I mean, it's more like little details that get added in change the trajectory, but it's typically a pretty slight change.  Like the change to "A Hidden Road" I mentioned above about the villain change:  that happened because of one line that one character happened to say that opened the would-have-been villain's eyes to the fact that hey, maybe he shouldn't hate everyone quite so much, but the new villain's agenda wasn't much different than the old villain's would have been, so the actions the heroes take in response are pretty similar to what they always would have been.  Or this brief Dragonji story I wrote because it was screaming at me to write it (despite that I'm in the middle of a Jiang Cheng-centric, massively-long, CQL-based AU), which I started out with the assumption that after a certain, very early point I was gonna have to go look for a co-writer so it could turn into smut, only then I just had this one tiny, very canon-accurate moment where dragon-in-human-form Lan Wangji gets flustered on seeing an underclad Wei Wuxian, and it just seemed like so much more fun to have it turn into a more slow (and mercifully consensual) romance than the smutty thing it had originally been building towards.  But the "happily gay ever after" ending is still the same, so it's not that I ended up somewhere unexpected, just that I passed through an unexpected place.
• "but that's okay cause this is more interesting anyway"
• My fingers are itching to fix that, but it's a quote so I can't go in and add the apostrophe that needs to be in front of "cause."
          Anyway, that's not totally an actual point?  But I mean, yeah, my diversions from the original plan do tend to be more fun/interesting than whatever I had originally intended, but surely that would be the case for anyone who decides to pursue an alternate to their original plan, because why would they deviate from the plan if it was less interesting to do so?  (Though I guess it's debatable about that Dragonji story.  The smutty version probably would have been a lot more fun to read, but trying to find and work with someone else to get the smutty part written would have been anything but fun.)

• "Brief outline"
• Yup, definitely.  At least to start with.
• "Likes to use beat sheets"
• I don't think I ever even used those back when I was studying screenwriting in grad school.
• "Modifies and updates outline as they go."
• Yup, absolutely.  My outline for a long piece like the one I'm currently working on (over 160k at this point) becomes sheer chaos, but that's okay, because I mostly only consult the paragraph or two describing the next however many scenes.  (Right now, that paragraph is...actually, there's two sets of them.  One describes the next major push of the Sunshot Campaign, and the other outlines the whole rest of the war.  After which the rest of the fic will happen.  (The outline for that part is fuzzier, but the current plan (which will likely not change!) is for Jin Guangshan to be the big bad.)  Absurdly, I think I originally intended the post-Sunshot Campaign part to be the bulk of the fic. 😰)
• "Thinks about writing character bios, rarely does"
• Yeah, actually, that fits me pretty well. 😅

        In the end, I'm not sure what it means that none of the squares really fits me, or that I come close to fitting into boxes of all three of the major types.  I'm not sure if that says there's something weird about me as a writer, or if it means the person who made this chart doesn't quite grasp the way other people write.  I feel like after this got posted the only people who talked about it said they didn't quite fit any of the choices, so I think the person who made it missed their guess about how it should work.

    Anyway, it seemed something interesting to talk about, so I thought I'd talk about it. 🤣

    (If anyone out there is confused about the whole "alignment" thing, these charts are sort of a meme, inspired by the D&D alignment charts of Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic and Good/Neutral/Evil, with the center block being True Neutral.)

IWSG: Happy B-Day, IWSG!

 

This month's question:

September 6 question: The IWSG celebrates 12 years today! When did you discover the IWSG, how do you connect, and how has it helped you?

   

     Wow.  12 years!

    I'm not sure exactly when I found out about the IWSG.  I started blogging on Wordpress in late summer of 2014 and blogged daily for a year (as part of a self-challenge, essentially) at which time I was pretty good about actively reading other people's blogs as well, and I know I followed several other, actually published writers at that time, at least one of whom is also in the IWSG, possibly more than one but I'm no longer sure, so presumably I found out about the IWSG through them, and thus likely joined around late 2014/early 2015.

    Eventually, though, my blogging started getting more and more erratic.  By the time Wordpress changed the way their free accounts worked to the point of them basically being unusable, making me leave for Blogger, I was barely posting more than once a month.  And that's kind of remained the status quo, though I think lately I'm starting to post more often (even if it's mostly been random fandom stuff as if this was tumblr), which is something, I suppose?  But to address the actual question, there have been periods where the monthly IWSG post was the only thing keeping my blog active at all, which maybe doesn't even address the question. 😅

    I'm afraid I don't really connect as much as I used to:  back when I first joined IWSG, I was pretty good about visiting a lot of the other members' posts, but at this point I have a tendency to get distracted and forget. 😰  I'm getting old and scatter-brained, I guess. 😭  (I'm also developing a weird inability to express myself without using emojis.  I blame Discord...)

    So...it's hard to say how it's helped.  I feel like it helped me a lot more back when I was on Wordpress and was more active in the community.  Probably if I had things to say that were more...how do I want to put this?  It's like, mostly these days what I post is something that doesn't really have an easy solution (or a solution at all) and so there's not much help I even can get, if that makes sense.

    For a long time, the day of/after the monthly IWSG post has been the only time this blog has seen any visitors, but that's starting to change since I posted my blog's URL on my AO3 profile, though I'm not sure if that's actual people visiting or some kind of bot thing, since none of them click on the "My Fiction" page link in the sidebar, which is sorta where I'd expect visitors from AO3 to go.  🤷

The Tragedy of the Blu-ray of Heaven Official's Blessing

     So, a while back I mentioned towards the end of a post about how excited I was that the animated adaptation of Heaven Official's Blessing had gotten a domestic US release on Blu-ray.  (I am too lazy to try and track down what post it was in, tbh.)

    Sadly, I am no longer excited.

    At least, not in a good way.

    It may look pretty, but it's basically unwatchable.

    And you know why it's unwatchable?

    Because the subtitles are utter garbage.

    And this is coming from someone who's watched large portions of episodes of The Untamed on Youtube, where the subtitles do such odd things as using "Childe" for "-gongzi," despite that "Childe" is such an archaic term that the last person to use it seriously (afaik) was Lord Byron in faux Elizabethan mode.

    Those are still superior to the subtitles on the above Blu-ray, despite that the manufacturers of said Blu-ray have the gall to charge a lot of money for it.  This is especially infuriating because good subtitles already exist:  the subtitles on Netflix (where I originally watched the show) are perfectly acceptable.

    The Blu-ray's subtitles are so bad that I literally had to pause the disc every so often to write down my disgust at its behavior.

    So let's dive into those notes and catalog all the horrors I encountered in the first four episodes of the "official" US Blu-ray release of the animated Heaven Official's Blessing!  For the sake of my sanity, these are just following the order of my notes (thus roughly the order in which they happen in the show) and not escalating from least to worst.  (The worst is actually from episode two, so there's still a lot more after that.)

    First off, I was already annoyed just on the menu, because in this day and age it was defaulting to English dub instead of original language with English subs.  Seriously.  It's 2023, people.  Can we please stop acting like entitled 1990s toddlers?

    Right off the bat in the very first scene, they exhibit their confusion over whether or not the name of Xie Lian's country is one word or two.  (Hint:  it's one.  One word.  He's the Crown Prince of Xianle, not of Xian Le.  Not that hard, guys.)

    Then we get the ambush on Mount Yujun, and these zombie-things are forming up to attack the wedding procession:  we see skeletons, and then flesh assembling itself on top of the skeletons.  So they are very clearly zombies, in modern English parlance; they're probably some variant of jiangshi (I think that's the word) in the original Chinese, the standard MDZS translation of "fierce corpse" would likely have been appropriate here.  But no!  The subtitles decided to call them "slave-goblins."  Because yeah.  Those totally looked like freakin' goblins.

    But then...oh then.

    The next point in my notes is the most egregious of the lot.  Likely the most egregious in the entire series, if I could bring myself to watch the rest of it.  (Hint:  I cannot.)  Because this next problem is not just crass and reductive, it's also racist.  Against Chinese people.  On the subtitles for this Chinese animated program.

    Yeah, let that sink in there for a minute, then I'll explain.

    So, for this first of Xie Lian's outings as a newly reinstated god, he's being accompanied by two junior heavenly officials (low rank gods, essentially) named Nan Feng and Fu Yao.  These two are working for two martial gods (often referred to as generals), Feng Xin and Mu Qing respectively.  Feng Xin and Mu Qing had served Xie Lian back when he was just the Crown Prince of Xianle, and then had been his own junior officials after he first ascended as a god, and since parting ways with him became gods in their own right.  (This was not strongly explained in the show, which seems to expect the viewer to have already read the book.  (Which is why I was rather confused by the opening episodes when I watched it initially, of course! 🤣))

    The subject comes up that Feng Xin, under his divine name Nan Yang, has a lot of female worshippers, which naturally seems strange to Xie Lian, since Feng Xin is a martial god, and therefore one expects him to mostly be worshipped by soldiers and men in positions of power who have ambitions that they need military might to fulfill.  He asks about why he has so many female worshippers, and is given a long and amusing explanation.  Rather than try to paraphrase or retype (since it's two pages long!) I'm just going to present phone photos (sloppily edited together) of the pages in question.

    Obviously, the show didn't want to spend that long on a point that was ultimately pretty minor, just one of many petty tribulations that Xie Lian's former subordinates have gone through in the 800 years since Xie Lian's initial ascension and fall from grace.  (Feng Xin, it should be pointed out, does not generally get on well with women, so suddenly being worshipped by them in droves was particularly uncomfortable for him.)  So it mostly just expressed the story with a few lines of dialog and one image of the sign that got changed.  I don't speak Chinese, so I can't say exactly what Fu Yao says to go along with the visuals, but I do think it's safe to say that it's the tl:dr version of what was in those two pages of text:  at some point a king changed the characters Ju Yang was written with so that instead of meaning "Perfect Sun" they meant "Tremendous Masculinity."  A spelling error, but one that doesn't change the sound of the name.  Like if someone were to spell Fred as Phred instead.  That kind of thing, only where it would also change the meaning.

    As that situation simply cannot exist in English (unless they wanted to change Sun to Son, which would actually kind of work here), obviously the translators had to either plan on adding a footnote to the image (or a second line of subtitles to translate the on-screen text) and still say that the king changed the characters so they meant "Tremendous Masculinity" instead of "Perfect Sun" or they had to try to get creative and make the king have actually gotten the divine name wrong, not just in its spelling but in its sound.  Which is inherently much more implausible, but...I'll admit that it's much easier to try to deal with.

    In the Netflix subtitles, they go with the explanation that Feng Xin's original divine name was "General Duke" and that the careless king changed it to "General Dick."  Crass, but it gets the point across.  (Although honestly I feel like the "Tremendous Masculinity" version gives the benefit of the doubt of sounding just as much like it's about fertility as it is about size of equipment, but maybe that's just me.  Given that MXTX went out of her way to specify that the love interests of her first two novels were both hung like horses, she may have intended it to mean size of equipment.)

    That's not what was on the Blu-ray's subtitles.

    The Blu-ray's subtitles said that Feng Xin used to be called "Big Yang" until the careless king changed it to "Big Wang."

    Yeah.  You read that right.

    The Blu-ray's subtitles act on the disgusting assumption that people in China would associate the very common Chinese surname Wang with the crass English slang for "penis."

    This is so appalling that I have no words for it.

    As I said, it's actually downright racist.

    And, as I said above, this is still just the second episode.  But I've sort of worn myself out with ranting about that one, so I'm more or less just going to list from here on out.

    They also got three of the four ghost ranks wrong ("Wrath" being the only one they got right), but I didn't write down what the wrong ones were.

    Continually referencing the "Ghost Groom" as a "demon" despite that "ghost" is literally part of the title.  (There are, as of volume 6 of 8, no demons in Heaven Official's Blessing.  Just gods and ghosts.)

    First reference to Qi Rong and they're calling him the "Green Immor" instead of the "Green Ghost."

    I would like to send a personal note to whoever was in charge of translating this:

    "IMMOR" IS NOT A WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE!!!!!!!!

    Sorry for shouting like that, but what else was I going to do?  What the *&&%^*(^ is wrong with the translation team on this that they're so desperate to avoid acknowledging that this show deals with ghosts?  I mean, they seriously went and invented a crazy-ass word rather than use the very obvious correct word, "ghost."

    And yes, I am quite confident about the fact that "immor" is not a word.  On top of the fact that three different online dictionaries didn't have it, I looked it up in the massive dictionary that my parents for some reason have, the type that normally you only see in the reference section of a library, because it is the size and weight of a small child.

The cover of said dictionary

    Here's the page where "immor" would be if it was a word:

    See?  Jumps straight from "immoment" to "immoral."  If "immor" existed, it would be above "immoral."  And in case you're thinking maybe this isn't such a big dictionary as I said it was...

    2662 pages of pretty tiny type.  (My parents keep a magnifying glass on hand in case they want to consult it.  Though they typically only do so when they want to exult in the fact that the crossword puzzle in the paper is wrong about something.)  If that word existed, it would be in there.

    So, finally moving on to episode 3, and mostly no new problems, until the kid unwraps the bandages around his face.  The subtitles call it "face sickness" instead of "Human Face Disease."  Now, I have no problem with "sickness" instead of "disease."  They're synonyms, and there's no particular advantage or disadvantage to either.  Leaving the "human" off, though, that is just dumb.  Because without specifying that part, it sounds like "a sickness of the face" not "a sickness wherein human faces appear on the skin."  Kind of a big difference.  (Especially since the image of the kid's face is not entirely clear that those things are supposed to be human faces.)

[EDIT:  okay, so I am apparently unable to count. 😰  The kid removing his bandages was in episode four, and it was actually episode five that I got through on the Blu-ray.  I'm currently skimming my way through those episodes on Netflix so I can finish rewatching the show with their superior subtitles, y'see, hence I noticed my mistake.  😅  Anyway, they got the other ghost ranks wrong, too, or at least got them different from the way Seven Seas translated them (I gather the difficulties in translating from Chinese to English are much greater than for a lot of other languages), and did not translate the Calamity titles of the others quite the same way, either, but much closer.  Interestingly, rather than translating "White No-Face" they treated it as a name.  Not sure why (did they also think people would confuse it with Spirited Away's No-Face?), but at least a name makes sense, whereas "White No-Form" does not.  And more importantly, they don't try to pretend ghosts are demons!]

    And now we reach episode 4, the one that made me give up in disgust.  To start with, I was already shuddering at the way they translated the episode's title:  "Ghost King of Hua Cheng."  Where's that "of" come from?  What purpose do they think it serves?  Hua Cheng is a Ghost King, not the subject/kingdom of a Ghost King!

    Then we get another reference to Qi Rong, this time as "Sad-faced Green Immor," which had me really confused at first.  I was like "how did they translate Night-Touring to mean Sad-faced?"  Then I thought about it rationally for a moment and realized that they hadn't used his name in the subtitle, even though I could hear the actor saying Qi Rong.  So I looked it up, and guess what?  The freakin' translators decided that his name was an epithet rather than, you know, the man's flippin' name!  (This is especially problematic because Qi Rong is someone Xie Lian knew back in the day, and Qi Rong was his actual name in life, so when Xie Lian eventually runs into Qi Rong in the course of the novel, he's shocked and appalled that the near-supreme ghost Qi Rong is in fact the very same Qi Rong he knew back in the Xianle Kingdom.)  I don't know why the subtitles wanted to use as few names as possible, but they absolutely did:  in one scene, Xie Lian addresses Mu Qing by name, but the subtitles don't use his name (again, this is brutalizing the story and the characters' relationship with each other, since things are so fraught between Xie Lian and his former subordinates).

    There are four super-powerful ghosts in Heaven Official's Blessing.  Three supremes and a "near supreme" added in just because he's so annoying (and/or to pad out the numbers to a perfect unlucky four), collectively known as the Four Calamities.  The subtitles on the Blu-ray call them the "Four Devils."  On top of the fact that devil is a word with far less punch, its use here also borders on racism, because of the old stereotype of Chinese people calling foreigners "foreign devils."

    I decided to write down how they handled the official Calamity titles of the four, just so I could compare them to the proper translations in the book.  Noting, of course, that they kept using "Immor" instead of "ghost," because why would they let go of something stupid once they had gotten hold of it?

    They went with "Black Water Boat-sinker" while the Seven Seas translation used "Ship-sinking Black Water."  I think the Seven Seas version looks and sounds better, but I'll give the Blu-ray's subtitles a pass on this one, as it does at least convey the same meaning...though changing a participle used adjectivally into the primary noun is a weird choice.

    Next they translated Qi Rong's Calamity title as "Green Light Night-stalker" instead of "Night Touring Green Lantern."  Again, changing around which half is the noun and which is being used adjectivally.  The meaning, in the most strict sense, isn't strongly different between the two, but "Night-stalker" makes him sound considerably more dangerous and effective than he actually is.

    Then there's the white Calamity.  All I wrote down for that one is how they translated his lesser title; I don't think they even used his full Calamity title (which is White-Clothed Calamity).   Unlike the other Calamities, we don't know the white one's name (at least, not as of volume 6, but I suspect his name is probably going to be exposed either in volume 7 (coming out later this month) or in the final volume (currently with a release date in November), so the only name he has to go by is "White No-Face."  The Blu-ray subtitles changed that to "White No-Form."  Which.  Makes.  Literally.  No.  Sense.  He's called "No-Face" because he appears to have no face, as it is always covered with a mask.  He has form.  (Well, okay, technically he doesn't have form at this point in the story, since his form was destroyed not too long after the fall of Xianle, but as he was already called White No-Face before that, it doesn't change my point.)  What he hasn't got is a face.  Hence White No-Face.  Changing it to "No-Form" is just stupid.  It's like someone in the translation department at Funimation/Crunchyroll said "wait, but that guy in Spirited Away is called No-Face!  We can't use the same name as him or people will get confused!"  Despite that no one other than an executive is that stupid.

    And finally, before we get to Hua Cheng's Calamity title, there's the fact that they call his wraith butterflies "Dead Soul Butterflies."  Which is, I guess, not totally wrong?  But it's...not good.  It's creepier (in a bad way), lacks punch, and takes longer to read/say, so it's all around bad.  (I added the "say" part because I'm pretty sure these craptastrophic subtitles are actually dubtitles.  Which is something I honestly thought no one did anymore, and yet there's kind of no other way to explain this?) [EDIT:  my brother volunteered to check in this for me, listening to the dub with the subtitles on, and astonishingly he reported that the two were not the same, because evidently in the dub they rarely used both words "Ghost Groom" together.  (Sadly, it sounds like he was in episode one or two, and not looking at the bog meeting in episode five; I'd love to know how the dub screwed up the Calamity titles, and if they actually persuaded their dub actors to use the non-word "immor.")]

    So.  Hua Cheng.  Crimson Rain Sought Flower.  The supreme Ghost King who challenged 35 gods simultaneously.  The love interest of the novel and all around sex bomb.

    The subtitlers decided to translate his Calamity title as "Blood Rain Flower-seeker."

    It's rare that I want to hit someone for reals, but this really does make me want to punch these guys.  Or at least slap them real hard.

    Changing "Crimson" to "Blood" implies an alignment with Qi Rong (who is known for hanging corpses upside down and causing a rain of blood from them), which could not be further from the truth.  Changing the past tense of "Sought Flower" to "Flower-seeker" makes him sound like a freaking hippie out hunting for flowers all the time rather than something that happened in the past.  (That part of his title has not been fully explained so far in the novel (or if it has I've forgotten) but I'm pretty sure I know what it's vaguely in reference to, however I won't say what as it's something that happened much later in the novel.) [EDIT- in rewatching the rest on Netflix, I saw that Hua Cheng himself (early in his San Lang guise) provided an explanation of the monicker, but I'm not sure that it was the real explanation, as it's sorta weird, but 🤷🏻‍♀️ I guess it could be?  I'll find out in a few months when the final volume of the novel comes out and I reread all the preceding volumes.]

    Of course, the subtitles don't even get right that he challenged those gods at the same time, and say he challenged them "in a row."  Fighting 33 gods one at a time, even back to back, is much less impressive than fighting them all at once.  (Not that he actually fought them all at precisely the same time:  some of them weren't martial gods but civil/scholarly ones, so what he really did was fight all the martial gods at once, and then debate all the civil/scholarly ones at the same time.  But close enough.)

    (The discrepancy between 35 and 33 is not a mistake on my part:  he challenged 35, but Feng Xin and Mu Qing refused to fight him.  While done for the wrong reasons, still a very wise decision on their parts.)

    Allow me to quote the next point from my notes:

Aaaaaaand they just called Hua Cheng a demon rather than a ghost.  That is so [censored] stupid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    I think that sums up a lot right there.

    But let me go one further.  After talking about how Hua Cheng's stake in the challenge against those 35 gods was that if he lost he would surrender his ashes to Heaven, here's a direct quote of the subtitles of a line from Ling Wen:

   "He comes from Mt. Furnace, where thousands of demons fight to the death to become kings."

    AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

    ^ I can't sum it up better than that. ^

    So, Ling Wen's line is trying to fill in the viewer on another lengthy bit of world-building backstory that's accomplished in a long passage of narration, but which would be awkward to try and fit into the adaptation unless they wanted to have an actual narrator.  (Given MXTX's heavy reliance on simply putting world-building and backstory in these narrative asides, I think the adaptations might benefit from having a narrator.  It might be awkward finding the right type of narration for the stories, but it would make these detail moments work better.)

    Allow me to try to sum up everything wrong with that one line from the subtitles.  (Aside from the fact that it's probably half of what she's actually saying, but as I can't speak the language, I have no way of knowing.  Except that at this point I've watched just enough subtitled Chinese programs (and video game cutscenes) to know that expressing most things in English typically seems to take a lot longer than it does in Chinese.)

    Hua Cheng does not "come from" Mt. Tonglu.  He actually comes, originally, from Xianle, not that Ling Wen has any idea of that (as far as I know).  Now, Mt. Tonglu (which means "copper kiln," not "furnace," btw) is the site of a colossal battle royale, the winner of which becomes a Ghost King, and yes, Hua Cheng is one of the few who have won that battle royale in the past.  But everyone fighting in it was a ghost, not a demon (as I said, no demons in Heaven Official's Blessing!).  And the phrasing of "to become kings" implies that there will be more than one to emerge as a king at a time, when that is 100% not the case.

    Without knowing what she actually said, if I were hired to proofread the disasterpiece that is the subtitles on that Blu-ray, I would probably suggest replacing that line with something more like "He emerged from Mt. Tonglu, where he fought thousands of other ghosts to the death in order to earn his title as a Ghost King."  Or something like that.  (And yes, the idea of ghosts fighting to the death seems very strange to the Western way of thinking, since ghosts are already dead, but it comes up a lot in the novel, and the idea also came up in MXTX's other novels, so it's just a different way of thinking about ghosts ideologically, I guess.)

    So.

    Yeah.

    There you have it.

    After that massive pile of crud was slathered all over Hua Cheng in episode 4, I decided that my sanity was more important than trying to watch that thing.  I'd rather waste the money I paid to buy it than go mad trying to finish watching it.  (Sadly, I can't return it, because opened Blu-rays can only be exchanged in case of defect, and even then only for the same product.  Returning it because it's unwatchable due to horrifically bad subtitles is not an option.)

    It's a shame, because it's a pretty decent adaptation of volume 1 of the novel.  (Though I wonder how well they would have adapted the remaining 7 volumes if they had been permitted to make more seasons.  (Given the uptick in anti-LGBTQ+ activity on the part of the Chinese government, I think one can assume that the animation company does not feel that continuing to adapt gay romances is a safe move.)  At this rate, it would have taken eight seasons?  And I feel like they probably would not have wanted to dedicate nearly that long to it.)  Still, as long as it's available to stream on Netflix, at least I can watch it whenever I want.  But if Netflix ever takes it down, then I won't get to watch it again unless I want to either suffer through the rest of these ghastly subtitles or learn Chinese.

    On the plus side, it is faster to read volume 1 of the novel than it is to watch the entire season of the show, so there's at least that, I guess.