Finally remembered the last thing!

     After I failed to remember my last MDZS thing to add it to the previous "oh I forgot some stuff" post, I finally remembered it.

    It's that I was stunned to see that Crunchyroll has added the animated version of MDZS to streaming.  They didn't exactly put any effort into its presentation on the page for the series, though:  there's literally no description of the story (I can only think of one other show I've ever clicked on that left that space entirely blank, and that was something that was simulcasting so I had assumed they had no idea how to describe its story) and for the first two seasons the episodes have thumbnails and titles but no episode summaries.  Then for the final season and the quasi-fourth season (made up of mini episodes of things that happened during the earlier seasons that apparently they just left out) they have episode summaries but no thumbnails.  Everything about the show's page on Crunchyroll is just sort of "wtf." 😰  (Okay, actually, it seems like episode summaries are only available on the console version of Crunchyroll, as I just went to the version on my computer to double-check something and found no access to episode summaries at all.  Which is particularly weird all around, but maybe I'm just failing to navigate the PC version correctly.)

    The second time I clicked on it to have a look at the wtf-ness of it all (several days later than the initial time), I noticed something appalling in the descriptions of the episodes in that final season:

IWSG - I should probably come up with a title for this post but I'm bad at that

 

    So.

    Today's suggested question was about if we've ever wanted to go back and rewrite something, right?

    For me that's kind of a "yes and no" thing.

    Like anyone, I look back at my oldest writing and cringe.  But I tend to write exclusively for myself in the sense that most of the things I've ever written have never been put before other people in any context.  That being the case, if I ever want to rewrite something, there's nothing stopping me from doing so.

    However, for the most part I wouldn't want to because the really old things I've written are things I now don't particularly want to interact with in terms of their story material.

    Before I figured out I was asexual and aromantic, I often included heterosexual romance in my writing.  Actually, that even continued on for a few years after I figured it out, in fact.  But now I prefer to write about same-sex romance, if I include romance at all, so most of my old stuff is something I don't even want to interact with in any way.  And since it's not out there being interacted with by anyone else, that's fine.  It can continue to rot in digital oblivion.  (Or something.)

    On the other hand, I have been rewriting--and releasing!--a series of novels I wrote in 2014, so sometimes I do want to go back and rewrite older works.  (Okay, if I really wanted to go to older works, I started writing back in the 1990s, so if any of those even still exist on any accessible hard drive, I could dive back into the ultra-cringe of things I wrote when I was still a teenager.)  I need to finally get around to finishing up the research for the next rewrite in the series, though.  It's hard to find books talking in sufficient detail about Late Bronze Age Mesopotamia...

Forgot a few things!

     I forgot a couple things on my previous MDZS-related post.

    First, I wanted to mention that I not too long ago watched the anime Raven of the Inner Court.  Like The Apothecary Diaries, it originates in Japan but its setting is inspired by ancient China.  Unlike the other, though, I was pretty disappointed by Raven of the Inner Court.  The body count of bystanders was pretty high, the romantic elements were far too highlighted and far too shallow (at least in Apothecary Diaries Jinshi is trying to pretend he's not head-over-heels for Maomao, plus he actually has a personality and is extremely entertaining to watch), but I think my biggest problem with Raven of the Inner Court is that the anime's pacing is terrible.  They were clearly rushing to get through as much of the plot from the light novels as possible; if they'd spent twice as many episodes on the same amount of story, it would have surely been better, or at least had a lot less of "wait, who's that again?" syndrome.  (Having better character designs with more distinction between characters and a higher animation budget would definitely have helped, too, of course.)  However, as some of my problems with the story were definitely built-in to the original work, I'm not going to bother reading the light novels to get the original version, since I plainly wouldn't be satisfied with it, either.  And I'm obviously not its primary audience (since I prefer queer romance), so that's fine.

    So why do I mention it?  (And especially in a MDZS context?)  Because two of the male characters in it had names that made me sit up and take notice, especially in connection with each other.  Now, keep in mind that this is their names as written in the subtitles.  Unlike Apothecary Diaries, which gives its characters Chinese (or possibly just Chinese-like) names that can be pronounced in Japanese, Raven of the Inner Court gave its characters...how do I put this?  The Japanese versions of actual Chinese names.  If you ever do something like look for MDZS merch on a Japanese storefront like Mandarake, you sometimes find the names transliterated as they're said in Japanese, which gives really weird different names for some of the characters.  (I think "Lan" becomes like "Aoi" or something, going on the meaning of the character used (blue), instead of matching the sound.)  So, there is some uncertainty in my mind as to whether the names in the subtitles on Raven of the Inner Court should be viewed as the names intended by the author of the light novel or not.  (And since I don't actually care, I haven't bothered to look into that.  I would expect that it's either easily found out just on Wikipedia or something...or it's basically impossible to find out because nothing's ever been said in print.)  But either way, whether it's just the subtitles or the author's intent...

    ...two of the male characters are named Wei Qing and Wen Ying.

    Given that the lead of MDZS has the birth name of Wei Ying and one of the major female characters is Wen Qing, it feels like that cannot be a coincidence.

    It still could be a coincidence, of course.  (Or it could be someone in the translation-to-English pipeline deciding to throw in some MDZS references.)  But it's just so weirdly overlapping that it's hard to look at it as coincidental.  (And I did at least look up when the light novels started being published, and it was definitely after MDZS was published, so it's not impossible.)

    Then the other thing was....

    The other thing was...

    ...

    ...I've forgotten it.

    😭