Destined to calamity, one is born under the ominous star. Another, beneath the star of solitude, bleeds alone. The god of misfortune finally meets the one who lures it near.
If one is a magnet for misfortune, that is the god to answer those prayers. Thankfully, Wu Ming loves it. 🌸
This is a meta for gifset trade with @purple-fury! Maybe you would like to trade something with me? You can PM me if so!
Choosing a Chinese name, if you don’t know a Chinese language, is difficult, but here’s a secret for you: choosing a Chinese name, when you do know a Chinese language, is also difficult. So, my tip #1 is: Relax. Did you know that Actual Chinese People choose shitty names all the dang time? It’s true!!! Just as you, doubtless, have come across people in your daily life in your native language that you think “God, your parents must have been on SOME SHIT when they named you”, the same is true about Chinese people, now and throughout history. If you choose a shitty name, it’s not the end of the world! Your character’s parents now canonically suck at choosing a name. There, we fixed it!
However. Just because you should not drive yourself to the brink of the grave fretting over choosing a Chinese name for a character, neither does that mean you shouldn’t care at all. Especially, tip #2, Never just pick some syllables that vaguely sound Chinese and call it a day. That shit is awful and tbh it’s as inaccurate and racist as saying “ching chong” to mimic the Chinese language. Examples: Cho Chang from Harry Potter, Tenten from Naruto, and most notorious of all, Fu Manchu and his daughter Fah lo Suee (how the F/UCK did he come up with that one).
So where do you begin then? Well, first you need to pick your character’s surname. This is actually not too difficult, because Chinese actually doesn’t have that many surnames in common use. One hundred surnames cover over eighty percent of China’s population, and in local areas especially, certain surnames within that one hundred are absurdly common, like one out of every ten people you meet is surnamed Wang, for example. Also, if you’re making an OC for an established media franchise, you may already have the surname based on who you want your character related to. Finally, if you’re writing an ethnically Chinese character who was born and raised outside of China, you might only want their surname to be Chinese, and give them a given name from the language/culture of their native country; that’s very very common.
If you don’t have a surname in mind, check out the Wikipedia page for the list of common Chinese surnames, roughly the top one hundred. If you’re not going to pick one of the top one hundred surnames, you should have a good reason why. Now you need to choose a romanization system. You’ll note that the Wikipedia list contains variant spellings. If your character is a Chinese-American (or other non-Chinese country) whose ancestors emigrated before the 1950s (or whose ancestors did not come from mainland China), their name will not be spelled according to pinyin. It might be spelled according to Wade-Giles romanization, or according to the name’s pronunciation in other Chinese languages, or according to what the name sounds like in the language of the country they immigrated to. (The latter is where you get spellings like Lee, Young, Woo, and Law.) A huge proportion of emigration especially came from southern China, where people spoke Cantonese, Min, Hakka, and other non-Mandarin languages.
So, for example, if you want to make a Chinese-Canadian character whose paternal source of their surname immigrated to Canada in the 20s, don’t give them the surname Xie, spelled that way, because #1 that spelling didn’t exist when their first generation ancestor left China and #2 their first generation ancestor was unlikely to have come from a part of China where Mandarin was spoken anyway (although still could have! that’s up to you). Instead, name them Tse, Tze, Sia, Chia, or Hsieh.
If you’re working with a character who lives in, or who left or is descended from people who left mainland China in the 1960s or later; or if you’re working with a historical or mythological setting, then you are going to want to use the pinyin romanization. The reason I say that you should use pinyin for historical or mythological settings is because pinyin is now the official or de facto romanization system for international standards in academia, the United Nations, etc. So if you’re writing a story with characters from ancient China, or medieval China, use pinyin, even though not only pinyin, but the Mandarin pronunciations themselves didn’t exist back then. Just… just accept this. This is one of those quirks of having a non-alphabetic language.
(Here’s an “exceptions” paragraph: there are various well known Chinese names that are typically, even now, transliterated in a non-standard way: Confucius, Mencius, the Yangtze River, Sun Yat-sen, etc. Go ahead and use these if you want. And if you really consciously want to make a Cantonese or Hakka or whatever setting, more power to you, but in that case you better be far beyond needing this tutorial and I don’t know why you’re here. Get. Scoot!)
One last point about names that use the ü with the umlaut over it. The umlaut ü is actually pretty critical for the meaning because wherever the ü appears, the consonant preceding it also can be used with u: lu/lü, nu/nü, etc. However, de facto, lots of individual people, media franchises, etc, simply drop the umlaut and write u instead when writing a name in English, such as “Lu Bu” in the Dynasty Warriors franchise in English (it should be written Lü Bu). And to be fair, since tones are also typically dropped in Latin script and are just as critical to the meaning and pronunciation of the original, dropping the umlaut probably doesn’t make much difference. This is kind of a choice you have to make for yourself. Maybe you even want to play with it! Maybe everybody thinks your character’s surname is pronounced “loo as in loo roll” but SURPRISE MOFO it’s actually lü! You could Do Something with that. Also, in contexts where people want to distinguish between u and ü when typing but don’t have easy access to a keyboard method of making the ü, the typical shorthand is the letter v.
Alright! So you have your surname and you know how you want it spelled using the Latin alphabet. Great! What next?
Alright, so, now we get to the hard part: choosing the given name. No, don’t cry, I know baby I know. We can do this. I believe in you.
Here are some premises we’re going to be operating on, and I’m not entirely sure why I made this a numbered list:
You’re going to stick with the same romanization system (or lack thereof) as you’ve used for the surname. In the interests of time, I’m going to focus on pinyin only.
First let’s take a look at some real and actual Chinese names and talk about what they mean, why they might have been chosen, and also some fictional OC names that I’ve come up with that riff off of these actual Chinese names. And then we’ll go over some resources and also some pitfalls. Hopefully you can learn by example! Fun!!!
Let’s start with two great historical strategists: Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu, and the names I picked for some (fictional) sons of theirs. Then I will be talking about Sun Shangxiang and Guan Yinping, two historical-legendary women of the same era, and what I named their fictional daughters. And finally I’ll be talking about historical Chinese pirate Gan Ning and what I named his fictional wife and fictional daughter. Uh, this could be considered spoilers for my novel Clouds and Rain and associated one-shots in that universe, so you probably want to go and read that work… and its prequels… and leave lots of comments and kudos first and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
(I’m just kidding you don’t need to know a thing about my work to find this useful.)
I had to remove the links from the main post in order for it to show up in tag search, so here are the links to dictionaries and resources as a reblog!
🎋🎋 quality time with shizun
yes we all know how utterly depressing tgcf book 4 is but there's just something so funny about wu ming straight up manifesting with a very specific mask like
in those 2-3 days between xie lian returning home from the altar and *ahem* ruoye's creation hua cheng was like "aight okay how can i subtely show dianxia i am on his side no matter wha- oh 'lll wear a mask like him- but i am not conflicted about anything i just want to be there for hi-THATS ITS SMILING MASK yeah that'll symbolize my undying love" like dude
we got so much bigger issues here. and you actually spent time going hey what fashion statement should i make during my crush's meltdown
In the FengLian universe, do you think fx was freaking out when he got the golden belt?
'omg omg omg omg the crown prince GAVE ME a golden belt I'll keep it forever!!'
And of course, here he keeps it forever.
Finishing up some 2022 drafts and looks like half of them are Xie Lian and some black neck goo (ツ)_/¯⟡ ݁₊°
Having thoughts about Jun Wu's relationship with Xie Lian... One could say Jun Wu never really cared for Xie Lian himself and rather the idea of him, but I like to imagine Jun Wu did truly care about Xie Lian in his own twisted way, a sad desire for understanding and someone to share their pain with, someone who could empathize with him. Ironically, I'd say this could be a parallel to Hua Cheng, as both kinda use Xie Lian as kind of an "anchor", but unlike Hua Cheng, who doesn't need any other reason to live, ground his morals on or even move forward, being content with seeing Xie Lian happy on his own, Jun Wu's core issue is, deep down, internal to himself. Even if Xie Lian became a calamity and understood him, it wouldn't be enough, because no amount of allies could ever soothe his self loathing over breaking his own morals. Jun Wu needed to "forgive" himself, his Wuyong self, and to know it wasn't stupid to believe in people, not to have another corrupted "him" by his side.
What Jun Wu wanted was someone to confirm he had no other choice, that he was right in not believing in people, but what he needed was for someone to prove that his old ideals were right.
So in the end, Xie Lian did indeed save Jun Wu... Not by giving what he wanted, but instead by giving him what he needed.
Fontainebleau State Park, Mandeville, Louisiana by Lana Gramlich
Adoration.
I loooove curly Hua hua
Hualian NSFW commission for @sir-camelot ♥ Thank you very much for trusting me for this commission! The full drawing is on my Twitter Remember that my commissions are open!
hua cheng’s other tattoo
i’m writing a story and there are several scenes centered on a single character, but the story is in 3rd person. when should i use the characters pronouns and when should i use her name? i feel like just writing “she” and “her” is getting redundant but idk when to use her name instead...
Rule #1 - Use a character’s name when they’re first introduced into a scene.
Rule #2 - Use the character’s name any time the writer might be confused about who is speaking or acting.
Rule #3 - Do not attempt to create variety by using titles instead of names or pronouns as it distances the reader from the character. This is especially important when you’re going for a close or deep POV. For example, if a secondary character has been introduced as Mrs. Smith, don’t periodically refer to her as “the teacher.”
Rule #4 - Names and pronouns are like “said” in that they’re essential and mostly invisible to the reader. However, if you feel like you’re overusing pronouns, you may be guilty of one or both of the following:
Rule #5 - There are always exceptions, so use your best judgement. The rules above are good general guidelines, but if you have a good reason for breaking one of them, do what you have to do. Writing is all about learning the “rules” so you know how and when you can break them.
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Have a question? My inbox is always open, but make sure to check my FAQ and post master lists first to see if I’ve already answered a similar question. :)
Shen Qianqiu says he isn't gay, but he found all the plot holes and filled them up himself 🙄
I wonder how many gay moments did Xie Lian have with random handsome twinks before meeting San Lang.
He had just met him and Xie Lian had to pray for forgiveness because he thought he was going to get kissed 😭
Probably not many moments. Because of his luck and reputation, most walk away, but there had to be SOME, right??
Imagine Xie Lian wanting to work for Hua Cheng in paradise manor thinking it was a brothel—after burning it down, he has to pay the money somehow, right???
Hua Cheng actually agrees with the offer, but doesn't take it far. Xie Lian then is actually offended because he thinks Hua Cheng rejected him, and now he's doing is best to seem more pleasing.
This is a battle between Xie Lian's lust and Hua Cheng's self control.
