The perils of fanfic
Aug. 21st, 2023 12:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkReading fanfic of Chinese source material is always frustrating to me, because I can't tell whether fanfic authors are of Chinese descent or not and it often seems like cultural nuances are messed up.
And I want to be kind to fanfic authors, plus some part of me wonders whether these "mistakes" are possibly intentional choices to call back to the source material. But I can't tell, and if unintentional, these mistakes are as bothersome as mosquito bites.
For example, I was reading one Erha (The Husky and His White Cat Shizun) fanfic that was an Edo period Japan AU. Overall, I enjoyed it...but what bothered me was how the names were handled. See, people in Japan wouldn't pronounce Mandarin names; they would pronounce the characters according to how they're pronounced in Japanese.
So "Taxian-jun" would never be called that in Japan. It would be something like "Fusen-sama" (according to my mediocre Google-fu; an actual Japanese-speaker can feel free to correct me). Especially because the character "jun" in Chinese, a respectful honorific, is "kun" in Japanese, which is informal.
Another fanfic I was reading, this time for SVSSS (The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System), was an imperial Chinese AU in which the two versions of Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe all existed and they were all twins. Which was cute. Except...it bothered me how the younger twins would refer to their older brothers: Shen Yuan called his brother "Jiu-ge" and Luo Binghe called his brother "Bing-ge."
That's...not how you refer to your brothers in Chinese culture. Using a given name + "ge" is how you would refer to a good (older male) friend. For your actual familial brother, you would call them "Gege" or "Ge."
(deep sigh)
And I want to be kind to fanfic authors, plus some part of me wonders whether these "mistakes" are possibly intentional choices to call back to the source material. But I can't tell, and if unintentional, these mistakes are as bothersome as mosquito bites.
For example, I was reading one Erha (The Husky and His White Cat Shizun) fanfic that was an Edo period Japan AU. Overall, I enjoyed it...but what bothered me was how the names were handled. See, people in Japan wouldn't pronounce Mandarin names; they would pronounce the characters according to how they're pronounced in Japanese.
So "Taxian-jun" would never be called that in Japan. It would be something like "Fusen-sama" (according to my mediocre Google-fu; an actual Japanese-speaker can feel free to correct me). Especially because the character "jun" in Chinese, a respectful honorific, is "kun" in Japanese, which is informal.
Another fanfic I was reading, this time for SVSSS (The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System), was an imperial Chinese AU in which the two versions of Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe all existed and they were all twins. Which was cute. Except...it bothered me how the younger twins would refer to their older brothers: Shen Yuan called his brother "Jiu-ge" and Luo Binghe called his brother "Bing-ge."
That's...not how you refer to your brothers in Chinese culture. Using a given name + "ge" is how you would refer to a good (older male) friend. For your actual familial brother, you would call them "Gege" or "Ge."
(deep sigh)
