Ok. So. Look. I am not an expert on Chinese history at ALL, and certainly not the periods of most xianxia novels are set in. But I do know a fair bit about QUEER history, and one thing I know is that China went through long periods of not only accepted but even formalized male homosexuality, similar in some ways to ancient Athens. And those periods are around the same periods as xianxia times I think (one thing I’m not good at conceptualizing is Chinese historical periods because my brain is too Western-pilled with western historical periods which do not match one-to-one with Chinese periods). So. Every time a western author says something like “no period-typical homophobia here” I’m like. Wait. No. Period-typical homophobia is a WESTERN thing at that time, stop it. Just because China is homophobic NOW doesn’t mean they always have been because as it turns out history is not a linear progression from less-progressive to more-progressive.
Anyway, new slowly-percolating pet peeve for specifically SVSSS fanfic (I don’t encounter it much in tgcf fic because there’s no one there with a modern lense thinking about the past).
Of course, I’ve been told that a lot of Chinese folks living in China are unaware of their rich historical and literary traditions of homosexuality because of homophobic censorship, so I suppose I could write it off as “would Shen Yuan be aware that this period of Chinese history would likely be far less homophobic than his first life’s period?” Because. I feel like that is very likely something Shen Yuan would NOT know, given his own levels of internalized homophobia. Or maybe I have my internal understanding of xianxia time periods completely off. It’s not like anyone actually nails it to a specific era, especially in svsss which is deliberately mixed up with different periods because Airplane is an idiot who definitely did NO research.
@TheBookewyrme people using “period typical” to refer to their complete assumptions about what the past was like with zero research or factchecking also drives me crazy so i feel u on this
and also i feel like the period messiness of xianxia in general / svsss in particular only makes the use of the term MORE inappropriate. like how can *anything* be period appropriate when we’ve thrown like a thousand years in a blender?????
@TheBookewyrme which would not be an unreasonable thing for an author to do in a vacuum, but given the confusion surrounding the issue in question i do feel like authors have a little bit of a responsibility to signal that they do not, in fact, believe this and are just depicting SY having bad takes
@TheBookewyrme maybe i have just been burned too many times by otherwise reasonable and well researched people having massive blindspots about something because it conforms to their preexisting biases
@Satsuma totally Valid!
@Satsuma Yes!! Bewilderingly it often shows up in otherwise well-researched and well-written fics. So I have to wonder if sometimes it IS a deliberate “SY would think homophobia was period-typical and this is his voice” authorial choice. But definitely not every time.