(no subject)
May. 22nd, 2022 17:14![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
superborbI feel Some Kind of Way whenever I encounter really rigid views of Chinese culture. Twitter forces one to start adding unnecessary caveats and apologies in advance and I want to resist that impulse, but really, sometimes you need to caveat your instincts, especially if you don't have any actual evidence backing them up?
Like, yeah, your first instinct might be that Confucianism is patriarchal and so there can't be any female sect leaders in wuxia, but that's simply not true? Things are sexist enough without adding MORE sexism please. My first instinct personally upon encountering that "disrespectful to Confucianism" (sigh, as if culture were static) narrative was that it seemed incorrect.
And then I went searching for receipts, which @douqi7s provided (from Jin Yong, since this is @douqi7s):
1. Lin Chaoying and Xiaolongnv in Return of the Condor Heroes
2. Abbess Miejue and the entirety of the E'mei sect in Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre
3. Abbess Dingxian and the entirety of the Hengshan sect in Smiling Proud Wanderer
Anyway, this seemed egregiously wrong, but even those things that are commonly known to be correct are more flexible than generally presented. I had the previous post on how heterogeneous practices can be in time, but even more trivial things. In the last episode of Delicious Romance, there's single word name use, so that's unusual, but it's not THE END OF THE WORLD TABOO like fandom sometimes makes it sound. (Definitely unusual though.) People are soooo strict about name taboo, but my grandpa named my dad with one of the characters in his name and if he had a girl, he was going to use the other character. (Also definitely unusual.)
I guess I just feel like fandom sometimes treats Chinese culture like a fantasy setting where there are static unchanging rules, but it encompasses so many people over so much time. And people have instinctive feelings over what feels right, which is very valid, but sometimes their instinct is setting up rigid rules that are either way too rigid or simply wrong.
Like, yeah, your first instinct might be that Confucianism is patriarchal and so there can't be any female sect leaders in wuxia, but that's simply not true? Things are sexist enough without adding MORE sexism please. My first instinct personally upon encountering that "disrespectful to Confucianism" (sigh, as if culture were static) narrative was that it seemed incorrect.
And then I went searching for receipts, which @douqi7s provided (from Jin Yong, since this is @douqi7s):
1. Lin Chaoying and Xiaolongnv in Return of the Condor Heroes
2. Abbess Miejue and the entirety of the E'mei sect in Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre
3. Abbess Dingxian and the entirety of the Hengshan sect in Smiling Proud Wanderer
Anyway, this seemed egregiously wrong, but even those things that are commonly known to be correct are more flexible than generally presented. I had the previous post on how heterogeneous practices can be in time, but even more trivial things. In the last episode of Delicious Romance, there's single word name use, so that's unusual, but it's not THE END OF THE WORLD TABOO like fandom sometimes makes it sound. (Definitely unusual though.) People are soooo strict about name taboo, but my grandpa named my dad with one of the characters in his name and if he had a girl, he was going to use the other character. (Also definitely unusual.)
I guess I just feel like fandom sometimes treats Chinese culture like a fantasy setting where there are static unchanging rules, but it encompasses so many people over so much time. And people have instinctive feelings over what feels right, which is very valid, but sometimes their instinct is setting up rigid rules that are either way too rigid or simply wrong.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-23 16:17 (UTC)