Two links and grousing over fandom platforms make a post, right?

History and Politics of Wuxia by Jeannette Ng

Great short introduction into the foundations of the genre which has gotten popular here recently too. Untamed/MDZS and so on all come from the tradition. Ng also talks about Han supremacy which is also part of the genre. In light of wuxia getting popular in Hong Kong first and also as a counter the Cultural Revolution, this makes sense as a diaspora genre. However, mainland China has embraced and even claimed Wuxia for itself and instrumentalizes it.

I admit I only know the bare bones of the genre as well. I have been reading a complete translation of Outlaws of the Liangshan Marsh, one of the genre fore bearers, for a few years - I usually go for full text with classic works, it just so happens this one is 2000+ pages. Despite being one of the four classic Chinese novels, it was at least partially transmitted via folk story telling.

Every chapter has some sort of fight in it and, I can't emphasize this enough, all of them end on a cliffhanger. E.g. the ending of the chapter I am currently at:
"And because of Zhu Tong's request, there was turmoil in Gaotang Prefecture and strife in the Liangshan Marsh stronghold. A noble patron of learning fell into the clutches of the law, a hospitable relative of the emperor was cast into a dungeon.
What was the demand which Zhu Tong made? Read our next chapter if you would know."

It's very easy to imagine, say, traveling story tellers narrating one chapter one evening and then leaving it like this for the next night. With up to over 100 chapters, it's an action series in words and uses an actual To Be Continued to have you hooked.
 

A more comprehensive look at the fallout of the story "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter".
I liked it overall when I posted about it here and only added on later that there was speculation about it being malicious. Well, it wasn't. Isabel Fall is trans, but this clearly hurt her deeply. In this very depressing read, one positive thing I want to take away is the concept of reparative readings of art (vs. paranoid) as something to more consciously practise. I hope Isabel Fall will come back in some shape or form, because she deserves to be whole and her story made me feel things, which is probably the best marker I have for good art.
 

Finally, platforms fandom uses are making bad choices:

- Tumblr introduces paid posts. Everyone I know hates it and I feel like we are just waiting for a fan getting sued because they monetized their fan content. I wish it doesn't happen, but I don't have that kind of faith in the world.

- GDrive is going to change their security and as an unnecessary result, a lot of links may become broken. This is mostly horrible for people like podficcers, who often host there for streaming. I am not scared for currently active podficcers, but I am sure older file links will get broken. Especially devastating since the audiofic archive broke a few years back, so there is a high chance that some will have zero working links.

Finding good hosting for multimedia fanworks is a big struggle. Outside podficcers, I think only vidders have it worse.

 

( So have some vid recs to cheer me up again. )