Discussion Friday + Some updates

[geraineon]

Time for discussion Friday~

Discussion Topic

In the past weeks here and elsewhere, I had some fun talking about tragedies (spoilers: I love them).

So, I want to hear from you all! What do you think of tragedies in your novels? What makes it work for you and when does it fall flat (e.g., when you feel absolutely nothing). Do you check if the main CP in a baihe/danmei have a happy end before reading? Will you read a novel if the main characters/main CP die at the end of the story?

Updates

1. I am probably going to run dry on discussion topics if I do this every week, so I'm reducing the frequency to once every two weeks. Please feel free to post up any discussion topics any time though! If you want to submit topics but don't want to make a post for it, you can suggest them here.


2. For the weeks we do not have a Discussion Friday post, we will have a general chat and Q&A post. Let's call them Friday Chats (I am not very creative with names, haha). Chinese learners, feel free to use the Friday Chat posts to practice Chinese if you wish!


3. Related to point (2), there are two communities that may be helpful to Chinese learners:
   
   • guardian_learning: Despite it being called guardian_learning, this is not limited to Guardian the novel/drama~ It's a comm that updates with a grammar point and word a day, with sample sentences from Guardian.
   • chinesestudy: This is a comm for Chinese writing practice
   
   You can check them out!

Comments

[geraineon]

Ah true. Maybe writing towards a Good Death does make these stories inclined to be structurally tighter.

I'd love to read an article/some fan studies on this phenomena. XD And not just CN vs. EN, but also other languages, other lit!

[douqi]

Haha this would require fan studies to actually get its act together and take TEXTS (rather than just fandoms) seriously, which it is currently showing no signs of doing.

[geraineon]

I confess I don't read a lot of fan studies things but what I've read seems a lot more like sociological studies of fandom *community dynamics* rather than something like this, yeah.

I'm super interested to read about the overlaps and influence of Bl/Yuri on danmei/baihe as well... The former I have more knowledge on, the latter I need to dig.

[douqi]

If you find anything on overlaps, let me know! I would really love a literary exploration of how and where the genres interact!

[geraineon]

This is not an overlap but it came up on my other social media feed today, in case it's of interest: https://www.animeherald.com/2019/02/06/yuri-1919-2019-from-then-to-now/

(if all fails, guess will have to read the history of yuri, and then the history of baihe, trope conventions, and then do own comparison, ahaha)

[douqi]

Thank you for the link! :)