Language Resources Masterpost

There are two types of writers:

1. 'It's fiction, it doesn't need to make sense!'

2. 'I didn't account for the rotation of the planet and how that affects the constalations while my characters stargazed at different times of year, I have failed as a writer, and this entire thing is trash'

“Morning After” starters

as requested by anon. Enjoy and feel free to make any changes !

Sexy

“Feel like another round?”

“You were great last night…”

“Wow, you look even better in the daylight.”

“My clothes look better on you than they do on me.”

“I had no idea you were into that stuff…I’m glad I found out.”

“We didn’t even get to use the toys last night.”

“You should play with my hair some more…”

“I don’t remember ever having this many hickeys. But I don’t mind.”

“That was a workout.”

“I don’t know your name. But you can share it with me, so I know what to scream this time.”

“The fun doesn’t have to end.”

“I think I can convince you to stay…”

“Don’t pretend like you’re asleep. Should I find a way to wake you up?~”

“We could order pizza and just stay like this all day.”

“I love your bedhead.”

Awkward

“Oh no…what did we do?”

“Hi! You need to leave.”

“I’m sorry…who are you?”

“Ugh…I drank so much.”

“I can’t believe I did this again.” / “I can’t believe we did this again.”

“Where are your clothes?”

“…I’m sore in such weird places.”

“Hey, sorry! I’m gonna go. Right now.”

“You didn’t seem like you were having such a bad time last night.”

“Someone’s coming. Is that your mom/partner/spouse/etc.?”

“I think this was a mistake.”

“*trying to sneak out while half-dressed*”

“Your foot is in my face.”

“Did we use protection?”

“*sees ___ and screams*”

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐑𝐨𝐲𝐚𝐥 (2024)

A king who doesn't really want to and isn't able to run the kingdom properly catches wind of a noble woman who wants to kill him to take over and he realizes she is extremely competent so he decides to propose to her to save everyone the hassle and they have a surprisingly healthy relationship.

“Do it scared” but please realize that, if you Do It Scared too much and don’t let yourself rest + relax + have fun in between, you will fuck yourself up. If you “do it scared” all day every day, you will burn out badly and quickly. Sometimes this is temporarily necessary but please keep this in mind.

It is absolutely useless to point out to me that my favorite characters went insane and perhaps slightly evil, especially when they were the ones wronged first. I support them and think they could have been more insane, actually. I think they should have just started attacking people on sight. They should have gone off the walls completely. They should have made all their decisions based off of grief and fear for far longer! I support rights and wrongs indiscriminately. I think forgive and forget should only come after they've worked through their hurt in the most destructive way possible and traumatized everyone back. Pls never assume otherwise

I have a question how can I pick Chinese names for my original characters there not real people and I see people in Chinese vocals use them I was wondering if there are any tips on choosing Chinese names

Hello! Chinese naming IRL is super complicated and takes into account a huge number of factors. This is why there are professional naming services, to help you calculate the most favorable name. A great twitter thread summarizing it for the casual audience is here:

https://twitter.com/yurouchng/status/1211935445619073024?s=20

If it’s only OCs, Jia Pu and Ba Zi are way too much to consider (and you likely won’t have them anyway), so I’d focus on meaning and how the name sounds, if possible.

I also have an additional suggestion regarding surnames: the top 100 most common surnames covers almost 85% of China’s population, and I’d guess the top 400 list should cover at least 99%. Hence there isn’t much room to be creative with them, unlike in English. I recommend just checking out the top 400 list on Wikipedia and picking your favorite:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Chinese_surnames

The impact of toxic family dynamics in Till the End of the Moon (长月烬明)

A bit random and I have never done character analysis posts so it might not be as good as some other posts on here but bear with me.

I'm watching Till the End of the Moon (ep 25) and the recent development of Ye Bingchang's character into a full blown villain has made me hate her, but also empathize with her in ways I didn't expect.

To contextualise, Ye Bingchang 叶冰裳 is the second child and first daughter of the Ye family, and she is basically the perfect daughter of a noble Chinese family. She's sweet and kind, beautiful but not attention seeking, smart but not a smart ass, dutiful and filial, delicate and thoughtful. She shares a beautiful love story with Prince Xiao Lin 萧凛, the 6th son of the Emperor, so she's going to marry in the Imperial Family and no doubt bring honor to the Ye Clan. She seems to be doing everything exactly right.

And yet she's a second class citizen in her own family, who openly favours her younger sister Ye Xiwu 叶夕雾.

Now there are two levels to this.

1) They're openly and unabashedly favouring one child over the 3 others, but then still ranking the other kids, and somehow Ye Bingchang ranks lower than her brother who is a lazy and stupid gambler. Her family simply doesn't see her, she's completely forgettable to them, like her existence only matters because sure, she's their blood, but she's a complete afterthought.

2) The daughter they favour over her is Ye Xiwu, and Ye Xiwu is a monster of a golden child. She's completely selfish and narcissistic, she explicitly abuses her husband, she schemes again and again to seduce and try to rape Prince Xiao Lin, her sister's one true love and fiancé, and when this doesn't work she becomes physically violent towards Ye Bingchang as well.

Ye Xiwu is an extremely abusive and horrible person, straight up. And her family continuously makes excuses for her violent behaviour, dotes on her, spoils her, and barely has a look for Ye Bingchang, expecting her to forgive and turn the other cheek. The golden child / black sheep dynamic is at its peak.

I find it quite rare that in this type of situation, a show will have the golden child as our hero ; almost always, if there are complicated family relationships, the main character is the one who's rejected, underestimated, and who has to rise through those challenges (which applies to our main male character Tantai Jin 澹台烬 btw, and I think we could say a lot of the parallels between Tantai Jin and Ye Bingchang).

I can think of other cases where the child who was favoured is the main character over the child who is rejected (Jiang Cheng 江澄 in The Untamed 陈情令, Feng Chang 丰苌 in Who Rules the World 且试天下) but they're not as clear cut as this (Jiang Cheng being his mom's favorite and the only actual son of the family while Wei Wuxian 魏无羡 is also a black sheep on many levels, Feng Chang's more favoured brother Feng Lanxi 丰兰息 being fairly rejected as well and having to fight not to be poisoned).

The golden child as a main character works here because it isn't actually Ye Xiwu : we discover her character and the situation when the spirit of Li Susu 黎苏苏 travels back in time and takes possession of Ye Xiwu's body. Our main character is really Li Susu, and like the audience she's horrified to learn everything Ye Xiwu has been doing, disgusted by her abusive behaviour towards her sister and her husband, and at first disapproves of how much the Ye family favours her over Ye Bingchang. But she also comes to love the Ye family as her own, and the fact that they would neglect one of their daughters so much doesn't impact her affection for them.

We only learn about Ye Xiwu's abuse through flashbacks, so it doesn't have the same emotional impact for us as an audience, and we only brief moments of those memories so we don't have to confront the full magnitude of how horrible she was, including to Ye Bingchang. Again, Ye Xiwu tried to rape her sister's one true love and fiancé, and even after getting married herself she continued to throw herself at him, and when it didn't work she turned to actual physical violence on Ye Bingchang.

And throughout this, the Ye family excuses it all away, and even Ye Bingchang excuses it away. She forgives before Ye Xiwu even apologizes, because she knows that's what's expected of her, and she just tries her best to be a kind soul still defending her sister from people spreading rumors about her. In a way, she's a victim of domestic violence who forgives an abuser and thinks she just needs to be softer, sweeter, weaker, so maybe they don't feel like bullying her anymore.

So when Ye Bingchang tries to use the affection of men to get protection, to feel love and be sheltered from her condition, it's very understandable and to me resembles a lot of things I've seen in real life. And when she turns to resentment over her condition and decides she needs to gain control over her situation through getting some amount of power so she can protect herself, it's an arc we could expect from a main character.

She only becomes a villain after the arc of Bo're Life, in which our four main characters Tantai Jin, Ye Xiwu/Li Susu, Xiao Lin and Ye Bingchang are absorbed into a dragon's dreams of its past as a War God centuries ago. Ye Bingchang is "reincarnated" in this dream as a powerful immortal, a scorned lover but who has the power to actually be vengeful over the woman who steals the man she loves. The object of her ire being Ye Xiwu, reincarnated in a very sweet clam spirit woman, Ye Bingchang gets a taste of what power feels like, of what manipulation feels like, and of what revenge over Ye Xiwu would feel like. And when even in this dream life, Ye Xiwu is preferred over her and she ends up dying, she comes back to herself determined to change and not let others control her life anymore.

Every character (except Xiao Lin really) seems deeply influenced by what they lived in Bo're Life, having identity crises of sorts over who they actually are now. As an aside, it works as a pretty good plot device to suddenly get Tantai Jin a lot more open to Ye Xiwu/Li Susu and move their romance along, it almost feels like cheating but I'll allow it.

Anyway, Ye Bingchang has now slowly become as manipulative and cruel as her counterpart in Bo're Life, and it's easy to just see it as that counterpart taking over her body in a way.

But this manipulative and cruel streak is born out of the profound reality that she can not count on her family to protect her, and that the people who were supposed to love her unconditionally preferred her literal abuser over her.

She did everything right and it was never enough, so now it's time for her to claim her life back.

And again, in another show (like the Story of Yanxi Palace 延禧攻略 for example), this urge to climb to power so no one can hurt you anymore and take revenge on the people who ruined your life along the way, it would make you the hero.

But here, Ye Bingchang still can't win, and she actually turns into a villain.

husbands #2

if you were to draw tengen uzui from demon slayer I would give you my life savings 😭

I really want to he looks dashing 🤭

Also here is smiling yoruichi