tigerine

I'm feeling pretty anxious lately about spending so much time on developing an original property, so I'm writing a post that I hope will work some of that out. 

When I started thinking about the setting and the characters of jade veterinarian, yu shou yi shi, 玉獸醫師, whatever I'm calling it, I was reading a lot of mxtx's xianxia BL. I am up-to-date on both mo dao zu shi and scum villain as of this post, and I haven't read heaven official's blessing, so maybe I'm missing out on more tropes, but I felt like I had a pretty good handle on """mxtx-inspired""" xianxia settings, enough to start daydreaming about my own. 

Daydreaming about my own setting, story, characters, is daring act, and one I would not have done even a year ago. (I still have other Serious Projects I'm working on.) I thought that having a regularly updated webnovel would be good training for me learning how to write professionally. I didn't want the subject to be too serious or I'd be tempted to spend more time on it. I want yu shou yi shi to be quick, informal storytelling for a group of friends hungry for chinese-fantasy-flavored BL.

I am hopeful that others will like it? and also afraid of it, because I'm not Chinese, and I don't speak the language. So I want to make an advisory for people, if I've talked about it and you're curious. 

yu shou yi shi is xianxia, but it's also... not. 
it's xianxia-esque. there will be big battles and intrigue and murder, because I liked those things in mxtx's plots. there will be big magic and demons and war. But I'm also a white queer, and I want to see things in my xianxia story that I don't see in mxtx, or in the genre as a whole. I want more queers in the story, and less (but not NO) homophobia. I want some filial piety, but I also want personal freedom. I want to play with gender roles. 

there's going to be things about yu shou yi shi that don't pass muster with people from se asia or china. like you are going to be able to read it and be like 'yeah sounds about white' (not shoes on in the house, not that bad, but like ... you'll see it, it's gonna be there, hell, just from the paragraph above you're probably already rolling your eyes like jesus christ this bitch)

so I just want people to know that going into it, before I even post anything. I want you to know that this is a white queer's imagined 'xianxia'/'Chinese' high fantasy world. yes, I'm talking to people who speak chinese about choices I'm making. i'm not just mashing sounds together, I'm making conscious choices about names, narratives, dialogues. i'm trying to clumsily work in puns and homophones, because I think they're fucking fun in english. I have been spending time reading about cooking, and agriculture, and idioms, and history, and trying to at least get the flavor close to right, if not the substance.

I'm not denigrating mxtx's original texts, because I love them a lot. I'm not keeping anyone else from having fun where they are, I'm not keeping people from finding and enjoying whatever translated or raw shit they wanna read. 

I just want to have a world like that where I can change things to be the way I want them to be, without disrespecting another creator, and with only a little bit (I hope) of disrespect to traditional, conservative values. maybe there's no way to do that without being inherently colonialist (especially since white folks brought the homophobia into asia anyway lmao) but i'm going to do my best with it while still telling gay stories.

having read all that, if you want to read ysys? if this sounds like something you'd be into? that's great.