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Three Priest-fandom things
Saturday, 22 April 2023 21:531) I managed to wheedle a friend into doing scanlations of the Lie Huo Jiao Chou manhua with me - friend is doing TL, I'm doing all the graphics work and some editing (and we roped a third friend in for final edits and QA). Slow going because we're all adults with jobs, but I'm excited about it anyway!
2) I promised Justice in the Dark thoughts and even wrote up most of the notes and then like... forgot about it with all the busy-ness around Anime Boston. I'll see about getting those up in the next few days.
3) Managed to accidentally start Twitter Discourse by pointing out that the SPL official release is using incorrect pinyin for Changgeng's name. Seems to have been a combo of bad-faith readings deciding I had actually said any splitting of multicharacter name parts is incorrect, and people going 'well I think the incorrect way looks better'.
For context: the English fan translation split all names at every character, which is not standard Mainland pinyin, but *is* common in a lot of the SEA Chinese diaspora (you would, for example, write 'Lan Wang Ji' or 'Zhao Yun Lan' by this strategy). This was at least internally consistent, but also very confusing in a novel where many characters have two-character courtesy names they are frequently called without using surnames, making it REALLY hard to tell when we are referencing an existing character by a courtesy name or if we have introduced a whole new character. Fandom has generally corrected back on all the other two-character courtesy and given names but.... didn't for Changgeng? Possibly because at least some of them probably thought it was a one-character surname and one-character given name, but it's.... not. It's a two-character childhood name, and he has no surname until he learns his father is the emperor.
Anyway I think it is narratively important to make that lack of surname clear, and also Seven Seas seems to not be splitting any of the other names, so it's not even consistent like the original fan TL was, and 7S has always used standard pinyin romanization for names AND there's no other compelling reason to use a different strategy either for Changgeng alone or the novel as a whole (ie, I would expect a novel set in Taiwan or with prominent Taiwanese characters to use romanization patterns more common there). So I just have another pedantic hill I'm willing to die on, lol.
2) I promised Justice in the Dark thoughts and even wrote up most of the notes and then like... forgot about it with all the busy-ness around Anime Boston. I'll see about getting those up in the next few days.
3) Managed to accidentally start Twitter Discourse by pointing out that the SPL official release is using incorrect pinyin for Changgeng's name. Seems to have been a combo of bad-faith readings deciding I had actually said any splitting of multicharacter name parts is incorrect, and people going 'well I think the incorrect way looks better'.
For context: the English fan translation split all names at every character, which is not standard Mainland pinyin, but *is* common in a lot of the SEA Chinese diaspora (you would, for example, write 'Lan Wang Ji' or 'Zhao Yun Lan' by this strategy). This was at least internally consistent, but also very confusing in a novel where many characters have two-character courtesy names they are frequently called without using surnames, making it REALLY hard to tell when we are referencing an existing character by a courtesy name or if we have introduced a whole new character. Fandom has generally corrected back on all the other two-character courtesy and given names but.... didn't for Changgeng? Possibly because at least some of them probably thought it was a one-character surname and one-character given name, but it's.... not. It's a two-character childhood name, and he has no surname until he learns his father is the emperor.
Anyway I think it is narratively important to make that lack of surname clear, and also Seven Seas seems to not be splitting any of the other names, so it's not even consistent like the original fan TL was, and 7S has always used standard pinyin romanization for names AND there's no other compelling reason to use a different strategy either for Changgeng alone or the novel as a whole (ie, I would expect a novel set in Taiwan or with prominent Taiwanese characters to use romanization patterns more common there). So I just have another pedantic hill I'm willing to die on, lol.
