melannen | December meme: A story you'd never want to write, but would love to read

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december meme

December meme: A story you'd never want to write, but would love to read

Okay, "fail at shitposting february" is over! Where was I in December meme?

noxelementalist requested "A story you'd never want to write, but would love to read!"

This one is actually tough, because I exist at all times balanced on the knife-edge between "Wanting to write literally every story" and "Never wanting to write anything at all ever".

(This balance may be familiar to some of y'all.)

There are some situations where the "don't want to write/want to read" balance leans more toward the one side than usual, though. They tend to fall into the categories of: I know it's not something I currently have the skill to write well; I know it would be a lot of effort and I am that lazy; I am too chickenshit to write it.

Most of the stuff I'm too chickenshit to write is also stuff I'm too chickenshit to talk about too much in this journal, but a lot of it is either stuff that cuts really close to the bone for me - the kind of personal-issues stuff that if I wanted to be a DEEP LITERARY AUTHOR, I should probably be deliberately poking at, but all I ever dreamed of as a writer was being able to put out fun stuff about spaceships and dragons on command, and ugh, 'know thyself' isn't fun :p

Or it's stuff that touches on issues like identity and politics that fandom as a whole is pretty sensitive about right now, and/or that I feel like my views aren't really lined up with the generally-accepted views, but they're also not coherent enough that I feel up to defending them, and/or that I feel like my voice isn't the right voice to be writing about those things right now. Some specific examples in that last category:

I'd still really love to read more Black Panther fic that specifically explores Wankanda's relationship with the colonizers - whether that's stuff about Bucky & Shuri's relationship, or Erik's history (I really want fic about Erik's pre-movie team-ups with the Winter Soldier, for example), or Nakia's spy adventures, or T'Challa at school abroad having to pretend Wakanda is less than it is, or stuff that looks at the worldbuilding very closely, and where there are clear, long-standing non-African influences, and what that says about Wakanda and cultural interchange in general, or South African Raimonda adapting to Wakanda - well, there's so many possible stories! Except that I really don't want to be the white girl presented with Blank Panther and only wanting to write about white people stuff. Even just wanting to write about Wakandans in Wakanda is scary enough, because - because, well, it's not mine, it's explicitly not mine, and it's not something I feel comfortable claiming as mine, even as much as I would, say, a Chinese fandom. But that's of course also really complicated, right, because white people staying out of fandoms like that doesn't help to magnify those voices either, and white people really need to work on their shit around racism more than black people need to do it for them, so someone probably should write some of those stories, but...

So yeah, chickenshit.

Also I want to read a "Judaism-is-the-default" AU for pretty much every fandom (yes, including Black Panther. Actually, especially Black Panther, African Jews are great) and am definitely not the right voice to write those at this moment either.

In the category of "stuff that would be way too much effort", we've got a whole bunch of ideas that would need to be 100,000+ words in order to be good (including quite a few continuations of stories I've already posted as 'done' on AO3...), and while I want to write them, I don't want to write them desperately enough to put 100,000+ words worth of my life into writing them. Also, stories that would require getting deep into canons I don't really want to go that deep into anymore. Also, stories that would require SO MUCH research in order to feel like I'm doing them well. For example, I really want a Rivers of London/Guardian crossover where Peter is sent to the SID as part of an exchange program, to learn about how a magical-crimes unit that's actually been functioning as a proper unit functions (and 'start dating the mysterious, distinguished, impeccably dressed magic specialist' is NOT HELPFUL, and stop laughing when I talk about how smoothly the SID functions, you don't know my life), and also obviously someone would be sent to London in his place (although I haven't decided who, because any option would be equally amazing). But, while I'm not as worried about the #ownvoices aspect there as with something like Black Panther, there would still need to be a lot of cultural-specific stuff that would need to be done right, and for me to be the one to do it would be so much research...

Similarly I would love more stories about Steve Rogers and 1930s queer culture (yes, I have probably already read the one you're about to rec, but that doesn't mean I won't be compelled to immediately re-read it if you do) and especially the one where Sam takes Steve to a modern drag ball because he never got a chance to go to a Harlem one like he always dreamed of as a teenager; and the Steve/Tony one where they both fall back in time and get trapped in 1930s Brooklyn and Steve uses the queer community passwords he remembers to get them a life and adopted family in the past, and then they get the chance to go back home and of course things are so much better for queer people now, except that - except that in the 1930s they were part of a community that in a lot of ways was easier than today's outward-facing alphabet soups, and they're not sure they will still work; and honestly I would like all of the fanfic in all of the different historical/international/intersectional queer communities and families, but I have done just enough of the research to not be satisfied unless I have done all of the research, and I don't have that kind of time or focus in my life.

(somebody write me a fanfic about Bucky being adopted by the Wakandan Jewish queer community. :D )

In the "I just don't have the skill to do it well" category is -- well, is nearly everything in my WIPs file, 'cause that's often why they stall out. The one I am currently banging my head against is that I have gotten to the point in the Superman fic where Girl Reporter Lois Lane and Playboy Billionaire Bruce Wayne go on a date. And I would read ALL of the fanfic about Girl Reporter Lois Lane and Playboy Billionaire Bruce Wayne dating and being unsure as to whether they enjoy the fucking or the mindfucking more (there is not NEARLY enough of it around, and what exists is hard to find on AO3, and is also disproportionately written by very good writers). But to be done well, it needs to be drenched in both sexual tension and performative heterosexuality, and sexual tension and performative heterosexuality are basically the opposite of what I am good at. They-- go to a fancy restaurant and at least one of them is probably wearing nylons? And they mush their mouths together at some point I guess? Ugh. So I may end up just fading-to-black on all the Bruce/Lois dates and writing the part of the fic I actually know what I'm doing with, even though if I was reading this fic and the author did that I would want to punch them because the Bruce/Lois is the whole reason I want to read this fic.

Anyway.

Also there are some stories where it's the opposite, where I want to write them but not read them, at least if you interpret that as "don't want to read them as written by anyone else, because anyone else who wrote them would probably do them WRONG". Those I usually do actually write, though, because I am filled with the righteous fury of "even if I do screw them up, at least I won't screw them up as bad as THOSE OTHER PEOPLE WHO HYPOTHETICALLY MIGHT WRITE THEM INSTEAD would screw them up." (A significant % of all my kinkmeme fills in my kinkmeme days were like this.)

What kinds of stories do you want to read but not write, or write but not read?

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I still have a few thousand words of 1930s!Steve/Tony that I started before Winter Soldier came out. I don't see myself ever going back to it, for similar research-related reasons, lol

That sounds about right! :D I started thinking about the drag ball one right after Avengers.

Even just wanting to write about Wakandans in Wakanda is scary enough, because - because, well, it's not mine, it's explicitly not mine, and it's not something I feel comfortable claiming as mine, even as much as I would, say, a Chinese fandom. But that's of course also really complicated, right, because white people staying out of fandoms like that doesn't help to magnify those voices either, and white people really need to work on their shit around racism more than black people need to do it for them, so someone probably should write some of those stories, but...
So yeah, chickenshit.

Yeah, I personally really, really want to read and write more about Wakanda. But I also really don't want to do it injustice. (I also REALLY want some pre-BP Erik fic because his journey contrasted to T'Challa's is really interesting.) -- And basically I want Roxane Gay to write like a novel version of her World of Wakanda book, which was SURPRISE CANCELLED AFTER SIX ISSUES, MARVEL, WTF. Do they not want my money?

That was such a good comic! Why cancel that, marvel, why?? It was what I was recommending to people who liked the movie, since the main Black Panther title is not really a starter title over the past few years. And then it was cancelled. D:

I saw so many BIG OUTLET type articles going, "BP #1 is great, but also be sure to pick up World of Wakanda which is way more accessible!" I still don't understand the apparent economics behind axing something which is getting GOOD PR about being an entryway into a major franchise. Written by a skyrocketing best-selling award-winning author no less. -- And I like Coates a lot, but the Black Panther/Black Panther in Spaaaace big storylines he's doing are kind of impenetrable even to n00bs with some prep like me. Then Nnedi Okorafor had a Wakanda mini that was split over four separate books and advertised like once at midnight in Pumpkin Centre Town Hall. Altho at least now she has the Shuri book, which is getting decent press.

(And then of course one ACTUAL criticism I kept seeing from white fanboy types re World of Wakanda getting cancelled was "Marvel got greedy, they put out a new Black Panther, and there was World of Wakanda and then Wakanda this and Wakanda that and it was all too hard to follow and the market was saturated," and I mean all you have to do is point to the Venom booming industry and go REALLY, MOTHERFUCKERS? THAT IS YOUR ARGUMENT?) (And right then there were precisely like three, 3, spinoffs -- Rise of BP which came out two years after Coates's relaunch, WoW which was six months after, and BP and the Crew which was a resurrection of Priest's famous Crew book, cancelled after seven issues, and BP&Crew was cancelled after....TWO issues! and six were published. WHY am I even a comics fan, why.)

("Comics will break your heart, kid." - Jack Kirby)

I mean, cancelling WoW and BP&Crew that early means they were cancelling them based on pre-orders for the floppies - which means they were cancelling them based entirely on the desires of the types of white fanboy you are complaining about here. Very few people who had never read a Marvel comic before but liked the movie are going to walk into a comic book store to just pre-order WoW, especially not black female people who if they are at all geeky, have probably had bad experiences with comic book store denizens in the past. The mainstream comic book industry REALLY needs to get with it already and stop basing everything on floppy pre-orders, so many of the problems with the industry are directly traceable to that, but there are so many baked-in structural reasons why they won't. :/

In other words I am really sad that my library doesn't have any of the Shuri trades yet. :D

Yeah, and the same thing happened on a slower timescale with Cain's Mockingbird -- the wossname, brick and mortar direct demand Diamond type sales weren't happening, right off the bat, so they assumed nobody was going to buy it. -- Altho then what pisses me off is I know there are other books, like Daredevil and I think Old Man Hawkeye, which did not do as well as books which weren't about white dudes which were cancelled anyway. So the industry's hypocritical AND stupid on a number of fronts.

I guess what might happen at some point is floppy sales will collapse, trades will still go on being printed (and the quality is for shit now) and they'll do everything through Comixology. IDK. It doesn't seem like a big collapse like in the nineties or whenever, but more like a slow prolonged decline.

Well, I have sort of an insider's knowledge on some of this, but basically: all floppy sales are through one distributor, Diamond. If you want to sell floppies, you have to do things Diamond's way or not at all. (If you are a storefront, you absolutely have to do things Diamond's way.)

Diamond's way is set up to benefit Diamond only, which means that if you, as a publisher OR retailer, don't want to risk losing a LOT of money on a given book - and nobody's got a lot of money to lose at this point - you have to stake everything on preorders of floppies, because if you don't, you can't work with Diamond anymore, and you have to work with Diamond. (And while some of the preorders are from individual collectors, this also includes pre-orders by stores - so a book that's beloved by the kind of people who own comic book stores will do well in the first few months of pre-orders - because pre-orders are at least two or three months ahead of sales - even if it doesn't do well with customers, but the publishers will take that as a sign that they should promote it harder, and so on.)

There is an entire, separate, segment of the comics industry that doesn't mess with floppies or Diamond, and goes directly to trades (and also doesn't rely on comic book stores as their primary retailers). That part of the market is selling very different books than the floppy-publishers (most kids' and YA comics and most translated comics, for example) and doing better every year even as the big publishers struggle and flop about.

Thing is, the floppies rely on Diamond, but Diamond relies entirely on floppies, and as the floppy market isn't doing great, Diamond isn't doing great, either. What I suspect will happen is that Diamond will either go out of business, get bought out, or get majorly restructured (note that Diamond is also solely owned, and still personally run, by one micromanaging 70-year-old dude - he is basically the one man who determines how the entire comic industry works at this point). If Diamond's iron grip goes away - either due to its policies driving the floppy market and itself into the ground, or its ownership changing - literally anything could happen. Breaking the distribution monopoly would help, but of course the stupid policies mean the market isn't big enough anymore to support a new distributor starting up.

There is an entire, separate, segment of the comics industry that doesn't mess with floppies or Diamond, and goes directly to trades (and also doesn't rely on comic book stores as their primary retailers). That part of the market is selling very different books than the floppy-publishers (most kids' and YA comics and most translated comics, for example) and doing better every year even as the big publishers struggle and flop about.

Yeah, in my limited knowledge this is stuff like Moon Girl and Squirrel Girl and a lot of the YA comics field, and Ms Marvel some as well, altho I now wonder how that's going to do with a relaunch. And they do great! but it almost might as well be another branch of the industry because there's so little overlap. (Altho Marvel is doing Marvel Rising, which they're giving a pretty big push, and they still do Champions and Runaways? but Monsters Unleashed was a giant flop and they cancelled Hellcat a while back. Anyway -- )

What I suspect will happen is that Diamond will either go out of business, get bought out, or get majorly restructured (note that Diamond is also solely owned, and still personally run, by one micromanaging 70-year-old dude - he is basically the one man who determines how the entire comic industry works at this point)

OH MY GAWD

If Diamond's iron grip goes away - either due to its policies driving the floppy market and itself into the ground, or its ownership changing - literally anything could happen. Breaking the distribution monopoly would help, but of course the stupid policies mean the market isn't big enough anymore to support a new distributor starting up.

Ohhh boy. Would everything kind of just shift over to Comixology at that point maybe?

Moon Girl and Ms. Marvel actually are in floppies first; I don't know if they're just doing so well in floppies that it didn't matter (possible, they are really good books that got a lot of good press early on) or if the publishers decided to take a chance and push through until they hit the trade markets, because they knew that books for younger audiences do really well in trade. But I'm thinking more like the graphic novels published by Scholastic and First Second and the manga-only publishers that sell mostly through booksellers and don't care much about the comics-only market. (DC has been trying to find its place in that market for the last decade or so, and I think they finally managed with the Superhero Girls line; Marvel keeps dipping its toes in and out with things like Marvel Adventures and its cartoon tie-ins.)

I suspect what will happen is that most of the comic book stores will go out of business or shift to mostly gaming/merch stores, floppies will become even more of serious collector's items only, and nearly everything will shift to trades sold through book distributors. But I dunno - that would be a huge change not just in how the comics are sold, but how the stories are told. Maybe some hero will come out of the woodwork and save the direct serial market! (Although if everything does shift to trades, I suspect you will also start to see skinnier and skinnier trades coming out more and more often until many trades are just more expensive floppies....)

(Comixology and ilk are kind of running alongside the rest of the market; but somehow ecomics don't seem to have become as big a thing as a lot of people were hoping. Maybe because they don't factor in e-comics sales either when deciding whether to renew major-publisher books....but I think a collapse of Diamond's system would also lead to more high-budget electronic-native comics, too.)

I suspect what will happen is that most of the comic book stores will go out of business or shift to mostly gaming/merch stores

Yeah, my beloved very queer-friendly LCS (Phoenix! ) basically survives on gaming night stuff, and they're right smack in the middle of some prime real estate being developed and their lease might be cancelled pretty soon. They keep on hanging on somehow and I love them.

that would be a huge change not just in how the comics are sold, but how the stories are told. Maybe some hero will come out of the woodwork and save the direct serial market! (Although if everything does shift to trades, I suspect you will also start to see skinnier and skinnier trades coming out more and more often until many trades are just more expensive floppies....)

I FEEL LIKE THAT HAS HAPPENED ALREADY //very cranky comics fan who now sees trades with issues 1-5 priced at like SIXTEEN BUCKS?! AND they're horribly printed and badly coloured!

I think a collapse of Diamond's system would also lead to more high-budget electronic-native comics, too

I would FUCKING LOVE THAT, because while I've really liked the new digital-only trade whatevers Marvel put out -- Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Daughters of the Dragon -- the art is HORRIBLE. That was a real fucking bummer.

To be fair, I have some very early trades from, like, the late 70s, and they are also skinny, horribly printed on bad paper and badly colored. We've just had a golden age of trades for awhile! (Although I hate the 'standard' style of coloring in modern superhero comics anyway...)

GDI I forgot to include the URL of my shop

http://phoenixseattle.com/

I have a partial start to a Wakanda fic that is a "magazine story" by an African-American journalist who is one of a handful of outside journalists invited in to Wakanda to do longform reporting and "Wakanda 101" after they revealed themselves to the world. So like they picked 10-15 journalists, and invited them in, and sent them to spend a week with each tribe (each journalist on their own, not all together as a group). I got about halfway in to the first section, was having trouble with the voice (it turning into Me Having My Say About American Politics, which, um, not what the story is about) and then I got distracted by other things.

Those are all AMAZING stories! I hope someone gets prompted into doing them.

I know it's not something I currently have the skill to write well;

YES THIS. This category covers all the stories I wanna read but can't write, and it's also due to.the research overload I'd have to do. I wonder if it's a common problem for people who react to wonderbuilds a particular way...

Yeah, I love worldbuilding and I love research but I also get stopped stone cold dead by the fear of Getting it Wrong, or missing that one unmissable source.

Yeah, being a fan of worldbuilding is tough! Especially if you do the research, you eventually hit the point where you start noticing all the places where other authors didn't do the research, and then everything gets even harder.

I'm hoping there's a point where you get over the hill and back to where you're willing to go 'fuck it' and know which research is really vital and which you can skip, but I'm not there yet (especially for identity- and culture- based stuff; in the hard sciences I am at least to the point where I'm more likely to go 'that's not weird enough yet, there's weirder stuff on Earth' than to nitpick the science.)

I really like this post.

Stories I want to read: identity and politics and work that cuts close to the bone.

Stories I want to write but don't currently have the skill/mindset for: fun, plotty stuff about dragons and spaceships; historical fiction with great detail about clothing or hygiene or mores where everyone speaks in long, plummy sentences.

I really want fic about Erik's pre-movie team-ups with the Winter Soldier, for example

Is this a thing? That happened in the movies? Does this mean, as someone who now has time to write that Erik fic I've zero drafted, that I need to watch an Avengers movie beyond the first one? (shakes fist at MCU-verse.)

Oh, no, it's not definite canon, don't panic! It's just a very strong headcanon of mine, because the way Erik's career is sketched in vs. the way Bucky's last few decades of activity are sketched in makes it seem very likely to me that it happened, and also I really want it to have.

(Admittedly, I am mildly disappointed every time I read a fanfic where Erik has never heard of the Winter Soldier, because it seems like he should at least know him by reputation, but that is literally every fanfic with Erik and Bucky in it that I have ever read, so yours would not stand out.)

(I am also mildly disappointed every time Sam and Rhodey never met before the Avengers, because it's really hard to believe War Machine and the Falcons would never have crossed paths while active in the same service in the same theater at the same time, and yet, there goes every single fanfic I've ever read about them.)

Thanks for the clarification! All the avengers canon makes my head spin.

Should the fic ever make it past my laptop, it just might include a winter solider ref. :)

I will admit that I don't have it explicit they've met prior (Timeline, is there a timeline for the non Marque events?) but it's only implicit that Sam and Rhodey are meeting in Steve's recovery hospital room. (Which, canon, I can't tell if MCU acknowledges they must have met not just at the Age of Ultron party pre-Civil War).

Since Ross explicitly calls Erik one of the CIA's wetwork, yeah, he'd at least have heard about the Winter Soldier. And it would play into his post-D.C. plans.

~~Pushes Eliot Spencer into the room and locks the door.~~

Erik got his own mini! IDK if Winter Solder is in it, tho https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/73446/killmonger_2018_1

That's right. You've mentioned this before.

Hmm...Do I not read it and just lalala along with my idea? Do I read it and work my (barely formed) story around it? Or read it and ignore it if it doesn't fit with my headcanon.

[These are not rhetorical questions. Suggestions welcome!]

TOTALLY lalala along with your own idea. OR maybe read and ignore if you don't feel that will mess up your process. But I am typically on the side of people favouring their own creativity first.

There's a few stories that I would love to read but not write. A handful of them are things that would need to be own-voices and it's not my voice. Mostly, it tends to be stuff where either a) it would be too long a fic, or b) I'm not familiar enough with the canon.

Not familiar with the canon is a good one! Especially "not familiar at all with the canon, and don't want to be". When I read a whole bunch of Legion of Tomorrow fic I had all these fic ideas I wanted to read but still absolutely no desire to go watch canon, ever. :D

For example, I really want a Rivers of London/Guardian crossover where Peter is sent to the SID as part of an exchange program, to learn about how a magical-crimes unit that's actually been functioning as a proper unit functions (and 'start dating the mysterious, distinguished, impeccably dressed magic specialist' is NOT HELPFUL, and stop laughing when I talk about how smoothly the SID functions, you don't know my life), and also obviously someone would be sent to London in his place (although I haven't decided who, because any option would be equally amazing).
Oh no, I want it! I want it very badly! I want to read about Peter trying to introduce Shen Wei to electronics, and applying community policing to the main villains!

As for who's sent to London - perhaps Guo Changcheng? I'm not sure if the Dixingren have ever been taught any English (or gotten their mandatory vaccines...) so Chu Shuzhi and maybe Da Qing are out, and Guo following the Nightingale around, dutifully taking notes, while Nightingale does his thing would be super entertaining.

The SID actually seems pretty good at community policing already, TBH! (At least... compared to the Folly...) They have actual members of most of the communities in question on their team! They have a non-fatal detainment option for dangerous criminals! They have a working relationship with the authority structures of Dixing, Haixing, and Yashou! Peter will be in heaven! I'm not sure how to deal with the language issue, which is one of the research-y things that's tripping me up - Peter definitely won't speak Mandarin either, and I don't want him to just magically have less language trouble than his counterpart. So they'd need either some kind of convenient magical translation device (which doesn't seem to be very likely in either world's base paradigm, but maybe the Rivers could provide?) or a translator along for the ride - Michael Cheung or one of his people could come in on the British side, maybe? I don't know Guardian canon as well, or how English language learning is distributed in China well enough to guess, so don't know who would be most likely to be able to translate for Peter in Dragon City. On the other hand, it's not unlikely that Nightingale has at least some Chinese from his days in the foreign office, or that Shen Wei can speak any language he feels like, so you could just go with that, too!

I imagine there'd be enough forewarning for Peter to enrol on a basic Mandarin course? As for the characters, I'd say Shen Wei has to be literate in English to be a professor, and the youths – Guo Changcheng, Zhao Yunlan, Zhu Hong, Lin Jing – will know an okay to decent amount of English. Da Qing, Chu Shuzhi, and the ghosts likely have undergone zero English lessons and thus will be unable to keep up with Peter's excited squeeing about how the SID has community stakeholders as a part of it! (Zhao Yunlan would boggle at how badly the Folly must be mismanaged.)

Maybe? Based on previous experience, a few weeks of a basic Mandarin course isn't going to get him to where he doesn't need a translator, though. I kind of like the idea of Guo Changcheng following him around everywhere to translate, though! I do kind of feel like he's the one other than Shen Wei most likely to have actually functional English - do we know if Zhu Hong was educated in the normal Haixing system, even?

He'd be able to say "Hi" and apologize for his inability to speak Mandarin. And figure out how to pronounce everyone's names, if given the pinyin!

Lin Jing is also some sort of scientist type, so he'd have decent English. (Likely more decent than Shen "what is a computer" Wei's, in any case. A lot of ESL English education happens through the internet by happenstance...) I don't think we're ever told whether Zhu Hong went to school, but given that she's their secretary/HR, she's at least read some schoolbooks/osmosed enough about the Haixing reality that she's not utterly lost.

Right, but I don't know what the odds are that "capable of passing in Dragon City" means she would have learned English - she might have been learning Mandarin as a second language instead, since the Yashou tribes seem to have their own languages.

Do you know how well the "everybody learns a little bit of Internet English" applies inside the Chinese firewalls? I've gotten the impression (based on both reading Language Log's China language updates & the issues AO3 has been having with communicating with Chinese users) that it's much less likely to learn good English just from living on the internet in China than in, say, Europe or India or South America. It's not that there are no English-language websites accessible (AO3 is visible there! So far!) but it's much easier (and safer) to mostly stick to Chinese spaces, and the Chinese-speaking internet is large enough and firewalled enough that you won't feel like you're missing anything.

So I'd expect Lin Jing to have some internet English, but not at the level of the brilliant ESL fans we're all used to interacting with regularly. And probably Lin Jing, Sang Zan, and Shen Wei all have at minimum technical English to the point that they can read an English-language paper in their specialist fields - I read something recently about how, increasingly, Chinese science in China is conducted in English, just because in English it's much easier to deal with all the newly-coined technical terms that are needed in fields like genetics and comp sci - but it's probably a very specialized and limited version of English that does not necessarily mean they could make small talk with a London policeman.

Zhao Yunlan probably speaks English exactly as well as he feels like speaking English, but he does not feel like speaking it well enough to be the Starling's translator. :D

How were language issues handled in the time travel sections? I still haven't made it that far. I suspect they ignored them though, right? Or was there some kind of official handwave that made it make sense that they could talk to each other across ten thousand years?

Edited 2019-03-05 01:33 (UTC)

Actually, I just remembered that Dragon City seems to be set up with an english-speaking minority in mind - all the gravestones are bilingual, even for people like Li qian's grandmother, and Zhao Yunlan has a business card that's almost completely in English (and has his English name of "Mark Stewart"). Based on that, I'd guess there's a suitable pool of volunteers for translation, and we can assume that the populace is better than average at english. Zhao Yunlan is probably at least moderately fluent, but going to offload babysitting duties to other people. :P

I come from an ESL nation, and there is a wide, wide gulf between perfect ESL English we see in fandom and the clunky English with which people can still communicate, but even at the clunky end: people can still communicate. Peter might have to speak slowly and use simple English, but clunky English can still get the point across.

Sang Zan is actually the SID member least likely to speak any english! He doesn't even speak mandarin yet, so his language study attempts would obviously go that way.
- However, the show has zero language barrier during the time travel section. IDK. The Hallows can translate?

Oh, right, I remember the Mystery of the English Gravestone! Hmmm. Has anybody figured out why the show has so much written English? But then again, Dragon City isn't technically on Earth, so technically the crossover doesn't work anyway.

Or we just go with "IDK, the Hallows can translate, and Nightingale knows a 15th-level spell", which is probably easier.

...ah. I hadn't actually gotten far enough in the show to remember facts about Sang Zan. Lucky I'm not the one writing this! :D

There's not much I want to write but not read, because if I didn't want to read it, I wouldn't give writing it a try. Unless there's a big paycheck involved. As there isn't, I try to be my own audience. It works out most of the time.

The stories I want to read without writing are those that generally either require a very precise tone and voice - more Kesh AUs, please - or those where I haven't got enough of a plot to sustain it when I really would like several thousand words of the scenario beyond the initial idea, such as Foggy Nelson dating Jennifer Walters, or the Mayor's years of creating sustainable civic infrastructure throughout Sunnydale.

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December meme: A story you'd never want to write, but would love to read

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