Haunted 1-14
Let’s briefly go into this guy’s name, 刘希愿 (Liú Xīyuàn).
刘 (Liú): Destroy or kill—archaic meaning, nowadays it’s used only as a last name. (To pronounce, try to say ‘Leo’ as one syllable with a rising tone.)
希 (Xī): First character of 希望 (Xīwàng), which means ‘hope,’ ‘wish,’ or ‘expect.’ (To pronounce, say ‘she’ with an even tone, except the ‘sh’ is softer. I don’t know how to describe it other than softer.)
愿 (Yuàn): First character of 愿望 (Yuànwàng), which means ‘wish’ or ‘desire.’ (To pronounce, try to say ‘U.N.’ as one syllable with a falling tone. Many speakers gloss over the terminal ‘n,’ so his nickname is p. much a triphthong.)
So you could interpret his first name as ‘wish’ and his full name as ‘destroy wish.’ As in, “hey mom and dad, if your primary expectation for me is to have kids, this is not going to end well.”
If CT had been planned in advance rather than emergent, I’d give him the last name 风 (Fēng), meaning ‘wind,’ which would be way more appropriate. I’m also not fond of Shu’s first syllable—I don’t know enough about Chinese poetry or history to come up with something ironically refined for him, but anyone who helps retcon this dude’s name will certainly earn their leaf.
(Fun game: We’re going to flash back to Yuan’s early boarding-school years—want to guess how many times he got Hank Tina’d before someone named him David?)
Love.
Interesting what you’re doing with the color-coding too, both for the speech bubbles’ outlines and the text. Definitely getting tone-of-voice cues!
First person to yell out why the words are color-coded in this one but not the previous one gets a bonus leaf!
Because you just thought of it!
Hah! Though if you want to check, the emotional color-coding in both Yuan’s internal monologue and the speech bubbles has been there since page 1, and appears on every page except 1-13 and the cover. Sketchy…
This is making me feel bad about him having to take his coat and scarf off when he arrives at the office. Poor Scarf, to have a boring day hanging on a hook.
Hanging on a hook can be quite wonderful, especially if there’s a nice hat on the next hook!
This is a super sweet episode, even with The Scarf being rather shy.
That’s so cool that you’ve color coded their emotions into the dialogue. I’m going to have a hard time differentiating between playful and flirty then xD That makes me wonder why the bubble turned red there in Nina’s dialogue.
I always thought Xi Yuan was such an optimistic name because I never actually checked what liu meant. LOL. Either his parents were going through a tough time or they secretly wanted a warrior baby to crush his rival’s hopes and dreams.
But if he was called liu xifeng wouldn’t there be too much yin energy in his name? 😀 lol I’m joking. I’m being obnoxious for comedic purposes. I don’t do this irl. XD
Hahahaha, YES, please be as obnoxious as you want, it’s clear I’m out of my element—pun intended—with the naming system and could use all the help I could get, silly or not. I was thinking Feng Xiyuan (my American ass sees ‘xing’ as ‘last name’ rather than ‘surname’ or ‘family name,’ both of which make more sense), and that’s even more dang yin. He’d have to name himself Sunny to compensate.
Who are we kidding, Xiyuan would have named himself Wish again, or possibly Pink.
(Speaking of Feng, I feel kinda bad for using the four-element system for symbolism here when the five-element system could use some buzz; what happened was that my friend’s OTP and mine coincidentally happened to align with all four elements and it was too cool not to use. I’m brainstorming ways to work the five-element system in as well.)
I’m still figuring out what to do with the color-coded speech-bubble borders! In earlier comics, I had a schematic clarifying that when the outer border was red, it indicated that the text was translated from moni shimin yu, but haven’t yet settled on how often to remind people. Because binge readers and regular readers are going to encounter it at different rates, you know? Maybe once at the beginning of a new conversation is the way to go. So thanks for asking, I think I’ll change the comic later today to put a little flag in!
Don’t we all have trouble distinguishing between flirty and playful? Don’t we all.
BRB laughing at “Liu Xiyuan: WARRIOR BABY”
Oh, this place already IS Yuan’s regular! Better yet!
Ooh, I enjoyed the semantics! It’s so interesting that the last name can have the meaning of his name go from light and hopeful to doom 😀 I have absolutely no knowledge of Mandarin so this is all brand new information. Now, pronunciation-wise, looks like the way I pronounce it in my head when I read is relatively accurate for his last name and absolutely butchering his first name… so, 1/3 successful I suppose. To be honest, when I’m not familiar with how a word should be pronounced I automatically default to a Czech pronunciation. Works better with some languages than others, haha.
Aaah, I did not notice the colour-coding until I read the comments. Mind blown.
Oh! Now I’m curious: how would Yuan’s name sound with Czech pronunciation?
Enjoy the color-coding and how Sims-4-fanwork-specific it is, haha. As much as I’d like to reveal why some speech is color-coded and some isn’t, I’m keeping my mouth all the way shut so some lucky reader can have the reward of figuring it out early.
Ermn I’m terrible at transcribing phonetically in a way that would make sense to an English speaker (precisely because in Czech there’s really only one way to read everything), but the closest I can get to describing it is something like
X like the x in latex
i like in sit
you
an like in ant
Not sure if that gives you an idea – and obviously it’s very incorrect, haha 😄
Ooh, thanks for the phonology lesson! English is nuts and I wouldn’t wish learning it on anyone.
I should have mentioned earlier, and this is for lurkers too, that the ‘yuan’ in his name has the same phonemes (but not the same tone) as the base Chinese unit of currency, which many English speakers pronounce as ‘yen.’ So that’s another acceptable way to say it in English.
LOL Drinky Drinky Bird.
Poor Yuan. I get his struggle. When you’re born with an uncommon (by society or cultural standards) name, it make it pretty difficult to navigate situations where people, who are new to you/your name, mispronounce/misspell/slaughter your name. It sucks. Honestly, I, myself gave up and went by my initials. Sadly, I’ve had people ask how to spell DJ… >.> Like, bruh, it’s 2 letters, c’mon.
It’s pretty badass and [UN]enabling of Nina to put Yuan’s birth name on the cup (in Chinese to boot).
I love that you refer to “David” as a stupid-Simerican name lmao. fucking briliant.
Okay, Yuan is like world-famous, so whatever he did it is news-worthy, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and say, by the look of Neta’s eyes popping out of her face, that what Yuan is known for isn’t something heroic like… developing a highly-effective vaccine during a pandemic.
Omg I just momentarily-panicked. Is there a “like” button for your comics that I’m missing? I don’t see one on your website under the comics, so if I’m missing something let me know.
I see you’ve already found the Like button, but don’t worry about it. Comments are the best thing ever, and yours are extremely high quality! If it helps to know which emotional-labor things matter the most to me, it’s voting on topwebcomics.com (which can be done once a day), joining the Discord, and the holy grail is shout-outs because, as you know, it’s damn near impossible to get people to read SimLit.
Again, though, I don’t expect anything extra, especially since you have your own story to write!
Yeah, unfortunately, WP is kinda lame and refuses to show older history at either a certain point or a certain number, in its search engine. So, while I was able to like some of the comics I’ve read, or plan to read soon, I couldn’t get to the earlier ones.
Cool did both. Are there reminders (throughout your comics) to vote? I have to leave the tab up otherwise, as I am dreadfully forgetful.
Oh dang. There aren’t reminders to vote. I’m not entirely comfortable asking for things from readers yet…
But if one person says it’s okay to put reminders, that does help!
Honestly, if I saw the reminder (with link) I would vote. It’s really hard for me to remember otherwise. I don’t think it’s being pushy, or anything, it’s just your preference to having “likes.”
There’s so much I love about this scene that I struggle to put it into words. But the friendly banter and the acceptance and the refusal to accept “David” as his name makes me really happy.
ALSO DRINKY DRINKY BIRD