#The main takeaway here is that yes. yes you may reblog my edits.

[tachiisms]

I’ve been asked about this a few times, and I am very glad that people want to be respectful of what they can and cannot reblog, but I thought that I’d try to make it clear. This is mostly for the personals that follow me, though a few RP blogs have asked, too. Generally speaking, if I’ve put it in a general character tag, book tag, or other very general tag, it’s free to be reblogged. If it’s a thread or tagged as a personal headcanon, please do not reblog it. But as a helpful list: 

You may reblog:

--Any of my edits, photosets, gifsets, etc, that can be found in my :: liesl makes things ( my edits ) tag.

--Anything in the general character tags, book tags, or author tags. Examples: if something is tagged #siri tachi or #last of the jedi or other general tags.

--Any of the Legends canon quotes that I post. These also fall under the ‘general character tags’ but anything in the :: the stuff of legends ( legends canon quotes ) tag is also acceptable for reblogging.

--Any of the incorrect quotes that I post.

--If you’re looking for sometimes snippy meta type things that may or may not also be in a general tag, there’s also the salt-filled #educate yourself tag that is rebloggable.

--PS that if you like my edits you may be interested in my edits sideblog, lvminousbeings, which you, of course, may also reblog anything from.

Please do not reblog: 

--My headcanons, as tagged :: self reflection ( headcanons )  If you really, really want to reblog one you can ask me and I may say yes.

--My in character meme responses, or headcanon meme responses ( unless you sent the meme ). 

--My threads with other people.

--Edits made specifically for another person and tagged with their url as an @ mention in the caption.

--Any promos I make for myself, or any promos I reblog for other rp blogs; these will be tagged as ‘promos’ or ‘sp’.

--If you are confused as to what any of those things are, feel free to ask and I’ll let you know if it’s something you may reblog or if I’m not comfortable with you reblogging it. ( I have been asked in the past about certain things being rebloggable or not and I don’t actually think I’ve ever said no when asked, unless it was a thread. )

Please ask before reblogging:

--My thinking-out-loud, for lack of a better phrase, regarding Siri/Ferus/canon/etc. These are essentially my metas, which are something in between personal commentary on canon and headcanon. So depending on which way I personally feel like each one leans, I’ll either be fine with you reblogging it or would prefer you not to, so please ask first.

--Anything that isn’t explicitly allowed in the ‘you may reblog’ section.

If you are ever in doubt as to if you can reblog something or not, please just ask. I will never be mad at you for asking, I appreciate you asking, and appreciate those of you who who respect my boundaries and thus allow me to feel comfortable continuing to keep my blog open to personals. If you ever reblog something that I am not comfortable with being reblogged, I’ll ask you to delete it, and thus far most people I’ve encountered have been very polite and receptive to those requests. ( If I ask you to delete something and you won’t do it, or are rude to me when I ask, then you’ll be blocked. This has only happened a couple times over all the years I’ve had this blog, and I appreciate that the majority of personals who follow me are polite and receptive to my boundaries. ) 

thank you!

#:: this has been a psa ( psa ) #I do thank all of the personals who follow me for being so respectful. I know some rpers have a hard time with this and for the most part #I have only had good experiences with the lovely personals who follow me. #The main takeaway here is that yes. yes you may reblog my edits. #I make them as my contribution to the fandom and you may reblog any and all of them that you'd like. #I appreciate that I've been asked by people who are unsure and I know some rpers don't want them reblogged #but I don't mind. in fact I love it when people reblog my edits. so while you all are very very polite and I appreciate that. #yes you may reblog them. and my quotes. and my cracky incorrect quotes. #rules #for personals

[selenuntius]

Zhang Longevity - Southern Archives

Hello I know I just wrote about this at length but like I acknowledged in that post, I hadn’t read Southern Archives. Well now I have, and I’ll make a couple of additions/speculations based on the information in that. Don’t read if you haven’t read Southern Archives. Some of this information is related to plot points.

The main takeaway from Southern Archives that’s truly unambiguous is that there is a way to destroy the Zhang longevity (quite violently it appears).

Two other ones that have ambiguity to them are related to qilin blood. It’s a bit hard to just give a conclusion so I won’t be giving one here. My take beneath the break, or just read the novel.

Again, I’m trying to make clear what’s speculation and what’s actually in there, but I think even just by pointing out ambiguity, I’m making an argument. Just read the goddamn novel, really, especially to draw your own conclusions about the qilin blood things.

There are some other takeaways from Southern Archives about Zhang clan lore but I thought I should make a followup of sorts to my previous post with new info. Also Southern Archives was a pretty good read. I enjoyed the third-person POV and the period atmosphere. Zhang Haiyan, Haixia and others are some very engaging characters. I feel I may be a little attracted to Zhang Haiqi but I also want to call her mommy, so you can say I’m in a bit of a Haiyan predicament.

Zhang longevity can be destroyed

Probably one of our biggest takeaways from Southern Archives. This was achieved here via some kind of gas. The people who became aware of this in Southern Archives are Zhang Qishan (and some of his clan?), Zhang Haiqi, Zhang Hailou, Mo Yungao.

This may give support for the Zhang Qishan died because he found a way to age normally theory.

Zhang longevity is in their “blood” (not said to be the same blood as qilin blood; might just be blood as in they’re born with it)

This one is more ambiguous. The quote I’m drawing this from is in c.55:

“That German nerve gas was not produced in Germany, and its origins are unclear. It seemed to be able to destroy the mechanisms within Zhang people’s blood. Mo Yungao mentioned in his records that he found this by chance, and only possessed a single cylinder of it.”

If you’re checking your sources and see that this translation and merebear’s edited MTL is different and want to know why, I will leave a note at the end about this.

Anyways, like I said, I feel like immediately saying that this blood refers to qilin blood is a bit of a leap. I, for one, mostly read it as like a Zhang inherited trait rather than qilin blood. I went into a bit of why I felt the qilin blood is directly linked to their longevity theory wasn’t the best in my previous post, and I did see a reblog also theorising about that but I was too tired to finish writing my response (and I didn’t want to seem like I’m trying to start shit; I really just have too much time on my hands).

If qilin blood is directly linked to longevity, then everyone who has lived for longer than usual has to have a bit of qilin blood. That would mean there’s some kind of threshold for recognising qilin blood, and below that threshold it counts for longevity, but isn’t strong enough to detect.

To confirm the theory, we need some kind of confirmation that an in-between state between full-on qilin blood and non-qilin blood exists. The blood has different degrees of strength - this is true. Wu Xie speculates that the Qiling is chosen by who has the strongest qilin blood (book 8 c.81; N.B. that in Shahai 3 a different reason for selecting our Qiling was hypothesised), and Zhang Haike talks about hearing rumours as a child that our Zhang Qiling had the strongest form of their kekkei genkai blood (ZHH 2 c.7).

However, I still think there’s a distinction between the ones who do and the ones who just don’t, and it’s not all about how strong the blood is. Going back to the Qipan Zhang sect, they wielded quite a lot of power within the clan because they “held the qilin”, which Wu Xie guesses to mean the qilin blood (book 8 c.50 p1). Don’t know if that meant only Qipan Zhang had qilin blood, or if there was just a higher occurrence and a greater strength (I’ve read a headcanon that it’s because the Qipan Zhang absorb anyone who has the blood). Also, Wu Xie says in the 2017 short of Zhang Hailou, “You’re from the branch family… like me, you have to worry about mosquitoes.” Wu Xie, by this point, is quite knowledgable about the Zhang clan so what he says is kinda? reliable. In fact, all three of the Zhang that have qilin blood are from the main family or descended from a sect of the main family (Haiqi is one of the few Hai-generation main family members, southern archives c.47; Qiling was part of the main family according to Haike; Foye is a descendant of Ruitong of Qipan Zhang and Wu Xie speculates at the end of book 8 that Foye’s father brought their entire sect out of the Northeast Zhang’s control, which makes Rishan a descendant of Qipan Zhang too). So is it only the main family that ever has proper qilin blood? If it’s a thing all Zhang have to a degree, surely sometimes it pops up in the branches too.

This is pretty much a joke but I was going to say that maybe bare min qilin blood only protects you from mosquitoes and nothing else but still counts for longevity, and I can’t even make that joke anymore…

The problem here is at what point do we stop saying the longevity has to do with qilin blood and just say the longevity runs in the family, and for some reason, Foye didn’t get it (or died for other reasons). And even if we take a step back and say, yes, longevity does come with the Zhang blood but qilin blood makes you live even longer, not enough time has passed for us to say that.

An addendum about qilin blood, not directly related to longevity: Can qilin blood be an acquired trait?

Mo Yungao believes qilin blood to be an acquired trait, because he asked Zhang Qiling about it and he said it was acquired (Archives c.55).

This is contradicted in other places, for example, by Zhang Haike in ZHH 2 c.7, where he specifically talks about qilin blood as an inherited trait. The two previously mentioned passages about Qipan Zhang and from Wu Xie duking it out with Xiao Zhang Ge also support this, though less directly.

So, why did Zhang Qiling tell Mo Yungao it’s acquired?

There are a couple of possibilities, including Zhang Qiling lying and this actually being true and everyone else being wrong, but I think this was a misunderstanding.

Mainly because I don’t think the line is entirely without ambiguity.

He had asked this strange person if he had been born with his extraordinary abilities or if they were acquired, and the person had replied that they were acquired.

(I have another note about this line but it doesn’t matter for the ambiguity bit, so I’ll leave it at the bottom too.)

The key here is that Mo Yungao, in this omniscient narrator recollection, did not specifically ask about his blood. Mo Yungao clearly meant his blood, because a couple of lines above, Mo Yungao is saved by this person and his blood, and his later obsession is with this blood. But what he actually asked was his extraordinary abilities (plural) so maybe Zhang Qiling took it to mean combat ability rather than specifically his blood?

Again, there are other possibilities, but I prefer a simpler answer rather than a complicated one that takes more speculation to support.

Nerve gas line note:

The original contained the phrase 张家人血液中的肌理, literally “the skin texture of Zhang people’s blood”. This is because 肌理 (skin texture) was likely a typo of 机理 (which I translate as mechanisms here; not necessarily the best one. Could also use principles but I felt that sounded less physiological and more philosophical). These two words have the exact same pronunciation. XL makes these mistakes quite a lot, and because most of our stuff is sourced from his serialisation and web versions, these mistakes don’t get corrected. I suspect this is why merebear uses the vague sentence “but it seemed to specifically target the Zhang’s family blood” instead. It’s not a huge difference, but I thought I should explain my addition of mechanisms and using destroy instead of target (this I don’t quite understand, the original says destroy and I don’t see an issue with simply using destroy) so it doesn’t seem like I’m making stuff up.

Acquired abilities line note:

“Extraordinary abilities” is actually my guess of what XL means when he wrote 无常的能力, because I feel the adjective used is a misuse of the word. 无常 can mean changeable, can be a reference to a Buddhist concept of the cycle of life and death (don’t have the best grasp on this, but bear with me), can be a euphemism for death, or can be a kind of ghost? spirit? that collects people’s souls, kind of like the Grim Reaper I guess but they work for the king of hell. None of these quite fit here. The two characters, taken on their own can maybe mean something like extraordinary, so I’m thinking maybe that’s what XL’s trying to get at but used a slightly different word to replace what you might usually use for extraordinary (不凡 or smth idk), but not to great effect.

#southern archives #南部档案 #dmbj lore