Chapter Four: Bird's Eye View

titled “bird’s eye view” on three accounts:

1. the chapter in general is about stepping back and not letting overthinking the details blind you to a bigger truth
2. very early on, i Needed that xv scene where they talk about xiao’s willingness to partake in their matchmaking schemes, and when i first scribbled it out, i got the vibe of watching the very end of it happening from afar, like a bird’s eye view of things
3. we have finally met cloud retainer, whose perspectives on how everyone’s private matters should be handled will play their own role in the story as it moves forward

mostly, though, the vibes are related to that feeling of watching things happen from afar

one of my friends asked me if this fic was xiaoven with side ganqing, and i explained to him that i was hoping it would be equal parts of each, with a fair bit of yantao in the mix, and that i was also coming up with excuses for xv to kiss before they got together, and also that there was this whole ganqing side plot where they get real engaged n stuff, n he was like, “right now i’m imagining a romance movie starring ganqing that just occasionally randomly cuts away to xiaoven making out” and i hope that this chapter kind of embodies that energy lol.

• the reason i chose the word “hair” for “the fine hair of their own hides” to describe a qilin’s fur coat (rather than fur) is bc like. idk, saying that ganyu’s qilin form has fur just doesn’t feel right. i think it has something to do w/毛 for animals also being translatable as “animal hair”
• “a set of soldier’s clothes that reminded her that her life was no longer her own” was a line written with the general vibe of “once you put on a general’s armor, your life is no longer your own” (which i’m PRETTY sure is from the 2009 chinese live-action mulan movie) in mind.
• in general, this opener sets up to talk about kq’s profound influence on ganyu’s life and how it changed her outlook on the world to the point of falling in love, but let’s take a moment to sit and think about it:
  • like, ganyu is a character with a lot of grief. she’s clearly dissociating through the centuries from a sense of trauma and alienation.
  • kq’s departure from the status quo basically had a domino effect that resulted in ganyu snapping out of that kind of long-term haze
  • after all, rex lapis told her that kq is the type of person liyue needed in this day and age, prompting her to truly take a better look at the nation liyue had become
  • in slowing down and observing the world around her, ganyu was able to once again appreciate the simple joys of being alive. while she didn’t do it bc of kq specifically, it wouldn’t have happened had she not complained about her.
  • anyway, i think that’s probably a pretty big part of what makes her relationship with kq literally SO MAGICAL that it motivates her to try to set that sort of thing up for xiao: she understands the numbness of grief all too well, the sense of stagnation that comes with the endless centuries, and kq’s entrance into her life was essentially the butterfly wings that led to time feeling real to ganyu again.
  • she was accepted for what she was (a blood traitor, an alien in her own homeland), and got to experience the full spectrum of human emotion entirely unfettered for the first time in forever
  • n happiness and love is so nice, and she knows xiao struggles with that too
  • n that’s basically how her relationship with kq connects back to her desire to set up xv
  • ganyu’s side of gq in this fic is essentially “someone falls in love again after years of chronic depression” and as someone who has struggled a lot with ~falling in love~ (or a lack thereof) after, like, trauma and depression, i just think that’s compelling
  • that said, “chronic depression recoveree” was not at all how i expected to characterize ganyu, like, ever. this will probably be the only time it’s gonna be talked about in much detail, but idk man i think i have a soft spot for it lol
  • “the changing of the seasons is not such a terrible thing to watch” was written to echo “a monster is not such a terrible thing to be”, which comes from on earth we’re briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong.
• “she had been inadvertently digging her own grave in the grief of her future by refusing to watch humanity bloom out of fear of witnessing her own past dying” there’s. a lot going on in here it feels like lol
• the grave in the grief of her future — refers to the way her love for liyue at this point in time feels like mourning her place in human society. the fact that she is always thinking she’ll never understand/belong with humans bc she’s half-adeptus, she witnessed the archon war and all that stuff, is ultimately what also distances herself from them more and more as time goes on. self-fulfilling prophecy of grief
• witnessing her own past dying — she’s afraid that by looking at what humanity has become in these last few centuries, she’ll find that they have forgotten the truth of the past, or even if they know and remember the events, they do not know the personal details
• “heart-startingly” was deliberately “ startingly” (rather than “startlingly”, with the l) bc at first, i was gonna put “heart-stoppingly”, but then i was like, “actually no, it’s so beautiful it starts one’s heart up again; it brings her back to life rather than driving her to death.”
• jianjian [鶼鶼] are a mythical pair of birds also known as 比翼鳥 [bi yi niao], where each has one wing and therefore must rely on each other to fly. euphemism for lovebirds/inseparable couples.
• tenghuang [騰黃; from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenghuang]
• spelling 阿姨 [pinyin ā-yí] as “ahyi” was an aesthetic choice made bc i didn’t wanna hyphenate twice as like, “keqing-a-yi” and smth like “beidou-ayi” where it’s just ayi does not sit well with my english-speaking sensibilities
• the true eye of the adepti is a reference to the fact that they’re occasionally referenced as having three eyes or smth idk i turned off the internet as i was writing this and i’m not turning it back on to check the specifics rn
• the ‘HELP ME’ joke was smth i spent a lot of time on bc i wanted to make it translatable into cn as well.
  • anyway, so i’d have it translated as 援救[我], using 聲援的援, (meaning “to support [a cause]”/more literally “to voice support [for a cause]”) and then 救 [jiu] looks kind of like 宿 [xiu] when lip-reading, and 星宿 → constellation (although it’s different from how constellations are referred to in-game, 命之座, please just let me live i am trying desperately to facilitate hypothetical translations into chinese for my own ego)
• “i’m being deprived; i think this is an adequate amt of drama!!” is a sword art online: abridged reference. i forgot which episode specifically, but basically asuna puts a knife in kirito’s face and is like “dude chill” and kirito is like “YOU JUST PUT A KNIFE IN MY FACE I THINK THIS IS AN ADEQUATE AMT OF DRAMA”
• the game “pyro slime” hu tao, venti, and later xiao play is based off a clapping game i learned as a little kid called “ pikachu”.
• the reason they needed so much prep time in wangshu inn is bc they had to clear wei the cat out for venti
• i spent a fair amount of time searching for and translating an appropriate song for venti to sing for hu tao to throw him the silk flowers (probably too much considering that it was a last-minute addition to the chapter, but i really like what it adds), to the point where i considered just writing a poem myself.
  • my first thought had been to use 比翼鳥 by teresa teng, but between difficulties in translating that song faithfully, poetically, and within the melody, combined with the fact that i later found out it takes its tune from this apparently incredibly famous 1967 american song “san francisco (be sure to put flowers in your hair)”, i was hesitant to use it
  • i was also initially hesitant to use 望春風 as well, as it’s always sung in taiwanese hokkien (which i’ll just refer to as ‘taiyu’ from this point on bc i’m lazy), n this posed a problem to me in how i mentally worldbuild liyue to justify certain headcanons: internally, i can justify use of cantonese as like, “the peasant tongue (affectionate)” (vs. mandarin as like, the upper-class/well-educated dialect that foreigners usually learn), esp since i prefer to base the harbor off of hk rather than mainland china. but if liyue is mainland china, they have no taiwan equivalent, so i didn’t really know how to justify picking a song in taiyu such that it fell in line with my very carefully and elaborately crafted liyue worldbuilding hcs. buuuut, the lyrics for 望春風 were just so cute and cheery and perfect that i decided just not to care if anyone judged me for it.
  • anyway, that said, i did manipulate my translation a bit to better fit the situation, esp with regards to the final line, “as i fell for the wind”. the original cn line is more akin to “i hadn’t realized it was just the wind deceiving/playing tricks on me”, and while “falling for” tricks in en is very much a thing, i also obvs chose it bc of the way it can also be interpreted as “falling in love with” the wind
  • i also removed any gendered implications of the singer in the translation, but in cn, it is implied Exactly Once that the singer is a girl (as she has yet to be married [feminine] out), and almost every single recorded version of this song is sung by a woman. shoutout to david tao in 1997 for almost making it straight-up gay , then writing a different second verse so that it wasn’t.
    • similarly, i also tried to limit my usage of first-person pronouns as well, bc even though cn is a language where it’s acceptable (n actually pretty classy) to drop pronouns, inserting them into the en translation feels SO MUCH like i’m committing blatant acts of interpretation
  • “pale as the moon” is another interesting t/l choice on my part too, since there is no mention of the moon until the very end: the original cn line simply says the young man has a pale complexion
    • on a related note, “the man in the moon” towards the end is mostly meant to reference yuelao, the god of marriage, but the moon laughing at the singer at the end is part of what influenced my decision to use “pale as the moon”. i kind of liked the idea of implying that the singer had mistaken the moon for a pretty young man and falling in love with it
  • neither here nor there, but the use of “pretty” over “handsome” was also deliberate: the other word used to describe the young man, 標致, is typically used on women
  • the original taiyu also rhymes pretty much all the way through. i obviously did not match this in english because i am not yet a wordsmith on so fine a scale, but i did try to maintain a similar sense of audible pleasantry through similar vowel sound usage
  • the first line has a word usually interpreted as “lamp”, but i chose “lantern” specifically (even sacrificing the word “night” for it, though i think the context is enough to drop it) bc xiao association with lantern rite in canon lmao
  • tbh, working on this translation really made me wish that my mom had put more effort into teaching us taiyu growing up, bc for as infinitely more useful mandarin is, there’s smth v homely about dialect that my cantonese friends get to experience that i don’t
• the mahjong scene has a lot of stuff made up for it regarding the flowers and seasons, but it is true that plum blossoms were once traditionally associated with winter, shifting to spring in the modern day. the original reasoning behind plums == winter comes from the fact that the tree begins to bloom in the late winter, before it sets out leaves and the snow melts away fully, thus becoming a symbol of resilience. i’m not sure exactly how they became associated with the spring, but if i had to guess, it would be that the emphasis shifted away from the harsh circumstances of the bloom towards the act of daring to come alive again and blooming at all in the face of hostile conditions.
  • the other three plants that make up the Four Gentlemen are orchids, chrysanthemums, and bamboo, historically representing spring, autumn, and summer, respectively; and summer, autumn, and winter, respectively, in their modern associations.
  • chrysanthemums are associated with mourning, so leaving them in autumn makes sense. from spring → summer for orchids makes sense since you’re just going from fresh life to full bloom sort of thing, but how bamboo went from summer to winter is frankly beyond me
• i did think about replacing the plum with a fourth in-game flower, but with violetgrass as my final option in liyue, i didn’t want to associate it with the winter bc canonically they’re described as having a strong vitality, and i felt like that was more of a summery sort of thing
  • though, i guess having the order be qingxin violetgrass, glaze lily, silk flower might have also worked for spring summer autumn winter. eh whatever
• it’s also mentioned that some seasonal associations got swapped around between flowers— qingxin with plum; glaze lily with silk flowers— over the course of in-story history. plums being historically associated with the winter, later shifting to spring, is grounded in real life, as plums blossom in the late winter when the snow just begins to thaw.
  • in shifting the qingxin from winter to spring, it’s meant to have the same implications as how plums have shifted from winter to spring in real life: deemphasizing the harsh conditions one comes into, and instead focusing on the act of defiance and rebirth.
    • giving venti the qingxin— which, as his ascension material, are also associated with xiao— is meant to represent that, in being given xiao’s heart (as qingxin/清心 translates to ‘pure heart’) [as in like, xiao falling in love with him], xiao is starting to make the active choice to live again, to let himself come alive as ganyu had before him with keqing.
  • chapter two also has zhongli mention that silk flowers are associated with two major events in a person’s life, with one being funerals, and the other one intended to be weddings, though he got cut off. with this in mind, giving ganyu the silk flowers was meant to reinforce her coming engagement to keqing. i kept their autumnal association though, bc i wanted to also give it the vibe of being related to funerals.
• originally, xiao had received the qingxin, venti the glaze lily, hu tao the silk flower, and ganyu the plum blossom. xiao and hu tao bc those are their ascension mats (+ the aforementioned symbolism of shifting qingxin from winter to spring for xiao, and association of silk flowers with funerals for hu tao), venti bc i wanted him to sit next to xiao and didn’t want him to be winter (though there’s also an argument to be made about the glaze lily’s association with a refined, young, unmarried lady), and ganyu bc she’s cryo (and also i think it’s kind of fun to associate her with the dead month bc ofc she’s also killed many before too)
• the more i thought about changing their associations to the final version, the more i liked it, though, in particular bc venti sang “yearning for the spring breeze” earlier.
  • what did yelan mean by doing venti a favor by rigging the seating the way she did? honestly not sure at the time of this writing, though it can be interpreted as like, a warning to not keep trying for eye contact with xiao. considering the fact that venti was switched to the east seat (from the south) i currently like the idea that she’s setting him up to be haloed by the moonlight later on in the night
• essentially, xiao is kind of stressed out by everything that goes on bc the matchmaking schemes go against his understanding of his relationship with venti (i.e. that of an unworthy weapon pining after a god; the toad lusting after the goose’s flesh), and also bc he has to suppress all his feelings through denial, which fuels his karmic debts and causes a flare-up in this particular case.
• chose the word “smites” in the praise bit bc the word “smitten” is derived from the word “smite” lol
• “xiao’s neck, where his pulse beats by his throat, warms” → deliberately parallels earlier how he took his pulse by his neck, which burned from the karmic debts. foreshadows the eventual climax + signals xiao repressing his feelings
• the glove scene was originally from lighthouse and was from venti’s pov, which made me a little sad to cut in transitioning it to here, where it’s now xiao’s pov, but it serves a different purpose in lighthouse anyway. the glove bit wasn’t even supposed to happen here! :D
• the gild the lily comment mostly came to mind bc of that one fic, “gilded lily”, but since i’m starting to find i don’t particularly like that author’s characterization (it feels kind of infantilizing of xiao tbh), i don’t really feel the need to include it as a reference, esp since “to gild the lily” is already an existing phrase
  • anyway, the line can be interpreted as either the qingxin framing the glaze lily (which is already pretty on its own), or as a little more metaphorically as a comment on how xiao already finds venti to be so beautiful, the extra dressing up is a little unnecessary.
  • also suddenly realizing that there was something going on in the mahjong bit with the flowers… would’ve been fun if i’d kept it as xiao qingxin/venti glaze lily for this purpose, with xiao fixing the disarray so that venti is the center of his life, which keeps falling apart on its own anyway. to do so in reverse… hmmm… (well it’s not like that scene had been planned in the first place lol)
• xiao removing his gloves and reaching out to fix the flowers in venti’s hair is also important bc it shows him doing smth for venti of his own accord.
• his refusal to put his gloves back on is a selfish one, but also an easy one, as i imagine he has a much easier time rejecting offers than requesting things. it’s also important bc it signals to venti that xiao knows his boundaries, is willing to communicate them, and that he hasn’t been crossing them in his flirtations.

other references (mentioned in the a/n on ao3):

1. like every xiaoven shipper on the internet, the art of evercelle lives rent-free in my mind. this is where saucy venti qipao comes from ~
2. here is Bāng Chhun-hong as performed by fong fei-fei

you can read more translation notes on 望春風 on its page in the translation notes section, as well as the notes on my given-up t/l of 比翼鳥

this chapter, i started switching the order of pairings on ao3. it's something i wanted to do since the start, but then i was high on xiao “endless suffering” pv drop and forgot for ch 2, and ch 3 simply felt too focused on gq for the tag order swap to feel appropriate. although moving forward, the tag order will be continue to be swapped every so often, where it will settle is anyone’s guess

the discussion questions:

1. on a related note, do you feel as if the fic has been overtagged, undertagged, or tagged just right, esp w/regards to the relationships? at what point do you think a relationship's presence in a fic warrants tagging for it in the freeform tags? in the relationships category? for those unaware of the differences, here is an explanation
2. in the mahjong scene, each character gets assigned a flower, which is associated with a season and cardinal direction, in order to determine player order: venti (qingxin, spring, east); xiao (glaze lily, summer, south); ganyu (silk flowers, autumn, west); and hu tao (plum, winter, north). as is often the case with art, none of this was by accident (i actually went through several permutations for character-flower-season, though the cardinal directions remained permanently tied to the same seasons), so what do think the logic was primarily grounded in: floral association, seasonal association, player order/seating arrangement, or some combination thereof?