Chapter Two: Dead Dove (Do Not Eat)

titled “dead dove (do not eat)” on three reasons:

  1. for all the morbid connotations the phrase has come to garner in fandom, at the end of the day, it still essentially means, “exactly what it says on the tin”
  2. this is the chapter where venti fakes his death ofc i had to title the chapter in reference to that
  3. all this gets combined with the fact that doves are a common symbol of love and fidelity.

hence: “dead dove [venti]; do not eat [xiao fails to kiss him]”.

original a/n:
gonna break character as “cool and calm anonymous author” for a second here n just say that i feel like i’m on cocaine or some shit rn what the fuck xv canon oh my god
  • “yuehua” [月華] as a code name for ningguang is taken from a mora for a myth in a land filled with legends, by cadriona_m. as a side note, when i first read that fic i thought that ‘yuehua’ would have been 月花 (moonflower)
    • anyway, surname ‘feng’ comes from fenghuang/鳳凰 (phoenix) bc i’m lazy
    • i know no one here is familiar w/the surnames i’ve assigned to every single liyue character, but this feng is different from the feng i gave ganyu as a surname [馮]
  • the idea of mondstadt having bawdy/raunchy/salacious hymns comes from this one verr goldet character study i once read titled partial ocean view, by Schistosity. i just think the idea of that is so fun
    • anyway, in the original handwritten draft for this chapter, i just put “[insert raunchy title here]” for the supposedly salacious hymn title bc i couldn’t think of anything at the time, and frankly i still can’t
    • it got titled “love’s dream” bc i cracked open the old bible to blaspheme by using its words out of context for the sake of gay fanfiction and started reading song of solomon, bc i had the vague knowledge that that book can get a little bit… uhh… saucy?
    • anyway “love’s dream” is apparently what the third chapter of the book of song of solomon is titled in english in the 1989 “new revised standard edition” of the bible, and from what i’ve skimmed, it’s basically about a bride looking for her lover at night, and when she finds him, she takes him home and they fuck lol.
      • “isn’t that a rather literal interpretation of the bible?” yes and that is on purpose. now hush.
  • as a chemistry student, i’ve extracted eugenol (an essential oil) from cloves for a lab before, so i got curious as to whether it’s possible to extract apple flavoring from, like, actual apples, or if it’s purely synthetic. this sent me on a massive quest that i did not expect.
    • anyway, “green apple flavoring” is made possible thanks to an ester called ethyl valerate (or ethyl pentanoate), and, according to pubchem, naturally occurs in:
      • polygala senega, a type of milkwort native to north america
      • nepeta nepetalla, a type of catnip native to france, spain, italy, algeria, and morocco. it is apparently very difficult to obtain.
    • ananas comosus, which is… pineapple. like, regular ass pineapple. i was shocked, too.
    • heracleum dissectum, which i cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. apparently it’s a traditional vegetable of china, and belongs to the apiaceae family which also apparently lays claim to celery, carrots, n parsley.
      • okay so apparently it’s a type of hogweed. anyway, so you can get ethyl valerate from there.
      • pyrus pyrifolia, also known as asian pears (also known as the only good pears fuck you fight me).
      • anyway (2), through a series of wacky hijinks, i managed to procure a study from 1992 that would’ve cost me $58 usd to rent for two days for free, in which some people ran an analysis of the volatile esters present in asian pears, which includes ethyl valerate
      • (this is actually where i realized that i should probably stop wasting my time trying to figure out how to actually make apple-flavored lip-balm from apples and why it Would Be Possible, Actually, using O. Chem, which is why the notes cut off so suddenly lmao)
  • you guys might have noticed that i have at least a little bit of beef with xiao over ganyu’s heritage n identity as mixed-race. this is incorrect; i have a LOT of beef with xiao over how he dismisses her struggles as merely “confused”.
  • upon giving it some thought, i remembered that xiao is surprisingly stubborn when it comes to accepting the deaths of people close to him. he literally went into the chasm for himself to SEE and know for certain if bosacious had died, and during the liyue archon quests, he doesn’t believe the traveler when they tell him that rex lapis has died until they are able to provide him with elaborate detail, and only then, he expresses difficulty truly believing the matter. that, combined with venti’s tendency to vanish, leads me to believe that xiao would need a lot of proof to believe that venti was truly dead.
    • i still think it’s a bit mean and inconsiderate of them, but that happens sometimes. xiao’s an old man; i don’t think he’ll be too affected by it in the long term.
  • xiao hesitates to call kq ganyu’s girlfriend. this is bc as an adeptus who is very distant from humanity, he probably isn’t terribly familiar with the differences in their courtship stages, and words like boyfriend/girlfriend probably sound very childish to him. mortals are, of course, all like children to him anyway, so he likely doesn’t bat an eye when mortals use it on each other, but an adeptus (or half-adeptus, in this case, though i tend to interpret him as considering ganyu to be more adeptus than mortal) like himself? i think he struggles to conceptualize it, since his impression of that sort of relationship is probably very shallow, and so in trying to be polite to ganyu (by acknowledging that her relationships to mortals have a lot of depth n meaning to her), he struggles to come up w/a term adequate to describe his perception of their relationship. he fails, obviously, n just uses the word he knows mortals would use, but his hesitancy is still obvious.
    • knowing kq, she probably assumes he’s being derogatory or just plain stupid w/how he says it lol

    the discussion questions:

    1. zhongli says that silk flowers, blooming in twins, are therefore appropriate gifts for funerals, then gets cut off. considering how liyue’s culture emphasizes balance, what other life events do you think silk flowers might be appropriate for? what sort of meaning do you think the flowers coming in pairs holds?

    this chapter's notes were done rather rushedly, bc like i said at the top, i was high on xv canon trailer interaction (that shit was like cocaine to me), so i'll just say now that basically, the other thing silk flowers were meant to represent/be common at would be weddings.

    both are important ceremonies/rituals in people's lives; yet one represents life (or the start of a new one, basically), and the other is the result of a death. this is an important theme in the fic.