Natural history and landscape of Haixing

[mecurtin]

I'm betaing a story set largely in Ye Old Haixing Era, which means the characters spend a lot of time moving in a natural landscape.

Because I'm an ecologist, natural historian, birdwatcher, and environmentalist, I may be going a ~teensy~ bit overboard in wanting "accurate" natural history details. Just a leetle.

First, does anyone recognize any of the forested locations in Guardian? Where did they shoot the Hanga scenes, the YOHE scenes, the Yashou scenes?

I note that, in contrast with e.g. Detective L (and most wuxia I've seen) we see no bamboo forests in Guardian. This may be just the way things worked out, but we can tie it into the way the drama uses Western (European/American) cultural elements to signal "this is SFF, it isn't China, nope". So we might legitimately make the landscape & nature history European or American, in both species and "look & feel" ... but that doesn't seem right to me, either.

Does anyone besides me care? Should I let my poor author be, and not sweat over what kind of tree Zhao Yunlan is leaning against? Would ZYL, even in YOHE, notice or care whether the tree is an oak or a pine or a ginkgo or something else?

If you were reading a story where the characters traveled out of Dragon City, would you expect to see: small, intensely farmed plots as in the Yangtze basin (mostly rice); ditto as in the Yellow River basin (mostly wheat), a less intense farming picture as Europe, or a much less intense picture as in the US?

For those who've read the novel in Chinese, do you have any impressions about what part of China it is set in? Does it "feel like" Yellow River provinces, lower Yangtze River provinces, Sichuan, Guangdong?

Comments

[bonibaru]

I am writing a story largely set in ye olde Haixing era (sort of) and I can tell you, IDGAF what kind of tree ZY is leaning against in my story, because the point of the story is the journey of the characters, the conflicts and challenges they face, and how they grow as people separately and together through it.

Having wasted WAY TOO MANY hours looking up a few specific plants for specific symbolisms needed for the story, and tried to be somewhat not-too-crazy in the flora and fauna, I can say that it's much more aggravating and time wasting for a writer to worry over whether ZY is leaning against a gingko or an oak - just say "leaned against a tree" because it really doesn't matter what kind it is and get back to telling me why his leaning there is important to what's happening in the story right now :)

So yeah, let your author be. Beta the journey. Beta the characters and the plot. If something seems incongruous or jarring, maybe it doesn't need to be there at all. Only make a fuss if it *does* need to be there and if without it, something meaningful in the story is lost.

[bonibaru]

Here's the truth about fanfiction: 99% of readers are gonna skim right past that three word description of a flower or name of a forest that you spent two hours looking up. Because they aren't there for the scenery. They are there for the characters, the plot, and possibly (mostly? not me but some, lol) the porn. Help your author tell their story. Help them bake the cake so that it tastes good regardless of the icing. When people rave about the story and rec it to others, they aren't going to say, in paragraph 17 the author put a totally wrong tree in YOHE. They're going to say, this story made me FEEL xyz. Help the author get the feeling. If there's time and desire at the end, you can always go back and fix the tree.

[mecurtin]

PRACTICAL ADVICE. WHAT. FOCUSED. HOW DARE YOU. ;D

The thing is, for me *as a reader* it actually makes a lot of difference if the trees are green blobs on sticks or specific *trees*, with smells and shapes and natures. But this may make me part of shrinking minority: a good friend who is a gardener, forsooth, calls all conifers "pine trees" which hurts me in my SOUL.

[riventhorn]

IMO, I think it depends on what type of story it is as to whether I care about the tree. Details like that can give a story verisimilitude and create an evocative picture in the reader's mind. On the other hand, if the focus is more on action or something, detailing what kind of tree it is and expanding on the setting might kill the narrative tension. It all depends. But in the right fic, I think exploring the landscape more could be very interesting.

[no_detective]

maybe it's the situating CGI of dragon city (there's a river! and some buildings! and sunsets! and a flock of birds that always fly in the same direction!) but it honestly feels like... a made-up place to me. i think of it as haixing rather than a location in actual china - does that make sense? which means i'm open to details in worldbuilding and landscaping (heh) that serve the story, and i wouldn't get hung up on them the other way around.

fwiw, i think they filmed many of the YOHE and the hanga scenes in the same place...

[naye]

All I've got is that the Dragon City University Campus shows up in Detective L too. So they're probably at least partially filmed in the same location - just that Detective L had a way bigger budget.

I don't think any description needs to be that detailed? Dragon City is whenever you need it to be, and who even knows what vegetation was like after the meteor strike 10k years ago?

Plus: a lot of readers aren't going to know the difference between an elm and a beech, much less be able to picture trees that grow in a part of the world where very few of us have been! (I don't see Yunlan able to identify trees beyond a basic "has leaves" or "has needles", either... Shen Wei would be able to be more specific but let's be real: if Yunlan's standing by a tree Shen Wei's not looking at the tree.)

[extrapenguin]

Furthermore, since Shen Wei might have grown up in Dixing, it's possible to come up with a characterization where he classifies the trees not by species but by whether or not they're climbable!

[likealeafonthewind]

(I don't see Yunlan able to identify trees beyond a basic "has leaves" or "has needles", either... Shen Wei would be able to be more specific but let's be real: if Yunlan's standing by a tree Shen Wei's not looking at the tree.)

Lol! And I completely agree. I think a lot of it depends on the character whose pov you're seeing the fic through or who's talking. If it's someone with expertise in that area, then yeah, they probably would note the specific kind of tree (of if they're waxing poetic about plants and trees to the other character, who's lost AF but listening patiently because they're just that fond of them).

Otherwise, I'd just call it a tree. If a certain type of tree is important to what's happening in the scene, I would probably describe it rather than name it.

[bonibaru]

let's be real: if Yunlan's standing by a tree Shen Wei's not looking at the tree

same, same

[yantantether]

if Yunlan's standing by a tree Shen Wei's not looking at the tree

Lol, I love this! And it's so true: one thing I try and make myself keep in mind is C.S. Pacat talking about how she spent FOREVER deciding exactly what type of horse one of her characters would ride before realising that there was no way her POV character would notice; he'd just call it a horse.

[mekare]

I don't see Yunlan able to identify trees beyond a basic "has leaves" or "has needles", either... Shen Wei would be able to be more specific but let's be real: if Yunlan's standing by a tree Shen Wei's not looking at the tree.)

My first reaction: how very true! :-D

On second thought, echoing the importance of point of view of the story/paragraph: what if BB Shen Wei associated a special kind of tree in YOHE with Yunlan because that’s where they made out met lots of times (in the drama we see them on that rocky outcrop but there could be other places too) and the associated sound of eaves, smells etc. Make him remember Yunlan in the present? And seeing present Yunlan in the vicinity of that three gives him double vision if memories?

[winter_blossom]

I've never even thought of Haixing as Earth, honestly, and in the drama at least it looks to me like the writers are taking pains to show that this isn't China, so who are we to say otherwise? At any rate, show history and actual Chinese history don't seem to bear any similarities to each other, so I don't think the setting matters as long as it at least resembles what glimpses we got in the YOHE and Hanga arcs.

I'm not much of a writer, but as a reader I can say that in a YOHE story I'd be mostly interested in the characters (especially if there are important OC's) and the credibility of their interrelationships, accommodations, food/drink, weapons/powers and military strategies than I would the scenery.

Also, if the POV character is drama!Zhao Yun Lan, I think you especially don't have to worry, since he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who'd know or care much about what this or that element of nature was as long as it serves its purposes. He strikes me as a very "urban" kind of guy ^_^

[extrapenguin]

Re: travel, I'd expect to see something like what we see during their trip to the mountains for the Hanga arc. There seem to be a few farmed plots and a bunch of wilderness around the mountains, so agriculture is not uniformly distributed. I'd also prefer that the trees be things actually seen on the show - after all, this is sort of second-world China, not present-day Europe. (For me, the trees are foreign, but then again, while I might be nominally European, I come from Snow And Ice Dixing.)

Haixing doesn't seem to have pronounced seasons and the trees are mostly deciduous. It's also very green, and the population density is such that there can be large, deserted stone cicle thingies in good repair where Envoys and their spies can covertly meet, confident they won't be interrupted.

[mecurtin]

Good point about the deserted stone circles! I shall bear that in mind.

[kimboo_york]

I can't speak for accuracy and yes, I agree with most here that readers don't care too much about trees species but as an SF fan? Yeah, I have opinions, and those mostly rest on the headcanon that the likelihood of a planet being ENOUGH like Earth to support our species is cronk and therefore Haixing was actually terraformed, which is how the genetics got all mixy-mashy. So sure! Those could totally be spruce trees or spruce-tree adjacent.

To me, the whole feel of the show -- Dragon City and the forests and the mountains -- spoke to the American west. Like, I could absolutely see Ft. Collins, CO as a stand in for Dragon City and its environs,down to the river and the parks and the surrounding forests. The trees, both in the mountains and in the city, really reminded me of places I've been in Colorado and New Mexico. Dunno if that helps you at all! But those are my thoughts. <3

[tsubame_17]

Like a reader, I don't usually care about these things, but If I find it's a part important in the story I try to understand it and search about it (for me almost everything green is plant, tree or grass, and sometimes there are flowers! It's the same with the animals for me... ^^; )
BUT if I was reading a fic about/with plants yashou people that is different AND if I write it more... so all depend

[lunabee34]

I care about this kind of thing, not in the way that I will know whether your details are correct or not but in that way that I find specific, concrete details about setting very grounding. They make the story feel real and vital to me.

One pro-fic writer that does this really well for me in the context of an ecological lens is Jeff Vandermeer in The Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance). One of the POV characters is a biologist, and she is very attuned to the natural world and describes the flora and fauna in exquisite detail. I know jack all about what she was observing, but I enjoyed reading her observe it.

I think how you do this is dependent on your POV; if you're in a close/limited third with Zhao Yunlan, you have to decide how much you think he'd know/recognize about the world around him. He'd observe it all because he's a detective, etc., but I'm not sure I believe he's really knowledgeable about plants. If you're in a third omniscient, then I think you can go whole hog, and I would buy Shen Wei having more knowledge if you're in his POV.

I really, really like when authors bring their own interests or places they've lived/traveled or their jobs or whatever to their writing. It makes it feel rich and layered and real in a way that having everything be constructed of details from the source material does not.

I feel like I am now straying from the question you actually asked. LOL

[ranalore]

This. I am honestly not terribly familiar with flora, I know certain flowers, I can tell a palm tree from a deciduous tree from a tree with needles, but if I'm writing something set in a specific place, featuring a POV that knows and notices those details, I will include them to the degree that they add to the setting or plot of the story. As a reader, I appreciate when writers do the same, because I think that kind of verisimilitude in setting helps set apart excellent stories.

That said, I do think we have to keep in mind as betas that the details we would think important to include in a story are not necessarily things our writers will view as important. Thus, I might mention something I think it would be good to specify (food, usually, if there's a meal mentioned, sometimes cultural observances), but if the writer wants to focus on other aspects of the story, I make myself--sometimes with great difficulty--drop it, and turn my attention to the writer's concerns. And to the things that most fans are there for, which is character and relationship exploration. Even the bulk of gen I've betaed has been focused on relationship dynamics, just other kinds of relationships than ship fic.

[mekare]

I really, really like when authors bring their own interests or places they've lived/traveled or their jobs or whatever to their writing. It makes it feel rich and layered and real in a way that having everything be constructed of details from the source material does not.

Dito.

[asya_ana]

I know that Haixing is an alien planet and all, but I do also actually think it's China? Outside of the fact that there is no population density and no people or cars are in the streets, everything else feels like China that we're agreeing to call an alien planet. The scenery outside of the city is clearly location-specific, since well, it was shot in places. China is massive and ecologically diverse. I wish I was the kind of person who paid more attention to those differences, but in the absence of actual knowledge of flora and fauna, perhaps someone knows where it was actually filmed, and then you could research the ecology of that area? Like you, I feel somewhat cringey about the idea of deciding to make it European or American just because it's an alien planet.

In terms of would I care as a reader... that depends on the scene. Often, specific detail is what distinguishes evocative writing, but it's risky if you get it wrong or labor it. The trick is to include accurate specifics in a backgrounded way so as not to distract from the action or feelings, but to enhance it. As a fic writer it would be nice to keep that in mind in principle but not necessarily to beat yourself up over it. Most fic doesn't have the readership or the longevity to merit self-torture.

The other question for you as a beta is: is the question about tree one that you have or one that the writer has? If the writer is content to call a tree a tree and move on, it seems fine to leave it that way, but if the writer asked for specific help with painting a more realistic picture of the scenery, then well, I guess you have your work cut out for you!

I feel like I need a book now on Chinese ecology!

Let us know if you find anything out. :D It might also be a good article for the wiki. :D

[bonibaru]

For the wiki I would definitely love to see a section on geography and landmarks: the river, the forest, the caves, the mountains. Do they even have names. I couldn't find names or screen shots in quick searches (they may not have names) and haven't had time to go back through and look at the episodes yet. This might actually be a great place for mecurtin to dive in deep and contribute to the wiki.

[melannen]

For reading purposes, I would kind of file Guardian as one of those fandoms where the canon ecology is deliberately vague and story- and budget- driven (see: Stargate's nearly galaxy-wide Vancouver ecology, for the obvious American example) so I probably wouldn't critique anything that wasn't blatantly contradictory or distracting from the story.

For writing: I have kind of been filing Dragon City, for no reasons that are very easy for me to articulate, as being in ecologically in the Karst-y, mountain-y southern/southeastern areas, maybe around Guangzi? That part of China isn't super population-dense, and it has the kind of mountain-y areas we see in canon, and it's actually more likely to farm things like sweet potatoes and maize these days. Plus I can then flipside that Dixing is the poisoned rare-earth mining areas.

For Ye Old Haixing era, well: if you really want it actual 10000 years ago, there would not have been rice or wheat, and the staple crop was probably non-intensive millet (or something extraterrestrial, as they hadn't domesticated any Haixing plants yet....) And even counting out any climactic effects of the meteor, Earth was still just on its way out of the Last Glacial Maximum, climate and vegetation would have very different - Beijing would have been permafrost tundra until very recently, and the monsoon weather patterns would have been very different. Sea level was still much lower, but rising about as fast as it is today, and Japan might have still been a peninsula.

(That said, I've been trying to research palaeoecology of ~10000 years ago in Europe for a long time as research for an original world, and it's much tougher than it has any right to be, so only go into this if you want to make it a, like, project.)

(and because I can't, apparently, turn that off: Ye Old Haixing Era in Southern China would have had giant tapirs, Ultimate Hyena, stegodonts, possibly saber-toothed cats, and DIRE PANDAS. Pls give me Shen Wei + dire pandas.)

[lynndyre]

I want everything about Shen Wei and dire pandas, that is perfect. Maybe bb!Envoy can ride one.

[zeest]

Re: filming locations, the town scenes were filmed in Shanghai Film Park while the outdoors Hanga scenes were filmed in a mountain in Suzhou.

Actual filming locations aside, I generally agree with the other comments. Too many details would take me out of the story unless the detail is relevant to the story or if it fits the POV character to notice those details. Using details to paint a lush and evocative setting works if it's a third person omniscient POV, but whether or not it works also depends on the tone and style the author is going for, and can sometimes feel as though the author just wants to indulge in their specialty. Which is cool, just may not work for me as a reader.

I'm not keen on using the novel setting or a specific location in China as the setting because I prefer Haixing as "not-China", and pining it to an actual existing place makes it feel AU-ish. I prefer if a fic builds on what is already in the show. For e.g. if you can identify the trees that were in the outdoors scene, maybe use those trees and not, say, bamboo which even a flora-ignorant person like me knows that it doesn't appear in the show. Rice paddies to me seem reasonable as we know that they do eat rice in Haixing and rice is a common crop in the parts of the world that eats it as a staple. Another idea is maybe fruit crops, perhaps the fruits sold by the Merit Brush dude or the fruits we see on Shen Wei's coffee table.

[mecurtin]

Thank you for the location info! v. helpful.

eta: What "mountain in Suzhou"? That might help me ID the trees, at least as far as general species.

Would the Yashou forest location be in the Film Park, or elsewhere in Shanghai? Or Suzhou?

[forestofglory]

I love talking about this kind of thing in a meta context, and generally enjoy stories with these kind of details. However I'm also not bothered if the author doesn't mention tree species or whatnot.

Based on what the food we see in the show I would expect Dragon City to be in traditionally rice growing region rather than a traditionally wheat growing region. I wish I knew more about how Chinese cuisine varies by region -- then I might be able to pin point it a further than that. But the foodways do seem Chinese -- so I'd expect a landscape more like Asia than like Europe.

I noticed that there are several globes with Earth shaped continents in Shen Wei's office, so you could make a case for Haixing being an alternate dimension Earth, rather than just some planet somewhere.

[mecurtin]

Great catch with the globes!