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]

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.

[extrapenguin]

+1 There are readers who will actually engage with every word you write. If you are exceedingly lucky, you will get two of them. A surprisingly large chunk of readers will even skim over the plot, because they're only interested in their OTP interacting, and that scene of one half of the OTP thinking about something that is not the other half holds no interest to them. There are people who only read the porn. Almost all readers will be willing to shrug and go past it if you write the wrong species of tree.

[bonibaru]

If you are exceedingly lucky, you will get two of them

spoiler alert one of them is probably me lol