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

[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.

[bonibaru]

I get it, I do! If the details are important to the story, and the writer wants them to be important, then do your best. If the details are icing but the cake tastes like cardboard, like I said ... no one is going to remember the beautifully described flora and fauna if they noped out at bad characterization and boring plot before they ever got that far.

[loligo]

I am a nature nerd, too. FWIW, I picture Haixing as being more like Europe in its population density and intensity of agriculture, but built on a foundation of Asian plants and animals. But since I'm not very familiar with the flora of China, a writer could get away with a lot of general tree names like "oak", and I would just accept it and move on. The only thing that would throw me out of the story would be specific trees that I know are native to somewhere else. So no Osage orange or Kentucky coffee-tree, LOL.

[lynndyre]

fwiw, I think in some ways it depends on the canon, as well as the sort of story you're trying to tell? I try to stick to mentioned trees and plants and so forth in Tolkien because that specificity and detail is present, but in Guardian it isn't - this isn't detailed accurate China, it's budget one-cliff-only, here's some fake flowers for your Hanga date night Haixing. So while some detail can still be nice, it's not essential and wouldn't throw me out if it weren't there, because it's not really present in the original setting.