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sid_guardian2019-05-06 10:43 pm
mecurtin) wrote in sid_guardian2019-05-06 10:43 pm
Entry tags:
Natural history and landscape of Haixing
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?
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?
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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.)
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I assume you mean Guangxi? Huh, that is an interesting and fitting place, since that far South there are no seasons, either, just as shown on the show.
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Yeah, it might actually be a little too hot in summer for the number of Symbolic Jackets we see? But a lot less seasonal than further north. And very green. But yeah I don't really know Chinese geography very well (and couldn't give you any specific set details from the show to back it up if my life depended on it), but that's where ~following my feelings~ led me.
If I wanted to do a very serious deep dive as to where it is, I might actually look closer at, like, ethinc cues from Sang Zan and Wang Zheng, to see what historical regional cultures they might match up with, too, but I seriously wouldn't even have a starting point for that yet, especially given the issues around minority ethinicities in China rn. I get the impression Dragon City itself is deliberately Generic Hegemonic China, culturally speaking, so maybe they're Generic Ye Olde Tribal China or the equivalent of Cherokee living in teepees, but maybe not.
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My experiences as a Finn are that people from Elsewhere will happily wear jackets, symbolic and otherwise, in temperatures I consider too wasm to exist in, so idk. People adapt to their climates? The greenery is certainly very green, and doesn't have the tinge of desperation places with more seasonal climates have.
AFAIK the Hanga are just Generic Non-Han Peoples. They might be more Northern China than Southern China, based on the costuming, but idk.
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