“Okay,” he says, “Do it again.” “—————,” replies Karkat.

I’ve been thinking since the ending of Yuri!!! on Ice, especially since its closing lines made me break out into ugly, wracking sobs, about how the show defines love, and how it is such a delightfully Japanese interpretation of the concept to my (American) mind.

So when I started interacting with the fandom and reading people’s fics, I got really confused by the way some folks were writing dialogue for Lan Wangji; he often sounded super awkward, spoke in fragments, and sometimes exclusively in third person. To be fair, all of those are elements of his speech at various times, but like, seeing it in English-language material felt like a really heavy-handed way of rendering it in translation?

Once upon a time, in a land about twelve hours north of here, I was in the second year of grad school and really regretting all my life choices. Because the professor of the sociolinguistics class I was taking was a post-doc living several states away from her fellow-academic husband, she felt the same and gave our class completely free rein in picking our final paper topic. Since watching Firefly was the only thing that had given me joy that semester, I decided to examine the pidginization of Chinese and English in that universe.