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?