kiwi

Okay so I spent the past several weeks doing Battleship (very enjoyable, would battleship straight into the sun with the rest of team Pear again, 10/10) and consequently neglected absolutely everything else fannish. Creator reveals are on Wednesday, when I'll subject you to a long post of my year-on-year Battleship statistics plus links to everything I made, as usual.

But! This update is not about that. Instead, this update is about this Chinese book review, or rather, its final paragraph:

来弟、招弟、领弟、想弟、盼弟、念弟、求弟......这些触目惊心的女孩名字，看得我头皮发麻，在我身边也有叫这些名字的女孩，只不过她们的家长在“弟”字左边又添了个女字旁，变成了“娣”，招娣，这个女字旁加的很是巧妙，虽然同样是招来弟弟的意思，但是万一有人深究，她们还可以因为用这个女字旁来狡辩。除了招娣，还有若男、亚男、胜男......异曲同工之妙，倒从来没听过哪家男孩会起名叫招妹、若女、亚女、胜女，这是为啥呢？

Shortly: [list of girl names that mean "give us a boy next plz"], author finds these shocking, something I didn't get about how the author finds it women with those names changing the dì from 弟 younger brother to 娣 wife of younger brother ingenious; girls are also called names along the lines of "like a man", but you never see a man called "wishing for a little sister" or "like a woman".

The list of names (来弟、招弟、领弟、想弟、盼弟、念弟、求弟 ; 若男、亚男、胜男) is useful for when you want to write early 1900s realistic sexism, but the speculation at the end made me sad I only discovered this after works had been revealed. I wrote a matriarchy AU and there were some OC dudes I could totally have called 想妹 and 盼妹, for instance.

Anyway, I'm having some vague matriarchy AU thoughts. Will they come to anything? Probably not. Do they still exist? Yes.