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kimitama — ARCHMAGI: Wenyan Jiang ref sheet reboot
Published: 2013-09-22 03:25:26 +0000 UTC; Views: 2074; Favourites: 39; Downloads: 9
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guess who's back?lol remember when i couldn't decide on a surname for this guy. memories. can you believe it's been two entire years?!?! MY BABIES ARE TURNING TWO UBUBUBUBU POKES THEIR CHEEKS
I'm afraid this doesn't necessarily constitute a return of my interesting Archmagi webcomic monstrosity (that lasted for a tragic four strips? I don't know). But I still definitely love Wenyan and Elain, and I'm still forever amused that Wenyan is a watcher favourite (second place behind Elsa LOL WOT M8) And I really wanted to redesign them- (there may be an elain sequel. we don't know yet)
Wenyan's original robes were rather plain, imo, (god lmao i've been going through my entire archmagi gallery folder and laughing) so I kinda spiced them up so that they resembled a weird JRPG mage-class like Elain's? I also had this idea to make it a bit of a combination of traditional Chinese and British dressing.
- Western trousers and buckled loafers (lol wenyan you fuckin nerd)
- a more... hooded Merlin-like cloak (like Elain's)?
- the do-ups on the cloak are pretty Asian (note: they're not frog clasps though)
- sort-of semi-changshan (长衫 ??!?!?!) that isn't REALLY THAT.. ACCURATE...
- with chinese.. uh.. shoulder guards? lol they aren't even historical armor but they appear in dynasty warriors which means IT'S TOTALLY CHINESE (no)
- the scarf-front-things are... made up MING DYNASTY. (nah, seriously, some ming dynasty empresses wore something like them?? um. I don't know. I was inspired. the weird goldy-swirl things on them are some crazed form of anti-demon charm in my head, and, much like in an RPG, Wenyan is forced to wear them for necessity rather than fashion (otherwise he'd never wear something so bright-coloured!!! bless him). Upon further research, I realized that the circular things could actually be akin to the daoist demon charms which were employed in the Zhou dynasty so i was like "aight i can do this" and sort of. adapted it?
- the cut of his sleeves and length is pretty Qing dynasty, iirc? not sure about this. someone help me i don't know what i'm doing
i know absolutely jack about Chinese clothing and Wenyan's clothes sorta come off as "vaguely asian" as opposed to truly Chinese— which is pretty bad on my part because i use a lot of Rule of Cool despite the extensive research on period clothing, haha! A similar thing happened with Elain's clothing— in her case, it's very Hallstadt Celtic meets Thirteenth Century Britain meets Gay Nineties meets JRPG mage class LOLOL
Wenyan's belt buckle is copied from the handles of my dresser, which is Chinoiserie (aka: "that one time that european furniture-makers went through a chinaboo phase in the 1700s and started making chinese-looking stuff") The dresser was handed down to us from my grandmother's house in the desert, and I only just realized that the gold plated handle thingies on the dresser are actually the Chinese symbol for longevity (?!) which is pretty cool. It's one of those weird things where the symbol is burned into my mind from staring at my dresser handles when I couldn't sleep as a kid |D (side note: i went and asked my parents how old the dresser was, but they read my ulterior motive and were like "no, lunatama, you can't sell it on antiques roadshow", so... so much for that money-making venture)
man i like to ramble. here's more ramble about some wenyan/general archmagi backstory that never managed to come out in comic.
SO BASICALLY I'm not sure if this ever came out much, but Wenyan is essentially raised by Taoist monks. Why the Tao? To be honest, this is kinda an ethnicity deal.
To be more specific— Elain is technically a druid, because she's ethnically a Celt from the Welsh region— this means that in the end, Elain's strongest suits would lie in the things Druids traditionally specialized in: in other words, Elain is actually supposed to be in-tune with the forces of nature, the unbreakable pattern of Celtic society, a sort of nature guardian of society. Elain shoves this association away, and chooses to pursue a more Harry Potteresque branch of fighty fight magic, without strenghtening her magical foundation. Because she's talented, she succeeds fiercely at this, and really winds up more of a spectacular renegade magical knight with extremely strong offensive powers. (this actually means she has quite the capacity for villainy; in druidic society, if you lose touch with your roots and get carried away with your power, hella bad shit happens. Elain's pretty far down this path, and given more ambition, could easily turn into a wicked being; Wenyan supposedly pulls her back from this, and their relationship winds up symbiotic. k, too much rambling, moving on. if only i could have put this in comic form brah)
Wenyan is in the completely opposite situation; for Wenyan's "magic" (usin' this word loosely, here; technically my universe is magic but the actual celtic/chinese/INSERTCULTUREHERE practices are deff not, and would fall under... spirituality, maybe?) I went with the wu (巫) of the Warring States period, who were essentially spirit mediums, diviners, healers, and HELLA BADASS DEMON EXORCISERS. one of the character's translations is "sorcerer" so i was like.. yeah. ok. (another reason I wanted to ensure he had a demon background is a FUN TIME SPOILER HEY WHAT'S THIS NEW CHARACTER? NO. SH). Wenyan is pretty bad at reigning back demons, because... he's... pretty human at heart, and raised by mundane humans, and demons are fucking scary— moreover, they're pretty thin on the ground. (Why? I still have to figure this out. Urbanization drove them away, perhaps. Are they all waking up at once, thanks to the turn of the century? Yes. Yes, they are. God, look at all this wasted plot.) Besides his demon problem, he's pretty in-touch with what being a wu entails; he's always been a pretty solid healer since his conception, can divine in rather vague terms, and he could theoretically save a small town from drought if he tried very, very hard. So, yeah, he's weak at practical application, but the point is that his foundations are there, yes? He's in-touch. (there's a lot of really cool stuff about the possible origins for the wu character on wikipedia, btw, i recommend)
his backstory's kinda shifted slightly throughout his conception because of trying to make it realistic, but essentially he's like some kind of bizarre muggle-born. His parents were dead normal and he's from somewhere in south China that keeps changing because i'm inconsistent (Chongqing?). I should think that his parents reactions to figuring out that he had weird freaky powers would range from superstitiously impressed to complete and utter terror. Obviously it wouldn't be scary at first, since Wenyan's brand of magic is rather gentle; easy Cassandra truths about vague things in the future and predicting the gender of his siblings, which would make his parents just assume he was rather introspective or a little spiritual. I figured as he got a bit older, it would escalate further; I actually considered at one point that he manages to accidentally lure some kinda small-time vengeful ghost to his family home (operating on the Percy Jackson principle that divine powers lure monsters) where he basically puts his little sister (yes there will be another post about wenyan's family) in the line of danger by the sheer power of existing. From there he'd probs be a) bailed out by a capable magic user who is like YER A WIZERD HARRY or b) he actually manages to seal it. According to bullshit new-age tao websites VERY REPUTABLE SOURCES, the Zhou Dynasty actually believed that chinese writing was a weapon against bad stuff; this is where I paused, impressed with myself, because if you're chinese, you'd know that Wenyan's first name— 温言— ... yeah. Damn. I'm cool (more like "all my OC name significance is based off of coincidences but w/e). this is where i started laughing, imagining little eight-year-old wenyan warding off a ghost with a sheet of calligraphy homework. I don't think I understand Chinese exorcisms very well. I should... probably brush up on that. Cough.
I suppose from that point, it'd become pretty apparent that Wenyan certainly couldn't remain with his family— he wouldn't want to, if it meant constantly being pursued by scary stuff, and I guess this is where a Tao monastery would come in. A lot of the principles of Taoism were based on the practices of the wu, but I'm still a little shifty about using a real religion! It reeks a bit of that mortal instruments "beethoven was an alien spy" sorta deal, so I might kinda... semi-excuse it by saying it's more of a Tao sect of secret society monks? ... yeah, I don't know.
Also, to clarify: Wenyan is not a monk, and thus not under any obligation to remain chaste (lol as if he'd get laid). He's just educated by them. I haven't been able to find much of info on taoist monk rankings, but he's the bottom level. I also firmly believe that there were one or two other "gifted" children who were educated alongside him, and, needless to say, they were not raised by regular people, and had a bit more of a... knack for the practical magic they were taught. Wenyan scored the highest in written testing, but he was always shoddy at the actual magic part, and so he felt like a bit of a failure. Also, being a bit of a dweeb, he was probably picked on quite a bit because he's bookish and an asshole. Over the course of his nine-year stay, he goes from quite a gentle, soft-hearted boy to the rather sardonic stoic idiot he is today partially because these combined experiences: he can't protect the people he loves from something that's his fault, he's kind of a geek, he's caused his mother and father extreme inconveniences and he'll never be the eldest son that Chinese society wants him to be. So he makes up for it by trying to be an encyclopedia, and the best at what he does— but he even fails at that, to an extent. (Also, the glasses might be a metaphor, or maybe just me being shitty; he fixes his own eyesight when he gets advanced enough in some kind of weird effort to shed the geek??? i .. i don't know)
He's a failure, basically. He's a piece of shit. He fucked up. He's trash. And when he finally moves to London to be apprenticed abroad, he's fucking enraged to find out that his mentor is a loose, amoral, lazy white girl that can do hugely successful magic with minimal theory study; she's also charismatic, and sociable, and everything he's not, and also, he is forced to babysit her.
I just realized through typing this that Wenyan was born in modern-day mainland China, and thus shouldn't have siblings thanks to the one-child policy. Uh... he's... born in Hong Kong...?? (whispers "god damn it i fucked up" to the wind)
SUPER DUPER TL;DR: wenyan is a magical monk who is trash
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Comments: 23
HE'S REALLY TALL AND HE HAS AN EXCELLENT JAWLINE AND THAT BACKSTORY IS KILLER OH MY GOD. IT'S FRIGGIN' AWESOME.
ps
'warding off a ghost with calligraphy homework'
'brush up' on chinese exorcisms
UNINTENTIONAL STEALTH PUN
I LAUGHED
UGLILY
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HE'S SO TALL IT MAKES ME CRY WITH JOY IMAGINE HIM JUST WALKING AROUND BEIJING INWARDLY CRYING "I'M SORRY I'M SO TALL I DON'T KNOW I EAT THE SAME THINGS ALL OF YOU DO" it's made better by the fact that his dad is 5'6" and all of his family is shorter and he jUST TOWERS ABOVE THEM LIKE A MAGICAL BUILDING
.... wow
that must have certainly been an unintentional stroke of genius on my part
: )
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MOPS YOUR TEARS AND CRIES
DID HE EVER REALLY LEAVE OUR HEARTS
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wenyam come to me son
also i read the entire thing and screeches wenyan u chinese diva u
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wenyam: waddles into your arms
wenyam: rolls out of arms and into soup pot
OH GOD bORI NONO obNRFOGNRKGHBSLKGHSDLG BORI NO I SWEAR HE'S WAY DIFFERENT NOW ALSO ELAIN ISN'T AN ACTUAL WHORE AND DOESN'T TALK LIKE ADRIAN MOLE
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BLANCHETTE IS MY FAVORITE NOT ELSA OR WUDING oh his name is wenyan nevermind but I EMOTIONALLY CONNECT WITH BLANCHETTE SHE IS MY SPIRIT ANIMAL MORE BLONDIE PLS TY
and i love reading your descriptions never stop thank
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WUDING MARY UR A SHIT
thanks for the new wenyan nickname fodder now elain can call him "wu tang clan" too
every time someone says they actually like blanchette i start to bawl because blanchette is comprised of the worst parts of my personality hurrah hurrahcries
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BLANCHETTE IS MY FAVORITE then tree then alvin.
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OMFG EVERYONE BE LIKIN THE TREE YALL IDK WHAT GIVES
alvin is number one
prom queen
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tree with her iphone and sleepyness and gnjklhbd cutie
blanchette is #1 in my heart
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NOTE: NOT A REAL WEBCOMIC. MISH-MASH COLLECTION OF COMIC STRIPS ABOUT OWN WEIRD STORY. ALSO, SUB-PAR 2011 ART.
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Additional note: regarding the Dao, I don't think religion is more of the proper term, despite the books saying that it is. I guess in a sense it is reasonable to call it a "religion" but I prefer to call it "spiritual practice" instead.
If you're narrowing down to the Wu period, I suppose you're right about the ghosts and whatnot since the people there still referred back to ancestral worship. But from what I know about Daoism is that it emphasized "The Way" or the harmony of nature (You know, the Ying and Yang?) and the flow of events (that's why they often compared rivers and water to symbolize Daoism). The earliest Daoist teachers practiced it for the sake of prolonging their life and meditation; they did not have any intentions of the practice becoming a religion (since religion implies worshiping a deity? Lao Tsu was only the founder of the principles, he was not worshiped at all--I hope).
Adding on to the "flow of events", the term they called it was "wuwei" which meant "without thought/becoming tranquil without the interference of external influences" so that it can help those who meditate achieve peace with themselves.
So I suppose that's enough information to help you? I don't know if you already attained this information but I guess it can be used to sort out any misconceptions.
I took some info from my Ancient Chinese Civilization primary source. But I actually know some information from my knowledge anyway. The text was to verify the facts.
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This entire universe is actually modern-day, so this would be China in 2013! But it's one of those typical "all the supernatural stuff that the legends talk about are actually true" settings, so this info still applies |D Sorry about the religion thing, btw, I kinda just jumped to the "religion" conclusion because there are monks. Whoops!
hmm.... is Daoism simply that belief and meditation, then? we glossed over some chinese schools of thought in high school, but it was very sparse and focused more on names. I suppose it means that the sort of thing wenyan practices is less Dao (is this the right romanization GDI I'VE BEEN USING THE WADE-GILES THIS ENTIRE TIME--) and then more the early Shang/Zhou superstitions and ancestor worship? I think they did assign deities to nature, iirc. Idk if that makes it a religion
this info is super useful though! thanks : D ps: totally jealous that you're taking chinese civilizations. I'm currently taking history of the late medieval world but my college's history dept is severely lacking in asian history departments besides GLORIOUS NIPPON of course OTL
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Ah. There's nothing wrong with the intertwining of both modern and ancient cultures! Haha there is a difference between spiritual practice and religion anyway so yep, it's understandable why people would think monks would belong to religion. The same also applies for Buddhism I believe; it was meant for the same purpose except that it unfortunately changed into the whole "worshiping Buddhas" after centuries after Sakyamuni's death. Now I'm going off track here.
But yes, the Zhou period is about right when it comes to ancestral worship. But it was something that lasted for a longer period of time--to this very day I suppose.
Fun fact: People did have a deity (named Di-stands for higher being) in the earlier periods (such as the Xia and I believe the Shang) that they worshiped. Everything they did was to please that diety--they even initiated sacrifices and fought wars for Di. If they experienced natural disasters or physical/mental exertions from the emperor/ruler, they thought it was Di's way of punishment because they angered it.
As for the Shang, they really did it with the supernatural beings. They even used oracle bones to tell the situation and outcome of certain events and that really tied in with their belief in Di. Also nature gods/spirits and the like.
It wasn't until after the conquest of Shang by the Zhou that the worshiping shifted from Di to Tian (or heaven) and that commenced the astrology, cosmology, and astronomic studies (that's the time when they detailed out the celestial bodies and predicted future outcomes from the stars).
Moar info. Yay.
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The Di... hmm, I didn't know that. I'll see if I can look it up and find out more! : > I knew about the oracle bones for deffs, because it was the wu who decoded what the cracks in the bone meant. (hence wenyan and his whehehrhdgsr interpretative ability idk)
ah.. oh lord. but with all this conquering and stuff, it might be difficult to consolidate all of these beliefs into one- then again, it can't possibly be harder than the problems trying to mash pagan spiritual practitioners into the same plane of existence as catholic mysticism |D
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I suppose that it won't really matter to leave out a couple of things since it'll get really complicated for your universe.
As long as you have the general info I don't think you will have to make Wenyan's BG incredibly complex. What you wrote there is fine.
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Okay I will admit that I've been stalking looking at the webcomic you made and I absolutely loved the characters and concept you put into the short series.
But Wenyan really grew to me for some reason.
Perhaps it's because I have a thing for animated Asian men whoops
I'm guessing that from my knowledge on Ancient Chinese history, the clothing looks about right and you don't always have to make it accurate. I like the way you designed his clothing and his background story and his personality and his everything because it just suits him very much. Haha!
You make me want to make Chinese OCs now. Good job, creator Bridget!
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ps: if you actually read that entire essay, you are inhuman.
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I somewhat skimmed through it-read most of it. haha
I NEED SLEEP
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OH GOD PUTS FACE IN HANDS THE ART WAS SO BAD DON'T JUDGE ME DEB
Wenyan is weirdly popular, and I actually kinda like that he is BD I actually think it's partially because there's an overwhelming majority of white people in english-language comics, so the bit of diversity can be nice (?) YEAH!
i feel u 100%, though. let's get down to business to defeat the huns
oh god i'm really relieved though! chinese history and culture can never be my strong point so i felt like i was flailing around at times HUE HUE my poor failure baby
PLS GO MAKE CHINESE OC
THE WORLD NEEDS MORE GORGEOUS ASIAN MEN. I BELIEVE IN YOU
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PST I added another comment so that's why I'm replying late whoops. Haha yes, diversity is good.
Haha! I'm taking Ancient Chinese civilizations as my cultures class so I'm actually really intrigued by the lasting history. I learned so much so far even though it's been about two weeks since college started. YOU CAN ALWAYS REFER BACK TO ME I'LL DO MY BEST TO RELAY THE INFO.
I'm actually planning on making two male Chinese OCS. I have their names picked out ohyes.
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