No, but seriously

[branchandroot]

Am I the only one bewildered by Guardian fanon that Shen Wei must never have tasted anything as concentratedly sweet as a lolipop before Zhao Yunlan introduced him? I mean, concentrated sweets are not a modern phenomenon, and straight honey is at least as intensely sweet as modern hard candy. And if we go with an assumed cultural base of the show's originating culture, well, both honey bees and sugar cane arose from Southeast Asia. Chinese desserts historically incorporate both honey and cane sugar, including straight-up hardened sugar syrup.

If anything shocked Shen Wei about that (besides the essential point of having someone shove something in his mouth) I'd expect it to be the flavoring, not the sweetness.

Comments

[winter_blossom]

A lot of the fanon about Shen Wei bewilders me, tbh. Though this one does have some canon basis behind it. It seems plausible enough to assume that Dixing didn't have concentrated sweets back then (they seem to lag behind Haixing, development-wise, plus normal plants don't grow underground), but Shen Wei seems to have spent a lot of time on Haixing even as a child, so he'd have encountered Haixing sweets, at least? Though what with the meteor strike, such luxuries would have been in short supply, so maybe not.

But, yeah, the point of the whole lollipop scene wasn't anything to do with the taste/novelty of candy. After all, it was a metaphor for "lightening up enough to try out new things, even if they're things you didn't think you fancied before." Since Shen Wei canonically doesn't like sweets but loved the lollipop because it was Kunlun's gift to him. (Also, there had to be some basis for the lollipop wrapper-encased pendant!)

[branchandroot]

/That's/ the part of the moment I love best, yes. That Shen Wei has enough affection for this crazy man in his life to accept the gesture.

I think the assumption that the meteor knocked the whole world back to subsistence-level is one of the things that gets to me, actually. We know they retained enough technology to create the Holy Tools in that same generation, and even if food production /was/ back to hard-scrabble for some reason, unless every (many and varied) source of sugar was destroyed, we'd still be seeing it in food preservation. Salt and sugar are the two biggies, there.

Honestly, this is probably part and parcel of my discontent with a lot of the common YOHE world-building.