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!)

[glymr]

You can comment on the original post, I don't bite. :)

To clarify, I never thought Shen Wei's reaction was due to the sweetness specifically (Like you, I figured it was a natural reaction to having something shoved in one's mouth!) But I did think he probably found it startlingly sweet.

However, you make some compelling points. I hadn't considered the wide availability of honey and sugar cane in Southeast Asia. Canonically, though, I think an argument can be made that neither of those would be things that young SW would have a lot of access to in a post-meteor-strike world. Or if either of them were, they would be a very rare sort of treat. It's something I think about sometimes, how different our palates must be compared to those of our ancestors, given that we eat so much sugar/corn syrup/etc compared to people even just a few hundred years ago. Not to mention the wide availability of every kind of spice and flavoring imaginable!

[china_shop]

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.

Yeah, I wondered about artificial flavours, particularly acidic ones, but I don't know anything about prehistoric diets so I tend to fall into handwaving and la la la... :-)

[ranalore]

Generally, I think people are going by Shen Wei's backstory of how recent the meteor strike was, and the privation he suffered before pretty much immediately becoming a child soldier, and drawing the logical conclusion that honey and sugar cane are in short supply in YOHE. Honey, at least, lasts a while, and some food storage may have survived the meteor strike, but I imagine any such supplies are saved for medicinal and preservation applications during wartime. I don't think it's impossible he's tasted something as sweet as the lollipop before. I just don't think it's likely.

That said, I agree that what surprises him in that scene is someone shoving something in his mouth, and probably the artificial flavor.