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

[branchandroot]

Well, we're pretty sure booze existed ten thousand years ago. XD

But honestly, these people had /interstellar travel/. Even if they were hammered by ecological disaster I'd bet on a patchwork of "totally lost this" with "extremely sophisticated the other". The three things I'd count on retaining or immediately figuring out some way to re-acquire are alcohol, food-onna-stick, and sweets.

(Which is why I just stick my fingers in my ears and la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you about the whole making wine to feed the branch thing, because no, really, seriously, alcohol is one of the very oldest inventions we have archeological evidence of.)