Beefleaf
| Pairing | |
|---|---|
| Pairing: | He Xuan (贺玄)/Shi Qingxuan (师青玄) |
| Alternative name(s): | 🍖🍃, Beefleaf, 2Xuan, XuanXuan, 雙玄, Shuangxuan |
| Gender category: | non-binary |
| Fandom: | Heaven Official's Blessing (TGCF) |
| Canonical?: | no |
| Prevalence: | Popular |
| Archives: | Hè Xuán/Shī Qīngxuán Works on AO3 |
| Other: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Beefleaf (🍖🍃) is the non-binary pairing of He Xuan and Shi Qingxuan from the Heaven Official's Blessing fandom.
The ship is one of the most popular in the fandom on AO3.
Canon
Relationship
In canon, He Xuan and Shi Qingxuan have a very complex relationship. The reader first meets He Xuan under the name Ming Yi, Shi Qingxuan's apparent best friend. Later in the book, it is revealed that "Ming Yi" is in fact He Xuan, a ghost king and one of the Four Calamities, and that He Xuan has assumed the identity of Ming Yi in order to carry out a centuries-long revenge plan against Shi Qingxuan's older brother, Shi Wudu.
While Shi Qingxuan is implicated in this revenge plan—without Shi Qingxuan's knowledge, Shi Wudu swapped He Xuan's fate with Shi Qingxuan's, leading to Shi Qingxuan's ascension to godhood and He Xuan's painful and humiliating death—He Xuan brutally murders Shi Wudu but chooses to let Shi Qingxuan live, stripped of godhood. In a scene towards the end of the book, He Xuan seeks out Shi Qingxuan to return Shi Qingxuan's beloved hand fan, suggesting that He Xuan may feel some regret. Fans have latched on to the complexities of this dynamic to explore the interplay of things like violence, love, duty, and guilt in the characters' relationship (and, of course, to write fix-it fluff, angsty darkfic, PWPs, and everything in between).
Gender
| International Focus Request: Help! Editors need some assistance with including international and/or non-English perspectives on this page. I have no idea how Chinese-speaking fans, or indeed other international fandoms for the book, feel or have talked about the gender stuff |
Gender is another aspect of beefleaf's canon of which a great deal is made in fandom. Both Shi Qingxuan and He Xuan can canonically shift between "male" and "female" forms. Shi Qingxuan prefers the female form, and a backstory reveal tells the reader that while Shi Qingxuan was assigned male at birth, they[Note 1] were raised as a girl in an attempt to fool a demon who had marked Shi Qingxuan at birth. He Xuan occasionally adopts a female form on the page, but only under the guise of Ming Yi and only in Shi Qingxuan's presence. (Notably, He Xuan is rarely seen in canon without Shi Qingxuan also being present.)
Debates exist in the English-speaking fandom as to whether Shi Qingxuan and/or He Xuan are canonically cisgender or transgender, to what extent transness can be read into Shi Qingxuan's character, whether He Xuan can reasonably be interpreted as something other than a cis man, and exactly what these characters' respective gender identities are. As a result, there are plenty of fanworks depicting the characters both as cis women, both as cis men, both as trans or nonbinary, or one (typically Shi Qingxuan) as trans/nonbinary while the other is cis.
Fandom
This article or section needs expansion. |
Origin of "Beefleaf"
The ship name "beefleaf" comes from a meme in Heaven Official's Blessing's English-speaking fandom. A Twitter user called cucumberbros drew NSFW He Xuan/Shi Qingxuan fanart and posted it to the website Privatter. The Privatter post was locked with the password shuangxuan, a romanization of 雙玄, the Chinese-speaking fandom's ship name for He Xuan/Shi Qingxuan. (Shuangxuan was at that time the commonly accepted ship name for the pairing in the English-speaking fandom.) Cucumberbros decided to use emojis for the password hint, and landed on "Hint: 🍖 x 🍃 name": 🍖 (meat on bone) in reference to the fact that He Xuan eats a lot, and 🍃 (leaf fluttering in wind) because Shi Qingxuan's title is Wind Master.
According to cucumberbros, this confused their friends, who ultimately translated 🍖🍃 to "beefleaf" and began circulating the term.[1] "Beefleaf" caught on, in part because it solved the problem of the extant ship name shuangxuan containing a spoiler about He Xuan's identity,[Note 2] and the ship is now almost exclusively referred to as beefleaf by English-speaking fans.
Common Tropes in Fanworks
Example Fanworks
| Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples. |
Fanfiction
Fanart
Fanvids
Meta
Zines
Links & Resources
- Hè Xuán/Shī Qīngxuán works on AO3
- Beefleaf on The Shipping Wiki
- #beefleaf on Tumblr
- #beefleaf tag on pixiv
Footnotes
- ^ This pronoun is used not to imply that Shi Qingxuan identifies as non-binary in canon, but to acknowledge the ambiguity in canon that has led to various readings of Shi Qingxuan's gender in fandom.
- ^ 雙玄 (shuangxuan) means, roughly, "two Xuans" or "pair of Xuans". That both characters have the given name Xuan is not revealed until well into the canon, when the reader learns that "Ming Yi" is He Xuan.
References
- ^ shen yun 🍖🍃 @cucumberbros (Feb 14, 2019): hello ive decided to explain the beefleaf name lore in one messy doodle....... tell a friend......... that i am sorry..................... but also not very sorry at this point (Tweet). Accessed March 24, 2024. (archive link)