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Burial at Sea
| Zine | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Burial at Sea: Trans Gothic and Tian Guan Ci Fu |
| Publisher: | Roland |
| Editor(s): | |
| Date(s): | 2025 |
| Frequency: | |
| Medium: | Print, PDF |
| Size: | 66 pages |
| Fandom: | Heaven Official's Blessing |
| Language: | English |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Burial at Sea: Trans Gothic and Tian Guan Ci Fu is a 2025 Tian Guan Ci Fu zine by Roland. It contains a 51-page meta essay about Beefleaf, gender, and gothic fiction, plus a table of contents, a bibliography, extensive endnotes, and an "interlude" that details the results of some Beefleaf-related polls Roland issued to their friends. It is focused primarily on the popular Black Water arc of TGCF, which is also known in the English-speaking fandom as the Beefleaf arc.
The author describes the essay as both their "reading of the Black Water arc of TGCF as a work of trans gothic"[1] and a Beefleaf ship manifesto.[2] In terms of both format and content, Burial at Sea represents a departure from the norm among TGCF zines.
Contents
Table of Contents
The zine's table of contents reads as follows:
- Introduction
- I. Forced to Swallow
- II. A Cloaked Figure in Shadow
- III. The Dark Vagina
- IV. Manic Pixie Dream Girl 4 Big Titty Goth GF
- V. A Body Under Siege, or, the Fall of the House of Shi
- VI. Shattering the Barrier (?)
- Interlude: Beefleaf market research survey
- VII. Life Un/gendered
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
Introduction
In the introduction, Roland explains why they've written an essay on the Black Water arc as gothic fiction:
[The Black Water arc] is about loss, family, loyalty, and gender. In short, it is a gothic novel nested within a broader story. And it obsesses me.[3]
He quotes an interview where Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, the author of TGCF, said that Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights had a big influence on her work, then goes on to list elements of the Black Water arc that follow conventions of gothic novels like Wuthering Heights. These include:
- disjointed narratives that jump between narrators and points in time, contain stories-within-stories, or are fragmented around crucial pieces of information;
- atmospheres of gloom and apprehension;
- emphasis on doubling, dopplegangers, mimesis, etc;
- fractured selves, characters who are not who they say they are, and true identities that have been concealed, either willingly or unwillingly, perhaps even from themselves;
- fraught familial dynamics, including curses and secrets, especially around bloodline, inheritance, or incest;
- structures and estates that are vast, ancient, anachronistic, labyrinthine, haunted, etc, and which often contain subterreanean or hidden areas;
- imprisonment, enclosure, live burial;
- sexual violence that manifests as genuine danger for the characters but a source of titillating horror-pleasure for the reader[4]
They conclude the introduction by saying that they had not found any English-language analyses of the gothic elements of the arc that went beyond aesthetics, so "now you’re here, and you’re in for it."[1]
The Interlude
The interlude, which comprises pages 46-54 of the zine, lists the anonymized results of what Roland jokingly calls their "market research"—polls they conducted among their friends in the fandom. Questions included "describe your feelings about beefleaf in three words", "do you associate the ship with any particular imagery?", and "if you could change one thing about beefleaf canon, what would it be?", among others.
Each question received 12-15 responses, and answers varied, though they skewed towards enjoyment of the dark and violent elements of the Black Water arc. For example, three of the responses to the question about changing one thing about beefleaf canon were "For hx to have tortured swd more before killing him", "I don't know how you could make it worse. but worse.", and "i think the whump could have been more gratuitous."[5]
Comparison to Contemporary Zines
Like many fandoms of the time, most zine production in the English-speaking (and Russian-speaking) C-Novel fandom of the early- to mid-2020s focused on polished, collaborative anthologies of art or both art and fiction. For example, other TGCF zines of the same era included Unfulfilled, Four Calamities Zine, and Heaven Official's Kitchen. Burial at Sea, as a non-fiction essay zine by a single author on a single topic, was a departure from this norm.
In terms of its contemporaries, it perhaps most closely resembles zines published by tshirt, which include Good Kid, a 17,000-word Scum Villain essay, and Yaoi Zine, a non-fiction anthology zine to which Roland has himself been a frequent contributor. Tshirt is also thanked in the acknowledgements of Burial at Sea.