- 莲, “lían”: “lotus, water lily”
黎, “lí”: “black”
凰, “huáng”: “phoenix” (more accurately, used to refer to a female of the mythical fenghuang species)
- 智, “zhì”: “wisdom, intellect”
豪, “háo”: “brave, heroic, chivalrous”
煌, “huáng”: “bright, shining, luminous”
Nickname: He’d really rather you didn’t. It’s one of the precious few things he won’t be easy-going about. Líanlí picked his whole name for a reason, thanks, and he’s not fond of being nicknamed.
Gender/Pronoun: DMAB genderfluid, he/she/they/any. Most often he/him for the sake of convenience, but really, doesn’t mind any of the pronouns he’s ever heard (even ones that were explicitly made as jokes, like “shklee/shkler” from Futurama’s The Beast With A Billion Backs). Just don’t be weird if he decides he’s not feeling a certain pronoun today and corrects you on it.
Age: 27, going on 28.
Birthday: November 1st, 1994.
Sign: Scorpio.
Gemstone: Citrine, but you’ll never catch him wearing it. It’s ugly, he doesn’t like it; he’d prefer rubies, jet, onyx, or black diamonds, if he even remotely had the money for those.
Blood Type: B-
Fav. Food: Honestly not your business. If you insist, then as far as you’re concerned, he’s not picky as long as you either drown him in sugary sweetness or burn off the roof of his mouth with spice. Or both. “Both” is good. Please drown him in sweet chili sauce, yes, thank you.
Hated Food: Bland foods, oatmeal, and whatever unspeakable, unholy things British people do to their poor beef before they feed it to people like <********>, leave Cockney diction and drawling, country village accents alone, that’s all ******** fine: why can’t the English teach their children how to COOK.
Occupation: Independent composer and musician—which, in practice, means that most people would really call him a Youtuber/TikToker, because he has to post his music there to get people interested in buying it off Bandcamp, Amazon, or the iTunes store, or streaming it.
Hobbies:
i heard the old songs radiating from you / shroud ourselves in the cosmos, let the music play (Music): Some people say they live and breathe music hyperbolically……and Líanlí Huáng is not one of them. As far as he’s concerned, his life didn’t start properly until he heard a plug-in novelty doll shaped like Frankenstein’s Monster sing “The Monster Mash,” made it play the song over and over, and tried to join in after a few rounds. As far as listening goes, he’s omnivorous, finding something to either enjoy or learn from in everything, be it Britney Spears, mash-ups of BTS and Nine Inch Nails, Tchaikovsky arranged for the theremin, or sea shanty covers of Nickelback.
His true passion, though, lies in composing and performing. Please don’t ask him to pick one over the other because he can’t, it’s why he studied both aspects at college. Líanlí’s parents only meant to make sure their kids were well-rounded when they forced all of them into piano lessons, but for him, it was an awakening. He has since studied five other instruments, some that his parents tolerated (violin and yuéqín [Chinese moon lute] are distinctive and complex, thus worth bragging about) and one they attempted to forbid (he learned guitar at college without their permission). He’s particularly fond of guitar and the two kinds of flute he’s studied, but he’s used all the instruments he knows in both his original music and his “cover songs for the socmed algorithms.”
Ask him his feelings on the Western concert flute vs. the traditional Chinese dizi only if you have time to spare. In so many words, they are A Lot.
my dreams are haunted by armies, armies of ghosts / i dreamt that i was perched atop a throne of human skulls (Dream Analysis): Once upon a time, before he left his family, Líanlí’s older brother Qiáng tried telling him that reading into his dreams was stupid, that it was a waste of time, and that Science said dreams didn’t actually mean anything, they were just the result of your brain doing weird s**t while you slept. With all the respect Líanlí believes his older brother is due (which means “none”), Líanlí thinks this is garbage. He doesn’t believe in dream interpretation as a way of predicting the future or anything—this, in his opinion, would genuinely be stupid and attributing to dreams more power than they deserve—but Líanlí nevertheless believes dreams (everyone’s dreams, not simply his own) to be Significant and worthy of analysis. Dreams may not be prophetic, but they are signals you’re meant to be taking, whether from your unconscious mind or from the more spiritual, less mundane realms of reality.
All that in mind, he tries to stay on top of his dreams. He’s kept a dream journal since he was about seven, and still has his old ones, going back to his 13th birthday. More than that, he keeps them pretty well organized and refers back to them not-irregularly. Each dream, to him, is a unique experience that requires individual analysis, though he also thinks it helps to look at any themes that might emerge. Either way, even if you don’t end up missing something important by not analyzing your dreams, does analyzing them really hurt anybody? No, obviously it doesn’t. So, don’t talk to him about your “scientific” explanations; he doesn’t care.
there’s a club where you’d like to go, you could meet someone who’s lost like you / a stranger’s just a friend who hasn’t shared their secrets yet (Clubbing): The worst part about Líanlí’s career, if you ask him, is how utterly solitary it is. He is, at heart, a people person. He enjoys being around people. Meeting other Youtubers and musicians in town is always a delight, and he treasures opportunities to collab with people. But those chances aren’t always reliable, so one needs to find other ways of being around people. In this way, Líanlí sees nightclubs and bars as basically the adult version of a playground at the park: he shows up with no real expectations, he finds things to amuse yourself, he talks to some people maybe, and even if he doesn’t go home with a new friend (or at least a one-night stand), he still gets to be around people and get the wonderful buzz he gets from not being alone, knowing that he’s not alone, and being swept up in getting to feel connected to something bigger than just……one silly little person, working alone in either his silly little apartment or the silly little studio space he rents for recording his songs and shooting his videos.
got my paintbox out last night, stayed up late and wrecked this place / unfurl the black velvet altar cloth, draw a white chalk Baphomet (Drawing): Líanlí may nominally speak four languages (in order of fluency: English and Mandarin, French, and German), but he and words are not always on speaking terms, exactly. Even with his music, it’s easier to write lyrics than to just say how he feels about something—especially because he can, for the space of any given song, put on the persona of one character or another, and just write from the perspective of, for example, an ancient vampire with no ties left to their humanity, or a fairy tale princess whose Prince Charming never came, or whatever. Sometimes, though, words just don’t play nicely with him, regardless of context.
When they don’t want to behave with him, and he needs some kind of outlet, he picks up a pencil and a drawing book. He doesn’t consider himself an artist by any stretch of the imagination; he’d have to put in more time, effort, and dedication to earn that title, in his opinion. But he is a person who enjoys venting his feelings by putting various kinds of pencils, pens, or markers to paper, and doodling whatever images come to mind. Thanks to his dream journal, even if no images immediately come to mind when he sits down with a drawing book, he rarely runs out of material.
Virtues:
no sweeter pleasure than to see the credits clear through to the end / you gotta be strong in the face of suffering, even if it ends up meaning nothing (Resilient): Líanlí would bill his resilience more as spite than anything else: if the odds haven’t been in his favor lately, then why should he give the universe what it wants by rolling over and dying? While this phrasing isn’t wrong, it downplays the reality considerably and acts like Líanlí hasn’t put in work to pick himself up, dust himself off, and keep it pushing. By the very nature of his career, he’s had to learn to do this. Letting little setbacks or meritless criticism get to him would knock him down forever if he let it, between the contemporary haters and trolls who can show up in the comments sections, and the old scars from times in high school and undergrad when he went low-to-mid-key viral for being (at the time) a chubby, visibly queer Asian kid who was effusively emotional about everything from his schoolwork to Heath Ledger’s untimely death to what you missed on Glee. Getting knocked down like that sounds like something he’s already wasted enough of his life on doing, so thanks for the offer, but he doesn’t wanna.
and i am coming home to you, if it’s the last thing that i do / it gets dark and then, i feel certain i am going to rise again (Determined): Approaching problems, Líanlí Huáng goes hard or not at all. When he’s decided on pursuing something or getting some kind of job done, he hates to give up on it. That, to him, would feel like losing. Yes, he tries to keep his head up in the face of temporary setbacks, but he also gets moody, sullen, and vindictive when he loses, because he hates to lose. Regardless of the context or the situation, losing feels like he is proving right all of the people in his life who’ve ever told him that he can’t do what he wants, that he’ll never make it with any of his dreams, and that he won’t succeed unless he follows their specific rules and plans for him to the letter. Whether the specific naysayers he has in mind are random youtube trolls or his parents, they are not allowed to win. If he gets himself into a game instead of walking away from it, he will find a way to win, no matter what it takes.
some moments last forever, but some flare out with love, love, love / hold them close, hold them near, tell them no one’s ever going to hurt them here (Devoted): Líanlí does not open up to people easily—but that does not mean he won’t get attached quicker than anyone’s business. He struggles to tell people how he’s feeling or how much they mean to him, but that isn’t the same as them not mattering to him at all. When he takes a shine to someone, Líanlí wants them to feel valued, and important, and safe. He’ll come over to comfort them at two in the morning, even though he has videos to shoot and a studio space booked for eight AM. He’ll keep track of their behaviors until he can read their emotions better than his own. He’ll give them his jacket, sweatshirt, and flannel in the middle of a blizzard. The extent to which he struggles to verbally express how much he cares about people only motivates him to go bigger and harder about showing people that he cares about them, even if it “must” be done at his own expense, because he doesn’t want the people he cares about to feel like they don’t matter.
when you see the risen beast in your nightmares, you treat him like a long-lost brother / companionship is where you find it, so i take what i can get (Open-Minded): The way Líanlí sees things, life is too short to close yourself off to new experiences. Even if the experience ends badly for you, even if you get hurt or make a fool of yourself or whatever, you’re going to miss out on so much that the universe has to offer by not expanding your horizons and trying new things. When it comes to people, his attitude is one of the few good things that he’ll credit his birth family with giving him. As far as most of the people who knew their family back in Boston were concerned, the Huángs were a picture-perfect family, aspirational even, all of them bright, hardworking, and devoted to each other. Outside appearances told everyone that everything with the Huángs was fine, but it wasn’t. Living for so long with that dichotomy has made Líanlí painfully aware of how little you can actually tell about anyone from outside appearances alone. It costs nothing to withhold judgment and give people a chance to prove for themselves if they’re assholes or not.
Flaws:
it’s so hard to be yourself when you’ve already seen the inside / but i am just a broken machine, and i do things that i don’t really mean (Performative): Líanlí gets deeply invested in crafting every aspect of how (he wants) people (to) see him, in terms of both general personal qualities and how he feels at any moment—often neglecting the real person underneath his performance. He rarely outright lies (when he does, it’s usually to downplay things that genuinely hurt or bother him), but he stays aware of his audience and gives them what (he thinks) they want. Certain material realities may limit him in some ways (e.g., he may not have a certain skill so improvising with it will be less effective, and he can’t stop being of Han Chinese descent), but the best way around that is working the limitations into how exactly he plays himself for people. Even in moments of crisis, Líanlí struggles to genuinely express himself rather than playing up his reactions to an almost theatrical extent. Moments of genuine reality with him are rare, precious things and most of them come because either someone successfully caught him off-guard, or he got very, very drunk.
i try to tell you why i’ve come, it’s like i’ve got molasses on my tongue / when i try to open up to you, i get completely lost (Emotionally Tongue-Tied): Early on in life, Líanlí got the message that his problems didn’t really matter and talking about them at all was selfish, rude, and unfair of him to put on other people. Since there wasn’t a point in vocalizing his problems, he stopped doing it. Since bringing up his feelings only seemed to result in people using them against him, he started burying them in layers upon layers of misdirection. Even when writing lyrics, poetry, or the occasional piece of fiction that is blatantly inspired by his life and/or his actual feelings about something, Líanlí struggles to do it in a way that involves phrases like “I think” or “I feel.” Using the shield of “Well, I wrote from some fictional person’s first-person POV” is the only thing that helps, because it allows him some degree of nominal distance from his own feelings. At that, the strategy is hardly foolproof. Sometimes, there’s nothing for it, and the most you’re going to get is Líanlí shutting down and ******** off to mess around with one of the music pieces he’s working on, head out to a club and find a one-night stand, take a walk around town with no direction in mind and see where he ends up, or otherwise do. something. real. until he feels less bogged down in his own inability to tell you how he feels.
you smile at me in total defiance of all decency / i start laughing like a child, and i mark their faces one by one (Irreverent): Líanlí doesn’t like to let himself get bogged down in momentary setbacks or in emotions that are thorny, messy, and otherwise difficult. More than that, he doesn’t like letting other people see him sweat. While it’s true that he genuinely enjoys having a good time and spreading joy to others, it’s also true that he regularly ignores pretty much anything that could be construed as an unwritten social rule about when it is or isn’t appropriate to make a joke. Partly, this comes out of all the teenage rebellion he didn’t get to do while actually a teenager. These unwritten social rules ran his parents’ lives and were one of their primary tools in making Líanlí and his siblings miserable. Now that he doesn’t have to deal with those rules for fear of incurring parental wrath, he chooses not to bother. He knows the rules (most of them anyway) and he can abide by them, but please consider: the rules are stupid and he doesn’t want to deal with them.
On the other hand, Líanlí’s irreverence is often bound up in how much he is constantly performing some version of himself rather than being entirely honest with people. As far as he’s concerned, the correct time to make a joke is basically always and especially when he is going through some s**t. Is he injured? Make a joke about it (unless it’s something tiny like a paper-cut or a twisted ankle, in which case the answer is not “make a joke” so much as “make a big, dramatic scene in which he overhypes how much he is suffering and acts like his broken nail is the end of the world as we know it”). Is his entire life about to come crashing down around him? Time to make a joke about it and call himself a drama queen, besides!! Surely, this will prevent anyone from noticing that he is ever Not Okay.
no greater love than to lay my life down for a friend / hard limits fade into memory once broken through (Self-Sacrificing): Líanlí doesn’t have a problem with self-esteem, not really. On the whole, he thinks he’s a perfectly fine person, no better or worse than anyone else. Yes, he tries to be decent, and yes, he screws up not-irregularly, and yes, he has screwed up in ways that have hurt people and he probably will again, likely sooner rather than later, but he doesn’t feel like he’s done anything particularly heinous or damning on his character. He’s just a silly little guy who loves making his silly little music and wants to make people happy.…… But liking himself is not the same thing as truly valuing himself, which Líanlí has a great deal more trouble with. He is ready to give of himself for other people at the drop of a hat, whether any given sacrifice means his personal comfort (e.g., ignoring his own boundaries for someone else’s sake, giving up a seat on the train when he’s dead tired because it looks like someone else is even more tired), his time (e.g., coming over at 2am when he has recording studio time at 8, because someone he cares about is upset, cooking something special for you instead of working to edit his next video and get it ready for posting), his safety (e.g., giving up his jacket, sweatshirt, and flannel in the middle of a blizzard, throwing himself in the way of danger for you), or anything else. He’ll do these things with very few questions asked and little regard for any of the potential fallout, especially any side-effects that his choices might have for him personally.
In his mind, though, this isn’t a problem because it doesn’t come with a lack of self-esteem. It’s not a matter of thinking anyone else is a better person than he is, that he is a Bad Person who should suffer, or that they “deserve” his myriad sacrifices more than he does. On one hand, he hates feeling like he’s in anyone’s debt and will try to repay them for debts that may only exist in his mind without thinking about how that might feel to them. On the other, Líanlí just……wants so badly to help, to make people happy, and to feel connected to people, like he’s part of a group—a family, ideally—that’s bigger than himself and more than the sum of any individual parts. But outside of contexts involving his music, he’s not sure how to do that without falling back on behaviors that he knows come out of bad times and places in his life, but doesn’t feel he has a lot of viable alternatives for.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Eyes: Bright violet. Pretty big, relative to most of his family; pretty average-sized, relative to the rest of humanity. Crescent-shaped monolids. Gets puffy under the eyes very easily; no matter what he does to cover it up, it inevitably shows through when he smiles.
Hair: Black and long as s**t. Seriously, he’s 6’2” and his hair falls slightly past his waist, pin-straight. Sometimes, when it gets in the way, he’ll tie it up in a high ponytail or tame it into a braid or a messy bun (more often, two messy buns, just because there’s so much of it). If he’s feeling fancy, a partial updo (probably with crown braids, again mostly because he has too much hair and just putting it in a partial updo with nothing else will still look sloppy). Normally, though, a simple ponytail that gets it sufficiently out of the way.
Face: “Elfin” is a word he’s heard a lot. Overall shape is sort of between oval and diamond: longish and thin, with high, pronounced cheekbones and a jawline like a blade that’s dulled from too much use and not enough care to keep it sharpened. Full lips with a cupid’s bow that, when put together with his eyes, make for a puppy dog pout that is either devastatingly effective or hilariously pathetic, depending on your point of view.
Skin Tone: #F0CEB4, approximately. Warm-toned but fair and a bit on the pale side.
Body Type: As mentioned, 6’2”. Long-limbed, lanky, and frankly, too skinny for his frame and height; he’s maybe 150 pounds, soaking wet. Despite being a whole adult who can vote, buy his own skin mags and liquor, and (theoretically) rent a car all by himself, he still looks like a teenager who hit a growth spurt and makes all the nice aunties and grannies in his apartment complex feel compelled to feed him.
Clothes: Most common colors are black, red, and purple, but he’s not opposed to a splash of other colors (like, blues, grays, pinks). About the only color he doesn’t like wearing when it’s not required of him is white (it looks like you’re in mourning and thanks, he’d rather not). In terms of style: Layers. So many layers. Even in summer, Líanlí is likely to have on at least a couple layers, and one will probably be some kind of cardigan or thin sweatshirt because unfortunately, he runs very cold. He also likes combining elements that make people go “??? but what about your gender?” (he doesn’t know, what about it): flouncy sun-dresses with combat boots and men’s flannel shirts; black skinny jeans with pleated plaid skirts (give or take black lace lining around the hem) and beat-up concert tees; black skinny jeans with bondage straps straight out of the Tripp NYC back-catalogue and flowy, shoulder-baring peasant blouses. Generally, he looks like chaos and confusion, and thanks for noticing, he likes it that way.
Voice: In a word? Loud. Not that it’s unpleasant—quite the contrary: many of his followers/subscribers are fond of his voice (a rich, smooth tenor when speaking, with an impressive range when he sings), and any Tiktoks where he doesn’t speak tend to get comments to the effect of “where’s the audio porn” and “why isn’t he singing”—but Líanlí struggles greatly with the concept of an “inside voice.” He will try his best if you tell him he’s being too loud and ask him to turn the volume down……but his family regularly raised their voices at each other, and it was a struggle as the middle child to get any attention or be heard, even when he needed help (especially since the siblings next-youngest after him were twins). So, his sense of “too loud” wound up incredibly skewed. He tends to have exactly two volume settings: <******** Loud” and “Silent As The Grave.”
Also, he’s gotten very good at masking his natural accent after several years away from where he was raised—but when Líanlí is tired, drunk, especially distracted, etc., a distinctly, unmistakably Boston drawl rises from the depths like dread Cthulhu, coming to embarrass him and make people go “Oh my gosh, you never said you were from Boston!”
