Like other people said in this chat, Hong Meiling is a character that is always made fun of, but I think there is something else to this whole situation.
Meiling is my favourite character for 3 years now, so sorry if this post sounds biased or even straight up angry. I had all those thoughts building up inside my mind, and this is the only chance I found to let them all out.
Let's begin. Meiling always gets mocked for a multitude of reasons, like being weak, sleeping on the job, and being good for nothing, and this is only to name a few. Yes, I know that the whole "sleeping on the job" thing became kinda canon with PMISS, Soku and CDS, but at least the canon trait isn't as bad as the fanon makes it look like. I am thankful that the Meiling abuse meme didn't become canon, because dear God, some people in this community go to gruesome extents with this, ranging from "Meiling gets knifed by Sakuya for doing something wrong" to "Meiling gets all her body parts ripped off for just existing".
Thinking about all of this, I have realised something: all those negative fanon traits were made up just because she is Chinese. The Japanese and the Chinese aren't too friendly towards eachother, to say the least, and since during the early 2000's the Fandom was almost entirely made out from the Japanese, they were very quick to treat her like some moronic Chinese stereotype. People gave the Chinese Girl the whole "useless" label because they see all Chinese products as "low quality". And to top it all of, after a poll that was made to decide if she should be called "Hong Meiling" or "Kurenai Misuzu" (her Japanese name), some random guy came in out of nowhere and said "Hey, why don't we just call her China?", and everyone agreed. And so, during the late 2000's and early 2010's, there isn't a single Touhou fan who didn't call her "China". Nowadays, most people call her by her real name, and seem to respect her more than during the so-called "golden era" of the fandom, but people still recognise her only for her sleeping habits. Just try to find a Meiling-related post on the subreddit (or most other communities) that doesn't reference that either in the post itself or in the comments.
While yes, the fandom is behind most of Meiling disrespect, but there is one more individual I do have to talk about. That person is none other than Mr. Touhou himself,
ZUN.
Think about it. In most entries of the series after EoSD, ZUN treated Hong Meiling like a joke:
- In the interview in BAiJR between Aya and Meiling, the first reference to her sleeping on the job was made. Other than that, we found out that she is the gardener of the mansion, which is nice.
- One year later, PMiSS made the sleeping gag canon. We did get some neat characterisation about her.
- Hisoutensoku is when things start to get messy. Here, Meiling's campaign where she defeated the evil Taisui Xinjung and his assasins was revealed to be all just some dumb dream. At least we got more characterisation for her, so that's also nice.
- But there is more: The Inaba manga had a scene where Meiling was shown as incompetent when she had to check the invitations of some mere bunnies and the Eitnei crew (might have percieved the manga in a wrong way, tho). They already passed the gate before she even managed to finish with the invitations. It's still unknown if the manga is canon or not.
- In WaHH, Remilia and Sakuya started to violently tease her (to be fair, it was because Remilia and Sakuya drank something that made them behave like Oni, but still)
- And finally, to end this, we have the shitshow that is CDS. Why is it so bad, you may ask? Well, for one she openly admitted in the first chapter that she sleeps on the job almost every day, then she had an arguement with Sakuya when the maid got suspected for "poisoning" Patchoulli, then it was revealed that Patchy was actually possesed by an evil vengeful spirit that wanted to create havoc in Gensokyo, said spirit later possesing Meiling, as well as putting her into a coma, and for the grand finale, she gets almost strangled to death by Flandre herself because of that vengeful spirit that was inside Meiling at the time. I heard that other characters got this kind of treatment as well, like Reisen and Kanako.
I think it's pretty clear that ZUN doesn't respect her at all, at least to me. So all of this makes me wonder: why does ZUN treat Hong Meiling like this? Did he intend from the very beginning for her to be a joke character? Does he have a grudge against Meiling? Who knows.
One thing I do know is that her future is looking grim, and I actually dread the next time she appears in a another entry in the series, because she will most likely be treated like a joke yet again.
I mean, writing an essay for 2 hours straight isn't going to change the situation at all, so what can I do to actually change this? Well, nothing. I think it might be too late for anything to be done, unfortunately.
Hong Meiling had so much potential, yet all of that got thrown out of the window thanks to some memes that ZUN made canon for some unknown reason.
Well, that was a weird way to spend my evening, but at least I finally managed to say what I had on my mind.
