pinkfoxtails submitted:
There’s a post going around that is describing mulan being more badass than the disney version and that she dueled her father before going to war, the emperor offered her the hand of the princess when she came back etc etc but a lot of that is wrong.
OP:
okay I feel like I’m the only person who knows that Mulan was a real person and not talked about enough
Her story goes mostly how the Disney version went, except she didn’t go to war as a quest for self-discovery or because she felt as though she couldn’t make her parents proud. The sole and only reason she disguised herself as a young man was to take her Father’s place in the war.
So when she told her parents that she wanted to this, they were like wtf no you’re a girl and it’s chaotic out there. And you know what she did? She put on male clothes and challenged her own Father to a duel. Her dad was like ‘who the hell are you’ but accepted. When Mulan won and revealed herself as his daughter, he was like wOAH okay you can go. Basically she made sure to get her parent’s consent before going, so not only are her parents awesome, she was decent enough to not leave them hanging for 12 years.
Yes, she was at war for 12 years, but she not in fact meet a handsome general. Instead she BECAMEa general. Eventually the war was won, and the Emperor was so impressed by her he wanted to wed the Princess to her. It was only then that she revealed she was in fact a woman. Then she accepted the rewards and went right back home to her normal life.
There is now even a crater on Venus named after her.
Bolded parts are where OP is wrong.
The part where she only disguised herself to take her father’s place is correct, but she didn’t tell her parents and didn’t challenge her father to a duel lmao what, and didn’t tell her parents that she left. It’s also unclear whether she became a general or not, it’s only stated that she received high merits. The emperor didn’t want to wed the princess to her, he only offered her an official post in his court, which was a huge thing at the time, which she refused, and only asked for a camel that could travel a thousand (Chinese) miles, so she could go back home. She also didn’t reveal that she was a woman to him, because she would have been punished, as that was why she disguised herself in the first place. She did reveal herself as a woman to her war companions, once she got back home and put on her makeup and lady clothes.
I’m Chinese and I studied the original version of the ballad of Mulan, which is written in Classical Chinese and can only be read if you’ve studied Chinese extensively, and even I have difficulty with it.
I’m submitting this to you because that freaking post has come across my dash way too many times, and turns out to have 261788 notes and I really, really don’t want that many people to think that this is the true story of Mulan, and also I know that you understand the importance of preserving culture and folk stories, not embellished ones, but the original versions. Yes, OP’s version sounds cooler, but it is not the original, it’s a description of a Hong Kong movie adaptation of the ballad, which would obviously put more dramatic elements in it.
I really like that people on Tumblr spread more awareness about the original story of Mulan and other characters bowderlised by media, but please, please, please for the love of god, FACT CHECK. PLEASE. STOP MESSING UP MY CULTURE.
WOW. I studied this a little bit in college too, and the versions I keep seeing on tumblr don’t resemble the version I read about either? At all?
As far as I remember, the biggest point of the Ballad of Mulan was filial piety, and it’s actually really fucked up how Western feminists have stolen and warped the story to fit their OWN values while stepping on and erasing the values of the actual culture the story came from. It’s even more insidious than that, because as time goes on, records of the original will become more and more diluted by these completely inaccurate “retellings” of the original story of Hua Mulan.
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