This one is pissing me off because there’s cheese in it. I’m not sure there’s a period of Chinese dynastic history wherein the type of dudes likely to be having rap battles would also have been familiar with hard cheese. There’d be political fucking implications to that. Fermented dairy products were often seen as uncivilized foods, and were associated in particular with northern “barbarian” cuisine (see: <lactose intolerance in Eurasia>), whereas competitive poetry was viewed as a civilized and scholarly pastime appropriate to civil servants and courtiers. Mentioning cheese in a verse which also references the heavens could be seen as an effort to legitimize the presence of these dangerous foreign elements within Chinese society, and, thus, as seditious. If dairy were to become a common theme in rap battles, it might be viewed as a dangerous sign of poor morale and defeatist thinking among the literati. “Emperor, we have got to move the capital to the south. The scholars are rapping about cheese. It’s all falling apart.”

Now this is a fucking post

Okay but doesn’t this legitimize the use of cheese as a derogatory tool in this verse?

Because the whole point is that the wife of the opponent is bad and stupid. If cheese is babaric, then doesn’t it make perfect sense to demean her by claiming she loves it so much she wears it all over AND inflicts it on the heavens, committing a transgression inconceivable to anyone with even the tiniest speck of good taste?

Doesnit delegitimize the verse or does it mean the writer went even harder than we expected?

obsessed with this bench