Comment by Version467
4 days ago
Can you elaborate? I don't know much about Yu Deng or lesbian fanfiction, but it's not a crossover I would have expected.
4 days ago
Can you elaborate? I don't know much about Yu Deng or lesbian fanfiction, but it's not a crossover I would have expected.
He once asked on zhihu (chinese quora) for recommendations of yuri (~= anime lesbian) fanfiction. Under his real name.
Not only that.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/yu-deng-wins-the-fields-medal...
> For comfort, Deng turned to manga. “I remember him at Courant. He was always holding a manga,” said Jalal Shatah, a professor there who formerly chaired the math department. Deng particularly liked stories about deep friendship and romance and found himself drawn to a genre known as yuri, which focuses on those kinds of relationships between women — stories that “feel nice and warm and beautiful,” as he put it. They helped him be kinder to himself, “more comfortable with life.”
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Note that while the description "anime lesbian" might sound weird to western audiences, within asian nerd subcultures it's relatively a common thingy.