its so surprising to me theres like less than 10 fics in the beldaruit/deanreldy tag on ao3 like did we all not see the same homoerotic framing... look at them
it's ok to have opinions, even strong opinions, one way or the other. but "X is absolutely wrong and you don't know chinese" is usually a false and very uncool take.
"pin yin has rules" ok well according to the GB/T 2015 "The Chinese phonetic alphabet spelling rules for Chinese names" section 5.1.7: "三音节以内不能分出姓和名的汉语人名,包括历史上已经专名化的称呼,以及笔名、艺名、法名、 神名、帝王年号等,连写,开头字母大写。" ->
西施 -> Xishi is given as an example.
but wait! isn't 西施 -> Xi Shi on the Wikipedia page??
the answer is nobody actually cares *that* much... pinyin rules can be pretty arbitrary. chinese tokenization is fuzzy in the first place, and names are only one example.
as someone with a 3-character name who has their legal first name split into two words separated with a space, im telling you from first-hand experience that it really isn't that serious. i've heard the proponents for either side in real life and they're both valid.