Question: In the narratives, is Nezha described as androgynous as he looks in his profile picture? When I first saw the picture I thought he was a girl.
Ha! Poor Nezha. And he's the kind of dude who would punch a person into next week for calling him a girl, too.
Nezha is not actually described as androgynous anywhere that I recall. Rather, he's almost always described and depicted as a youth, a child or young teenager, reflecting his bizarre origins and the fact that he represents wholesale rejection of authority. Nezha's portrait (which, by the way, is by fabulous Chinese artist Haili91) isn't trying to show him as feminine but rather as childlike, with the sort of androgyny that children often have before they grow into adulthood. A lot of the imagery in the picture - pink flowers/lotuses, bracelets, hair ribbons and so forth - also tweaks our western minds as being womanly, but in Nezha's case they're not that odd. His body is, after all, actually made of lotus flowers thanks to his mentor reconstructing him from them after his death, and traditional ornaments look weird to us now but wouldn't have been odd for an ancient figure, particularly a god.
Now, he is described with snow-white hair, which that picture does not include, but that's artistic license for you. I would agree that something about the shape of his hips/thighs area suggests femininity to me, but I think that may just be a strange angle. If you like, you can check around and see if you find an artistic rendering of Nezha you like better - there are certainly plenty out there.
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