arkaniist

[arkaniist]

[arkaniist]

imo the most important thing to do if you want to get more familiar with danmei in general is just... read more danmei. read tons of BL webnovels, some you'll like, some you'll dislike, some you'll start proselytizing for, and some you'll drop because the characters are so annoying you can't stand to read another word about them. scum villain and the rest of MXTX's novels were all published on a chinese website FULL of webnovels (BL and het) and are as much in conversation with those novels and genre conventions as with annoying japanese harem anime.

if you want to find lots and lots and LOTS of webnovels (translated into English) of a wide variety of quality, try searching around on NovelUpdates. i recommend checking their rec lists section to see collections that others have curated, or clicking through from their genre explanation page to see everything tagged in whatever section you're interested in. (for scum villain (OG timeline, what SQQ thinks the story is) context, you'd be looking for something with Harem/Historical/Xianxia tags.)

if you can read Chinese, MXTX and her contemporaries post on JJWXC. i can't read Chinese, so i can't help with site navigation - just figured i would add it for context.

learning is ultimately about exposure. if you really wanna understand for yourself, you just have to experience it.

hey, first of all how are you? hope life is treating you well.

i'm gonna ask something maybe a bit off the rail, but feel free to simply delete the ask if it's too much of a bother. i get that it's a bit much to ask to a stranger.

i've been into danmei for almost 6 years now (dramas mainly), i've only read svsss, guardian and faraway wanderers in full, and a couple of volumes from 2ha, mdzs and tgcf. never engaged meaningfully with any other form of BL before.

i really didn't like svsss except for yueliushen and qijiu, but i keep seeing people mentioning how genius it was for subverting tropes in regards to bingqiu and the general plot. i feel i don't have the context to really appreciate these details or put them in contrast with what the "standards of the genre" are, because i don't really know about that. it's way easier for me to read dostoevskij for example because i have more context and if i don't know something i know where to find it. i have read multiple posts about tropes in svsss and i just don't get it. (this is also true for guardian and faraway wanderers, i have strong opinions that are completely antithetical to what the fandom thinks at large, especially i have issues with the whole "fem-coded wenzhou", but as with svsss i don't know enough about danmei and i don't know if it's me who just doesn't get it or if it's a case of fandom fandoming)

so i'm doing some research on my own, but i want to know your opinion too. since i want to enjoy svsss (and mxtx) as much as i see you all do, what do i do to gain context and perspective? i'm open to both novel suggestions and academic papers (i have one on my tbr about masculinity in danmei), and whatever else, also if you have suggestions on what to pay attention to while reading, really i just wanna know danmei better in general!!

sorry for the long ask, again feel free to ignore, and have a nice day!

To be perfectly honest with you unfortunately the problem with this is that the type of stuff you really need to read to understand scum villain is unrecommendable isekai/wish fulfillment/harem slop. Stuff like solo leveling or sword art online or seven deadly sins or whatnot that it's hard to recommend to anyone in good conscience. If you want to read essays though I'll always recommend our resident essayist @bao3bei4 's zines and zine anthologies. In the end though I think scum villain hits the hardest if you've been burned by being a fujoshi with an obsession with some real shitty media before so if you don't have that already it might be hard to reconstruct the experience idk

[arkaniist]

played rebirth and fell so hard, i’m kind of art blocked tho so drawing is hard rn

(also pls follow me silly new twt acc its dan_rar im lonely there)

[arkaniist]

No shota today : (

[arkaniist]

Okami Amaterasu inspired by Mucha's style

[arkaniist]

All I wanna do is draw this horse.

[arkaniist]

i have sugarcubes.

[arkaniist]

[arkaniist]

FOR REAL

[arkaniist]

If you’re LGBT reblog and tag with your opinion on beer.

[arkaniist]

I think 50 shades of grey did so much damage to BDSM writing in fic and like not because I think fic writers were taking inspiration from it, but we did get a lot of detailed explanatory posts about all the different ways in which those guys were Doing It Wrong, which is not in and of itself a bad thing but since then everybody got so hung up on making sure everybody in their fics was nothing like 50 shades of grey and actually demonstrates that yes I do understand the principles of safe sane and consensual and the traffic light system and safewording and aftercare and checking in that now everybody fucks like a 101 handbook and I think we've only just recently started to recover from it. love me a dynamic where it's two repressed freak idiots who accidentally invent BDSM all on their own and have to come up with the strangest most deeply harmful ways of navigating that situation

[arkaniist]

[arkaniist]

my oc on the unicorn, sketch

[arkaniist]

one thing about me is that i am always on this fucking website

[arkaniist]

Horse figure of the day: Lladro Chinese Zodiac Horse

[arkaniist]

The Alluring Tale of Mong-ryong: Episode 16

[arkaniist]

GUYS

THE TWO MILLION CREEP