#this is my orv of isekai romance fantasies

[rusquared]

ru im 90 chapters deep and so far the only romance I've come across is the grand duke's family's one-sided affection towards the duchess 😭😭

hey. holds your hand. you're statistically 99% likely to have read orv since you follow me. think of this as a shorter version of the sucky first half of the novel. please trust me. season 2 is about their relationship and the payoff feels so delicious 🥺

[milkbreadtoast]

Here's a v quick vague rushed half assed TWSB propaganda post

TWSB is a romance novel isekai subversion story. You know, the escapist genre that there r 2353533535 kr webtoons/novels for... i got reincarnated in my fav romance novel as the villainess yadayada THAT genre. but a twist on it!!!

TWSB is for fujoshi/fudanshi/fujin who would rather ship the 2 male love interests in a romance than have a love triangle with the female lead... TWSB is also for poly/throuple/trio enjoyers (whether platonic or not ur choice). And old women yuri enjoyers. And people who enjoy novel isekai subversions like orv and surviving romance (and SVSS? i havent read but ive heard comparisons)... /ppl who think novel isekai premises Could be interesting but find so many of them boring cliche or wasted potential... and people who like fun worldbuilding... or ppl who r interested in the premise "typical shoujo romance novel plot gets derailed and ends up accidentally becoming a non-romance action fantasy which is also highkey extremely gay"..... *dangling a chocolate croissant in front of u* ooooh u want to read twsb so bad wooooo is it worki

(EDIT: oh to be clear im recommending the novel btw!! webtoon is cute but the novel is where u get the full experience 🛐 idc which one u start w but pls read the novel... hehe)

[necronatural]

I may have followed you for BSDante but between ORV posting and getting me hooked on Shinozaki-kun...

I beg for your recommendations list because you have Taste.

baby all I read is historical romance. Read dungeon meshi and mob psycho 100 i guess

some good manga, no particular theme

The Summer Hikaru Died - READ THIS. Middle school summer love story BL crushed by psychological/cosmic horror

telework yobanashi - slice of life romance about a guy working from home getting to know his apartment neighbour

sensitive boy - shoujo romance about a boy trying to understand 'normal' after being sexually assaulted in middle school, with a variety of experiences with the concept of sex and relationships like a (seemingly?) aromantic woman and a (canonically) asexual classmate

I Was Summoned by Mistake, but I'm the Heroine - geni yuu has an entire manga cinematic universe about isekai girls and this is the first one. very pre-lightnovel-isekai storytelling style with post-lightnovel-isekai tropes.

A World Where Everything Definitely Becomes BL vs. The Man Who Definitely Doesn't Want To Be In A BL - for my eminent yaoi scholars

Heterogeneous Linguistics - dungeon meshi for languages. Linguist ventures to the land of Fantasy Monster Races where each has their own fascinating language and writing system and each have their own ways to communicate with other races, helping him slowly piece together how they communicate (with the help of his teacher's young half-wolfman daughter)

When a Cat Faces West - by the author of Mushishi so you know the vibes are good, a tiny investigation office for reality-bending incidents coloured by the people they happen to.

Double House - Simple story of a lesbian runaway and a trans woman bouncing off each other as they grapple with what it means to be a woman.

Yomi no Tsugai (Daemons of the Shadow Realm) - Arakawa Hiromu's new manga. Really good. I won't spoil anything besides the fact it's about several factions of people who can contract spirits with special abilities to fight vying to obtain the main character, who's auspicious birth heralds a vast potential power

[metanarrates]

hi as someone who's been browsing your utena and ORV meta, please I'd love to hear your thoughts on villainess isekai

my off the cuff answer is that most people are not revolutionary leftists OR revolutionary feminists and therefore don't even think about those ideas, since current oppressive systems are the air they breathe. their concept of wish fulfillment only occurs within those systems, or ones that have a strong resemblance to existing systems (ie feudal european fantasy world where the protag is/becomes landed gentry.) sure, the character is still in the system, but she's at the top of the class system, and she has Special Qualities that render her somehow immune to patriarchal violence. that sort of thing is the only escapism a lot of people can imagine, since existing outside the system is, well, a revolutionary idea!

FURTHER ANALYSIS UNDER THE CUT:

under patriarchy, there exist only a few models of womanhood that are okay for women to relate to and aspire towards. obviously, this is a complex sociological concept and those models are not uniform for every society, or even every person's perception of that society, but those models do have a tendency to shape what women fantasize about. and literally every one of those models has the common feature of being subservient to men in some way. this is, again, because of patriarchy lol.

patriarchy also has this effect of presenting heterosexual love, romance, and reproduction as the ultimate way for a woman to find fulfillment. there are other acceptable avenues of fulfillment, but all of them are supposedly inferior to the fulfillment of having a man who loves you and wishes to protect you. this essentially has the effect of making it so most, if not all, of popular fantasies targeted to women end up also treating heterosexual romance as the ultimate path to fulfillment!

you've identified that power fantasies written for men tend to be about gaining, yknow, power. they get skills and Do Cool Things and also often gain hot chicks as a secondary aspect of wish fulfillment. power fantasies for women are often an inversion of this: the primary wish fulfillment is that of a hot guy who loves them, with any extra powers or skills or Stuff the main character gets acting as a secondary component to that fantasy. this reflects real life gender expectations, where men are meant to be career holders first and husbands second, and vice versa for women. and a Lot of this ties into what I was talking about earlier with both acceptable modeling and patriarchial romance standards.

you see, i have a theory in relation to escapist main characters. in a lot of other genres, it's somewhat acceptable that the main character of a story is not someone you have to 100% identify with. they can do socially unacceptable things and the story can still be very enjoyable to a vast audience. but when it comes to a character who functions more or less as an audience self-insert, the standards change entirely. an audience isn't usually quite as comfortable placing themself fully in the shoes of someone who defies social acceptability too much, just because those are actions that make them feel uncomfortable in real life. they don't like having fantasies that feel wrong by the standards of societal structures.* and so, a LOT of the time, the main character must fit acceptable models of womanhood in order for the fantasy to sell.

(*generally speaking. see above on societal stuff not being uniform. i have a lot to say about how an Actually Evil villainess functions as a fantasy but for now I'm just gonna talk about patriarchy in shoujo fantasies lol)

and what are these acceptable models of womanhood? like i said, they're highly tied to the female character being desired and protected by men. this familiarity is comforting to readers. it's unchallenging. it's even desirable.

and this is what I keep identifying in escapist fiction: the need for comfort/familiarity above all else, even if that comfort is found in opppressive power structures. a key component of the fantasy is the power structure seemingly without the oppression that makes those real-life systems unbearable. sure, the protag is essentially the property of the man who loves her, but maybe he lets her do what she wants, or he won't hurt her in ways she doesn't like in the course of possessing her. it makes gendered structures that are implicitly violent in real life explicitly nonviolent (or not violent to a point where it cannot be tolerated by the protagonist) inside the fantasy. it is, in essence, softening patriarchy to a point where it can be viewed as safe. and to a reader of these fantasies, that feels safer than dealing with the uncertain territory of someone who tries to escape those structures!

[weirdplutoprince]

Since you like orv and villainess isekai let me tell you that SSS-Class Suicide Hunter is a lot like orv where it at first wants you to believe this is a standard (in sssrh's case it's tower ascension rather than reverse isekai) power fantasy with a boring zero to hero protagonist, but then pulls the rug out from under you to reveal deeper themes. The reason I also mentioned villainess isekai is that in a later arc, the protagonist and one other jump into a fantasy romance novel in order to change the ending. The protagonist ends up falling in love with the villainess and they're peak romance they're both insane in a way that really meshes well and makes for an incredibly entertaining read

Oooh....I do like this sort of thing. I already added it to my 'recommended to me' tag but I'll definetely keep it in my mind. If it changes my brain chemistry I guess it will make it to my tumblr lmao

[thatalmostopsorceress]

psa: I have another tumblr where imma post stuff about my webnovels/ games etc hot fictional men

to the very few tumblr humans that might know me from my lee hakhyun confusion post, orv stuff, zb1 & skz memes/ fanart/ stuff or maybe that one tcf meme and such...

If you like webnovels (otome isekai, campus romance, guzhuang, xianxia, fantasy, lords-and-ladies, modern, etc) and / or coding / games,,,, please follow my other tumblr where I post stuff abt my webnovels & games & silly funny stories/ drawings about life 🥺

@lemonpoems

PLEASE FOLLOW MY PROFESSIONAL ACC I NEED READERS WHEN I PUBLISH MY THINGS T-TTTTTTTT

[obstinaterixatrix]

Just my 2 cents, but I personally don't consider dokja/joonghyuk queerbaiting bc they are shown to deeply love and care for each other, it's just never given an exact platonic/romantic/familial context (I also personally don't think it NEEDS context). also kdj is a dumb bitch and unreliable narrator and wouldn't know a positive emotion if it hit him with a brick

Also I think the possible queerbaiting for gabriel/uriel comes from a line where I think uriel compares her relationship with gabriel to dokja and joonghyuks relationship. But yeah ur right there's not nearly enough context

as a story that isn’t a romance I think orv can get away with more ambiguous & undefined relationships as long as the same approach is used for all other relationships as well. like how kdj was kind of baited with ysa in a way that didn’t really go anywhere (lol) or how there’s sometimes a similar significance/ambiguity with hsy. if there was a canon m/f endgame then it’d turn into like… ‘this romantic m/f relationship can be defined as romantic but this same gender relationship *~defies label~* and *~goes beyond romance~* so I as the writer want you to know that these characters are foils they’re obsessed with each other they care about each they can’t live without each other but if you even think about them making out there’s something fucking wrong with you not everything has to be romantic god’. like I genuinely do think some writers unintentionally hit a same gender dynamic that can be read as romantic (because the characters have a mutual emotional significance to each other) but it’s like… there’s a certain hypocritical way some writers elevate same gender relationships to preclude a romantic reading. fun combination of homophobia and usually misogyny (in terms of like… regulating female character to role of love interest and not actually giving narrative significance or a particularly deep bond with the male lead because blah blah women can’t actually connect with men they’re sooooo fundamentally different men can only have heated drama with other men god forbid a woman have any significant emotional stakes in any conflict) (what the hell why are people imposing a romantic dynamic on the two guys who actually have 500% more screentime together and narratively/emotionally significant interactions??? who could have seen this coming????) (uuuuugggghhhhhhhh) (honestly I think a good example that hits like… the shounen-type narratively significant heated drama dynamic with an m/f couple would be spirit circle but it’s really rare) (like what other series do you have an m/f couple fighting to the death with the narration being ‘it felt like meeting an old friend’)

see the thing is I feel like some people see a refusal to define/confirm a same gender relationship as romantic as queerbait but tbh I’d just say it’s usually closer to homophobia. or cowardice. not necessarily in this context but in general.

also re: gabriel/uriel I do think folks probably have a harder time defining f/f queerbait bc 1) there’s just so fucking little, 2) there’s a different societal lens with affection between female characters so ambiguity/subtext with m/m relationships is easier to interpret as romantically coded whereas with an f/f relationship you have to get to. b*tv levels to interpret it as bait. well, you do get a lot of ‘wooow she’s soooo cool’ in a lot of fantasy/isekai shoujo but half the time it’s a two page interaction that gets tossed out for the rest of the series. sigh.