#this site even has danmei novels translations

[mendimore]

The Danmei Series 01: Tf is Danmei?

Note: This is an effort to convert more unsuspecting fandom children into danmei because I need more people to talk to about this. Enjoy!

Danmei.

If you haven't heard of it before, HAHAHA, you are in for a ride.

Basically, Danmei is a Chinese fiction genre (the name directly translates to indulging in beauty)that features m/m relationships.

Mendi, isn't that just bl? Yes, but specifically Chinese.

Well, Mendi, what difference does that even make? It's all the same thing.

No. It is not.

...Okay, it is a little bit.

BUT, danmei is its own genre for a reason. China, just like any other country is rich in culture. I acknowledge this may be a bit biased, but I am overjoyed that Danmei is flourishing. But, anyway, let's talk about it.

If you have heard about Danmei media in the West, even just a little, It's pretty likely that you came across one of MXTX's works. MXTX or Mo Xiang Tong Xiu is the pseudonym for a popular Danmei author on Jin Jian Wen Xue Cheng (jjwxc) a popular web novel site(a whole lot of Danmei authors publish their work on this site).

MXTX has three novels, and if you hear about the MXTX fandom, it refers to the enjoyers of all three of her novels. These three works consist of Scum Villain's Self Saving System(svsss), The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation(aka Mo Dao Zu Shi, or mdzs), Heaven Official's Blessing(aka Tian Guan Ci Fu, or tgcf). The first of their works to become very popular was mdzs, which has several adaptations(basically any adaptation you can think of). If you were into cdramas at all around 2019, you might have heard of The Untamed. The majorly successful live-action adaptation of mdzs. Or maybe if you are in the anime/donghua community, you heard about the mdzs donghua adaptation. And if you were a fandom child who found Ao3 at the right time, you might know of "Sexy Times with WangXian" which broke Ao3 with the number of tags it had and forced Ao3 to have a tag limit, or a fanfic of the lead actors of The Untamed making Ao3 illegal in China.

Have I scared you? Sorry. Truly, the mdzs fandom is not as problematic as it sounds. I started my own Danmei journey with mdzs, and it holds a soft spot in my heart. I also have way too many opinions on the adaptations and how new viewers of mdzs should approach it to get the maximum emotional value, but that is a discussion for another time.

Anyway, Heaven Official's Blessing, also skyrocketed in popularity when it came out. It has its own donghua that you can find on Netflix with a fully English dub. As well as an extremely beautiful manhua and audiodrama. But of course, I encourage you to read the novels first, especialy because these adaptations are not finished, unlike mdzs.

Scum Villain is the heavily underrated middle child as far as adaptations go. It absolutely does not mean that it is bad. It isn't. I don't wanna get into the debate about how someone isn't a true mxtx fan if they haven't read it, and how it's so much better than the other books. I personally disagree with the last statement. I do also hold a lot of love for Scum Villain, Shen Qingqiu is one of my favorite MCs of all time, the premise is a lot more relatable than the other two, but it's pretty clear that svsss is Mxtx's oldest work. She has definitely been improving. Obviously. go read it, especially if you enjoy her other two works.

But, before you come at me for only talking about one author out of ALL the Danmei out there, I would like to point out that MXTX works are probably the most accessible in the West in regards to Danmeis. They were the first to get a full English translation and along with 2ha (The Dumb Husky and His White Cat Shizun, another very popular danmei written my an author under the name Meatbun), I was able to see them perching on their own little stand in Barnes and Noble.

So, you may have noticed something. I talk a lot about the web novels. maybe if you're into bl or yaoi, you will notice that a lot of those adaptations are in the form of graphic novels. Why is it that there is more emphasis on the actual novel? I know I know, why do these people want to make us actually just READ words instead of look at pretty pictures of pretty people. Disgusting. I understand your pain. I actually do not have anything largely conclusive to tell you why this is, but based on my observations here are two contributing factors: 1. it's easier to hide subtext, specific cue words, and satire in text media(I mean it's pretty clear when a character is desperately holding on to another character, yelling "My, love, when will you return," when you skim through a manhua, then if there are just a bunch of words), this also means its easier to hide from censorship; 2. the Chinese language itself is very poetic and if you have interacted with Chinese people, the number of references and idioms will drive you nuts as a language learner, in manhua form it can lose some of its humor and imagery, particularly with Danmei because a lot of the subject matter and the nature of the romances is kind of idealized and poetic; 3. Danmei is actually very plot-centric, the romance is often like a little cherry on top of the mounds of story, drama, and character, and so when you see even manhua or donghua adaptations of the stories, I would say that often quite a bit of the depth gets lost for the characters and the story, it's the same as what happens with a lot of blockbuster films. I'm sorry but book >>> movie almost every time.

Of course, there are options for you if you are stuck on graphic novel-style stories. Chinese manhua generally has a distinctly pretty and clean style. It does depend on the artist, obviously, but if you are a huge fan of pretty art, I tell you Manhua knows what's up, just give it a shot.

Anyway, all this yammering and I haven't talked about the actual content.

Many things set a lot of Danmei apart, content-wise. Chinese fiction has its own fantasy genres of wuxia and Xianxia. Wuxia, translating directly to martial hero, is a low fantasy genre that centers around martial arts in a historical au including sects, master-apprentice relationships, cool fights, etc. It has a lot less supernatural or magical elements, and instead often focuses on what is feasible with the human body alone. Xianxia on the other hand(translating directly to immortal Hero), can vary with very cool magic systems and worldbuilding based on Daoist and/or Buddhist influences. Xianxia is high fantasy and often includes supernatural themes, immortality, spiritual cultivation, etc. It may include mentions of the three realms. where you can ascend to godhood, haunt the mortal realms being unable to find the land of the dead, or go through the cycle of reincarnation.

Danmei can be based in some Chinese historical settings as well, separate from wuxia and can be from ancient times or during the more recent period of militant china, often with some emphasis on Peking opera.

Of course, Danmei has plenty of works set in contemporary or futuristic timelines as well that are similarly unique in their own way.(right now I just started Little Mushroom, and I really enjoy the futuristic worldbuilding so far)

Additionally, I mentioned before that Danmei is in fact very plot and character-centric.

Ha, yeah right, Mendi. Plot. The plot is romance, that is the genre, what plot could there possibly be.

Well. A whole lot.

I gave you a little taste with the mentions of some cool worldbuilding, but you will get a taste of insurmountable joy and boundless despair, reading some of this stuff. Many of your favorite tropes appear often, from enemies to lovers to pretty guys with long hair falling down cliffs(ok that is just an MXTX thing, I don't care if you think my taste is basic because i love MXTX, the stories are good). Also, you get a dose of east asian ideals and culture. For Asian Americans like me, it was very refreshing to feel somewhat understood in a way that I didn't see in Western media. The emphasis on family relationships, age hierarchies, reputation, and the way your asian aunties will gossip about you both right in front of you and behind you and have no sense of boundaries, and dramatic-ass idioms(iykyk). The way that these relationships are built is through the plot, and that is something I miss sometimes with a lot of the romances I've read. There are plenty of points of interest, from being do-gooders trying to be a good person and then getting roped into and wrongfully blamed for some elaborate scheme, or a hefty, intricate revenge plot based on some deep hatred and a not so healthy does of body horror. You will have a blast.

So, now that I have sold you on danmei content. Let's talk about another factor why you may not already be a Danmei enjoyer.

Danmei is enjoyed by many women in China and internationally, which also means there is a lot of controversy regarding the fetishization of m/m relationships. While I agree that this is a problem, I disagree that enjoying a gay romance is fetishization. it can be, but it more than often is not. Just like how I can enjoy a poetic, well-set-up, straight romance, I enjoy a lot of really beautiful Danmei stories in much the same way. For a lot of Chinese women, Danmei allows them to remove the societal constraints put on women in a relationship. it's a way of escapism, this might also be a reason as to why a lot of these romances are so poetic, even if tragic at times. Having the stigmatism of fetishization might push more heteronormativity into media. As long as you can enjoy the romance healthily, appreciating the characters as characters, and the plot as plot, and not specifically enjoy the fact that the relationship is between two gay men, you should be in the clear. The fact that some people are driven away from these stories because of the stigmas around boy's love saddens me. You don't have to be a connoisseur or anything, but if the sole reason you reject a piece of media is because it has a gay pairing in it, that is pretty homophobic. Although I will say, there is a difference between not wanting to read it because it's gay and not wanting to read it because you don't want to read smut. I understand some Danmei has smut, and some people aren't comfortable reading that, ok. But if you are intrigued by the premise, I would say just do your best to skip the smut scenes, if you really don't wanna, ok, but I think for things like smut, you can really get away with not reading it usually. Also if you think all danmei has smut, you are sorely mistaken. There are plenty of Danmei fics with no smut, and a lot of the adaptations sometimes don't even have real romance, which is sad, but if that is your concern, seriously don't. Also, in regards to censorship, if that is your issue. Unfortunately yes, it is an issue, but, there are plenty of options in the Danmei world, I'm certain you will find something.

Anyway, some of this is just my opinion, I am still actually relatively new to Danmei, I have read my fair share, but if this encouraged you to get into some Danmei, I have fulfilled my mission.

I will be back, probably talking about mdzs adaptations next time or some recs or working on some reviews, but I hope you enjoyed!

NOTE: About MXTX official translations, I have heard some mixed reviews. I, personally, read all three of the works as popular fan translations online, so I have not reread the full official translation. I have heard there are some distinct changes, including smushing some of the chapters together, which is something I am not sure about. it's unfortunate, but its only something to keep in mind. The novels should still be faithful to the original story.

[rigelmejo]

some cool resources

Ilya Recently I found a collection of The Natural Approach study resources! It’s amazing! Its got links for learning through comprehensible input for several languages, and includes many resources I’ve mentioned before like Comprehensible Input French, Ayan Academy, Le Francais Par Le Methode Nature, Frank Method, along with stuff I hadn’t found before! 

Awesome Natural Approach - https://github.com/IvanovCosmin/awesome-natural-approach

This is a natural approach resource someone designed for japanese, which is really cool because its the first of it’s kind I’ve seen for an asian language (I would love more nature approach/comprehensible input resources for languages like japanese, chinese, korean etc). I’ve explored this site and truly it is comprehensible input if you can read kana. Its a wonderful resource and I’ve been going through it to see how much it teaches - I would be in heaven if a resource like this ultimately aims to cover as many words as Le Francais Par Le Methode Nature does. In my dream world many languages would have a resource that covers as much as that book ToT. I’m really excited by the project below, and I still would desperately love to figure out how to make a similar resource for chinese one day.

DrDru’s Lab https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html

Ilya Frank’s Reading Method (japanese - but it has several other language resources): http://english.franklang.ru/index.php/japanese/11-japanese-folk-tales

Wasabi-jpn (not a nature method resource, but it has phenomenal free lessons for japanese with audio and text and translations): https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/

DeFrancis Chinese Readers audio files (while the books are really good graded reading material, they’re old and out of print and hard to get copies of, and I highly recommend the audio files on their own - they’re clear enough to study from even without accompanying text, just like FSI’s language course audios are useful even without the accompanying text. The material is incredibly dry, but if you need tone drills, sound drills, drills of simple common words and graded listening material that gradually increases in difficulty, its a plentiful resource): http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=31539&TPN=3

Legend of Fei audiobook: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1iN411d7M6

Tian Ya Ke audiobook: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1t7sB?p=11&spm_id_from=pageDriver

Modu audiobook: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Gb4y1e7z8?from=search&seid=16682226077510869656&spm_id_from=333.337.0.0

Guardian audiobook: https://music.163.com/#/djradio?id=791802378&order=2&_hash=programlist&limit=100&offset=0

Guardian audiobook (deep voice): https://fm.qq.com/show/rd002ED4aN0mYz2L__

Night by U (Bai Yu): https://www.ximalaya.com/renwenjp/42190598/

Webnovel site jjwxc (it has a LOT of webnovels, is the place a ton of danmei authors post on, also one of my favorite pingxie fanfiction writers posts their stories here. Good for keeping up to date on newer stuff, following authors, supporting authors, and finding what’s popular) https://www.jjwxc.net/

Daomubiji novel site (I don’t think it has some of the really new novels though): http://www.daomubiji.org/

Zhenhunxiaoshuo (this lovely site has a ton of danmei novels backed up, along with a ton of romance novels in general backed up, while https://www.jjwxc.net/ is the go to for keeping up with novels, buying new chapters and supporting authors, zhenhunxiaoshuo has back ups and is nice for if chapters have been censored/taken down/changed or full stories have been deleted, zhenhunxiaoshuo also has the print chapters of some novels if you’re trying to find a limited-run extra online. Also if you’re just trying to find a new danmei author or story, everything on there is solid, then you can use the title or author to go search for more. As its named for zhenhun, it seems to prioritize backing up everything by priest in particular. I’ve often gone there when looking for chapters or extras that were missing from either a print novel I owned or another site I’d been reading on. For the learners and translators - it works really well with a lot of text to audio, click dictionary, mtl tools, it has none of the weird text partly not registering/not showing up issues that some hosting sites have).

MTLnovel (I know people like to look down on mtl novels, although to be fair a lot of novels still are untranslated and mtls get used until better translations are made - and sometimes some wonderful person makes an Edited mtl to fix some glaring errors, until a better translation gets made. Well, if you have to read an MTL, I recommend this site. It hosts a LOT of webnovels, seems to use Google Translate as far as I can tell so its not awful considering I know apps like Readibu use Google Translate too - though far from ideal. Its biggest benefit though is you can make an account, then click ‘RAW’ at the top of chapters and read a parallel text chinese text with the english MTL. As a learner it means a TON of convieniently made parallel readers with the click of a button and is easier than copy/pasting each section you’re reading into some translator and looking back and forth to compare. It has each line of chinese followed by the english mtl, so its well suited for following along with an audiobook or just comparing the chinese text to the translation to figure something out. If you’re a translator and know some chinese already but use MTL as a first-pass on texts, I found this feature useful so I could quickly read the original chinese and notice glaring errors like wrong gender or the mtl totally misunderstanding a sentence/phrase. Then I could narrow in and just work more on translating those specific parts with issues, instead of either missing them by thinking the MTL was fine or wasting a lot more time on parts that read-okay when there were messier sections that needed to be worked on. I just think the ability to quickly compare the original to a line by line MTL makes it easier to comb through errors in an MTL, if you’re trying to make an edited MTL translation for people or relying on MTL to help. And again, as a learner, a lot of the less great click-dictionaries like LingQ and Readibu use Google Translate anyway, so its nice to have a site that uses it but also separates it into easier readable chunks to compare with the original. About 6 months into learning Chinese I used mtlnovel to translate 10 chapters of Silent Reading for myself, because the translation was unfinished at the time. It was a slog as a beginner but the site absolutely helped me not drown. If you’re a person who ends up interested in a lot of chinese-only novels, this site’s a nice collective resource until better person-done translations get made) https://www.mtlnovel.com/

Deepl.com (a translator. Its not perfect by any means, and I have found times when it gets things Worse than Google Translate or Baidu. But me and a few others have used this to just BULK mtl a novel that has no translation yet. Like The Wolf and The Rebel Princess’s novels. And overall, it doesn’t tend to get to many errors - it still makes the he/she mistake which is fixable, but otherwise it mostly only has issues of somewhat misunderstanding complex phrases/sentences. It rarely spits out a Really Wrong word definition, whereas Google Translate regularly spits out a Very Wrong translation for a lot of commonly used words. Also unlike Baidu Translate which seems to simplify down phrases unless you are just translating one small section at a time, DeepL tends to keep most details in its MTL instead of simplifying. It still simplifies a bit, but I think that's just a sad issue with chinese to english MTL. Basically, overall DeepL is likely to give you a very readable text with few glaring issues that would cause frustration - only the he/she and names might need fixing - and then will give few enough major errors in meaning that you’ll still retain the gist correct plot of the novel. I cannot necessarily say the same for Google Translate, so usually when I use Google Translate I also use Baidu or Yandex and compare. If you’re trying to whip up a parallel text for yourself real fast with a machine translation, I’d recommend DeepL. But if you know of a better mtl that still retains most details and doesn’t give a ton of glaring errors, please let me know.) https://www.deepl.com/translator

Baidu Translate (I highly recommend pasting in a URL and getting the whole webpage bulk translated, if you’re attempting to keep the text from being as simplified. I recommend pasting in individual sentences and paragraphs if you suspect simplifying is happening, and baidu will give you footnotes below your translation of expanded translations of various parts. I think baidu Usually is fairly good at getting the overall meaning of a translation. However baidu Really frustrates me, because it clearly has the CAPACITY to retain idioms and longer turns of phrase but instead will cut out idioms and oversimplify when it spits out a translation Bigger than only the idiom/phrase. So something like ‘stiff as a coffin’ baidu may translate to ‘scared’. You lose a lot of detail when it does that constantly. 

Translations come out like this. Baidu is more likely to retain specifically correct word translations than Google Translate - for one thing Google Translate tends to get some really common words brutally wrong and if you’re a learner you will notice - but the longer the translation, the more likely Baidu is to start cutting translations you see below in its footnotes and then turn them into simplified shorter phrases on the right hand side. If you are using Baidu to MTL before you translate further yourself, its worth comparing the actual chinese to the actual MTL it spits out and seeing what stuff it simplified. Like DeepL, Baidu occasionally struggles with longer phrases/sentences and mistranslates them, but if you break down the sentence into individual words it will handle each word fine.) https://fanyi.baidu.com/#zh/en/

Various alternate sites to find cnovels (when you can’t find a chapter somewhere else, need to translate and copy paste, etc): https://www.sto.cx/list-mbook-44-1-0.html (sto.cx seems to have a LOT including fanfictions backed up, however it has some features which sometimes break text-to-audio functions and click-dictionary functions), https://www.mengruan.com/ (mengruan has some cnovels along with translations of things like The Little Prince, Agatha Christie, etc). If you search a novel’s chinese name followed by “小说在线” in a search engine, you will find a lot of alternative sites that host said novel, if you need to search for alternatives which work correctly for whatever tools you’re using (if you’re using a click dictionary or text to speech or google translate etc).

Bilibili Comics (if you’re looking for manhua, bilibili generally hosts a TON especially the new release stuff, just change the language at the top to Chinese) https://www.bilibilicomics.com/ There are alternative manga hosting sites, but honestly webtoons and bilibili are the most reliable and are the official hosts of a lot. However if again for your needs you need an alternative, search the manhua title in chinese then “ 在线” zaixian and you will find some alternative hosts in the results that may work better for you. In general though I’ve found its easy to find the official chinese releases, and its only for finding unofficial manhua translations in english that I’ve had to dig and really look around. 

Various sites to find audio books, audio dramas (有声读物 youshengduwu and  有声读物在线 youshengduwu zaixian are your friends. Go to a search engine and search the chinese name plus one of those phrases, and you will find potential audio even if its not on one of the bigger sites - that’s how I found daomubiji audiobooks. Its worth searching youtube or bilibili first as they have a lot of audio that’s easier to find. https://music.163.com/ , https://fm.qq.com/ , https://www.ximalaya.com/ are the big 3 sites to find audiobooks specifically, and they work fine in computer and phone web browsers if you can’t download their apps in your region. Ximalaya often has official productions, and music.163 and qq have a lot of fans who make audios. https://www.missevan.com/ is a good site for finding audio dramas, as well as bilibili and youtube. Youtube is the most likely to have english subs on the audio dramas if you need them, and if you click the button below the videos on missevan - or the similar looking button on bilibili below videos -  sometimes videos have chinese captions at the bottom of the video.)

[foxghost]

oi fox PLEASE tell me what you think the chances are of the danmei ~exclusive~ jjwxc international site flopping. i want it to flop so bad. they DON'T get to this after they censor entire books at the drop of a hat

Let's get one thing out of the way first: it's not jjwxc that censors whole books. It's the Chinese government who censor whole books. Individual companies don't really have a choice --- just like how Weibo has to blacklist an actor's name if Central Propaganda says so, jjwxc can't skirt those rules. Authoritarianism be like that.

Now excuse me while I rant about jjwxc re: things they do have control over

I can't say what are the chances of jjwxc intl flopping, that depends largely on how aggressive they get on the C&D honestly, and inside China they're REALLY LAX about it, so I can't see them putting much of an effort going intl at all since the Chinese market is that much bigger. We as international readers isn't a "target" audience so much as a "niche bonus". If they can exploit us, that's great, but there are 1.4 billion people in China and it's so much easier to find a % of them who'd pay for censored books. Inside the borders, they basically do not pursue websites that pirate books AT ALL, and they defend their writers never. Oh, you got plagiarised? Too bad, fight your own lawsuit. If you get sued for defamation by the more popular writer who plagiarised you, that's not our problem.

The biggest damage jjwxc has done to the danmei genre (the whole web novel thing, really) comes from their exploitation of writers and pushing them to pursue quantity over quality, and turning it into what's basically derivative fast food. The censorship is just more crap on that cake. A lot of danmei writers have moved to building a social media presence and monetising off of that instead of their books or giving up on being writers.

(My fav Qi Ying Jun is selling chips. Makeup, hair products, dresses, giftset food you can order online, pretty much anything, and releases her books on Weibo for free.)

I would advise anyone thinking about joining up with jjwxc to read their terms carefully. There are already several jjwxc-like websites that sell episodic fiction operating out of China/Singapore/Hong Kong, and recruit Chinese writers to post translated versions of their fiction. Those sites usually charge a flat subscription fee. I've looked into several and they all seem extremely exploitative on how little they pay their writers and translators. To stay competitive, I can't see jjwxc doing any different.

I'm not sure how their episodic format is going to do in the west either, since it hasn't really taken off with readers, even though I think it's a thing writers may want. Kindle Vella also exists though, and if episodic fiction can take off, it should be there. As much as I want to say F amazon, they split 70% of the profit with writers. Last I checked through the grapevine, jjwxc was 60, tickets bonus are split 50/50, and they'll charge a 20% fee if you sell the book to some other publishing company --- even if they contribute nothing at all. (It's like apple's platform fee. It's a tax.)

As for translation off of jjwxc, that would be translating work that is pre-censored to "everything that happens below the neck is not okay" wouldn't it? I've said before that I want a VIZ Media-like distribution network for Chinese fiction, but I really, really don't want jjwxc, the most self-censoring platform there is, to be the one to do it.

[dangermousie]

Dreamer In a Spring Boudoir - what a delight!

Spurred on by the fact that this is being adapted into a drama with Ding Yuxi and Peng Xiaoran, I decided to check this out and LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE

Introductory matters: this fully translated (and het so not subject to the issues relating to jjwxc new foreign site) so I think you can feel safe in reading without worrying whether you will be able to finish.

THIS IS SO FUCKING AWESOME!!!!!

It is no surprise that while I read a fair amount of both het and danmei web novels, I tend to enjoy the latter more than the former because I mainly read period settings and due to the nature of period society, most het novels end up focusing on inner court fights between heroine and other women, and it’s not anything that I find interesting (same reason I will happily watch a battle drama like Qin Dynasty but stay away from even best received harem dramas.)

So this is such a delightful rarity for me and the reason is the heroine. Ji Man is a modern salary woman who spends some free time reading a mediocre novel and falls asleep halfway only to transmigrate (of course) into the body of dumb and villainous second lead. Ji Man knows the lady’s eventual ending - her husband orders her to commit suicide for her many bad actions - so all she wants is to survive and figure out how to get back to the modern world and get the year-end bonus that is coming to her.

To be honest, this is a set up of many a web novel so why is this so good? Did I mention Ji Man?! JI MANNNNN! Her husband the ML will probably become more prominent later but now he’s a barely-there shadowy presence, unfriendly and remote.

I love how lacking in sentimentality this novel is in a best way. I don’t mean in Ji Man being pragmatic - though she is - she DNGAF about her husband having all these women, or even the fact that he now married a new legal wife and demoted her to concubine. She wants to make a living, have a comfortable life until she can get the hell out of there. But also the novel is rightly harsh on the ML- second FL may have been dumb and a shrew but Ji Man very clearly thinks that a man who marries someone and then keeps bringing other women in and then even demotes his legal wife for having too much of a fuss when he wants to take another concubine is a gross person. And he is gross - the reason the original wife didn’t have children was because he made sure of it and then brought in other concubines. But also even in that little time we see that society traps even him - he had no interest in his wife but had to marry her and treat her well because of her family. They are ill suited to each other. BUT the novel also makes it very clear that even if he had some provocation, he has all the power in the relationship and he’s mainly at fault - he started out disliking her because she dismissed his bed servants when they married. And his protestations of eternal love to his new wife ring utterly hollow.

I don’t really care if he reforms and loves her truly or if Ji Man just has a happy life restored to status and running businesses/managing her children not caring if he has 40 other concubines as long as she’s in charge. She should just get what she wants.

Some of my favorite bits:

It would have been a better alternative to transmigrate into any other character than this second female lead that was doomed to die. What should she do? Should she kill herself off with a knife so that she could have an earlier ending?

No, she couldn’t do something so passive and negative. As a modern day career woman, she was willing to tirelessly work like a dog to buy a house, so why couldn’t she do her best to save her life?

AND

If she were the real Nie Sangyu, who had to serve tea to her man’s new lover after being demoted from the main wife to a concubine, it would have been justifiable for her to resort to violence because of emotional distress. Fortunately, she was Ji Man. She didn’t have any feelings toward the current situation. These women were much easier to deal with than clients at work.

AND

Ji Man felt that Marquis Moyu was the archetype of an ungrateful person that failed to be loyal to his lover. Nie Sangyu had been his lawfully wedded wife. After he had angered her to the point of her losing her sense of propriety, he had casually taken away her position as the main wife. Marquis Moyu was probably secretly overjoyed.

Even thought Ji Man didn’t know if Nie Sangyu would be able to hear her thoughts, she still chided her. Look at this person that you had fallen in love with. You can’t just fall in love with a man by only looking at his appearance!

AND

Women seem to only care about two things: appearance and men. Although she had only seen Marquis Moyu once, Ji Man didn’t have even the slightest bit of good impression towards him. The female lead definitely thought this man was extremely wonderful. Unfortunately, she was the second female lead. The second female lead had and would continue to suffer terribly because of the male lead.

Although she didn’t know how to fight for favor, she not only wouldn’t fight for favor, she wanted Marquis Moyu to dislike her, dislike her to death. The more that Marquis Moyu disliked her, the more likely she would be able to survive.

I LOVE HER!!!!

I doubt the adaptation will be as wonderful as the novel but eh whatever.

[razberryyum]

So you’re done with The Untamed and want more, what now?

Reposting this since I’ve updated it with new info/links. Again, I entered the fandom via The Untamed so I’m by no means a MDZS expert, just tried my best gathering all the resources I can which I hope will help some new Untamed/MDZS fan out there. If you spot any errors, don’t yell at me, just let me know and I’ll correct it as best I can, especially for any future reposts.

READ THE NOVEL

Read the original web novel the show was based on: The Untamed (aka “CQL” or “Chen Qing Ling”) was adapted from the BL web novel, Mo Dao Zu Shi (aka ”MDZS” or Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) by author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (”MXTX”). Yes the novel came first, CQL is only an adaptation. In the novel, you get the uncensored romance of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, where they are canonically married and living happily ever after. The novel goes full into R18 territory so please tread carefully.

All four volumes of the novel can be purchased from the original publishing site, JJWXC. The site’s in chinese but here’s a tutorial on how to navigate it and purchase the books:  JJWXC Tutorial Link.

There’s also the option of purchasing the physical copies from Yesasia which might be easier but it’s also more expensive since they’re the middle man: Yesasia MDZS Link

It would be wonderful if you can support MXTX-laoshi by actually buying the books, especially since the cover art is so beautiful and the extra chapter volumes come with a lot of awesome extra goodies, but of course there’s also the option of reading the fan translations graciously provided by the Exiled Rebels Scanlations team at their site:  

They translated all the novels including the bonus chapters in their own free time and are providing the fanslations for free so please give them some love for all their hard work.  

WATCH THE ANIME (aka “Donghua” in Chinese)

Watch the anime based on the novel: The donghua was released before The Untamed. Two seasons are already available (23 eps total) with a third season in production and a special chibi version of the donghua in production as well. The Eng-subbed donghua can be seen using the WeTV app or on Youtube:  YT MDZS Donghua Playlist

Grant it, the donghua is even more censored than The Untamed, but the donghua team still managed to sneak in some easter eggs (f.e. WangXian naked bathing scene in the cold springs from the novel...in The Untamed they were fully clothed) and more importantly, the animation is just gorgeous so it’s absolutely worth a watch despite the censorship. 

READ THE MANGA (aka “Manhua” in Chinese)

Read the manhua which is ongoing and is being officially translated by WeComics, available on their app for free. Search under the name “Mo Dao Zu Shi”.

Unfortunately, the official translations are more than 20 chaps behind the raws and there have been complaints about the quality of the translations in the past, but I believe they’re starting to improve so since they’re official, it’s always better to support the official source.

The raw untranslated manhua can be found on the Kuaikanmanhua app. Other than being in Chinese, some of the chapters (f.e. the most recent ones) are behind a paywall, but here’s a tutorial on how to purchase the chapters, provided by @chiharuzushi on Twitter:  Kuaikanmanhua Tutorial

The chapters are quite cheap...I purchase 1000 KK coins for 10 rmb ($0.14) and each chapter is only 68 KK coins so even if we end up with 500 chapters it’ll still be...er...quite cheap overall (don’t make me do the actual math). The most painful part is figuring out how to set up the Kuaikanmanhua account, but otherwise, if you can read Chinese or know enough of the story by now that you don’t really need to read the words, the manhua is definitely worth reading because it’s less censored than The Untamed and the donghua. 

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO DRAMA

Listen to the audio drama, which is at this point the most faithful and LEAST censored adaptation of the novel we will probably ever get! Wei Ying’s voice actor in The Untamed is the voice actor for his audio drama counterpart. (Yes, almost everyone in The Untamed is dubbed by a voice actor, EXCEPT for Nie Huaisang. Ji Li, the actor for NHS, was the only one who used his own voice. Lan Zhan in The Untamed shares the same voice actor as his character in the donghua). 

Each episode art of the audio drama is AMAZING. Google Translate works well on the site, you’d want to see the listeners’ comments cuz they’re just adorable and hilarious.

Official links on Maoer FM:

Season 1: Maoer FM S1 Link

Season 2: Maoer FM S2 Link

Season 3: Maoer FM S3 Link

The audio drama was supervised by MXTX-laoshi, the author of the novel, so a lot of love and care went into the production, and it shows. The audio drama is behind a paywall but I remember it’s relatively inexpensive. Here’s the tutorial on how to purchase the audio drama from the Maoer FM site:  Maoer FM Tutorial Link

Ngl, it was tough at first navigating all that, Google translate helped, but once I figured it out, it was all so worth it because in addition to the MDZS, the site houses a lot of other wonderful audio dramas. There are also MDZS fan songs on the site that are near professional quality and oh so good.

Suibian Subs have kindly translated the episodes and their translations are available here:  Suibian Subs MDZS Audio Drama

Show them some love too for translating the episodes, but please if you can, purchase the episodes so you can support the audio drama team which have done an amazing job.

There’s even a Japanese audio drama which the Chinese AD team helped spearhead, available on the MIMI FM app. Here’s a tutorial on how to purchase the eps (half of the first season is out): MIMI FM Tutorial

It’s in Japanese but just follow the pictures. I’m hoping that the Japanese audio drama will end up being the MOST uncensored version of MDZS since Japanese BL dramas are not afraid (and allowed) to go all the way to R18. XD

MORE THE UNTAMED CONTENT

Lastly, if you’re just thirsting for more Untamed content, there are two spin-off movies you can watch. The first one, The Living Dead, is kind of centered on Wen Ning and Sizhui post-CQL. 

The second one, Fatal Journey, is focused on the Nie brothers, Nie Mingjue and Nie Huaisang, with a cameo by Jin Guangyao. It takes place prior to Wei Ying’s return from the dead.

Of the two movies, I definitely recommend Fatal Journey more. Both movies are available on the iQiyi app, which offers a one month free trial for first members. Each month afterwards for VIP is $6.99.

You can also go on the WeTV app for even more Untamed extras: WeTV put out a special edition cut of the show which tightened up the story AND features the original ending that was intended before censorship forced the production team to come up with the more ambiguous one we saw in its original run. It was a simple matter of rearranging certain scenes and getting rid of the separation part, but imho it really made all the difference to the ending.

There’s a ton of behind-the-scene cuteness that you can watch and also concerts with the cast in Thailand and Nanjing. VIP subscription to the WeTV app is $5.99/month and the Nanjing concert is for rent for 3 months at about the same price.  

The show also put out two official soundtracks, one for the vocals and one for the score. Both are available on Amazon and iTunes. For Amazon though, you can search under “The Untamed” but they did this weird thing where the vocals one is listed as “The Untamed (Chinoiserie Music Album)” (wtf) while the score is just listed as “The Untamed (Original Soundtrack)”.

Finally, most of the male members of the cast took part in a fan meet and greet at the start of the show, before it became hugely popular. The entire meet and greet is available on youtube subbed: The Untamed Fan Meeting

That’s it for The Untamed and MDZS. If you end up liking the novel enough to want to read more by the same author, MXTX-laoshi has also written two other BL novels, The Scum Villain Self-Saving System (aka “SVSSS” or “Scum Villain”) and Heaven’s Official Blessing (aka “TGCF” after its Chinese title). Both have been fully translated by fans (but always try to buy the original if you have the means, as a way to support the author!): 

SVSSS Translation: BC Novels Link

TGCF Translation chaps 1 - 24:  Sakhyulations Link

TGCF Translation chaps 25 - End: Suika & Rynn Link

As with reading any BL novel (aka “danmei novel” for Chinese BL books), please heed the warnings and if it’s not your cup of tea, just exit out of the page and move on with your life. No big deal, right? 

Anyway, hope all this info dump helps someone! If you’re brand spanking new to this fandom, welcome, and I’m so jealous of you! Would love to relive stepping into the world of MDZS/MXTX/danmei novels all over again since I feel like I’m already running out of stuff to read and I’m beginning to panic a little. 

Happy watching/reading/listening!  

[siodium]

ASKD;AKSL MY 天官赐福 MANHUA ARRIVED SAFELY

the day it got delivered i went to check the mailbox in the morning before work and i noticed it was full so i asked my family to go open it up hoping that whatever’s filling up the mailbox was my manhua

came back from work and nope no parcel for me :/ well that’s fine... i had asked the GO host to let me know when she’d mailed it out but she didn’t say anything so i guess it’s still with her,,, right??

wrong!! later in the evening it was in the mailbox!! my dad said if i didn’t ask him to check the mailbox in the morning and dig out whatever’s inside then the mailman might not have been able to fit my manhua parcel inside the mailbox and if they dump it at my doorstep and it gets lost or soaked in this rainy weather i’m gonna be mad >:(

tldr my ocd mailbox-checking tendencies may have saved my parcel

so for context after watching mdzs i started getting tgcf recommendations on youtube but i put it off bc idk?? it looked interesting but i wasn’t looking to start anything that time

then i became a netflix parasite and!! tgcf was just added to netflix so i thought eyyy why not start now while the host has yet to boot me

bruH i liked the donghua sO MUCH i went to find the eng translation of the novel so i could continue the rest of the story

the novel had over 300 chapters but i was so invested in the Plot and the Ship i would read it whenever i could so i finished it in two weeks

book gave me so much feels 10/10 i haven’t read something so engrossing that made me not want to put it down ever since AI the somnium files

i actually have a tiny bit of regret picking one of the best danmei novels to start with bc now it’s hard to find anything that can compare???

and that’s the story of how i became addicted to danmei

.

.

.

i was not expecting this book to be such a chonker O: it’s noticeably bigger and a lot heavier than your average japanese manga

xie lian looking gorgeous on the cover sasuga STAREMBER

i joined the bilibili GO so my set came with a shikishi, pin badge, sticker sheet and bookmark~ i heard the pin badge would only be included for the first 40k orders or something like that and they sold out really fast so i wasn’t expecting to get it but it’s a pleasant surprise!!

the sticker sheet was the only extra thing i wanted (luckily it came with all orders) askdjaldj look at all the chibis

wind master!!!! the goodest boi!! must protect

some peeks of the inside!!

yes it’s all in chinese

can i read???? no... but i’m trying my best

the translated chapters are up on the bilibili site/app for free but i just wanted a physical copy bc i’m a simp for starember’s art

bride xie lian... nice

the first volume ends right after the ghost bridegroom arc which means hua cheng barely got any screen time lmao rip

was kinda hoping that the first volume would cover a little bit of the banyue arc but it seems like they a publishing volumes based on the online publication... which means we’ll get four?? volumes of banyue arc gg

idk how to feel about that but at least there’s more hualian moments

the gambling den/ghost city arc tho!!! that’s the one i’m really looking forward to

.

.

.

due to space constraints i told myself to pick between the chinese physical manhua and the english physical novel

i pick the nice arts as you already know but recently when i went to kinokuniya i saw the taiwan novels?? the cover art was so beautiful?? and since the english novels will be using the same cover art... by extension they’d also turn out beautiful... so now i’m tempted

but i already have the digital copy of the entire novel tho and that helps to conserve space (and money) hmm,,

[jingyismom]

The argument is that a lot of people reading the free translations but not paying for raws are people who don't have the means to pay even if they wanted to

(In reference to my flippant tags on hunxi's great post about the creator-fan relationship and piracy wrt anglophone fan translators of danmei locking their work and asking for proof of purchase of the original novels)

Ah, anon, this is super understandable and shitty but absolutely did not occur to me as an issue here specifically, because, in all honesty, it is not an argument against fan translators locking their work. It's sort of...an argument against capitalism at large. Let me try to explain a little bit!

Firstly, I just have to lay down the baseline facts that your favorite danmei writers are working under super predatory contracts and do not retain ownership of their work—the big main site they post on owns everything and, from what I've seen, probably only pays them skimpy royalties off of actual site sales and nothing else. That sucks! But we can't do anything about it.

Hunxi's post covers the next main point better than I could, and boils down to the fact that fan translations are pirated copies, and the anglophone ~audience the authors gain from the circulation of these copies amounts to exactly nothing beneficial to them in any way.

Enfolded in this is the idea that creators (authors, and in this case fan translators) are entirely entitled to dictate how the rest of us interact with their work, full stop, and we must respect their ability to do that.

Thirdly, I have to really hammer in the point that there are two layers of hard work going into the English translations we're reading. First the author's, then the fan translator's. Without either of these laborious efforts, we would not be reading these novels at all. They are both highly intensive and highly creative, and the fan translators are doing it for free. Out of love for the work, and out of hope that a wider audience will share that love.

Should the author be able to control their own work, who gets to see it, and how? Because they created it, and it belongs to them? In an ideal world, yes. But I think, as hunxi mentioned, there is a lot at play with copyright etc between the web novel site and English-language publishers which has prevented official English translations. So we have the fan translations, out of desperation.

This means that control is now in the hands of the fan translators. They are the ones with ownership over both the hard work they have done, and the original author's work. Honestly, to me, that's a lot of responsibility! So I can understand that they want to do the most ethical thing they can with it, and funnel rightful compensation back to the authors. This is the thing I couldn't see any argument against.

Now we come to your argument, anon! And it's a really good one! Because should we broke folk be penalized for our monetary situations? Gatekept out of the danmei fandom because we can't pay? Absolutely not! That simply isn't fair.

But it's not fair to put the burden of our equity onto the fan translators, or onto the original authors either. They are not the ones responsible for the imbalance between us and those that can pay. They aren't the people at the top, laughing at us at the bottom. They're down here with us, and need our solidarity, not our judgement for doing the best they can.

This is a fan community. It sucks that sometimes we're at odds with each other, but we're honestly all just figuring these things out as we go, right? And I think that sort of thing goes better when we work together for solutions. Maybe instead of arguing with fan translators, those of us with time/energy/experience could do something like set up fandom mutual funds, so that people with a few extra dollars could throw those in, and people with internet savvy could use those dollars to buy original novels, and then people who can't pay could claim those proofs of purchase to unlock the translations they want? I dunno! I'm not an organizer, but something like that might be a good way for all of us to help each other out?

Anyway my point is, in many countries, we benefit from systems like libraries and public museums to be able to consume art without having to pay for it, while still compensating the creators of that art. We don't have those mechanisms when it comes to danmei! This does NOT mean the creators simply have to deal with not being compensated. It means we have to create those mechanisms so that we all come away with benefit.

[shijiujun]

Hi, I want to ask something. While I don't speak or read Chinese, it gets pretty obvious if the official subtitles are subpar, to say the least. For example, I'm able to enjoy SHL just fine because Youku's subs don't make me cringe (even if I have the feeling that some nuances are missed), but any other danmei adaptation subbed by WeTV/Tencent is just.... it's a meme-fest, to put kindly. What's your opinion on fansubs that are done if someone decides to revise/correct the original subtitles?

yeah shan he ling’s subbing team is frickin awesome!! got all them footnotes and shit which is like kudos to them especially cuz like... half of wen kexing’s lines are poems and idioms and shit hahaha i had a hard time translating too

okay it’s true it’s a memefest but also!! it’s hilarious af i mean it’s a good joke to have a round, just not very useful

honestly i’m okay with fansubs, but i think what happened on twitter yesterday with shan he ling was that there was this user (idk if you’re coming to me in reference to this) who basically half-joked that youku should be paying her to do the subs because she’s faster than them etc. and this created a bit of like hoohah in the fandom at least on twitter

1. subtitles are all interpretations right, my subs differ in exact wordings from for example the youku official subs for shan he ling, and that’s because i interpret idioms etc. differently, so i wouldn’t say all subs are good subs (cuz mine are definitely not like good) but all subs are VALID subs in a sense that it gives you a different look at how ppl interpret certain words, and also different sentence structures etc. appeal to different people as well so one translation might sound awkward to one person but alright to another - it’s all subjective 

2. the above applies except for the person who started the translation of ‘young master’ as ‘childe’ like jfc

3. if you’re fansubbing

(a) i do think fansubbers should do it from the paid or official versions of the show - same as most reputable translators for novels do, they do pay for jjwxc for example and each translation reminds ppl to support the original version - it’s great to make the subs or translations available to people, but always good to link back to the original and support that, because fansubs do take attention/support away from the original, so i personally believe the fansubber should at the minimum support directly and officially (in this case, pay for you vip youku), and also not advocate or post illegal screencaps from other streaming sites - this isn’t to say fansubbers or ANYONE can’t watch on illegal sites etc. personally, but when you’re sharing content to a larger audience...

(b) you should fansub ‘better’ from the original chinese text directly, not by editing the current ‘terrible’ translations or whatever haha, and no one who doesn’t speak chinese should be doing any revision or correction of the original subs 

- but other than that who can say who has the ‘right’ subs etc. right hahaha. subbing, even ‘badly’, takes up a lot of time, and kudos to every person who tries! (although can ppl stop using like ancient latin/greek or obscure english words to replace chinese words LMAO)

[nyerus]

Hey I originally followed you for YOI stuff and since that seems to be on haitus, I have seen you and a lot of people rebloing stuff about a different anime or manga (i think) with different mlm relationships? I think they're two diff shows and I've heard about mdzs before. But lately youve been reblogging stuff from a manga tagged tgcf and it looks pretty cool--so i was wondering how I could get into it and what its about? Does it have actual gay charas?

Hello! I’m sorry for the late response! This morphed from a simple answer into a beginner guide of sorts, so I hope you don’t mind! I know there’s like 500000 guides out there, but I figured I’d give it a shot too! ❤

So the stuff you’ve been seeing everywhere is indeed MDZS or related to it–including on my own blog! (I promise when YOI comes back from war, I’ll be all over that again ;o;!!!)

So these works are all by the same author, Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù (MXTX) and they are separate danmei (i.e. Chinese BL) novels, though they share a lot of similarities between them:

MDZS (Mó Dào Zǔ Shī) – Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation

TGCF (Tiān Guān Cì Fú) – Heaven Official’s Blessing

SVSSS – Scum Villian’s Self-Saving System

All of them are complete and fan translated, and I’ll answer your last question first: yes, they have actual gay characters! In the novels, the main couples end up canonically married! \o/ In some of the adaptations, their romantic relationships are also maintained (e.g. the manhuas (Chinese graphic novel)), though censorship is present.

Links will be added below this post! Grab some popcorn, this is long!

･:*:･ﾟ’★🐇MDZS🐇★･ﾟ’･:*:･

MDZS《魔道祖师》is definitely the most popular work by MXTX, as it has the most adaptations. You’ve almost certainly been seeing gifs and photosets from its donghua (Chinese animation) or live action the most. However, it has a manhua and audio drama (in both Chinese and Japanese) as well!

Synopsis: Reviled as the infamous Yiling Laozu, Wei Wuxian harnessed the forbidden dark power of demonic cultivation. Once the cultivation world decided he was too dangerous to leave alone, he was hunted down, and a terrible battle ensued that cost Wei Wuxian his life—and the lives of many others. 13 years later, he is resurrected under mysterious circumstances into the body of the pariah Mo Xuanyu. Now with this second chance at life (and while hiding his real identity), Wei Wuxian has to uncover the truth about a powerful malevolent spirit. It may just be the key to revealing a series of heinous secrets hidden from the cultivation world for years. And while the world may still hate him for crimes he didn’t commit, there’s one person who’s on his side—the illustrious Hanguang-jun, Lan Wangji—and is willing to stand by him against all odds. The two have a long and complex history, and Wei Wuxian is unsure of Lan Wangji’s motivations for helping him. But it couldn’t be more simple: respect and love.

Scene from the donghua.

Still from the live action, called “Chén Qíng Lìng”/“CQL”/”The Untamed.”

Panel from the manhua.

Art from the Chinese audio drama.

The great thing about MDZS is that you can really pick your poison in terms of what adaptation you want to get started with. If you are absolutely brand-new to the danmei scene, then starting with the donghua or manhua may be your best bet (both are ongoing). The novel of course is the most beloved, being the source, but all the adaptations have their own charms! They’re all worth checking out, and will keep you busy for quite a while.

･:*:･ﾟ’★🌸TGCF🌸★･ﾟ’･:*:･

Now, for TGCF《天官赐福》—that’s where my photosets are coming from: the ongoing manhua that started in October. There’s a donghua planned for late this year, and a live action in talks (info about that is largely unknown, but is slated for production sometime after the donghua release). TGCF actually has the same deal structure as MDZS apparently, so we’ll be getting an audio drama as well if that’s true.

Synopsis: Talented and virtuous, Crown Prince Xie Lian first ascended to the heavens when he was only 17. Once the darling of the earth and heavens for his boundless skill and purity of heart, he ended up falling from grace—not once, but twice! Subsequently, he became the laughing stock of the three realms. Spending almost 800 years roaming the earth and collecting scraps, he becomes known as the pitiful “rubbish god” and “god of misfortune.” No one could have expected Xie Lian to ascend for a third time, but fate seems to have something in store for this disgraced yet compassionate immortal. Thankfully, he is not alone, as the widely-feared ghost king, Hua Cheng, seems to have a special interest in helping him. The two of them embark on a series of adventures that unravel the secrets of their world, and of themselves.

Panel from the manhua.

Scene from the Donghua PV.

The novel for TGCF is a great place to start, especially considering how the manhua is still in it’s early stages (just starting it’s 2nd arc as of writing this post). The novel is long, incredibly well-written, and well-translated. The manhua is absolutely stunning, and follows the novel very closely thus far.

･:*:･ﾟ’★🎋SVSSS🎋★･ﾟ’･:*:･

The underrated sibling of the three, SVSSS《人渣反派自救系統 》has only the novel to interact with for right now. A donghua is planned for this year. There was a manhua, but it was cancelled due to some problems with the publisher afaik. Word on the street is that they’re searching for a new team for it, so we’ll continue to pray!!!

Synopsis: Shen Yuan is an avid reader of the web novel Proud Immortal Demon Way. The novel revolves around the protagonist Luo Binghe, a kind child who is tormented endlessly by his Shizun (teacher/mentor) Shen Qingqiu, until he turns into a powerful demon lord and exacts his violent revenge. While initially a fan of the story, Shen Yuan hates the unsatisfactory ending. Upon dying suddenly, he finds himself transmigrated into the novel, at the behest of The System—a sci-fi interface which gives him missions and directives. Unfortunately, he ends up in the place of the cruel Shen Qingqiu out of all people! This new Shen Qingqiu now has to use his knowledge of the novel to navigate around the plot, within the restrictions that The System has implemented. He has to find a way to ensure a better ending, if he wants to keep this second chance at life. His plan for doing this is to be as kind and encouraging as possible to the innocent Luo Binghe, who quickly takes a shine to this new Shen Qingqiu. Even after forced to the dark side, and despite the tension between them after this, Luo Binghe won’t let anyone else touch his beloved Shizun.

Cover of the Thai release of the novel.

SVSSS only really has the novel to interact with as of right now. There’s currently an excellent re-translation in progress by tumblr user Faelicy! If you want to get started now, however, you can read what she’s done so far and then swap over to the old translation afterward.

･:*:･ﾟ’★NOTES★･ﾟ’･:*:･

• ALL three novels are intended for an R-18+ audience ONLY. Other adaptations are safe for minors over 16 years of age.

• Please be aware that the novels may contain potentially triggering content. Feel free to ask me for content warnings if you need them.

• All three of these are totally different from one another and only share common themes typical of the wuxia/xianxia genres.

• The original Chinese raws of MDZS and SVSSS are no longer available for purchase on JJWXC (publishing site). You can find print versions on Taobao. TGCF, however, is still available!

• If you’d like more info on anything, please reach out to me! I’m happy to help.

• LINKS WILL BE ADDED BELOW THIS POST.

[ohnobjyx]

Why does it snow?

(Yes, I’ll keep using the snow theme, it’s fitting). 

Part 3: Underlying issues 

Okay, so I’ll try to explain in this post why people reacted so strongly to this matter. Let’s keep in mind that, as a country, they underwent an extremely fast technological and economic development. I don’t want to talk about politics, but let’s not forget that it’s a esential part of every society, as it constitutes how it’s governed. 

 Disclaimer: I try to keep things objective (if I include my personal opinion, it’s in cursive and in brackets), but I’m biased because of the XZ friendly content I’m usually exposed to and by my own views of their situation. Open to discussion, but please make sure you’ve enough information to do so. 

So, let’s go! 

For better or for worse, XZ’s fans incident touched issues Chinese netizens have had for years now. People did discuss about this before, and it will probably be discussed in the future.

Let’s keep in mind that I present here a rather negative view of a part of the C- society. That’s because we are placing a magnifying glass on a small part of the fandom, so by no means all C-fans are like this. These are all a minority. 

“Fan quan” culture 

This is a big one. “Fan” in this case is an anglicism, so it means “fan”.  “Quan” means “circle”, as the people who belong to the same group. The best translation for “fan quan” would be “fandom”, but it has more connotations than fandom has.  

So in a fandom there is a lot of people that share a common interest, XZ, in this case. There are groups in w/ibo for people that belong to a certain fandom, and that’s different than following the supertopic of that said interest. 

To enter the group, you have to apply for it, and a moderator has to accept you in the group. Belonging to a group like this is accompanied by some rules, like “be loyal to the celebrity”, “not mentioning other celebrities in the group”, “supporting your celebrity by getting their endorsements” or “defending him”. 

(We are talking about before... after this incident, a lot of groups have “relaxed” in their rules, and now they consist more in “don’t enter in discussions with other fandoms”, “don’t create heated discussions”, “be rational in your pursue”, at least in XZ’s. This however, is second-hand information: I’m not in any group, neither XZ’s nor WYB’s, so I don’t know how they are right now from the inside). 

So a fandom can change a fan. I’m sure there’s a psychological investigation somewhere out there about how these things work. It’s in this kind of environment that “extreme” fans appear. 

These are fans are willing to go to great lengths to show their support for their idol, some of them going to points like sasaengs, invading the idol’s privacy. They act in ways that perturb the normal progression of things, they are very disruptive, and some of them even try to buy votes for their idol. 

(Please remember that these are a minority, but when you have 30 million fans... even a small percentage is a huge number of people. In Western countries, these kind of “fans” also appear from time to time: stalkers that go to great lengths to chase a celebrity). 

The fandom culture has shapen how the entertainment industry works. It’s a symbiotic relationship: 

Celebrities are successful and popular thanks to their fans, who all belong to a fandom with their name. They depend on them, as fans are more likely to watch a film or a drama if their favourite actor/actress appears in it, no matter what genre (that’s why companies also analyse what kind of people conforms their fandom, to target the kind of genre would more likely be watched by the celebrities’ fans). They also depend on them for things like endorsements, as some fans see buying things recommended by their celebrity as an act of “loyalty”. 

However, fans have a large influence on what a celebrity does. The idol is severely criticized if they do something the fandom doesn’t approve of. There has been instances where people drop the fandom if the idol choose a role the fandom doesn’t like (like how WYB lost fans for trying for a BL drama, he wasn’t even casted yet), and an idol can lose their popularity if they choose a partner the fandom isn’t happy with (or if they choose a partner at all, we’ve said that there is a type of fans that fantasize with being said idol’s partner, so if they have a bf/gf or if they marry, these fans’ fantasy is broken). 

So we can see that the extreme fans are a problem, and why celebrities can’t outright reject fandom culture. They can disagree with the most extreme ones (like how WYB and XZ did in May), but they can’t simply say, “let’s dissolve all of the groups”. 

That’s why in recent years, a lot of people has been rejecting the fandom culture. But a big fandom and an influential idol can also serve to positive purposes, like charity and public welfare projects. 

That’s what XZ has been trying to do, to show that fandom can still produce things that are useful for the society, and to avoid people being ashamed of being his fan.

State control 

As we know, the cultural industry in China is subject to state control. However, have you ever wondered why did only ao3 get banned from the country? What about the page that hosted MDZS original novel? And other fanfiction sites? The website that hosted the novel wasn’t an “illegal” one. In fact, it’s very public, and they earn money by people paying subscriptions to their page to access their content, that’s not just limited to BL novels. 

(Heavens know that the novel was very explicit, and that it’s just a drop of water in the ocean: there are thousands of works like this one out there). 

So, why did 2/27 provoke so much anger? Because the accusers took advantage of the power of the government.

Fandom culture gives an important boost to economy. It’s not just about entertainment, with the endorsements, fandom culture promotes consumerism (people buy things not because they need it, but because it’s endorsed by their favourite artist). 

That’s why the government doesn’t only tolerate them, but even promotes secretly this kind of culture by not strictly enforcing laws and regulations. That’s why websites and novels that don’t comply with Chinese censorship laws have been “allowed” to exist until now (take for example the whole “danmei” genre, that MDZS belongs to). As long as no one reports them, the state will turn a blind eye to these kind of websites.

(Many of you may be asking, if a novel is “allowed”, why censor the tv drama? Well... the cover of the book wasn’t even remotely explicit, but videos and images of two men kissing each other, that’d definitely be banned by the government. Text is subtler that a picture, I suppose). 

In words of a former worker of the state regulation department, if there exists such a content, it needs to be censored. However, this places the regulation department in a tight spot, because it subjects them to rejection from the people and the anger of the commercial companies. 

Usually what if there’s no report, the department won’t investigate even if they’ve heard that the content is questionable, but if it’s reported, they must look into it. 

So the fans didn’t just report it, they announced loudly and widely that they were reporting it, so the department could only investigate, there was no other option. By that time, the matter had originated great conflict and discussion, and, after arising so much controversy, and with people knowing what kind of content had been reported, ao3 could only be banned if they didn’t want to people stop taking the government seriously.  

Thus, in this case, the regulation department has been used as a weapon in this fan war. This is not to say that the government is “innocent”, it’s to say that the accusers had reported the work and announced it knowing exactly what would happen.  

This has been a phenomenon in the last years: the “report culture”. People use this as a weapon: they know that if they report, your content is going to be banned. So it can be used as a threat, leaving the other party defenceless if their content is really not approved by the country. 

However, this kind of behaviour has enacted the rejection from the general public, as it’s seen as a cowardly behaviour: you don’t like their content, so you report them, knowing full well what’s going to happen. 

(To put it simply: there’s a guardian, a keeper, in the playground, that it’s in charge of the children in the playground. This keeper has set rules that the children must follow, but there are too many children, so he can’t keep an eye on every single one. However, he will listen if a child goes to him and tells him that another has broken a rule. He’ll go and teach them a lesson. But the keeper is busy, and sometimes likes the things the children do, even if they are breaking the rules, so he turns a blind eye on them. But if he ignores the children who tell on their mates, and doesn’t punish the wrongdoer, other children will start to do as they please, so he has no other option than to punish them.  Other children realize this, and soon, calling the keeper is made into a very effective threat against other children.)

This brings us to a point that’s very important...

We have to take into account that all industries have to show their loyalty to the government, no matter who they are. So the celebrities and the companies behind them, no matter what they think, have to express their loyalty and nationalism, especially since they are in such a visible spot. Even if they don’t have such feelings, they must pretend at least (but the majority are very patriotic, since it goes into the younger generations’ education). 

So before considering to criticize their government, we must be aware that both WYB and XZ, as well as any other Chinese idol you might like, live in there. Expressing very anti-governmental opinions identifying as their fans might actually hurt them rather than help them (this was a problem from twitter a few months ago, from what I know. So please, don’t do that). 

Some haters actually spread rumours of celebrities being unpatriotic quite frequently, to make the government look into it. These kind of rumours are the deadliest for them, and can actually retire them, so please, be careful with what you say while saying that you are their fan.

That’s also why XZ can’t say anything about ao3 being banned from the country, no matter what he thinks. Better not to enter that place. 

“Xiao xianrou” 

In recent years, more and more new celebrities are very good looking. So much that it’s more than just a suspicion that they get their jobs because of their looks rather than actual talent. They also get numerous fans because of their beauty. These young idols receive the name of “xiao xianrou”. It’s very noticeable when you compare them to the older generation of artists, who don’t have a face that would stop a crowd, but have a lot of talent. 

Being a xiao xianrou doesn’t mean that they don’t have talents (XZ is considered one too), it’s just a name that these new celebrities receive. However, people feel that new celebrities nowadays are very good looking, but have no skills. 

(This is just an example of what it’s called xiao xianrou. Remember, it doesn’t mean that they are talentless!)

Of course, not every good looking artist nowadays must be completely useless in anything else (we can all think of 2 good examples). In fact, people who get into the industry, and manage to stay there and continue working after, let’s say, 5 years, definitely has something more than just good looks. But people also feel that to stay in the industry when one isn’t so handsome must be purely because of their abilities with acting/singing/dancing. 

However, it’s also a fact that some of the new dazzlingly beautiful idols have singing or dancing abilities that aren’t so outstanding. A lot of good plots and dramas have been ruined by actors who are handsome and beautiful, but don’t know how to act to save their life. 

So for people who are very upset with this, when they saw the news about XZ and the comments of the antis saying that he had no acting skills, they thought that this was just another one of them, and jumped on the train of criticizing without actually knowing how his acting skills are or what happened. It was just a way of venting their displeasure with a whole other issue that has actually nothing to do with XZ.

W/ibo (W/)

This platform is a part of the problem. To start with, w/ earns money the same way twitter and instagram do, so for them it’s essential that people spend a lot of time in their website/app. 

While positive people spend time on their platform, another group that do that is haters and antis. 

W/ is full of netizens spreading hate, insults and cyber-bullying other people, but the platform itself doesn’t do anything to change this. And this happens because W/ profits from it. The more time a hater and a anti spend in W/, the more W/ profits from it. Sometimes, it’s W/ who sets marketing accounts that attack a certain idol. 

Moreover, an account with lots of followers will get more money from the platform (like youtube). That’s why people that have no particular reason to hate xz turn into antis and dedicate themselves to spreading hate, gaining followers from people who resent him from 2/27 or fans that hate him for any other reason. And that’s also why haters accounts appear and spread, and why W/ doesn’t always block them.

This is why when a celebrity or any other people who got insulted or has been systematically attacked on Internet, they can only report it to the police and let lawyers handle the issue. However, legal processes are long and take time and money, so many people don’t do it (especially idols, who can have a lot of antis).   

Seeing that people are starting to realize this, and protesting about being left defenceless on the Internet, W/ started recently a project to stop malicious content and hate (looks like just playing the part to me, tbh). 

Another problem this platform has is the privacy inside the communities and the false accounts. 

This platform holds communities where people can talk and share things they like. However, in groups of fans of a certain idol, there are also “spies” that sell information about the characteristics of the group or antis that disguise themselves as fans to continue spreading rumours and false news from inside the group. 

This is what happened a little earlier in February, before 2/27: an anti got into a bjyx group, but all of his comments were to belittle XZ and praise WYB. Even if people know that this is not true, after seeing it for a while, it’s bound to affect their image of the idol.

And last... 

This is not exactly a “problem”, but I couldn’t include it anywhere else. 

The economy and money is why XZ’s company haven’t given him up yet. For one, XZ has signed many contracts with several companies, so he can’t leave even if he wanted to, because he’d end up with a debt in the millions. For another one, the companies don’t want to give up on him yet, because he himself hasn’t committed any grave mistake (like, none, in fact). 

If it comes to it, they’ll “kill the hen and get the eggs” (meaning they’ll get what they can and discard XZ) but for now XZ is still very popular and he’s earning a lot of money for the company. So, right now, XZ isn’t a failed investment, just a very dangerous one (in case his reputation deteriorates again), but companies have put too much money on him to give up at the first sight of problem. That’s why XZ’s Studio is valiantly trying to separate XZ from those crazed fans, and declaring them from being independent of XZ.

Actually, one of the companies he signed with was on the verge of bankruptcy when they signed the contract (before CQL, I think). After the boom last year, they were actually counting on him to reverse their situation with the new dramas, but they didn’t expect 2/27. So now, they are one of the most interested in getting XZ back to work, and to air his dramas successfully. It’s for selfish reasons, but it serves XZ’s interests.  

However, companies do and will dare to “lick the blood from the knife” (it’s a continuation of the previous idiom, to lick the blood of the hen and it means to get even the last drop of profit). 

If XZ doesn’t enter the government’s black list of celebrities, they’ll continue to get the earnings from his fans’ “offerings” (the crazed fans who buys his every endorsement + rational fans buying their favourite artist’s endorsements they actually like). 

The future of the entertainment industry is uncertain, from both economic and social (epidemic) points of view, so this is to be taken into account when considering this problem.

←Part 2: A sudden snowstorm | Part 4: Plum blossoms in the snow (I) →

[what-a-treat-nz]

World Book Challenge: China

Officially, the People's Republic of China (PRC). It is the world's most populous country, with a population of around 1.4 billion. It covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometers, and is officially divided into 23 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), and the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau.

The areas in dark green are under direct Chinese control; the areas in light green (Tibet and Taiwan) are contested. For the purposes of this challenge, I’m treating China, Tibet and Taiwan as three separate countries. Because I can.

Number of Chinese people in New Zealand: As of the 2013 Census, there were 163,104 people of “Chinese (not further defined)” ethnicity in New Zealand - 10,008 of those were in Wellington City.

Have I been there? Yes! I visited Shanghai with my Dad in December 2011. I bought a really nice coat, had tea that tasted like warm Fanta (it was oddly addictive), and got hugged by Dave Grohl. So, the usual Chinese experiences, really.

I also had Peking Duck for the first time in my life, and holy hell I didn’t know what I was missing. I’ve tried to make up for it by eating copious amounts of it since.

The books

For “China” on my reading challenge, I read three fantasy novels - Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, and the final two books of the Poppy War trilogy (The Dragon Republic and The Burning God) by R. F. Kuang, a Chinese-American author.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (魔道祖师 / Mó Dào Zǔ Shī)

(Book 30 of 2021)

Given the fact that I have an entire subsection of my blog about how much I love the live-action TV show based on this book, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that I had Mó Dào Zǔ Shī at the top of my list of Chinese books to read.

Mó Dào Zǔ Shī tells the story of Wei Wuxian, a loathed cultivator of dark and demonic arts who resurrects 16 years after his tragic death. His return to the world brings him to reunite with the people in his first life, including his soulmate, the honored Lan Wangji (who mourned him for 16 years, during which he branded himself with the same mark as Wei Wuxian and kept his memory alive and I’m okay, I promise). Wei Wuxian then begins to remember his time before his demise 16 years ago, from his beginnings as a young cultivator to his descent to dark magic. Together, they solve a mystery linked to a dark tragedy from Wei Wuxian’s first life, then live happily ever after.

This novel was originally published on the Chinese web novel site JJWXC from October 31, 2015 - March 1, 2016, with additional side stories that continue to be released sporadically. The revised version of the main story was later published online until September 7, 2016. A paperback version was released on December 12, 2016, with a total of four volumes in traditional Chinese. The first of three planned volumes in simplified Chinese, titled Wuji, was released in 2018, but release of the following installments has stalled after the locking of the novel on JJWXC since January 2019.

Mó Dào Zǔ Shī isn’t officially available in English, and given that it depicts an explicit danmei relationship between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, I don’t think we’ll ever see an official version. Though there are official translations into Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Russian, Japanese, and Burmese, and the tour for the TV traveled to Toronto, Los Angeles and New York, so maybe one day there will be an official translation.

For now though, you can read the entire novel for free at Exiled Rebels Scanlations, where it has been translated in full by a then-highschooler called “K-san”. It’s hard to actually judge the merits of the writing of the original novel, given I was reading an unofficial translation, but that was actually half of the sweetness of it. It was kinda rough - K-san tweaked the terms they used as they gained more confidence with the translation, and I enjoyed reading the translator and editor notes that accompanied most chapters - especially notes such as “we’re translating as fast as we can, stop asking for faster updates!”. It felt really organic and friendly, and the story is good (though much gorier than the TV show and good god boys, learn what lube is, it’ll make your lives better I promise).

I read the book more as a companion to the TV show though, rather than a novel on it’s own merits, so I’m not sure I can judge it as a novel on it’s own merits. Though the book did teach me one very important piece of information: Lan Wangji canonically smells of sandalwood.

Would I read it again? If an official English translation comes out, I’d probably read that. I’m more likely to watch the TV show again, or dive into one of the sesquillion Untamed fanfics on AO3 ( Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn was the most popular ship on AO3 in 2020, with 12,878 new works about these characters being published that year).

The Dragon Republic and The Burning God

(Books 34 and 35 of 2021)

I read The Poppy War and The Dragon Republic back in September 2019 (when I wasn’t counting how many books I was reading, but I did have a record of them), and I decided to re-read The Dragon Republic because I couldn’t exactly remember where the story was up to.

And it’s a good thing I did, as something I thought happened at the end of The Dragon Republic actually happened at the end of The Poppy War, so oops?

The Poppy War trilogy is a grimdark fantasy novel set in fantasy China, with a Chinese protagonist and written by a Chinese-American author. It’s spectacular. The trilogy draws its plot and politics from mid-20th-century China, though it’s atmosphere is more inspired by the Song dynasty. The conflict in the first book is based on the Second Sino-Japanese War (though this time, it’s the Chinese empire against the Japanese empire), in the second on the start of the Chinese civil war (Chinese empire against nascent Republican movement), and in the third on the end of Chinese civil war (Republicans versus not-Republicans).

It’s a massive trilogy. It’s incredibly complex, with a huge scale and massive numbers of characters, though the fact it’s all seen through Rin’s eyes (with the occasional first and last chapter from the point of view of other characters) helps.

The story follows that of Fang Runin, better known as Rin, a poor war orphan in southern Nikara who trains in secret to test into the elite Sinegard Academy. Throughout the trilogy she deals with racism, sexism, elitism...most of the isms, really. Author R.F. Kuang said that Rin's life is meant to parallel the trajectory of Mao Zedong, and I had fun trying to match events in Chinese history to the events in the book (the easiest ones to spot are the Rape of Nanjing, the nuclear bombing of Japan and the Long March).

I don’t remember Mao Zedong having the power to call on a fire god, however. It’s probably a good thing that’s not something that happened in real life China, as Mao’s policies killed enough people without him literally being able to spit fire.

I described the first book as “If Kvothe from The Name of the Wind was female, Chinese, and allowed to say fuck.” Those two books felt really similar to me - they’re very much your “outsider is accepted to elite academy, winds up pissing off most of their classmates and chooses an obscure major to specialise in before being thrown into a conflict they are key to winning.” But honestly, I preferred the Poppy War trilogy, even if the final book did get super dark.

Rin is a really refreshing character, and the world seen through her eyes is a very different place to one I’m used to reading about. Kuang said that she "chose to write a fantasy reinterpretation of China's twentieth century, because that was the kind of story I wasn't finding on bookshelves", and I’m so glad she did. The world needs more books like this. I’m as pasty and as white as they come, and I loved reading a book where the heroine was authentically Chinese. This isn’t a pakeha author trying to fit themselves into someone else’s shoes - this is someone with a deep understanding of Chinese military history and collective trauma using that understanding and pain to build a new fantasy world.

I loved it, and if you can stomach war scenes, I recommend this trilogy.

Will I read the Poppy War trilogy again? I might do. It’s a bit darker and more desperate than I usually read - particularly The Burning God - but I did enjoy them. So that’s a firm “never say never”.

Bonus book! 

These Violent Delights

I read NZ-Chinese author Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights earlier this year (book number 20 of 2021), before I set myself this challenge, so it doesn’t technically count as an entry for “China” in my book challenge. But it is amazing, and I love it, so I wanted to give it a quick shout out here (because if we’re talking fantasy reimaginings of Chinese 20th century history by Chinese diaspora authors...).

These Violent Delights relocates the story of Romeo and Juliet to 1920s Shanghai, casting the two leads as the heirs to rival gangs. It’s brilliant, it’s beautiful, there were sentences that made me stop and gasp for the sheer delight of having read them, and there’s a monster made of bugs driving the citizens of Shanghai insane. The way Gong has woven the characters from the play into their 1920s counterparts is delightful (I say this as someone who’s never actually read the play, though I think I saw the Leonardo DiCaprio movie because it was difficult to be a tween in the late 90s and not be exposed to his films).

15/10, would definitely read it again, it’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks for a very, very good reason. Stop reading this blog and go get a copy. Now.

The feast

I admit, using China as my first country may have been a bit of a cop out, given my familiarity with Chinese food - though, living in a Western country, I’ve probably eaten more Westernised Chinese food than authentic Chinese food.

Which is why I was chuffed to learn that spring rolls are, actually, authentic Chinese food. I always thought they were a Westernisation, like sweet and sour pork or fortune cookies.

For my Chinese feast, I turned to The Woks of Life, a delightful Chinese cooking blog that I can’t open without being inspired to cook like 9 million things.

When I started this project, I originally was only going to cook one dish from each country. I figured I’d go easy on myself for China, and make 花生酥 (hua sheng su), a traditional sesame peanut brittle.

It’s something I’ve made before - I make little bags of it for my colleagues each lunar new year.

I don’t follow the Woks of Life recipe exactly - for example, I’ve never once roasted and shelled my own peanuts. I tend to use a mix of blanched and pre-roasted peanuts in my 花生酥, and I think it comes out okay. Next time I’m going to increase the amount of sugar I use - I find that 270g of rock sugar is not quite enough to cover the peanuts totally. Which is a pain. Next time I think I’ll use 300g, and turn the heating on in my kitchen so it’s warmer, to stop the brittle from hardening before I can properly get it into the tray to cool.

But then I changed my mind, and decided to throw a full on feast.

For the feast I threw, I made two more dishes from the Woks of Life - Easy Peking Duck with Mandarin Pancakes, and 年糕 (nian gao), or stir-fried rice cakes (though I did them with chicken, not pork, as that’s what I had in my freezer). I also cooked up some spring rolls, as I had them leftover in my freezer from my housewarming (for which I over catered, because I cannot do anything but over cater any event I throw). I should have marinated the duck longer. That one was on me.

I also made some 核桃酥 (he tao su), walnut cookies, which were delicious and I definitely want to make again. I think I’ll add some hazelnuts in as well for additional crunch, and make them slightly smaller - they were 12 very big cookies.

But delicious cookies.

Kisu was most distressed that we did not feed her anything from this feast.

The Playlist

I ended up finding this “Chinese Indie & Rock” playlist on Spotify, which I really enjoyed. I could understand none of the songs, but I enjoyed the heck out of a lot of them. I’ll probably keep listening to this playlist - they were definitely my sort of jams.

[foxghost]

This just my opinion i think mxtx have a big overseas fandom because mdzs is the 1st danmei novel that got english fan-translations then it got bigger in the overseas fandom after the success of cql if you see 2ha overseas fandom also came after mdzs fandom so yeah i see some pattern here, the key is the translator, when the fandom is big they gather and discuss about what they like most of them just talk the popular one bc the translator just talk about the popular one, how many of them that talk about other priest's works besides zhen hun, spl and tian ya ke (after the success shl?) Just few off them, i believe people just want to read something that was talked the most by everybody it's kinda like domino effect, but i'm surprised to know that fei tian's works is not popular in china, i think he was on the top 10 danmei authors, i remember hearing his jjwxc voice message along with the popular danmei author for new year greetings

You can run around on the general internet (not the danmei circles exclusively) a lot without hearing about FTYX, but you’ll probably run into mentions of MXTX.

MDZS is big in the way that Twilight was big, or the way that Harry Potter was/is big. They all appeal to the "young adult" audience. I think that age has a lot to do with it, but it’s not so much about the maturity of the books involved (tho i must confess MXTX’s writing style gives my old brain a headache) but a teenage audience (middle school to high school 2nd year) tend to generate more hype. They have less money for merchandise and make up for it with comments and ratings and defending their fav. 

FTYX has a consistent paying adult audience that’s also consistently quiet. He writes it, we read it. He says V, we buy it one chapter at a time as it comes out even if waiting for him to finish would cost less. I’m probably guilty of this as a typical invisible Feitian fan -- I may pour money into it (it is frankly not much, $20 worth of points lasts me months in between free book and V books, and I read a lot) but I don’t really use my “favourites” or use fertiliser or leave comments etc. This quiet audience really shows when it’s OFF jjwxc.

on the site Zhihu (like Quora, I guess), on how much FTYX is talked about (followers/questions)

Here’s MXTX’s

But Feitian’s written 30+ books. MXTX’s written 3.

And here’s some stats on douban reading (this is all around the same period so accumulation over time is less of a factor). I want to draw your attention to not the rating itself, but the # of people who rated, under the stars.

FTYX’s Golden Assistant, 2014:

FTYX’s representative palace drama work, Joyful Reunion, 2017:

MXTX’s representative xianxia, MDZS, 2016:

DFGG’s Peach Blossom Debt (the physical book published in 2016 but the book was serialised online 2007, these ratings are all from 2016+)

Priest’s representative palace drama, sha po lang, 2016

Priest’s Mo Du, 2014:

Feitian’s “Seizing Dreams” is voted in as an all-time top10 on jjwxc’s danmei (pure love) with the tickets system (Priest’s Mo Du is #1), but on douban where ppl talk about books? CRICKETS.

Meanwhile, “So And So” by Mu Su Li, listed just above Feitian’s seizing dreams on the same jjwxc list?

His quality is unquestionable, his ability to sell V, also unquestionable. /but apparently we like to be low-key about it? And maybe his newer work is more 大眾化 (cater to the masses) but I like his 2009-2016 period. Anyway I generally leave the screaming about things to other people. All I can do is provide the raw material. Maybe at some point when I have more time I’ll contribute some fan art.

[ge]

Hello could you please explain tgcf to me you're my sole exposure to it.

omg hii ILL TRY bt im not very good at explaining things.. tgcf (tian guan ci fu AKA heaven official’s blessing) is about a once young and well loved prince who ascended to the heavens at a young age and became a martial god but due to unforeseen circumstances he was banished back to the human realm several times and by his third ascension back to the heavens hes only known as a scrap collecting god and the laughing stock of the three realms. as he descends from the heavens again he unknowingly meets a supreme demon king who has been looking for him for a very long time... 

its a danmei novel which means its main pairing is a gay couple (xie lian and hua cheng) and they do both have a happy ending!

the tgcf novel translation has been completed w 244 chapters and 8 extras and u can read the entire novels here!!!!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1oXnp5Y2OD70i78utu4BcQ3xgAlygypd0

season one of the tgcf donghua is also completed and u can watch on bilibili or on any anime streaming site of ur choosing! theres also a manhua but it sucks so dont read it

TRIGGER WARNINGS bc while book four gets very heavy instances of these r spread thruout the novel (and these prbly arent all of them jst the ones i can think of so pls remind me if i missed any)

violence, body horror, suicide, abuse, torture

dubcon kissing idr the exact chapter but iirc there r two dubcon kissing scenes but nothing happens beyond that

and heres a tgcf masterpost by readtgcf soo if i missed anythng or if u wanna see a more indepth desc then here u gooo!

https://readtgcf.tumblr.com/post/620316816672260096/tian-guan-ci-fu-masterpost-all-info-links-tian

PERSONALLY i rlly love this novel even more than i do mdzs and i def recommend reading it and watching the donghua...

[yuexuan]

Fiction recommendation 19

Halloween’s here! As per past tradition, here’s another round of fic recs! The theme is still horror/supernatural/apocalyptic-oriented (because that’s my jam~). 

My previous Halloween fic recs can be found here and here

1.  小蘑菇 (Little mushroom)

Author: 一十四洲 (Xiao Shi Si Zhou)

Future, apocalypse, sci-fi

Summary:

He who brings Judgement is judged...by none other than a small mushroom. 

An Zhe was a simple mushroom and his only goal in life was to ensure the survival of his spore. One day, he lost his spore. He searched high and far, even risking his life to infiltrate a human base where he suspected the spore was taken to. The problem was that the human base was guarded by the Judge, a human with an inexplicably acute sense of distinguishing infected mutants from normal human. 

Too bad that he could only distinguish animal and plant-based mutants, and An Zhe was a fungi, eh?

Comments: 

Set in the future where Earth had finally lost its magnetic fields, inducing changes far beyond what anyone might anticipate. I particularly liked the world-building, from creating mannequins to commemorate the dead as a job, to the different ways they detect mutants, or the facilities that humans built to counter incoming attacks. Definitely worth a read!

Novel | Novel [Eng] Translation | Audio drama

2.  不死者 (Undead)

Author: 淮上 (Huai Shang)

Future, apocalypse, sci-fi, ABO, zombie

Summary:

2019, the year when the Pandora Virus raged across the globe. Infrastructures  were destroyed, basic services halted, nuclear plants experienced meltdown, and cities were sunken into despair. In a place without God, humanity's hope rests in the hands of a few. 

Unit 118 was responsible for bringing back the antidote, in the form of an omega who had developed resistance to the Pandora Virus. The problem was that the omega wasn’t entirely cooperative. Also, he was more-than-capable of taking down zombies and alphas alike.

Comments:

This is an ABO x zombie fic, so if you like both settings and appreciate a power couple, you’re gonna enjoy this!

Novel | Novel [Eng] Translation | Audio drama

3.  民调局异闻录 (Bureau of paranormal investigation)

Author: 耳东水寿 (Er Dong Shui Shou)

Supernatural, mystery, modern

Summary: 

During a stakeout, Shen La and crew were tricked into a cave filled with the Undead. In the course of escaping, he reopened his Heaven’s Eye that enabled him to see ghosts and other paranormal beings. As a result, he was approached and recruited by the ‘census bureau’, a secret government agency tasked with dealing with paranormal activities.

**Note that this is not a danmei

Comment:

If you like Daomu, you’re going to enjoy this novel because the writing style, characterization etc. are heavily inspired from Daomu. The entire novel consisted of short stories where the main cast deals with different paranormal events. It is situated within a larger universe, including prequels and sequels such as 勉传、暗夜将至、绝处逢生、民调局异闻录后传. I’m currently reading 勉传 , but it’s nowhere as exciting and entertaining as the main book lol. 

Novel | Novel [Eng] Translation | Donghua

4.  寒武再临 (The return of Cambrian Period)

Author:  水千丞 (Shui Qian Cheng)

Sci-fi, future, apocalypse, special abilities

Summary:

A sudden earthquake caused the rapid evolution of all living things on earth. Suddenly humankind found itself no longer at the top of the food chain and their hope rests in the hands of those who evolved special features to protect them. 

Chong Xia came by an old jade holding the secrets to advancing others’ evolution, possibly giving humankind a second chance at survival. 

Comments:

Another apocalypse fic with very expansive world-building. I really enjoyed the first part of the story - it’s refreshing to see a smart characters that make wise use of scientific knowledge. Somehow this dwindled later in the story, and Chong Xia became just any typical nice-hero, which was kinda disappointing but hey, the world-building more than makes up for it! Also, I heard that there is a new donghua coming out based on this.

Novel | Novel [Eng] Translation | Audio drama

5.  图灵测试 (Turing test)

Author:  唇亡齒寒0 (Chun Wang Chi Han 0)

Sci-fi

Summary:

The 28th test: failure. Once again Yu ShaoQing correctly identified the AI in the virtual reality test, much to the frustrations of the AI’s creators. But what if...the AI was losing on purpose? 

"Is this reality?" Yu ShaoQing awoke again from the virtual world, but he was supposed to be dead.

Comments:

Interesting take on the Turing Test, which is a method of testing whether an AI is capable of thinking like a human. It’s a relatively short fic for a good read :)

Novel 

6.  复生门徒 (Revived disciples)

Author:  四十九盞燈 (Si Shi Jiu Zhan Deng)

Apocalypse, sci-fi, mutants/special abilities

Summary:

‘A species is never extinct. Instead, their DNA is just sleeping. When the conditions are right, these DNA will reawaken.” - <Summary of the Solar Plan>

2017, the Solar Plan went askew, resulting in the reawakening of ancient species and the destruction of society. Majority of humankind fell into the bottom rung of the food chain. At the same time, the ancient DNAs resting within some humans were slowly coming back to life......

The killer ‘Red Eye’ and mercenary ‘Ghost Wolf’ were accidentally embroiled into part of the Solar Plan. Amidst the chaos, they paved a bloody pathway for humankind.

Comments:

If you like a power couple, this fic will be to your liking. It is fast-paced, with a lot of plot twists and interesting takes on power mutation/evolution. 

Novel 

7. 灵笼: Incarnation

Apocalypse, sci-fi

Summary (taken from myanimelist)

In the not-too-distant future, the human world has long been overpopulated. Humanity marched to the stars in search of a new home, and just as this was going on, the moon's alignment caused massive earthquakes to ripple across the world, lasting several decades. Humanity was demolished. When the land finally recovered, humanity reemerged to face this strange yet familiar world. Will we, who once lorded over this domain, still remain the masters of this world?

Comments:

This is not a fiction but a 3D donghua that really deserves more views due to its engaging plot and high-quality production. Honestly I felt like people didn’t talk about it just because it’s not BL/GL, but I strongly recommend the donghua. It is available for free on Bilibili’s official youtube site. 

[rigelmejo]

Some useful I found recently for reading cnovels, that work as Readers that provide translations, or Parallel Texts:

zhenhunxiaoshuo.com - A chinese site. has a ton of priest novels, a lot of other danmei novels as well including modaozushi, sleuth of ming dynasty, love is more than a word, etc. I adore this site. I found it by chance when someone recommended it for reading the sleuth of ming dynasty. I deeply appreciate whoever made this site. This site is visually simple and easy to look at, and if you know the titles of the novels you want to read then it is exceptionally easy to locate the correct one. (In addition, if you like any of these novels, please consider buying a copy of the official novels either on the sites they were initially sold on like jjwxc, or their print editions - this is a link to jjwxc, Priest’s Guardian page. jjwxc also has MXTX’s works on it, Meatbun’s 2ha on it, etc). 

This is a google doc guide by @anonflail on twitter about how to make an account on jjwxc and purchase the official novels: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ikGyfFiI4SQe2NmrNsJ3sgV71Iv6e5tGqN9i8SZbuSA/edit . If you happen to be reading any cnovel translations, most translation’s include a link in their intro page to the original official cnovel.

In addition, sometimes if the novels are published you can find print copies of them on YesAsia.com. If you find it this way, often they are traditional character book versions so check in the description. Also look up books by chinese title or pinyin, if the english title does not give you results. I got the mo dao zu shi books from this site, and The Untamed Drama OST. You can also find print novels on amazon, ebay, and aliexpress. Forewarning though I really... have no idea if the ones on these sites are official published copies or not. I got Zhen Hun off Aliexpress months ago, having no idea about anywhere else to find it at the time. The book is in simplified characters, and contains most of the novel but I think is missing all of the extra chapters, and my version has an intro featuring Kunlun that doesn’t exist in the jjwxc online version. Again, if you buy a book, check if the characters are traditional or simplified before purchasing. Be aware that often cnovels are more than 1 volume - don’t buy 1 and think you have the entire novel, actually check how many volumes it is... (Like Mo Du by Priest is 3 volumes?) I’ve found YesAsia to have the most genuine looking books...

Also, if I’m going to get nitpicky... if you want to guarantee you are reading a version of the cnovel with all the extra chapters - the official release is your only guarantee. I personally like to have some notepad copies of the txt to edit and look at, and often unofficial txt downloads will be missing chapters, be the older unedited and therefore less finished versions of chapters, and will be missing later chapters and sections. So if you really enjoy a story, you might as well enjoy the full thing by supporting the author, and getting their most complete official versions of the novels. 

daomubiji.org - If you’re a fan of The Lost Tomb series (the books or the multitude of dramas), this website seems to have most or all of the novels. Its absolutely huge. Like the last site mentioned, you can read them on here. If you’ve never read daomubiji, here’s a quick intro: its real well known sort of like Harry Potter. It’s very Lara Croft/Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones/Uncharted/The Mummy kind of stuff - with the fantasy elements being generally similar to other chinese-tomb-raider genre stories. So think adventurous tomb exploring plus some horror fantasy. It has a ton of drama adaptations you could check out if you wanted a visual introduction to daomubiji - some adaptations are better or worse than others. A fun fact - the two male main leads are probably the biggest ship/CP in the fandom, as far as I can tell. Despite them not being explicitly canonically romantic - compared to the danmei novels listed on the site above lol. I think its a tragedy tbh... that it is so hard to find daomubji fanfictions in english, given how huge this novel series is and how many adaptations it has, and how huge the chinese fandom is. There are some chinese fics on ao3, but I know there are some epic length well written fanfics for this series somewhere in the chinese internet. (Edit: here is the ao3 daomubiji tag). I just can’t find them lol ToT. Also there are tragically FEW english fanfics for daomubiji, despite how accessible the story is for english speakers (the first 6 novels already have official english translated books, and most of the drama adaptations have easily accessible english subs). If you know what chinese sites I can read daomubiji fanfic on, please let me know! I know some fanfics for this fandom are so HUGE, and well known, they have txt files floating around and are 100+ chapters and were once-upon-a-time recced on baidu (but the links are broken now :c ). Anyway, back to this site. You can use a dictionary/translator to lookup unknown words, use the free Zhongwen chrome extension to hover over words for a definition, or view this site in the Pleco WebReader/Chinese Zero to Hero reader/Idiom app, and click words for definitions as needed. Again, if you like any of the daomubiji novels, the author’s written a ton! Go support them! The Lost Tomb is actually published in english too up to volume 6, under the name The Grave Robber’s Chronicles (if you wanted a print english copy).

mtlnovel.com - useful in general as a way to read novels roughly-translated into english, if no existing translation is already being done. It’s also useful if, for example, the english translation you are reading is unfinished but you’re desperate to read more even if it’s machine translated lol. It has a large number of cnovels on the site. I feel this site’s coolest feature though, is the ability to enable ‘RAW.’ If you do that, at the top of the chapter you’re reading, then you will see the traditional character paragraphs above the english machine translated ones. This allows you to use any novel on the site as a parallel chinese-english reader. Right now you can only enable RAW if you are logged in. An account is free. If you run into unknown chinese words, you can look them up in the dictionary/translator of your choice. Or, if you have the free Zhongwen chrome extension, then you can just hover over unknown words for a definition on the same page. (If you like any of these novels, support the author’s official releases). 

https://dictionary.chinesezerotohero.com/#/reader - I’ve seen the site Chinese Zero to Hero before and its quite helpful. I think there’s paid areas, but this area is free. In the Reader, you can paste in any chinese text and it will provide pinyin above the hanzi, along with dictionary definitions if you hover over a word/phrase. I’m testing it right now, and their translations are pretty good! (This Chinese Zero to Hero Reader, or LanguageTools.io are free alternatives I would suggest instead of LingQ, for a reader). In addition, this site also has a lot of free graded readers with all these same features plus accompanying audio. I read The Monkey King on this site before. This site in general also has a large selection of grammar points, and a nice dictionary that breaks down words/characters by radical, includes links to related words, includes pictures of the word’s meaning (in case you’re a visual learner or are making flashcards), includes mnemonics (which I just realized!) and example sentences. It looks very useful and I should start using their dictionary more... (mnemonics seems to be the big benefit of this that Pleco doesn’t have). 

[kyogre-blue]

C-novel reading list

OK, here is (most) of my reading list at Novelupdates (a truly blessed site). I’ve removed the ones I haven’t started on yet, and also the ones that are, well, trash that I’m reading for the train wreck. I’ve also tried to divide them thematically. 

Danmei: 

The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System

Every Day the Protagonist Wants to Capture Me

Who Dares Slander My Senior Brother

The Rebirth Waste Strikes Back

The Villain Has Something to Say

The Villain’s White Lotus Halo

The Wife is First

So What If You’ve Been Reborn?

Pulling Together a Villain Reformation Strategy

Gen, male MC:

Lord Xue Ying

The Human Emperor - A man who ends up reborn early in his life to right the wrongs of his original lifetime. Also, a transmigrator because why not. Anyway, I recognize the general format from fem MC stories, so it’s more interesting to me.

World of Cultivation - The translation is a pain because it leaves so many words untranslated.

Fem MC: 

Ascending, Do Not Disturb - The most chill of novels. A very relaxed story about a girl joining a sect and cultivating. It’s so soft, I love it. 

Pampered Consort of the Fragrant Orchard - The MC has the cliche ridiculous backstory of “assassin medical genius” but she’s not edgy as a whole, and I like the change in setting from the capital noble houses to a small village. 

Picking Up a General to Plow the Fields - Also a story set in a village. MC is... an agriculture major lol. 

Phoenix Destiny - I’m not very far in this one, but I find the premise of the inter-dimensional chatgroup (basically) that the MC uses to be amusing.

Rebirth: The Journey of a Wife Spoiling Her Husband - I don’t know what the heck to call this. It’s like... women and men have switched gender roles (ok), and men can somehow get pregnant (ok.jpg). I am really curious for a sex scene just so that I can find out how this works. 

Tyrannical Wang’s Beloved Wife - Transmigrator MC but not an OP one with nice grandparents. However, the ML is a time traveler. I’m curious about the setup. 

OP is reborn in the past and murders her way through her scheming family and would be husband: 

The Rebirth of the Malicious Empress of Military Lineage - I would say this is the most solid “fem MC rebirth” story. It plays the angst premise well, and the romance is paced well. Translations are also almost complete, which is nice. 

The Rebirth of an Ill-Fated Consort - From the same author as Malicious Empress, but an earlier work. 

Pampered Poisonous Royal Wife - So far a minimum of family scheming, which is nice. 

The Cry of the Phoenix Which Reached the Ninth Heaven - Notable that she doesn’t get sent to the past, but rather takes over her younger sister’s body. But the premise is ultimately the same. 

OP medical/poison expert MC (I’m gonna be honest, I don’t remember which of these is which, they are very much “turn off your brain” reading): 

Bewitching Prince Spoils His Wife: Genius Doctor Unscrupulous Consort

Black Bellied Prince’s Stunning Abandoned Consort

Divine Doctor: Daughter of the First Wife

Genius Doctor: Black Belly Miss

Long Live the Wild Wife: The Black Bellied Evil King Against the Princess

The Enchantress of Medicine, with the Heaven Defying Child, and the Black Belly Father - This one is actually a rebirth story, but the power scale is more similar to transmigrator MCs lol. 

Unprecedented Pill Refiner: Entitled Ninth Young Lady

Rebirth of the Tyrant’s Pet: Regent Prince is too Fierce

Bonus round - completed and dropped after a strong investment: 

Demon Wang’s Golden Favorite Fei -- Complete, ch209. The plot is a hot mess lmao. But for some reason, I liked the main couple, especially the dude. He was just genuinely that into the lead, and he managed to never hit intolerable levels of jealousy or controlling behavior. I honestly only finished because I liked them. Everything else was... not great.

Transmigrator Meets Reincarnator -- Dropped, ch536. It was kind of light and easy to read at first, with the low stakes power plays and the restaurant stuff. But then the dude showed up in the plot again. The main couple... I don’t even know. All their scenes have this weird, uncomfortable undertone that just gets worse and worse. At first, I skipped through their relationship stuff, but after like ten straight chapters of it, I gave up.

Poison Genius Consort -- Dropped, ch288. This one held on for a while, but I just cannot with the male lead. Their entire dynamic is deeply frustrating. Plus, I really just do not care about the plot of who their birth parents are. I still can’t tell why the transmigrator cares so much about that body’s biological parents.