#it’s american cnovel fans

[xinyuehui]

Okay, one last post about Netflix's 3 Body Problem. I literally moved on (as in, I didn't bother finishing it), but today I saw a post on *** and some Chinese American saying the Ye Zhetai scene is the representation we need blah blah blah China could never. What triggered me the most about this is that the closest thing this person is to being Chinese is probably being born with the bloodline, probably never interacted with Chinese media. We are supposed to be in this together, and what are you talking about right now? There's a handful of Chinese diaspora out here who literally never bothered interacting with our culture (which is fine, nobody's business to tell them what to do), and then whenever America does any "representation," they are suddenly online! Sure, it would be nice if Western media started to be more diverse for us out here, but you literally can't rely on some white man to do it. You have to curate this experience for yourself if it's something you truly care about. There's no good excuse to not seek out things for yourself. The majority of the cdrama/cnovel fandom here on Tumblr (or Twitter) do not speak Chinese, but there are English subtitles on many official and fan-based platforms. Some non-Chinese danmei reader could probably tell you about censorship in China back to front better. Anyways, that's another can of worms.

Back to Ye Zhetai, I've already talked about it briefly here. It's not that deep, the scene exists to get people talking. It's all perfunctory, the banners are written in a Microsoft YaHei font (Microsoft invented this font in 2004), they do not care about the history behind it, it's to evoke a reaction in the West. Let's show this traumatic thing that happened in China, then segway all the world saving plot-line to England, is that clear now if that hasn't occurred to you yet??

There's a list of the media that stemmed from the Cultural Revolution on Wikipedia with one easy Google search. Did you really look? Did you watch and read everything on that list?? Is there really no Chinese representation apart from Netflix??? If it's not allowed in China, how could he ever write the book and publish it in China?? Did you even know about the speculation that Ye Zhetai is based on the real physicist Ye Qisun??

#third times the charm for three body - probably no more essays about this again i think ive covered everything within the 3 posts #3 body problem #three body #this is just not a good book to adapt to a western setting unless you change it to a western country revolution of some sort #which btw do exist idk why people act like china is the only one who went through a traumatic historical thing

[k1201a]

“Cloud Recesses arc is still one of the strongest elements of the wx story and it's because there's banter; there's a push and pull that i think that relationship of opposites requires for me to find it engaging and lwj is actually allowed to be a pathetic spoiled brat with a stick up his ass. it just doesn't commit imo, they have their cake and eat it in the blandest possible way and i think both characters are poorer for it. like for me, personally, for wx to have worked it needed to be either: lwj's corruption arc, properly established wx before wwx's death or lwj DRASTICALLY changing his worldview”

‘spoiled brat’

‘corruption arc’

Can ChengXi@n stannies simply say they hate WX/LWJ without inventing some bogus reasons to justify their dislike??..

This trope maybe popular in america, but this is a cnovel, it doesn't have to work for american audience. They're ideal characters, that's their appeal. They do not exist to be your comfort reading, or to tell you flawed people will find love too, you just have to change; or you will meet someone who will change to be worthy of you. They're the finished products, and they're already fine as they're. If people want to be flawed and annoying and believe they're more interesting for it, it's fine, each to their own, but these characters don't have to be "flawed" so that people can project. The story isn't about you and your 956803 flaws, it's about the characters.

When I read a western fan say "spoiled brat", I don't really understand what they mean. In my experience, whenever I checked out the character in question, they're nothing like a spoiled brat.

If people hate a ship, they should hate it with passion and honesty, and they should stop at that. When they start proposing writing ideas like "for it to work for me, it would have to....", my brain just goes like why expose your stupid ideas? Just be a simple hater.

#mxtx #mdzs #wangxian

[bao3bei4]

hello I just read your essay re cnovels and victorian england and I. have Thoughts. I am Thinking. Your writing is so clear - I am a Big Fan (a pun!). Cnovel fandom is interesting for me, because I'm Indian but my teenage internet experience was tumblr, which was all about the yts in US, and it just makes me. so happy to see something non-yt US from non-yt US people. Relatedly, and I know it's not the best place to ask, do you have any resources for western interactions with other asian cultures

i'm happy you enjoyed it! tysm for your kind words :) and ofc, i like recommending books. that said, this list isn't comprehensive at all. instead, i tried to pick out books that were really impactful to me when i read them! they either changed the way i think or write, or got me really excited about a new subject.

you can find pdfs of all of them on libgen >:)

start here:

edward said - orientalism. this is kind of THE book on western intellectual culture and how its traditional approach to the countries it designated as the orient is inextricable from the goals of empire. this book gives you the history of knowledge production about the "orient" and the vocabulary to talk about it!

frantz fanon - the wretched of the earth. fanon is not asian, but i think you'd do yourself a disservice in understanding colonialism if you skipped his works. this one is a phenomenal explanation of both colonization as well as decolonial strategies, grounded in his training as a psychiatrist.

jasbir puar - terrorist assemblages. the most contemporary of the three, puar explains how the liberal state has either accommodated queerness or designated it as terrorist, on a globally racialized basis. this is incredibly timely--both because uhhh happy pride! and also because of the escalation of pinkwashing as zionist tactic.

these following recommendations are more narrow in subject! i'd recommend checking them out based on your interests/what you enjoyed above.

edward said - culture and imperialism. this is probably not a surprise because i cited it a bunch in that essay. it focuses more narrowly on the novel as literary form and the historical moment in which it emerged. i'd recommend it if early brit lit bugs you, and you'd like the language to talk about why.

inderpal grewal - home and harem. this focuses on travel as a colonial encounter, specifically between 19th century england and india. she uses, to great effect, the titular mechanism of "home" (the domestic sphere of england) and "harem" (the colonial construct in which indian women were rhetorically placed). great way to dip your toes into transnational feminism.

afsaneh najmabadi - women with mustaches and men without beards. she makes visible how 19th c iranian modernity can be understood as a radical transformations of gender and sexuality, both discursive and embodied. there's lots to think about how european encounters with precolonial gender and sexual norms both shaped & were resisted by everyday people.

anne anlin cheng - ornamentalism. this one is quite recent, but i really like how cheng uses specifically asian racialized femininity as the basis of her writing. she theorizes how euro-american fantasies and art objectify (literally, to make an object of) racialized subjects.

there are also a lot of incredible specifically indian writers in this postcolonial domain. however, a lot of them are um. quite situated in particular philosophical tradition (post-structuralism), which can be slow-going to read if you're not used to the dense language they use. gayatri chakravorty spivak's "can the subaltern speak" is a wonderfully thought-provoking canonical text, as are homi bhabha's works.

because this is a long list of academic books, i'd honestly just recommend picking the one that sounds the most exciting, and then following up on all the threads the author mentions that you want to learn more about.

[spockandawe]

What are your favorite chinese webnovels? What are some of the differences youve noticed between cnovels and other types of novels?

That second question is really, REALLY interesting, and I really want to answer it well, and I am REALLY sure I’m going to do a bad job of answering it, so let me just noodle about that first question for a minute while I try to think XD

I went through some of my TOP-top favorite novels in more detail yesterday, but generally speaking, mxtx and meatbun are both at the top of the pack. They’re really good at writing compelling main characters and balancing piles of angst with plenty of humor and pulling everything together into a very satisfying ending (which is something I don’t alwaysssss see, even in some of the novels I really like). After them, The Disabled Tyrant’s Pet Palm Fish (transmigration, ancient chinese prince falls in love with pet fish) and Golden Stage (ancient chinese gay arranged marriage between bitter enemies(?)) are two novels that I love a lot, which both have very cute romances and go a bit lighter on the main character suffering front, and which I broadly recommend to anyone who’s interested in the genre. They didn’t end stick the landing QUITE as hard as an svsss or tgcf, but they still were very nice.

Then, let me see. I’m trying to remember which books I’ve read in the last year, and am doing a terrible job, haha. I will say that a book I enjoyed for like... eighty percent of it and then the ending let me down terribly was The Dreamer In The Spring Boudoir (modern day career woman transmigrates into barely-fantasy ancient china novel as the disliked primary wife of a nobleman), which is also the only straight webnovel I’ve read so far. The main character and romance were delightful, but that ending... haha, wow, I felt betrayed. But I did like the first half very much!! I’m idly contemplating a deliberately-partial reread. Then I’m currently like two chapters away from catching up with the current translation of The Wife Is First (ancient chinese prince lives out time travel fixit fic, determined to treat his spouse better this time around). I’m also catching up on Heroic Death System (transmigration, across MANY universes, where the goal is to die heroically in each one, and also maybeeeee to find his boyfriend in each one. this shit gets fucking bananas. in one of them, he emotionally seduces his boyfriend while he’s a dolphin. in another one, he’s a sentient mushroom. i’m in the middle of a section titled ‘I Am An Evil Pen’. yes, like a writing utensil type of pen. this is the weirdest book I’ve read so far). Oh, and Thousand Autumns (righteous sect leader gets sabotaged and loses a fight, wakes up blind and amnesiac, demonic sect leader is like ‘lol i bet i can turn him evil’ and accidentally catches feelings along the way).

What else... I’m keeping up with (but behind on) some others. First, there’s How To Survive As A Villain (modern terminally ill CEO transmigrates into stallion novel, wakes up as villain, accidentally seduces hero). Then, we’ve got Transmigrating Into The Body Of The Heartthrob’s Cannon Fodder Childhood Friend (only modern webnovel I’ve read, young man transmigrates into beginning of gratuitous whump book, back in high school, and is determined to protect the protagonist from all the canonical suffering). Then there’s Pulling Together A Villain Reformation Strategy (guy transmigrates into story as the hero’s childhood friend who will eventually become his enemy and get killed, successfully acts out his part and dies, completely fails to realize he’s broken his friend’s heart in the process... and then wakes up in another character’s body). And then there’s The Villain’s White Lotus Halo (a transmigrator keeps bouncing from universe to universe as a cannon fodder villain, who gets like half a line before being killed. he tries to purchase an upgrade package so he can be a COOL villain instead, but accidentally gets sold a ‘white lotus halo’ package instead, so that no matter what he does, everyone is just DEEPLY moved by his appearance and is positive he did nothing wrong). All of those are EXTREMELY delightful. You may notice a running transmigration theme, which....... yeah, I think there are a TON of delightful stories in the webnovel scene that deal with this genre, which seem so rare in English language media.

Which makes a good transition point to what’s different about the cnovel scene! I’ve seen hardly any transmigration stories in English, and I’ve got a couple go-to examples for when I’m trying to explain it, but like. Only a couple. Which is such a shame! Like, there’s the default idea of ‘I was reading this book and then I woke up inside the book!!’ but it’s clearly such an established genre that people are playing with it in all kinds of interesting ways, like in The Villain’s White Lotus Halo or Heroic Death System setups. It’s kind of wild to me, because it seems like such a gimme for a nice easy story structure? Whatever kind of world you want to present, there’s no need to introduce it to the reader from the ground up, or find a good way to hook them in. Either the main character read the book in question and can explain the premise and why we should care in pov, or the main character is new to the universe too, and trying to find their own footing. I enjoy it a lot! I’ve sampled transmigration books that didn’t grab me, but I’ve sampled way more that did. 

And then, the one semi-technical answer I thought of to this question was the way that these novels tend to handle pov. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule that regular novels are restricted to one pov, or that pov can only change at hard breaks in the story, but if I saw a bog-standard american novel glide from pov to pov the way these novels regularly do, I would tend to wonder if it was sloppiness or a mistake, or I would grump to myself about how I don’t like omniscient third person pov. And I still don’t know exactly what I think about this, or why it’s different in here, but I’m pretty sure I like it a lot, especially for stories where the romance tends to play a large part :V 

I used to read a lot of Books About Writing, and read plenty of stuff about why you don’t DO this, but.... I like it! In dtppf, Jing-wang can’t talk, and when Li Yu is a fish, he can’t talk, and drifting from one of their perspectives to the other gives me lots of useful information about how they’re both feeling. Could that be conveyed through restricted pov? Maybe! But I’m typesetting the svsss extras right now, and I’m in the bing-ge vs bing-mei section, and we get a few brief flashes of bing-ge’s thoughts, and it’s so NICE. It’s information I would not have otherwise received, because Shen Qingqiu sure wasn’t going to notice it. But early in the story, that pov was withheld from me, which also made sense (or hua cheng’s pov was withheld from me FOREVER, which makes me so sad ;u;). There don’t seem to be any hard and fast rules, which makes me really nervous about writing fic and trying to match the style, but I do like it a lot! 

And I’m definitely not able to articulate this in the way that I would like to, or speak with any real authority (I’m not that widely read in the cnovel scene, and i’m not very genre-adventurous in english), but there’s something about the role that the romances play in these stories that’s different from what I’m used to expecting, and it’s VERY tasty to me. I only rarely read romance novels, because I’m not often interested in the romance as a primary plot driver, but the romances in these books play a more substantial role than I’m used to expecting. And I’m into it! It’s a balance closer to what I’d expect from, like, a shippy longform fanfic. Which covers a lot of ground and is NOT a precise measure, but there’s more emotional weight given to the romance than I would expect, but without the romance carrying ALL of the emotional weight, and it strikes a perfect balance for me in a way I’m not used to encountering. Now, some of this could definitely be due to me not finding the right authors, or right subgenres, or whatever. But in the genres I inhabit, it’s a subtle difference, but one I find compelling.

Oh, one last thing. The cultural differences, duh :P I’m only familiar with things like, say, ancient chinese court etiquette through a lens of fan-translated novels like these, and I didn’t grow up steeped in the culture in a way I’m used to the trappings of something like medieval european courts. But there’s a distinct flavor to the social dynamics of these novels, from the formal levels down to the casual, and I know it’s super intricate and detailed and that authors play with differing degrees of historical accuracy vs fictional fun, and I wish I was better equipped to speak to the nature of any of this. But I find it really compelling! I recognize that it’s only new to ME because I didn’t seek out chinese media before now. And, the point that I originally wanted to get to before I got super distracted: the flirting. The flirting and teasing are a very different flavor from what I would expect in most english language media, and I love it, even if I can’t speak to how much of that is purely cultural, and how much of it is like... the conventions of How Fiction Is Written varying by culture, if that makes sense. I adore seeing what flirting and affection and indulgence and attentiveness look like in different settings, and these books, with their heavy romantic focus, absolutely deliver.

#spock replies #long post/ #i've read more novels than i thought :p #i thought it wasn't many #but then more kept occurring to me #i've only read a few that i don't recommend period but i've read a lot of good ones #Anonymous