#but either way. i think the novels are a thousand times better than the [redacted] anime. i mean heroine ikusei has ascana!!!!! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spockandawe · 4 years

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Okay, I want to pull together more detailed thoughts at some point, I think, because the sheer amount of material means I have about ten billion thoughts to sort out. But I’ve read all three of the mxtx novels now, and loved all of them, in different ways. Though I already tried to figure out if I can pick a Favorite, and tbh, I can’t. I love them all in ways that are too distinct to let me rank them easily. And... man, it’s lucky for my friends that social distancing is in place, or I’d be hassling them shamelessly to give these novels a try.

RIGHT. So.

The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System: Shen Yuan goes to bed full of rage directed at a trashy webnovel with a grimdark blackened hero who conquered the world and collected hundreds of women into his harem.... and wakes up in novel, while that hero is still an innocent youth. As the hero’s abusive teacher. Who is doomed for a horrifying death unless he can somehow turn things around.

I think I had the most fun with this one. I really enjoy self-referential stories, and stories poking fun at certain genres, and I’ve run into the concept of transmigration before (the idea being a person enters a fictional world, a la lost in austen), though I’m blanking on any media like that I’ve actually consumed. This was chronologically the first book mxtx wrote, and it has less of a sprawling cast with complicated relationships than the other two books, but it definitely has the thing where she lays early groundwork for later revelations that shatter my poor heart.

And there may be fewer relationships to play with, but my GOD, do I love the relationships we got. I’ve been rolling around in svsss fanfic since I finished the book, even more so than mdzs or tgcf. There’s a lot of good crunchy relationship content with the 79 ship (they destroy me, all day every day), Liu Qingge owns my whole-ass heart, and Luo Binghe makes for a fascinating love interest. I love that even at his best, he remains a needy, needy, manipulative boy, who’s so smart and strong and nEEDY. I don’t love how the book handled moshang, but mmmm the fan content is Good. And Shen Qingqiu does the unreliable narrator thing that is usually not my jam, but works so WELL in these books, in that his unreliable narration is hugely skewed towards not giving himself nearly as much credit as he deserves. Xie Lian takes this to UNBELIEVABLE heights in tgcf, but in Shen Qingqiu’s case, it’s done on such a casual, immediate, personal level that I’m fascinated by everything he does.

And, since Shen Yuan/Shen Qingqiu is a millennial fan of trashy romance webnovels who gets yanked into the universe of a novel he hates, into an old-timey xianxia setting, the prose is SO COOL. You swing between modern slang and old school high society courtesies at the drop of a hat, and I’m honestly awed that the translators were able to catch so much of that. Like, in-setting, I love all the nuance you can get in ‘qi-ge should give his a-jiu the scroll’ vs ‘yue-shixiong should give this teacher the scroll’ vs ‘you should give me the scroll’. But then it adds a whole new layer when the person ALSO has modern-day casual speech bouncing around in their head. It makes for a fascinating, fascinating reading experience.

The Grandmaster Of Demonic Cultivation: Thirteen years ago, Wei Wuxian died. And then he wakes up! In someone else’s body. I’m not going to try to summarize the premise of this one, go look up The Untamed if you want someone to do a better job of this than me XD

Ahhh, this was the book I read first. I still haven’t watched the show (only clips) and I’m not sure I ever will, because adhd is a hell of a drug. But it’s hard to purely evaluate the prose when there’s also this gorgeous, beautifully-acted visual adaptation all over my tumblr to bias me in its favor. I think this book benefits a lot from the MYSTERY of it all. From the very start, there’s the question of ‘what the fuck is up with this goddamn arm’ that the characters pursue, even as that takes them through flashbacks and other arcs within the story. It gives a thrust to the novel that I think isn’t exactly there in tgcf, though I’m torn on which one is “better.” This gave the story momentum, yes, but it also meant I was much more impatient in yi city and the 3zun flashbacks, because this isn’t what I was focused onnnnnn this is cool but how much longer will we BE HERE--

That being said, I think I’ll be more patient with those flashbacks on my next time through the book, now that I have a better picture of where everything is headed. I think the balance and structure of the book worked really well, I was setting myself up for self-sabotage because of the pace I was plowing through the thing. My reading habits didn’t lend themselves well to the nonlinear storytelling, and it speaks to the story’s strength that it held up that well despite me. And the CAST. My GOD. I went in not caring about anyone but Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji and maybe the jackass nephew, but... that Did Not Last. I didn’t intend to care about 3zun? Nope, too bad, you care so much now. Who cares about Xue Yang? Me. I care. Way too much. HECK!!!

And something that happens in this book and tgcf that was much less of a thing in svsss is that there are some meaningful holes in the story that I’d like to be filled, and I really care about filling-- and the story doesn’t go there. But it doesn’t leave me unhappy, it leaves me cheerfully scrabbling around in the throwaway details trying to piece together a picture of what happened when I wasn’t looking. What happened to Wei Wuxian in the burial mounds? How did Hua Cheng take control of the ghost city? Idk, but let us Rummage and theorize and roll around in ideas and have a fantastic, speculative time. Svsss might hook me more than the other stories from an au+shipping perspective, but mdzs and tgcf do a great job of making me want to roll around and create within the bounds of canon.

Heaven Official’s Blessing: 800 years ago, Xie Lian ascended to heaven. And fell. And rose again! And fell again. Now he’s ascended for the third time, and things are Awkward.

God, I just finished this, and I’m still reeling. This is the LONGEST mxtx book, that’s for sure. I also think it’s the most tightly edited translation. All the translators did an unbelievable job, I could never even approach what they accomplished, but I am genuinely stunned that a book this long was edited so well. I blew through this in about 3.5 days (if not for work, i could have made it in three dghsafdsgf) and my brain was cooking in my skull by the time I was halfway through, but I couldn’t STOP. I was ENCHANTED the entire time! I was reading so much my head was destroying me and I still sulked so HARD every time I had to put my phone down and sleep.

This book sprawls the hardest, I think, because it involves a cast made of mostly immortal/immortal-adjacent people, so time and space get... flexible. And I feel really bad saying this, because Lan Wangji is DEVOTED, but this is seriously the book with the most attentive and adoring and respectful love interest. Hua Cheng is..... god. I truly don’t think I’ve EVER read a character quite like him before, and I am so, so sad, because I don’t know how I’ll find one who lives up to these heights ever again XD I recommend reading this book just for the Hua Cheng experience, if nothing else. I was making audible noises at literally flailing at multiple points in the story, but most often, it was because of him.

Shipping is what usually drags me into a fandom hardest, and all of these books do pretty well for themselves, all of them have a nice selection of fluffy and crunchy ships to choose from. And this one... goddammit. I just realized, that the best, most crunchy ships are too spoilery for me to be willing to talk about them here. Hell. Goddammit. But I think tgcf has the crunchiest ship of all, even better than xuexiao. I was so invested, and then there were Reveals, and then I was like OH NO THIS IS TERRIBLE BUT MY INVESTMENT HAS EXPONENTIALLY INCREASED.

And something that I really, really appreciate, is that across the mxtx books, even though a lot of characters fit into strong archetypes, there’s nobody that is blurring together for me, either within or across the books. Liu Qingge isn’t Jiang Cheng isn’t Feng Xin. They’re all blunt, fighty boys, but all super distinct in my head, and what I want for each of them is distinct and character-driven. I want Liu Qingge to be properly cherished and I want Jiang Cheng to relax with his brother and nephew and I want Feng Xin to [goddammit i don’t want to spoil this book AGH]. It’s something I appreciated in the other books too, but I can really FEEL it in this book, with how long and luxurious it is.

And last thing I have to say, I think, is that tgcf is so long. It’s so, so long. But I would FITE if anyone tried to pare it down at all. I can’t think of anything I’d be willing to sacrifice. I enjoyed every last piece of it so much, and it was all ultimately SO well-constructed and interlocking, that any piece I can think of snipping out would take away significant emotional impact from what was left. It’s a nonlinear story, like mdzs is nonlinear, and I loved mdzs a lot! But the construction here is so, so, so elegant. I’m just in AWE of how well it was assembled. I was in Agony as reveals happened, because oh no no no no, now that they’ve told me this, that casts this whole other scene in a brand new light! The one I read hundreds of thousands of words ago! Literally, I need to go start the book over so I can savor the shitty teens in new ways, given [redacted] as revealed in like, the last twenty percent of the book. The book was a fun experience, but there’s so Much here that I know I haven’t even absorbed yet. I loved the other mxtx books a lot, and in many ways, they were easier to get a grasp on than tgcf was, but even before I finished tgcf I was already despairingly trying to figure out how easily I could fit a full reread into my life, and I think that says a lot

#tgcf #mdzs #svsss #long post/#[sad journaling noises as i realize that whatever ridiculous wordcount tgcf has still only counts as one completed book on my list]#i need to get an actual wordcount at some point #then stack up enough physical books to visually represent each of these monsters #i know i read a lot #enough that i very much want to know *how much* i read #because CHRIST

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shitihaveheardatwork · 3 years

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Hello, and welcome back to librarianship (Part 2)

The drive over to work is uneventful. I’m blasting Coffins’ Beyond the Circular Demise. It’s not related to librarianship at all, it’s just what’s in the CD player. Google has decided that the most direct route involves zig-zagging through neighborhoods, and New England seems to abhor qualitative street signage, so I have to pull a few legally dubious u-turns, but ultimately I pull into the lot just as the clock in my car strikes the top of the hour.

The director, my new boss, is waiting by the door, antsy to let me in. We’ll call him Wallace, for no better reason than that he had a kilt on and Wallace is a good Scottish name. He is very pleasant, but also very hurried.

He also seems to be trying to achieve some sort of new employee speedrun, because within the first minute a ring of keys is in my hand and a nametag is on my chest. He gives me a tour of the building and what keys go where, before setting me at a computer terminal to set up my employee email.

Along the way, he only slows down to sigh and regret the state of libraries during COVID. “This room is where we... (sigh) under normal conditions this is the room where we would,” and so on in that fashion. He also mentioned that as long as I’m six feet away from other employees, my mask was optional. Uh...

He seems to have a bit of a cavalier attitude about the epidemic. “Efficiency versus paranoia,” was a phrase that came up at one point. So was “we’ve had diseases like this before.” I find it off-putting and a bit of a yellow flag, but I also don’t know how many thousands of COVID meetings with city employees he’s been in, or what sort of bureaucratic hassles he’s been through. I’ll keep an eye on that though.

He asks if I’m familiar with the Evergreen software, I say yes, and he says “well that was pretty much the rest of the training I had so you’re good to go.” And then he’s out the door, to go help another branch he’s also in charge of. [redacted] resources must be thin if they’re making a director run multiple locations.

So at that point it’s just me and Lisa. She’s normally a supervisor at a different branch and is only here to help out with odds and ends. It’s only by coincidence that she’s here on my first day.

She’s nice enough. We have the same degrees (history and MLS), and she’s got all the hot poop on the town going back decades. She’s also got a few fun stories about her own adventures in librarianship. I like her, I hope she doesn’t say or do something fucked up at some point.

My only tasks today are reshelving and answering the phones. Lisa doesn’t get up from her desk and therefore is quickest on the phone draw, so I’m able to reshelve at my leisure. There’s only a single cart of books, but it’s got a mix of everything on it so I get to familiarize myself with all the sections.

There’s the usual stuff; fiction, non-fiction, large print, DVDs, board books, chapter books, young adult fiction, and even a graphic novels section. There’s also some stuff I’ve never seen before like an “urban fiction” section. It’s entirely by black authors about black characters in an urban environment. Some of it is romance, a lot of it is gangster crime fiction.

My feelings on this are mixed, so I decide to get more information and ask Lisa about the history of the section.

She’s got no idea, and neither does anybody else. Everyone, including the director, is new.

It turns out that in the previous year, the entire branch staff quit simultaneously. It was something relating to COVID, but Lisa either didn’t have the details or didn’t want to share them. As a result, there’s a huge knowledge gap about a lot of features of the library.

Why are there color-coded stickers on certain books all over the library? Who knows.

What’s this one cart full of DVDs doing in the back? Who knows.

Why is there a gospel music section and a christian music section? Who knows. There’s also about 40 “Now That’s What I Call Music” CDs. I’ll have to see if anyone actually borrows those because if not they’re going straight to hell.

It doesn’t look like there’s been much weeding under the (relatively) new leadership. It also doesn’t look like anyone’s checked where stuff is getting shelved either. Some Harry Potter is in young adult, some is in juvenile/childrens fiction. Problems like that.

As I reshelved the cart contents, I caught myself looking out the window and wistfully thinking “is this really what I did all that school for? This is what I want to do with my life?”

And then I checked my phone and realized I’d been shelving for three fast meditative hours.

It totally is. I fucking love this shit.

While reshelving I totally familiarized myself with the DVD and CD racks, alphabetized most of the graphic novels, began making notes for recommendations, and found a Moomin book which I quietly checked out without Lisa noticing. And I had a blast the whole time.

Incidentally, that Moomin book isn’t even ours! It’s got a different library’s name stamped on the frontispiece. How did this even get here? Why was I able to check it out?? Did this place have a different name not too long ago?

Guess I’ll find out. I go back in Wednesday.

#adventures in librarianship #thisisme #work

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dailyarturia · 5 years

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have you rated the rulers yet? all the four star ones seem your type

yeah whatever let’s go it’s been a while again

remember the part in apocrypha where she starts killing the souls that make up jack left and right and atalanta spits at her that she’s no fucking saint and she coldly replies “that’s right. i don’t think of myself as a saint at all.” of course you don’t bc the anime RUINED IT and the novel translations still aren’t fucking finished. anyway she’s way more hardcore than fgo would lead you to believe 8/10

slippery bastard man whose precise characterisation continues to elude me even though by all means he’s just another emiya type and i should be able to see right through him. his hair is ridiculous i once cut my friend’s amakusa wig and the amount of hairspray in there is positively blasphemous ??/10 he makes a lot of my friends very happy so he can stay

i wish she kept the hat in all her ascensions. do you know how fucking powerful she’d be if she had the hat together with the gauntlets? this woman fucks. 10/10

i [redacted] him so much he reminds me of a darker time and a self i left behind but i really dig the theory that he’s secretly a foreigner class so i guess he gets like half a point for that

AND IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOOOOUUUUUUUUUUU listen how do i even beGIN to talk about what makes the eternal emperor so great when everything about them is what makes them so great. their ego is big enough to eclpise the sun thrice over and they think they’re better than literally everyone else to the point where the difference is so obvious that they don’t bother to keep any distance and are actually surprisingly approachable. they were born in an era of constant wars and believe humans are naturally inclined to violence and cannot be trusted with either themselves or others and, seeing that they were literally more capable than anyone else on the planet, decided that they would simply have to take responsibility for everyone else then. they want humanity to prosper but don’t believe it can unless they personally keep everyone from fighting and so that’s what they fucking do. theyre misanthropic and risk averse but by god did they carve a peaceful future with their own two fucking hands, they suppressed all individuality yet stored any notable individuals at their palace for safekeeping, they forbid personal expression yet filled the capital with art, they became an immortal supercomputer yet insistently claim to be more human than anyone, they carried responsibility for the entire world and all of humanity for 2000 years in a desperate attempt to create a future they didn’t believe in but really wanted to. because they love humanity! so when guda shows up with a bunch of rowdy misfits telling them ‘you got that wrong bucko’ they LISTEN they listen and they consider their options and they have the dignity to not be bowled over by any rando shouting at them but the grace to admit when they are wrong and change course without bitterness or regret because they did the best they could with the information they had, they love humanity and can’t bear to see it suffer for no reason but if there IS a reason if there is meaning in the collective struggle for a better future they can be convinced to take that risk, and only after that do they realize how LONELY they were how incredibly lonely it was to be the only person they could trust and understand so they try to learn they TRY SO HARD to reach out and to understand how people can cooperate, how they can create a better future together as individuals, and they love, guda, so much, they love guda SO MUCH they completely hone in on guda as the shining symbol of the understanding that they cannot yet reach they want to understand and they want to be understood and they give you the fucking elixer of immortality for valentines in a thinly veiled desperate cry of loneliness because the only way they can see that happening is if you become like them because the only person they can understand is themselves THE PROGRESSION IN THEIR GIFT GIVING SKILLS IS SO SWEET by like bond 3 they’re like ‘you want an empire? no? you sure?’ and then they give you IMMOR FUCKIN TALITY for valentines and then by bond 10 they finally got the hang of it and give you a model of their own palace body for on your desk symbolically giving their all to you finally learning to put the weight of the gift in the meaning instead of its value and in the text they ask you to treat them as an equal like you always have because they have seen the world from your perspective and agree that it is so much more vibrant that way THE ETERNAL EMPEROR WAS THE ONLY REAL HUMAN THE ONLY ONE WHO STILL DREAMED OF THE FUTURE FOR TWO THOUSAND YEARS BUT ONLY AFTER THEIR EMPIRE CRUMBLED WERE THEY ABLE TO BE SEEN AND UNDERSTOOD AS A PERSON THE EMPEROR DOES NOT UNDERSTAND HUMANITY BUT THEY WANT TO LEARN FOR THE PERFECT HUMAN IS NOT PERFECT BECAUSE THEY ARE WITHOUT FLAW THEY ARE PERFECT BECAUSE THEY ADMIT TO AND LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES AND ARE ALWAYS TRYING TO BE BETTER ALWAYS WORKING TOWARDS A BETTER FUTURE

ok ill come clean i only answered this bc i wanted an excuse to talk about shi huang di but I am dutiful and will list the rest as well

IF YOU USE HER WITHOUT THE MASK YOU HAVE NO RESPECT FOR THE ART OF LUCHA LIBRE 10/10

i dont care about luvia but she shares an artist with moth and yall know how i feel about toh azuma’s blue rulers with big nonsensical hair and tactical skin cutouts so i stan just by proxy

remember folks: love is stored in the

MOTH

#mod post #tamamos spaghetti #we rate servants

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