Yesterday I couldn't concentrate on the script at all, accomplishing only a mere 347 words on the script. Which I thought would end up being the day's total word total, only then right before bed I ended up continuing the fanfic I accidentally started earlier, adding another 1,787 words and getting the fic up to the point where I can't continue it much further because it depends on knowledge I don't have yet, since I'm pretty sure the events I need to reference went differently in the book than in the TV show. (Not in terms of the final outcome, but in terms of the specific chain of events, and possibly the location of a lot of characters dying.)
Then today I was slightly better off on the script, adding another 649 words, but I probably can't get much further than that because I hit the TBD portion of the outline. 😅 At least that's an excuse to suddenly have no more words to write. (Especially since this script is being written for someone else, so I'm not the one deciding the story.)
It's theoretically possible I'll get a few more words written today, but...I sorta doubt it, hence why I'm writing this post before lunch when I'd normally write it closer to dinner time.
Yesterday's word count: 2,134
Today's word count: 649
Words written in November to date: 32,343
Okay, so now that that's out of the way, on to the other part of the post title.
"SVSSS" is the commonly used abbreviation (in Anglophone circles) for the novel Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, the first of the three danmei novels by MXTX. As it's also the shortest--4 volumes in its English physical translation published by Seven Seas Danmei--that means it's the first fully available in English in actual physical books (which I vastly prefer to digital), and so it's also the first one I've finished reading.
I have some thoughts on it that I want to express, and nowhere else to express them, so they're going here. (I have been repressing this for like a week, but it had to come out eventually...) There will likely be some spoilers in this discussion, but they're mostly about inter-personal relationships rather than the actual plot, and the main inter-personal relationship is like...if you're in doubt that the two leads are going to hook up eventually, then you don't understand what kind of book you're reading and are probably in for a rather glaring shock.
All right, so, to back up a bit.
Unlike MXTX's two subsequent novels, SVSSS is what's known in Japan (and thus in the west) as an isekai novel: our hapless protagonist, Shen Yuan, is reading an online "stallion novel" (a male power fantasy in which the lead gathers an appallingly large harem) called Proud Immortal Demon Way, which is so bad that he literally dies from his seething rage, only then he ends up being reborn as one of the characters, Shen Qingqiu, a villain who maltreats PIDW's lead, Luo Binghe, while he's supposed to be teaching the young man cultivation (super-hard to explain, but the social structure around its instruction parallels the structure around martial arts instruction). In the original novel, after Luo Binghe awakens to the demonic powers inherited from his demon lord dad, he goes on a vicious rampage, conquering the three realms (heaven, earth, underworld) and ruling them for centuries while obtaining more than 600 concubines, in addition to having one-night stands with countless other women. Part of his vicious rampage, of course, was killing Shen Qingqiu in a particularly nasty fashion, which our hapless formerly normal guy wants to avoid at all costs! So, that's pretty much the plot, watching everything he does to avoid that fate, despite that the System that brought him to the novel's world and inserted him into the character (who he had particularly despised in reading the novel) seems to really want him to die horribly at Luo Binghe's hands.
Okay, so before I say anything else, I'll go ahead and leave a few blank lines, just in case anyone is reading this and on seeing that thinks "hmm, maybe I'd enjoy reading that." (I'll also add that SVSSS is much more of a comedy than MXTX's other novels. Not that they don't have a lot of funny moments, but I wouldn't classify them as comedies, more fantasy/fantasy-drama with plentiful comedic moments, whereas I'd probably call this one a fantasy-comedy.)
All right, so now I can get into the spoilers.
Because obviously Shen Yuan's attempts to prevent himself being horribly killed by Luo Binghe involved stopping treating him badly (after he freed himself from the blaring OOC! warnings the System gave him at first), and in fact treating him so sweetly that instead of hating him, Luo Binghe fell in love with him.
Because of course.
I knew that was going to happen going in, but it still ended up being part of my problem with the novel, though. (Not that I disliked the novel, mind you. I just have a few problems with it, pretty much all of them stemming from their relationship.)
One of the main problems is that I didn't really ever feel like Shen Qingqiu fell in love with Luo Binghe in return. That he feels warmly towards him, yes, but it didn't feel like love? Part of that had to do with their power imbalance, of course.
The power imbalance is a huge thing. In a way, because there's an imbalance in both directions, I feel like maybe the idea was for the two imbalances to counteract each other, but for me it doesn't do that. Because you have the starting power imbalance, right? In that Shen Qingqiu is Luo Binghe's shizun (a more formal version of shifu, a term probably familiar to most westerners thanks to inclusion in certain popular western movies), and throughout the novel--right up to the sex scenes in the final volume--Luo Binghe insists on addressing him only as "shizun," never by name, which highlights their teacher/student relationship in a way and a situation that makes it very uncomfortable. However, after Luo Binghe's latent demonic powers awaken, then there's another power imbalance, in that he has the physical and magical power to literally tear Shen Qingqiu to pieces (that is, in fact, part of how he killed him in PIDW, by ripping his limbs off with his bare hands), and consequently there's a constant element of fear in Shen Qingqiu's reactions to Luo Binghe, because it never seems to leave his mind that if he doesn't make the younger man happy, then he or everyone around him might suffer and die as a result. So, as I said, it never feels like he develops any actual romantic love there. His affection seems to be more that of a master proud of his talented pupil, and it even kind of seems like Luo Binghe's refusal to step away from the shizun terminology is forcibly holding him to that level of affection, and preventing anything healthier from developing.
I don't know. Maybe I just read the wrong things into it. (My own squikk factor at teacher/student relationships may have had something to do with it, tbh.)
There's also a problem for me with Luo Binghe's character shift. Hmm. Maybe that's not actually the right way to phrase it. My problem is more with how Shen Yuan interprets Luo Binghe's personality developments. Because after a certain point--specifically after he finally figures out that he accidentally raised the womanizing half-demon into a mono-fixated gay one--he proclaims that Luo Binghe has developed "a maiden's glass heart" (I don't feel like searching the book for the exact wording, but I'm pretty sure that was the phrase used), which is deeply problematic on a lot of levels. Setting aside question of why he thinks a maiden's heart should be a fragile thing (given that he voluntarily read Proud Immortal Demon Way, a monstrous work of some twenty million words, with all its misogyny, that's probably just the character not having a healthy attitude towards women), there is the question of why Luo Binghe is considered to have developed that way. Well, firstly, there's the question of whether or not he's right about the fragility of his mental state, but that seems to be the first conclusion Shen Qingqiu comes to about Luo Binghe's behavior that actually fits all the facts, so...possibly? 🤷 But then after that there's the question of why he would have developed in such a radically different way; why would he have become emotionally fragile after being treated well (uh, if you can call it being treated well when you're kind of becoming a live-in servant on top of your regular training duties, no matter how happy the new role makes you) when he didn't become fragile after being mistreated for years on end. I feel like that's not really how psychology works? Like, if you're going to be fragile or not, that's decided long before you're a teenager? I dunno. Maybe that's my mistake. But it does kind of feel like the novel, or at least the POV character, is saying "gay = fragile and maidenly" which is wrong in all kinds of ways.
Now that I'm writing all this out, it may be that a lot of my problems came from giving too much credence to some of the words/thoughts of our extremely unreliable POV character. (Like the other two novels, the narration is sort of a hybrid of close 3rd person and omniscient; mostly, we just get the lead's perspective on things, but occasionally the narration decides to let us know what's going on in someone else's head, though never in the love interest's, for some reason.)
My other main problem is definitely not my misunderstanding, though.
And that has to do with the sex scenes.
That the first one focused very heavily on the pain the protagonist went through in accepting the apparently overly-endowed Luo Binghe into his body...that made sense. It was not a romantic context (strangely enough) and it did not even read like we were supposed to find it sexy. So I was okay with that.
But then there were several more sex scenes, which we obviously were supposed to find sexy, and they still focused on how much it hurt. (In one place in the final volume, the comment is made that they can only have sex once every two or three days, because it takes Shen Qingqiu that long to recover, because it's so painful. That is a creepy statement in just about every single way. (Especially since it begs the question "why don't you just swap roles, you morons?!") Hopefully it was intended to highlight that their relationship is anything but normal even after it's stabilized into a seemingly happy one, but...it's hard to be sure.)
That, honestly, kind of creeped me out, and left me a little worried about what the sex scenes in the other two novels will be like. I'm worried because unlike the couple in this novel, I have strong attachments to the romantic couples in MXTX's other novels, especially MDZS, since I fell in love with the characters via the live-action adaptation The Untamed. (Which had almost entirely scrubbed away the romance, leaving behind only longing glances and homoerotic subtext.)
I'm hoping none of the unhealthy issues developed in the other two, but it's hard for me to know how the novels developed past the point in the translation that's been made available to me. I mean, some of the unhealthy issues can't develop: neither Wei Wuxian nor Xie Lian are in any kind of student/teacher relationship with their love interests, and while there's some power imbalance in both couples in terms of magical ability (in both cases favoring the love interest, as in SVSSS), in both cases there is literally no fear whatsoever. In fact, there's no one Wei Wuxian or Xie Lian trusts more than their love interests. (Well, actually, that depends on when you are in the story in Wei Wuxian's case. For a large chunk of the time prior to his death at the beginning of the novel (don't worry, he got better in the next chapter), the one he trusted most would have been his adoptive brother, Jiang Cheng, and then for another part of it was more his...hench...corpse...? I'm not sure what the right term would be for that. But in any case, there's never a time when Wei Wuxian fears Lan Wangji, except maybe right after his revival, but even then it's less fear and more just "I'm in no state to defend myself right now if he decides I'm evil and attacks me!")
Certainly, the romance is more normal and healthy in the other books. As of where the translation is right now, we've not been fully told why Lan Wangji and Hua Cheng fell in love with their respective protagonists, but in the latter's case it's pretty easy to guess, and in the former's...it's hard to separate the novel from the show, tbh, so I'm having more trouble figuring that out (in the show, it's like "who wouldn't fall in love with him?" between how gorgeous he is and how adorably charming his personality is) but there are a lot of possible and very believable reasons, all of which make much more sense than Luo Binghe's "reason" for falling in love. (The fact that Luo Binghe started out in such a badly written novel as Proud Immortal Demon Way may have had a lot to do with how weirdly unstable his character ended up being.) And, although as of volume 3 of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation and volume 4 of Heaven Official's Blessing, neither protagonist has reached the point of "oh, hey, I'm in love with him," they have both started to realize that their feelings are deeper and more romantic than they originally thought, and it's felt pretty natural, and without any particular feminization of them. (Technically, Wei Wuxian was slightly feminized by his revival, as the novel goes to great lengths to explain that his new body is shorter and more feminine of facial features than his original body was (the former of which allows his love interest to princess-carry him 😰), but his behavior isn't significantly different than it was before his death, except that he's matured a little.)
All that being said, I'm still worried about the sex scenes being presented in a disturbing or unhealthy manner. 😰 I've heard people online claim that the Chinese danmei genre suffers from the same "self-lubing ass" problem that much of the Japanese yaoi/BL genre suffers from, so...while that's the kind of problem that breaks immersion, it's at least one that I can deal with? (I mean, I just have to mentally add a line about using a talisman with lubricating powers or something, right?) But if there's a lot of pain involved...it's not just that I don't want to see read about Wei Wuxian or Xie Lian (but especially Wei Wuxian!) suffering that kind of pain, it's also that I feel like it would betray their love interests' personality traits to proceed if they were causing pain to the man they loved.
....Hmm.
I seem to have petered out.
Not sure if I actually said anything worth saying?
But I just needed to get all that out of my system.
It's all quit absurd, really, considering both the other novels are available online in English translations other than the one I've been reading, but...I like the translation in the physical editions, so I'd like to stick with that translation. (Though considering Heaven Official's Blessing won't be fully published in physical English editions until September of next year, I think I'm probably going to have to break down and read the rest online first, 'cause that's a really long time to wait to find out what happens.)
(Also, I am really frustrated right now that I was able to so easily pour out so many words into a blog post when I'm struggling so badly on my actual writing for NaNoWriMo...)
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