(Or something.)
Actually, my reading over the month of June was been pretty light, in part because I've spent a lot of time writing, which cuts into the reading time, ya know? Anyway, I did get to some Pride-appropriate reading, so I'll just sum that up because...well, because it gives me something to write a post about. 🤣
So, this barely counts, but on the first of the month I was still reading Heaven Official's Blessing, volume 6...barely. Which is to say that I started reading it after lunch on May 31st and finished reading it after lunch on June 1st, so... 😅 As it's volume 6 out of 8, we're far enough in the novel that the love between the leads has become text instead of just very obvious subtext (as in MXTX's other novels, the love interest is in love first, devotedly/obsessively, and we're not really privy to his thoughts, just those of the protagonist, who is much slower to realize his own feelings), and I think the romantic arc is improved over her previous novels. Without going into spoilers, the short way to put it is that in her first novel, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, the protagonist never really seems to return the love interest's affections properly, just to submit to them out of a more sedate and non-romantic type of affection (and/or fear that the love interest will go yandere and murder him if he doesn't). In the second novel, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (currently my fav of them, and likely to remain my fav unless the last two volumes of Heaven Official's Blessing are really stupendous), that the hero returns his love interest's affections is undeniable...but he also goes from "wait, do I have those kinds of feelings for him?" to "I'm gonna marry him" in about twenty-four hours. (Maybe forty-eight, but not more than that.) So, like, the trajectory is fine and believable, but the speed of travel is absurd. 😅 As of the end of volume 6 of Heaven Official's Blessing (or really its halfway point, because the second half of the volume was a flashback to events 800 years earlier rather than tell us how the protagonist was going to get out of his current danger 😭), the arc and speed of the protagonist going from oblivious to in love feels much more normal to me as a reader. (Others may feel differently; dunno.) Anyway, danmei is sort of sketchy as Pride Month reading since it's gay (male) romance mostly written by women for women. (At least, MXTX is a woman. I don't know about the authors of the other danmei novels Seven Seas is translating. But I do know that danmei, like BL, has that reputation in general.)
I'm not sure how much better the rest of my Pride Month reading is, though. 😰 (The fact that most of it is manga doesn't help...)
Or actually not all manga, because there's a volume of...uh...what was the Korean word? Manwha? Hmm, actually, according to the front of the volume, it started out as a webtoon. Which kind makes sense, actually, in that it's very unlike a lot of what I'm used to seeing in m/m romantic material from East Asia, so if it didn't have to fit in with a publisher's notions of what sells, that would be why. Anyway, it's called On or Off, by A1, and it starts--much to my surprise--with the prelude to a sex scene, in which our young protagonist, Ahn Yiyoung, seems to be a somewhat unwilling participant. So it makes you think it's the usual "passive young straight guy seduced/coerced by handsome older/larger man and then somehow assuming that means he's in love" and you start getting worried, yeah? But then it goes into a flashback of how he got there, and you learn two very crucial details: our young lead was gay to begin with, and what's making him uncomfortable about the scene is that it's basically a very sketchy add-on to a business deal that went sour. So it's not that he doesn't want to sleep with the guy (in fact, his first reaction to seeing him was to try to ask him out!) it's that he doesn't feel right about doing so in that context. Even better, in the explicit sex scene that follows the flashback, it very carefully shows the use of both condom and lubricant, something that I've seen left out all too frequently. (Especially the lubricant. The frequently seen "self-lubing asses" are kind of a meme among Western readers...) And it's not sex = love, because afterwards things are really sour between them for various very logical reasons regarding how they ended up doing it in the first place, so the rest of the first volume is them sort of going from "what a creep he is" to "wait maybe he's not quite so bad?" and I presume the rest of the volumes (I was in the bookstore yesterday and saw volume 4 on the new release table) are moving from "he's not so bad" to some form of love or at least romance. 🤷 I'm not sure if I'll be buying the rest of the volumes, given the business context isn't enormously of interest to me (honestly, I'm sorta surprised I bought even the first volume) and my shelf space is limited these days. (Or more accurately, my shelves are all full and I now have towering stacks of books leaning against the walls in various places because I need a house three times the size of the one I've got, but where the heck would I get the money for that?) I did feel like the character motivations and actions were much more realistic than a lot of what you sometimes see in these things, though, so I still might check out the rest.
Next, actual manga, three volumes of Catch These Hands! by murata. This one is very sweet and also pretty funny. A twenty-something former girl delinquent is trying to shake her old tough-girl image, and in going to the store to try to buy some more normal clothes, she runs into her former rival from another school. The rival gives her a business card on the way out with a time and place for a meeting, and when they meet up there, she challenges her to a fight, on the condition that if our former-delinquent loses to her rival, then she has to date her! (And, obviously, she does lose, because otherwise there would be no story.) Which, again, sounds like a set-up ripe for awful things happening, but the rival is actually the sweetest and is determined to give them a nice, happy, normal relationship despite the weird way it started, and of course our protagonist cannot understand why her ex-rival suddenly wants to date her...though by volume three the feelings were starting to be mutual, if not fully acknowledged/understood. I'm actively looking forward to reading more of this one.
Finally, two things I haven't finished. One is the only novel on my Pride Month reading for this year, but...well, it's really long and glacially slow (so far), so I've been having trouble getting into it. Also, the back of the book promised me a romance between the two girls it describes on the back, but so far it has not delivered. (The fact that it started out when one of them was a literal infant and she's now only eighteen (by page 186!) is not helping.) If it ends up delivering on that lesbian romance after all and it seems worthwhile, I'll post about it after I finish reading it. (Not sure when that'll be, though, considering it has only periodically managed to grab me in that first 186 pages. But I have to finish it by September at the latest, 'cause that's when the next volume of Heaven Official's Blessing comes out, and I need to know how Xie Lian is gonna get out of that situation!)
Second unfinished thing is actually a bound fanzine for all three of MXTX's novels, but I didn't want to look at the part for Heaven Official's Blessing since I can't finish reading it until the final volume is published in English. Anyway, the artist is credited on the zine as Bones, and their Etsy shop is here. (I'd link to the bound zine, but it's sold out. There's a pdf version, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's another print run, considering the one I bought was already at least the second run.) The part I could look at was good. 😆 I loved that the Scum Villain section focused more heavily on the side pairing of Mobei-jun and Shang Qinghua rather than the two leads of that novel, since I never really felt "sold" on the novel's main pairing. 😅
So, yeah, I didn't really do much for Pride Month, I guess. 😰 I'd say "but I was working on a fanfic for a gay romance novel"...only the main pairing for the fanfic is actually straight. 😱 (In my own defense, I must point out that the novel's main pairing--Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian--is still in the fanfic and has actually so far gotten more attention than the fanfic's main pairing, because I'm much more into the two of them as a couple than trying to follow the drama's unachieved pairing of Jiang Cheng with Wen Qing. (I can't help it; when I started planning the fic, the only way I could see to have Jiang Cheng be the fic's lead and not have Wen Qing end up dead was to use the drama's version where he's got a crush on her!)) On the other hand, I've supported various fan works that are appropriate for Pride Month? I've ordered two MDZS zines that just haven't arrived yet, and I bought several pins for lesbian relationships (although actually I bought those yesterday so technically Pride Month was already over, but I can't help that it took me that long to find a good Lumity or Korrasami pin! (or that it took me that long to even look for Enid/Wednesday (is there a ship name for them?) stuff on Etsy))
Gah, that paragraph died in a cluster of parentheses.
Rest in peace, paragraph.
...
Okay, I think my brain may have given up the ghost.
I'ma go now.
Oh! Wait!
There was one other thing I wanted to say!
I was pretty excited at the bookstore yesterday, because the whole table that particular Barnes & Noble dedicates to MXTX's novels (I'm assuming an important staffer there is a fan, 'cause neither of the other locations around here do that) also had a Blu-ray copy of the animated show of Heaven Official's Blessing! I picked it up immediately, not so much because I felt like I needed it (it only covers the first volume of the novel, so it just sorta stops at the end of the arc rather than coming to any true conclusion) but because I wanted to encourage the release of more of the danmei adaptations on physical media in the US. (Specifically, I want a well-translated release of The Untamed, the live-action drama version of Mo Dao Zu Shi/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, because while deeply flawed as an adaptation, it's still got a lot going for it. Especially the gorgeous cast. But also it captured most of the characters really well, and helps to flesh out a sense of what that world is like; you get to see things like how the locals who set up stalls outside the hero's childhood home react to him and his adoptive brother, stuff like that. Just little details that would bog down a novel, but that help it feel lived-in as a world. Also the set designs, locations and costumes are all gorgeous. (Well, except the Wen Clan's home base, which was too much "here's the evil lair of the baddies!" and not enough "here's the home of a powerful group of actual human beings.")
Anyway, so, yeah, if anyone actually reads this post (chances are against it, I realize) and is into any of this stuff, please support the release of the Heaven Official's Blessing show so the corporate types who make the decisions will get it through their skulls that there's a market for these shows in well-translated official releases.
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