Pride Month Reading Recap '24

    Or so I call the post as if I did any kind of build-up.

    Or, like, any posts at all other than this one.  😰

    Well.

    Anyway.

    I didn't do as much reading for Pride Month as I'd have liked, but I did better than last year, anyway.  Which I suppose counts for something?

    First up, volume 6 of the graphic adaptation of Mo Dao Zu Shi.

    Uh.

    Not a huge amount to say there, really.  Though I can at least say that the adaptation has improved compared to the first few volumes, in that it's leaving out less crucial information.

    Still can't approach the actual novel, though.

    Next...

    ...actually, I'm not sure which one came next.  We'll just say this one did and move on.

    I wanted to read something a bit more genuine than the usual light novels/manga this year (and without falling into another long-winded trap like last year 😰) so when I spotted the book above I was immediately interested.  Until I Meet My Husband is the memoir of a gay activist in Japan, whose wedding at the Tsukiji Hongwanji Temple was the first same-sex marriage in Japan to receive religious recognition.  As of the last time I checked any news on the subject (which has been at least two or three years 😰), same-sex marriages aren't fully legally recognized in Japan yet, but they are at least treated similarly to common-law marriages in some areas, thanks to the work of activists like Ryousuke Nanasaki.

    The book often made me cry to read about what he had to go through growing up, but overall it was very uplifting, because he never let things drag him down, and he stayed true to himself, and pushed to improve conditions for everyone.  Some of what he had to go through is no different from what non-hetero people the world over have to deal with:  understanding the self, trying to come out to family and friends and fearing what their reactions will be, mockery from those who don't understand (especially in childhood), etc.  But some of it was very different from what people in the West are going through today.  The time Nanasaki and his boyfriend wanted to rent an apartment together and told the real estate agent that they were a couple looking to live together, and the agent flat-out told them not to tell that to any prospective landlords, but instead to lie that only one of them was living there, and the other just pay rent under the table, because no one would rent to a gay couple.  And if I did my math correctly, this was around 2012 that they were being told this.  That would not have happened in a big city in the US in 2012.  The incident, much earlier, where one of his teachers told him it was his own fault the other students were mocking him and that he needed to stop "acting cute for the attention"...I want to say that wouldn't happen here, but I guess I don't actually know that for sure.  It was upsetting just to read about it, though.  I can't imagine having to live through it.

    There's probably a lot more I should say, but I never quite know what I should say until about a week after the post goes up.  😅

    So I'll just move on to the next one.

    I wanted to get in at least one work that was lesbian instead of gay, and ended up with this one.  It's...well, it has its share of problems, but it's overall pretty cute.  The plot is that the blonde there shows up one day to the lead's high school and informs her that she's her future girlfriend who has traveled back in time seven years so they can go to high school together.  (Well, evidently just her mind did?  It's not totally clear from volume one.  And I suppose technically there's no proof that she's not just, you know, delusional.)

    The main problem with it is that the brunette spends most of the first volume asserting that she doesn't want real life romance and never will.  So for most of the book it kind of feels ace-phobic, but...if the story is true and they really were lovers seven years in the future (engaged to be married, in fact!) then that's not what's actually going on.

    Anyway.

    Ennead volume 2.  So, this one almost doesn't count?  It's described as being a "boy's love love/hate" webtoon, so...it's very different from the standard depiction of LBGTQ relationships in, well, anything.

    On the other hand, hot Egyptian gods.

    And not, like, generic gods with Egyptian trappings.  It's pretty well researched.

    It's also very intense, and pretty focused on the (sometimes metaphorical, sometimes literal) battle as Horus attempts to regain his father's position following Set's murderous coup.  (Or whatever you wanna call that.)

    I remember that I saw this one before and passed it up because I wasn't sure about it.  Wow, was I wrong to have passed it up!  So good!  And the art is gorgeous.  (Surprisingly, I find the art inside is actually better than the cover art, despite that normally it'd be the other way around.)

    It's like...imagine your standard court intrigue situation, and then place the lead of an ecchi comedy into it, and you get an idea for what you're getting here.

    And did I mention the art?  😍

    Okay, so...finally, the last thing on my Pride month docket I still haven't actually started yet, largely because I realized I needed to finish rereading my 494k word behemoth fanfic before the 27th for reasons I'll get to in a minute.  But probably tomorrow I'll start reading...

    I've been steadfastly refusing to read Thousand Autumns for a while now, because the plot description on the back of the first volume reads like "Xue Yang/Xiao Xingchen:  the novel!"  But looking at the text on the back of the later volumes (the final volume comes out next week) makes it clear that it's not really (much) like that, so I decided to take the plunge and give it a try.  If I like the first volume, I'll go ahead and buy the rest of them.  (Part of the reason I decided to give it a try is that Seven Seas is translating one of the author's other novels, and its plot sounded interesting, so it'd be good to know if I like their style as an author.)

    Okay, and, short as it is, that's been my whole Pride month reading for the year. 😭

    But, to address why I'm having to rapidly read through my whole massive fanfic, the reason is that I want to rewatch the entirety of The Untamed before I start rewriting it, right?  And it turns out that The Untamed was first aired (well, if "aired" is an appropriate word to use for a web series) in 2019, so this is its fifth anniversary.  And it started going up on the 27th of June.

    So my original thought was to watch each episode on the fifth anniversary of the day it went up, only I looked more closely at the listing of the airdates of the episodes on the wiki and realized that the episodes went up in chunks of two, with a few days off between blocks of episodes, so...I mean, I could still do it that way, but it's gonna be a lot easier if I just watch a single episode every day from the 27th of June through whatever day in August that I finish on.  (I think it'd be the 15th if I watch every single day, but I might need to take a day off here or there.  Or rather I probably should take a few days off here or there so that I can finish on the 20th, the day the final episodes went up.)

    Part of the reason I don't want to watch two episodes a day is that I'll have to be pausing to take notes often, since the rewatch is largely for reasons of needing to check on various little details that I need to get right in the fic, and stuff like that.  (That's why I'm having to reread the whole fic, so I know what I need to look for in the rewatch.)  So instead of each episode taking me about 45 minutes to watch, each episode might take an hour and a half or more.  So it'll be better if I'm not committing to two of them a day.  😅

    I might actually blog about it as a process, just to give my blog some content.  🤣

    Anyway, in the "you learn something new every day" category, I learned this today when I got distracted by a deep-dive into fanworks on AO3 that are meant as guides to help others with difficult projects:

(click on image to go to the source work)

    This explains so much!

    Specifically, in Mo Dao Zu Shi, there's a scene where the drunk Lan Wangji steals a couple of chickens to give to a confused-and-amused Wei Wuxian.  In the live-action adaptation, they very specifically made the chickens roosters.  (I seem to recall the translation of the novel calling them hens, but I'd have to consult the book to be positive.  I know it did not call them roosters, though.)  And now I know why they were roosters.  😁  Just one of those moments where they were working very hard to make sure the audience understood the romance is still there, even though they weren't allowed to call direct verbal attention to it.

    ....huh.  I just realized what's lacking in my Pride Month reading this year:  things originally written in English.

    I've got a volume of a Chinese web novel and a volume of the comic adaptation of a Chinese web novel, a Japanese memoir, two volumes of Japanese manga, and a volume of a Korean webtoon.  (At least, I think it said it was Korean?)

    Actually, maybe what's really odd about that is that it's sort of normal for me?

    Like, I seem to read a lot of translated works.  (Especially since getting hooked on danmei novels.)

    So maybe that's not totally strange, then, but...

    Oh well.

    At least it's better to read a lot of translated works from other languages and cultures than to never read them, right?

    (And it's not like I never read anything originally written in English!  At the same time that I bought several of these, I also bought a book on the history of Mesopotamia.  As a first step on my research for rewriting book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne books.  I just thought I shouldn't read it until after Pride Month was over.)