So...a week ago Monday, I started rereading MDZS.
Like, I actually did nothing else on that Monday except read MDZS; no internet, no TV, no games, nothing but reading. I thought reading a gay romance novel from China in which two tyrannical dictators and a couple more would-be tyrants were thoroughly defeated was a good way to show my spite and disgust at something else that was happening in the real world that day.
I ended up getting partway into volume three of the official translation in that first day. (They had just defeated the Xuanwu of Slaughter when I finally stopped reading and went to bed.) So, in one day I got through about 2 and 1/3 volumes. The remaining 2 and 2/3 volumes took me six more days to get through. ๐
(I.E., I finished on the following Monday. Well, except some of the bonus chapters. Those were still pending and didn't end up finished until yesterday.) Admittedly, I barely even opened the book at all on Saturday because I ended up having to spend most of the day out of the house actually doing things.
Anyway.
Rereading the novel really jammed my face down into the reality that I have been doing a very bad job in trying to recreate the characters in my fanfiction. (It also really forced me to notice how sloppy my memory was of various things about the novel, including that I had been convinced the Yi City arc ended in volume one when it was actually entirely in volume two.)