Heaven Official's Blessing, Season 2

     So.

    I went on YouTube last night for the first time in like a month.  (What can I say, I'm not a big "watcher."  I prefer writing, reading and gaming.)  And in the tier of suggested videos on the topic of Mo Dao Zu Shi there were two videos announcing Season Two of the animated adaptation of Heaven Official's Blessing.  (This feels a little like the world laughing at me, since I put up a post barely more than a month ago that, towards the end of the post, said how I was sure they would never continue adapting it.)

    One of those videos had the Crunchyroll logo on it.

    As in, the same people whose subtitles were so awful that they rendered the US Blu-ray release of Season One entirely unwatchable.

    I have to hope and pray that they're merely saying "yes, we'll be simulcasting this" and not "hey, we have exclusive international rights to this" because I cannot watch the rest if they continue the garbage they pulled in the subtitles on the first season.  Admittedly, it shouldn't even be possible to continue trying to pretend there are no ghosts in adapting a novel wherein about a third of the characters are ghosts (and we actually see, in flashback, the progression of one of the characters from child to young adult to ghost flame to powerful ghost) but I don't trust these idiots to have the sense to realize that it's impossible.  It's certainly obvious that whoever was in charge of the subtitles had not read the novel.  (Are they going to keep on trying to pretend that Qi Rong is an epithet rather than a name?  What will they do when he shows up and becomes a major character?  I don't know how much of the novel will be included in Season Two (and don't actually recall precisely when Qi Rong first showed up in the ghostflesh anyway) but chances seem high that he'll be in it, whether in the present as a ghost or in a flashback to while he was still alive...though I think he did show up in the present first, then get shown in the past.)

    Honestly, rather than being excited about a second season, I'm depressed, even a little distraught.  I don't want to see it only released in the US in a butchered form.  In this day and age, why is butchery on that level even still a thing?  Who would think it was a good idea to hand over the rights to their show to a company who would rather invent the word "immor" than admit that a ghost is, in fact, a ghost?  (What is even up with that, anyway?  I mean, did the translation team at Crunchyroll look at the changes that were made to MDZS in the live-action adaptation and decide that meant that Chinese TV didn't like having the undead exist?  If so, they were being morons, because that was obviously done because whoever made the decisions about the live-action adaptation didn't want a hero who was a necromancer.)

    In further mockery of, like, everything, this morning, while this is all still fresh and stewing in my brain, I go to the VN dev server I'm part of on Discord, and see that someone has posted a Twitter thing about how Crunchyroll (allegedly) sold the private information of its subscribers, and has agreed to a class action lawsuit payment to all American customers.  Which will probably be about $30 each.  About half of what I wasted on that Heaven Official's Blessing Blu-ray. 😒

    Now, the flip side of "I may not be able to watch it due to ghastly subtitles" is that I might not want to watch it.  I know it's coming from the same animation studio that did the animated adaptation of Mo Dao Zu Shi, and from what I've learned of that adaptation (mostly by reading a fanfic set in the animated canon) I would likely hate it.  Especially because that adaptation has a real hate-on for Jiang Cheng (who I'm very fond of (admittedly in part because I watched The Untamed before reading the novel)), and makes all kinds of changes to make him worse (e.g. changing their mock duel to a real one) while simultaneously doing I don't even know what with the novel's actual villain (on top of entirely removing his time undercover in the Wen Clan, it seems they changed the sworn brothers oath to sometime during or even before the Sunshot Campaign?) on top of which it has "everyone has the same face" syndrome.  (Admittedly, that's a problem in the adaptation of Heaven Official's Blessing, too:  Nan Feng and Fu Yao are literally just palette swaps of each other, but the different coloration helps to tell them apart a little, and their behavior most of the time does likewise...but when you get into the heat of the final confrontation in the ruins of the Banyue Kingdom, it's almost impossible to tell them apart because they're both concentrated on the business in hand and when they're all business they're virtually identical in behavior, plus it's at night so the low lighting makes their color schemes harder to tell apart.  But that's nothing compared to the notion of trying to figure out the difference between the members of the Lan Clan, who all dress identically!  That's the advantage of the live-action adaptation:  no one can look at the live-action Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi and get them confused, despite their identical garb.  Whereas in the comic, I have to flip back to an earlier page that specifies which is which and compare their slight differences in hairstyle to figure out which one is talking.  (Uh, sometimes.  Other times Lan Jingyi is obvious by his behavior because he's such a feisty little guy. 😆 ))

    Uh...okay, that paragraph just sort of took a side thought and ran with it until it died in a nest of parentheses.  Sorry about that.

    My attempted point was that there's every chance that, moving forward, they might make similarly devastating changes to the story and/or characters in Heaven Official's Blessing.  I can't know that they will, but it's a possibility.  Though admittedly I can't even think exactly what changes they could make that would be comparable to the ones they made to Mo Dao Zu Shi:  the closest equivalent to Jiang Cheng in Heaven Official's Blessing would probably be both Feng Xin and Mu Qing, I guess?  (Certainly, they've both got a bit of his tsundere vibe of "pretending not to care about the hero.")  But I don't even want to say anything about either of them right now, because as of the end of Volume 7, they're the two characters I'm most unsure about in terms of...well, everything.  I don't even want to say how I feel right now about them or what I hope will happen because what if that changes when the final volume comes out?  (I want so desperately to do what I did with MDZS and find a fan translation for the rest of the story so I can find out how it ends, only at some point Seven Seas stopped putting the online chapter numbers on the table of contents, so even if I did find one, I'd be at some difficulty figuring out what chapter to start with!  So I have no choice but to wait until late November! 😭)  As to the story, it's not as straightforward as the story in MDZS, so it's a little hard to know what changes would be most egregious to me.  (Also because I don't know the story as well, what with having only read 7/8 of it, as opposed to MDZS, where I've read the whole novel twice, watched the live-action adaptation once (and rewatched about 2/3 of it), and read the first half of the comic adaptation, too.  (Which reminds me, I wanted to do a post about the latest volume of that...)  Plus obsessively thinking about it an unhealthy amount of the time, because that is how my broken brain operates.)

    I feel like there's more to say here, but...I've run out of steam and lost my train of thought.  (What little train of thought I had to begin with, that is.)

    I guess, in conclusion, all I can say is to hope that the second season of Heaven Official's Blessing is as accurate as the first one, and that it's given better subtitles than the official Blu-ray of the first season got.  (Or, contrariwise, to hope that if the subtitles are every bit as bad, then that the adaptation is as awful as the subtitles.)

    I have to say, though, if the subtitles do turn out to be that bad, I may cancel my Crunchyroll subscription in protest.

The Tragedy of the Blu-ray of Heaven Official's Blessing

     So, a while back I mentioned towards the end of a post about how excited I was that the animated adaptation of Heaven Official's Blessing had gotten a domestic US release on Blu-ray.  (I am too lazy to try and track down what post it was in, tbh.)

    Sadly, I am no longer excited.

    At least, not in a good way.

    It may look pretty, but it's basically unwatchable.

    And you know why it's unwatchable?

    Because the subtitles are utter garbage.

    And this is coming from someone who's watched large portions of episodes of The Untamed on Youtube, where the subtitles do such odd things as using "Childe" for "-gongzi," despite that "Childe" is such an archaic term that the last person to use it seriously (afaik) was Lord Byron in faux Elizabethan mode.

    Those are still superior to the subtitles on the above Blu-ray, despite that the manufacturers of said Blu-ray have the gall to charge a lot of money for it.  This is especially infuriating because good subtitles already exist:  the subtitles on Netflix (where I originally watched the show) are perfectly acceptable.

    The Blu-ray's subtitles are so bad that I literally had to pause the disc every so often to write down my disgust at its behavior.

    So let's dive into those notes and catalog all the horrors I encountered in the first four episodes of the "official" US Blu-ray release of the animated Heaven Official's Blessing!  For the sake of my sanity, these are just following the order of my notes (thus roughly the order in which they happen in the show) and not escalating from least to worst.  (The worst is actually from episode two, so there's still a lot more after that.)

    First off, I was already annoyed just on the menu, because in this day and age it was defaulting to English dub instead of original language with English subs.  Seriously.  It's 2023, people.  Can we please stop acting like entitled 1990s toddlers?

    Right off the bat in the very first scene, they exhibit their confusion over whether or not the name of Xie Lian's country is one word or two.  (Hint:  it's one.  One word.  He's the Crown Prince of Xianle, not of Xian Le.  Not that hard, guys.)

    Then we get the ambush on Mount Yujun, and these zombie-things are forming up to attack the wedding procession:  we see skeletons, and then flesh assembling itself on top of the skeletons.  So they are very clearly zombies, in modern English parlance; they're probably some variant of jiangshi (I think that's the word) in the original Chinese, the standard MDZS translation of "fierce corpse" would likely have been appropriate here.  But no!  The subtitles decided to call them "slave-goblins."  Because yeah.  Those totally looked like freakin' goblins.

    But then...oh then.

    The next point in my notes is the most egregious of the lot.  Likely the most egregious in the entire series, if I could bring myself to watch the rest of it.  (Hint:  I cannot.)  Because this next problem is not just crass and reductive, it's also racist.  Against Chinese people.  On the subtitles for this Chinese animated program.

    Yeah, let that sink in there for a minute, then I'll explain.

    So, for this first of Xie Lian's outings as a newly reinstated god, he's being accompanied by two junior heavenly officials (low rank gods, essentially) named Nan Feng and Fu Yao.  These two are working for two martial gods (often referred to as generals), Feng Xin and Mu Qing respectively.  Feng Xin and Mu Qing had served Xie Lian back when he was just the Crown Prince of Xianle, and then had been his own junior officials after he first ascended as a god, and since parting ways with him became gods in their own right.  (This was not strongly explained in the show, which seems to expect the viewer to have already read the book.  (Which is why I was rather confused by the opening episodes when I watched it initially, of course! 🤣))

    The subject comes up that Feng Xin, under his divine name Nan Yang, has a lot of female worshippers, which naturally seems strange to Xie Lian, since Feng Xin is a martial god, and therefore one expects him to mostly be worshipped by soldiers and men in positions of power who have ambitions that they need military might to fulfill.  He asks about why he has so many female worshippers, and is given a long and amusing explanation.  Rather than try to paraphrase or retype (since it's two pages long!) I'm just going to present phone photos (sloppily edited together) of the pages in question.

    Obviously, the show didn't want to spend that long on a point that was ultimately pretty minor, just one of many petty tribulations that Xie Lian's former subordinates have gone through in the 800 years since Xie Lian's initial ascension and fall from grace.  (Feng Xin, it should be pointed out, does not generally get on well with women, so suddenly being worshipped by them in droves was particularly uncomfortable for him.)  So it mostly just expressed the story with a few lines of dialog and one image of the sign that got changed.  I don't speak Chinese, so I can't say exactly what Fu Yao says to go along with the visuals, but I do think it's safe to say that it's the tl:dr version of what was in those two pages of text:  at some point a king changed the characters Ju Yang was written with so that instead of meaning "Perfect Sun" they meant "Tremendous Masculinity."  A spelling error, but one that doesn't change the sound of the name.  Like if someone were to spell Fred as Phred instead.  That kind of thing, only where it would also change the meaning.

    As that situation simply cannot exist in English (unless they wanted to change Sun to Son, which would actually kind of work here), obviously the translators had to either plan on adding a footnote to the image (or a second line of subtitles to translate the on-screen text) and still say that the king changed the characters so they meant "Tremendous Masculinity" instead of "Perfect Sun" or they had to try to get creative and make the king have actually gotten the divine name wrong, not just in its spelling but in its sound.  Which is inherently much more implausible, but...I'll admit that it's much easier to try to deal with.

    In the Netflix subtitles, they go with the explanation that Feng Xin's original divine name was "General Duke" and that the careless king changed it to "General Dick."  Crass, but it gets the point across.  (Although honestly I feel like the "Tremendous Masculinity" version gives the benefit of the doubt of sounding just as much like it's about fertility as it is about size of equipment, but maybe that's just me.  Given that MXTX went out of her way to specify that the love interests of her first two novels were both hung like horses, she may have intended it to mean size of equipment.)

    That's not what was on the Blu-ray's subtitles.

    The Blu-ray's subtitles said that Feng Xin used to be called "Big Yang" until the careless king changed it to "Big Wang."

    Yeah.  You read that right.

    The Blu-ray's subtitles act on the disgusting assumption that people in China would associate the very common Chinese surname Wang with the crass English slang for "penis."

    This is so appalling that I have no words for it.

    As I said, it's actually downright racist.

    And, as I said above, this is still just the second episode.  But I've sort of worn myself out with ranting about that one, so I'm more or less just going to list from here on out.

    They also got three of the four ghost ranks wrong ("Wrath" being the only one they got right), but I didn't write down what the wrong ones were.

    Continually referencing the "Ghost Groom" as a "demon" despite that "ghost" is literally part of the title.  (There are, as of volume 6 of 8, no demons in Heaven Official's Blessing.  Just gods and ghosts.)

    First reference to Qi Rong and they're calling him the "Green Immor" instead of the "Green Ghost."

    I would like to send a personal note to whoever was in charge of translating this:

    "IMMOR" IS NOT A WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE!!!!!!!!

    Sorry for shouting like that, but what else was I going to do?  What the *&&%^*(^ is wrong with the translation team on this that they're so desperate to avoid acknowledging that this show deals with ghosts?  I mean, they seriously went and invented a crazy-ass word rather than use the very obvious correct word, "ghost."

    And yes, I am quite confident about the fact that "immor" is not a word.  On top of the fact that three different online dictionaries didn't have it, I looked it up in the massive dictionary that my parents for some reason have, the type that normally you only see in the reference section of a library, because it is the size and weight of a small child.

The cover of said dictionary

    Here's the page where "immor" would be if it was a word:

    See?  Jumps straight from "immoment" to "immoral."  If "immor" existed, it would be above "immoral."  And in case you're thinking maybe this isn't such a big dictionary as I said it was...

    2662 pages of pretty tiny type.  (My parents keep a magnifying glass on hand in case they want to consult it.  Though they typically only do so when they want to exult in the fact that the crossword puzzle in the paper is wrong about something.)  If that word existed, it would be in there.

    So, finally moving on to episode 3, and mostly no new problems, until the kid unwraps the bandages around his face.  The subtitles call it "face sickness" instead of "Human Face Disease."  Now, I have no problem with "sickness" instead of "disease."  They're synonyms, and there's no particular advantage or disadvantage to either.  Leaving the "human" off, though, that is just dumb.  Because without specifying that part, it sounds like "a sickness of the face" not "a sickness wherein human faces appear on the skin."  Kind of a big difference.  (Especially since the image of the kid's face is not entirely clear that those things are supposed to be human faces.)

[EDIT:  okay, so I am apparently unable to count. 😰  The kid removing his bandages was in episode four, and it was actually episode five that I got through on the Blu-ray.  I'm currently skimming my way through those episodes on Netflix so I can finish rewatching the show with their superior subtitles, y'see, hence I noticed my mistake.  😅  Anyway, they got the other ghost ranks wrong, too, or at least got them different from the way Seven Seas translated them (I gather the difficulties in translating from Chinese to English are much greater than for a lot of other languages), and did not translate the Calamity titles of the others quite the same way, either, but much closer.  Interestingly, rather than translating "White No-Face" they treated it as a name.  Not sure why (did they also think people would confuse it with Spirited Away's No-Face?), but at least a name makes sense, whereas "White No-Form" does not.  And more importantly, they don't try to pretend ghosts are demons!]

    And now we reach episode 4, the one that made me give up in disgust.  To start with, I was already shuddering at the way they translated the episode's title:  "Ghost King of Hua Cheng."  Where's that "of" come from?  What purpose do they think it serves?  Hua Cheng is a Ghost King, not the subject/kingdom of a Ghost King!

    Then we get another reference to Qi Rong, this time as "Sad-faced Green Immor," which had me really confused at first.  I was like "how did they translate Night-Touring to mean Sad-faced?"  Then I thought about it rationally for a moment and realized that they hadn't used his name in the subtitle, even though I could hear the actor saying Qi Rong.  So I looked it up, and guess what?  The freakin' translators decided that his name was an epithet rather than, you know, the man's flippin' name!  (This is especially problematic because Qi Rong is someone Xie Lian knew back in the day, and Qi Rong was his actual name in life, so when Xie Lian eventually runs into Qi Rong in the course of the novel, he's shocked and appalled that the near-supreme ghost Qi Rong is in fact the very same Qi Rong he knew back in the Xianle Kingdom.)  I don't know why the subtitles wanted to use as few names as possible, but they absolutely did:  in one scene, Xie Lian addresses Mu Qing by name, but the subtitles don't use his name (again, this is brutalizing the story and the characters' relationship with each other, since things are so fraught between Xie Lian and his former subordinates).

    There are four super-powerful ghosts in Heaven Official's Blessing.  Three supremes and a "near supreme" added in just because he's so annoying (and/or to pad out the numbers to a perfect unlucky four), collectively known as the Four Calamities.  The subtitles on the Blu-ray call them the "Four Devils."  On top of the fact that devil is a word with far less punch, its use here also borders on racism, because of the old stereotype of Chinese people calling foreigners "foreign devils."

    I decided to write down how they handled the official Calamity titles of the four, just so I could compare them to the proper translations in the book.  Noting, of course, that they kept using "Immor" instead of "ghost," because why would they let go of something stupid once they had gotten hold of it?

    They went with "Black Water Boat-sinker" while the Seven Seas translation used "Ship-sinking Black Water."  I think the Seven Seas version looks and sounds better, but I'll give the Blu-ray's subtitles a pass on this one, as it does at least convey the same meaning...though changing a participle used adjectivally into the primary noun is a weird choice.

    Next they translated Qi Rong's Calamity title as "Green Light Night-stalker" instead of "Night Touring Green Lantern."  Again, changing around which half is the noun and which is being used adjectivally.  The meaning, in the most strict sense, isn't strongly different between the two, but "Night-stalker" makes him sound considerably more dangerous and effective than he actually is.

    Then there's the white Calamity.  All I wrote down for that one is how they translated his lesser title; I don't think they even used his full Calamity title (which is White-Clothed Calamity).   Unlike the other Calamities, we don't know the white one's name (at least, not as of volume 6, but I suspect his name is probably going to be exposed either in volume 7 (coming out later this month) or in the final volume (currently with a release date in November), so the only name he has to go by is "White No-Face."  The Blu-ray subtitles changed that to "White No-Form."  Which.  Makes.  Literally.  No.  Sense.  He's called "No-Face" because he appears to have no face, as it is always covered with a mask.  He has form.  (Well, okay, technically he doesn't have form at this point in the story, since his form was destroyed not too long after the fall of Xianle, but as he was already called White No-Face before that, it doesn't change my point.)  What he hasn't got is a face.  Hence White No-Face.  Changing it to "No-Form" is just stupid.  It's like someone in the translation department at Funimation/Crunchyroll said "wait, but that guy in Spirited Away is called No-Face!  We can't use the same name as him or people will get confused!"  Despite that no one other than an executive is that stupid.

    And finally, before we get to Hua Cheng's Calamity title, there's the fact that they call his wraith butterflies "Dead Soul Butterflies."  Which is, I guess, not totally wrong?  But it's...not good.  It's creepier (in a bad way), lacks punch, and takes longer to read/say, so it's all around bad.  (I added the "say" part because I'm pretty sure these craptastrophic subtitles are actually dubtitles.  Which is something I honestly thought no one did anymore, and yet there's kind of no other way to explain this?) [EDIT:  my brother volunteered to check in this for me, listening to the dub with the subtitles on, and astonishingly he reported that the two were not the same, because evidently in the dub they rarely used both words "Ghost Groom" together.  (Sadly, it sounds like he was in episode one or two, and not looking at the bog meeting in episode five; I'd love to know how the dub screwed up the Calamity titles, and if they actually persuaded their dub actors to use the non-word "immor.")]

    So.  Hua Cheng.  Crimson Rain Sought Flower.  The supreme Ghost King who challenged 35 gods simultaneously.  The love interest of the novel and all around sex bomb.

    The subtitlers decided to translate his Calamity title as "Blood Rain Flower-seeker."

    It's rare that I want to hit someone for reals, but this really does make me want to punch these guys.  Or at least slap them real hard.

    Changing "Crimson" to "Blood" implies an alignment with Qi Rong (who is known for hanging corpses upside down and causing a rain of blood from them), which could not be further from the truth.  Changing the past tense of "Sought Flower" to "Flower-seeker" makes him sound like a freaking hippie out hunting for flowers all the time rather than something that happened in the past.  (That part of his title has not been fully explained so far in the novel (or if it has I've forgotten) but I'm pretty sure I know what it's vaguely in reference to, however I won't say what as it's something that happened much later in the novel.) [EDIT- in rewatching the rest on Netflix, I saw that Hua Cheng himself (early in his San Lang guise) provided an explanation of the monicker, but I'm not sure that it was the real explanation, as it's sorta weird, but 🤷🏻‍♀️ I guess it could be?  I'll find out in a few months when the final volume of the novel comes out and I reread all the preceding volumes.]

    Of course, the subtitles don't even get right that he challenged those gods at the same time, and say he challenged them "in a row."  Fighting 33 gods one at a time, even back to back, is much less impressive than fighting them all at once.  (Not that he actually fought them all at precisely the same time:  some of them weren't martial gods but civil/scholarly ones, so what he really did was fight all the martial gods at once, and then debate all the civil/scholarly ones at the same time.  But close enough.)

    (The discrepancy between 35 and 33 is not a mistake on my part:  he challenged 35, but Feng Xin and Mu Qing refused to fight him.  While done for the wrong reasons, still a very wise decision on their parts.)

    Allow me to quote the next point from my notes:

Aaaaaaand they just called Hua Cheng a demon rather than a ghost.  That is so [censored] stupid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    I think that sums up a lot right there.

    But let me go one further.  After talking about how Hua Cheng's stake in the challenge against those 35 gods was that if he lost he would surrender his ashes to Heaven, here's a direct quote of the subtitles of a line from Ling Wen:

   "He comes from Mt. Furnace, where thousands of demons fight to the death to become kings."

    AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

    ^ I can't sum it up better than that. ^

    So, Ling Wen's line is trying to fill in the viewer on another lengthy bit of world-building backstory that's accomplished in a long passage of narration, but which would be awkward to try and fit into the adaptation unless they wanted to have an actual narrator.  (Given MXTX's heavy reliance on simply putting world-building and backstory in these narrative asides, I think the adaptations might benefit from having a narrator.  It might be awkward finding the right type of narration for the stories, but it would make these detail moments work better.)

    Allow me to try to sum up everything wrong with that one line from the subtitles.  (Aside from the fact that it's probably half of what she's actually saying, but as I can't speak the language, I have no way of knowing.  Except that at this point I've watched just enough subtitled Chinese programs (and video game cutscenes) to know that expressing most things in English typically seems to take a lot longer than it does in Chinese.)

    Hua Cheng does not "come from" Mt. Tonglu.  He actually comes, originally, from Xianle, not that Ling Wen has any idea of that (as far as I know).  Now, Mt. Tonglu (which means "copper kiln," not "furnace," btw) is the site of a colossal battle royale, the winner of which becomes a Ghost King, and yes, Hua Cheng is one of the few who have won that battle royale in the past.  But everyone fighting in it was a ghost, not a demon (as I said, no demons in Heaven Official's Blessing!).  And the phrasing of "to become kings" implies that there will be more than one to emerge as a king at a time, when that is 100% not the case.

    Without knowing what she actually said, if I were hired to proofread the disasterpiece that is the subtitles on that Blu-ray, I would probably suggest replacing that line with something more like "He emerged from Mt. Tonglu, where he fought thousands of other ghosts to the death in order to earn his title as a Ghost King."  Or something like that.  (And yes, the idea of ghosts fighting to the death seems very strange to the Western way of thinking, since ghosts are already dead, but it comes up a lot in the novel, and the idea also came up in MXTX's other novels, so it's just a different way of thinking about ghosts ideologically, I guess.)

    So.

    Yeah.

    There you have it.

    After that massive pile of crud was slathered all over Hua Cheng in episode 4, I decided that my sanity was more important than trying to watch that thing.  I'd rather waste the money I paid to buy it than go mad trying to finish watching it.  (Sadly, I can't return it, because opened Blu-rays can only be exchanged in case of defect, and even then only for the same product.  Returning it because it's unwatchable due to horrifically bad subtitles is not an option.)

    It's a shame, because it's a pretty decent adaptation of volume 1 of the novel.  (Though I wonder how well they would have adapted the remaining 7 volumes if they had been permitted to make more seasons.  (Given the uptick in anti-LGBTQ+ activity on the part of the Chinese government, I think one can assume that the animation company does not feel that continuing to adapt gay romances is a safe move.)  At this rate, it would have taken eight seasons?  And I feel like they probably would not have wanted to dedicate nearly that long to it.)  Still, as long as it's available to stream on Netflix, at least I can watch it whenever I want.  But if Netflix ever takes it down, then I won't get to watch it again unless I want to either suffer through the rest of these ghastly subtitles or learn Chinese.

    On the plus side, it is faster to read volume 1 of the novel than it is to watch the entire season of the show, so there's at least that, I guess.

Pride Month '23 Reading Recap

     (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.

NaNo Rebel '22, Day 15: SVSSS

    Well, it's been a couple of days.

    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