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.)

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.