UI Matters

 So...lately, mostly due to MDZS/The Untamed, I have lately been quite into Ancient China as a setting.

Thus, when I was looking for an additional title to fill out a Play Asia order--

Wait.  Let me start further back.

The trend, at the moment, among the larger Asian game companies, is to release their games digitally worldwide, and to release them physically in Asia with multi-language support (and no region-locking), and only to release physical copies in the rest of the world if they feel guaranteed sufficient sales to justify the expense of the physical release.  (Thus, for example, there is a US physical release of Final Fantasy XVI, but not of Various Daylife.)

While there's certainly financial logic to this policy, it's definitely frustrating to older gamers like myself who like the old-fashioned comfort of owning a physical copy.  And that's where Play Asia comes in.  Their online storefront has a huge selection of these multi-language console games that they sell directly to the Western audiences who want them.  Some of these are so very intended for sale to the US market (like the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster collection) that their boxes are printed entirely in English.

Anyway, Play Asia offers free US shipping if your order comes to $100 (or more), so given the cost of international shipping these days, when I make an order there, I want to take advantage of that offer.  And that brings me back up to where I started this post:

So I had gone to Play Asia to get a physical copy of the Etrian Odyssey I-III HD Remaster collection (ridiculously, about $10 cheaper than the digital bundle!), and was looking for something else to fill out the order and reach that $100 for the free shipping.  There were the physical copies of some old Squaresoft titles that have recently received HD remasters, like Chrono Cross and Legend of Mana, but I admit that I'm still trying to find a decent justification for spending $40 on a game I pre-ordered when it was brand new back in the PS1 days, especially one that I then replayed so many times I practically have it memorized even all these years later. 😅  (I justify buying the Etrian Odyssey collection because evidently I skipped III when the 3DS remakes were coming out (which was my introduction to the franchise, having somehow missed the DS versions when they came out 🤷🏻‍♀️))  Anyway, so I'm browsing around to see what else is available, and come across Sword and Fairy: Together Forever, which is set in a fantasy version of Ancient China.

Now, I had heard of the Sword and Fairy series because of its merchandising:  several characters from various installments have had Nendoroids made, and given my interest in the setting, they had of course garnered my attention.

Anyway, since the game page looked interesting, and since I figured there was no chance it would get a physical release in the West, I went ahead and ordered it.  (Then about a week after it arrived, I went into a Gamestop and saw a domestic copy sitting on the shelf there.  😰  At least there wasn't a significant price difference between the domestic copy and the import I bought, but I still felt effin' dumb.  😭)

Now, while I was waiting for it to arrive, and knowing that what I had ordered was a later game in the series, I went looking in the PlayStation store (sadly, the originally PC-only series has only seen ports to PlayStation and not to Switch (except for a spin-off about restaurant management)) to see if there were any of the others available in English.  And, sure enough, Sword and Fairy 6 (the previous game in the series) was available in the PlayStation store, and when I happened to look up the series, it was even on a massive sale that reduced its cost so much that it was only a bit over $5!

Obviously, at that price, I felt no need to hesitate, and went for it.  🤣  Fortunately, the series is very much China's answer to Final Fantasy (to the extent of having very Amano-like game logos for both 6 and 7, with 6's logo being particularly reminiscent of Final Fantasy X's logo, appropriately enough, since the game itself had a lot of Final Fantasy X vibes to it) so not having played 1-5 is not problematic, except that it means I haven't met the character with the most epic Nendoroid, Zhao Ling'er.  (I really want to know what game she comes from so I can hope they bring it over, 'cause I'd rather not buy a Nendo of a character I don't know yet, but I'd love to get that one...)

And this is where the title of this post finally comes into it.

Because Sword and Fairy 6 has some serious UI issues.

I mean, really, it has a lot of technical issues, to be honest, most of which I suspect are programming things caused by the port.  (In-engine cut scenes crashing is a new one on me, though, I gotta say!)  And translation issues, of course, because they did not have a native speaker look over the English to make sure it was, you know, comprehensible.  Though mostly the problems with the translation were just awkward, not anything that would actually stop you from understanding what they were trying to say.  (Sadly, one of the worst was right in the opening movie, where--among other problems--they accidentally used "peach" when they meant "peace.")

[EDIT:  the bit about the in-engine cut scenes "crashing" is something I feel like I ought to explain.  They didn't crash in the sense of failing to run or causing a forced stop to the game.  It took me quite a while to figure out what was actually going on there:  basically, the only thing broken about the in-engine cut scenes actually seemed to be the commands given to the camera.  This was particularly jarring on one occasion, where you fast-travel to a location and see the spot where you land from fast-traveling there, and then you hear the cut scene playing, but all you can see is this empty stretch of cliff face.  Which I thought at the time was just the game crashing, so I quit out to the Playstation menu and tried again.  But then, much later in the game, it happened in a way that let me understand what was actually going on:  again, it happened after a fast-travel, and the camera simply stayed in the base arrival position for the location, while the models for the cut scene did their thing....which included appearing and disappearing, rapidly jumping from one side of the screen to another, etc.  Because it was an interior scene, the characters had to move around a lot to have them be in the right place for various close-ups where they were or were not supposed to be visible.  (I really wish I had been able to record that somehow, because wow was it wild to watch!)  But lately I've sort of been thinking about that for some reason, and I kind of wonder just how many of the earlier cut scenes had been ignoring the camera commands like that and I never noticed.  For example, there's this one minor character who was several times shown "walking" on screen when his model seems to have been rigged at all, so he's just sliding around unanimated.  I can only think of a handful of times that happened, and in all of them I seem to recall the camera being completely static.  So it may be that those were other cases of the camera commands being ignored because of whatever the heck was causing that, and so if I had been seeing the cutscenes as they were meant to be seen, it wouldn't have been apparent that that guy's model wasn't rigged, because if he was shown "walking" it was from a higher angle where you're only seeing his face and shoulders or whatever.  Now, this is all still a new one on me, keep in mind.  In fact, having the cut scene play properly while just the camera commands are ignored is probably even more unusual and weird.  I suspect it's an issue with porting the game to the PS4, but having pretty much zero knowledge of the workings of the kinds of engines high end 3D games are made in, I have no way of knowing if that's likely to be the case.  I am quite certain about it being only the camera commands that were being ignored as the cut scenes played out, though.  Whatever was causing it, I got around it by saving basically every time I thought a cut scene might start up (the map helpfully gave you a marker to show where you needed to go, so I just got in the habit of saving right before reaching said marker, whether it seemed likely there would be a cut scene or not), and if it was obviously broken, then I'd quit out and start the game up again, which usually fixed the problem.  So it must have had something to do with having too much in memory at once, or something? 🤷  Sometime I ought to look up a playthrough on Youtube (if there are any) and see if some of those cut scenes I remember as looking sort of weird with their static camera were actually bugging out.  Actually, just watching the game would kinda be a better experience anyway, in that I could go back and see what any subtitles I didn't manage to read had said...]

But the UI is the biggest problem, or rather, the accessibility of the whole program is.  Because everything is tiny.  The entire UI is minute.  Including the subtitles.  Which have no background behind them to make them easier to read.

And I have a really small TV.

I had to sit on the floor halfway between the sofa and the TV just to be able to read the subtitles.  And even then I often couldn't finish reading some of the lines between the poor contrast and the fact that Chinese is a more efficient language than English (at least sometimes) and so things that are said in just a dozen words or so in Chinese then need three lines of text in English, and there just wasn't time to read all of them before the words went away as the cutscene continued.  (And after about the halfway point of the story, the gameplay loop was like 80% cutscenes!)

Still, I did soldier through and finish the game.  I was able to catch enough of the dialog to know what was going on, thankfully.  (There is at least a story section in the menu that sums up the story as it goes along...though the text there is just as tiny as the subtitles.)  Never really grasped some of the finer points of the combat system, though, as the battle UI was just too small to be comprehensible.  😰  Maybe it's better on a computer, where the screen's supposed to be really close to your face, but since computer monitors are even smaller than my TV, I don't know how much that would actually help?

Anyway, on the whole, the game was a positive experience, in my opinion.

Xian Qing is best boi.

Luo Zhaoyan suffered a humiliating costume change in the late game that needed to be reverted as soon as possible and never was.  😖  (Even with the humiliating new costume, still second-best after Xianqing.)

The graphics were sorta late PS2/early PS3 level, but very pretty anyway.  😁

Anyway, I was super excited (after having dealt with the previous game's itty-bitty subtitles) to see that Sword and Fairy 7 had in its settings menu a "Subtitle Size" setting! 😁

I was much less pleased to see that it didn't increase the size of anything else in the UI.  So I can read the subtitles (usually; there's still nothing behind them, so the background can make reading the text difficult, and it still often vacates the screen before I can finish reading it) but I can't read the messages in the upper corner that are telling me what I'm supposed to be doing next. 😭

So, yeah, maybe I should have called this post "Accessibility Matters" or "Subtitles Need To Be Legible, Guys!"

Or something.

I dunno.

.

..

...

(Actually, maybe I just wanted to make a post that allowed me to say "Xianqing is best boi.")

(This is Xianqing:

I rest my case.)

Anyway, as to Sword and Fairy 7, I'm not really far enough in to have much to say about it yet, aside from the even more eyestrainy UI issue.  The translation still has problems, but they're not as bad.  At least they're trying to be more naturalistic with the honorifics; the previous one literally had people addressing each other as "Brother Yue" and "Brother Luo."  Which is, technically, accurate in translating the honorific -xiong, but it's not how people speak in English unless they're Pilgrims and it's the 18th century.  (If you have any familiarity with Japanese honorifics, the Chinese ones are at least twice as complicated.  Three or four times more if you start getting into the extended family stuff...though one of the guides on AO3 pointed out that some of that is so complicated that even native speakers have trouble with it!  I've barely scraped the surface of research on honorifics and other forms of address for my MDZS fanfics; I figure as long as I'm able to reproduce the level the official translation uses, I'm probably okay...)

I did have a couple of double-takes last night, though!  We had to get some rubbings of ancient musical scores for a side quest, right?  Only when I looked at the menu for more information on what we were looking for, it said they were "Xianle rubbings"!  I couldn't stop myself from laughing and saying "I didn't know this game had a crossover with Heaven Official's Blessing!"  And then not too much later, we met an innkeeper whose name was Wen Mao.  Probably spelled with different characters than the founder of the Wen Clan in MDZS, but still!  Given that at that inn we encountered poor unfortunates being worked to death like the Wen remnants, I can't help feeling that wasn't a coincidence.

Especially since the all-white-wearing Xiu Wu is really trying very hard to be a heterosexual Lan Wangji.  Uh, probably with less tendency to jealousy, though. 😅  And almost certainly without the secret massive horniness.  So, yeah, maybe I should say more that he's trying to be Lan Wangji's public image. 🤣  Only not as taciturn...though he does say "Mn." a lot!  🤣  (Which they always translate as "Sure." even if that's completely the wrong tone for the context.  😰 )

But there's almost a poetry to there being obvious references to MXTX's work in game 7 considering that something in game 6 seems to have influenced one of the changes made when MDZS was adapted into the live action drama The Untamed.  (Specifically the strange urukhai-like things the "puppets" could be turned into.)  Though that could be both things drawing influence from an older work/tradition, though; as I only discovered the genre last year, I'm obviously not very knowledgeable about it!

IWSG: Conflicted

 

    Amusingly (or not), this month's question is actually pretty much exactly what I would be talking about anyway.  (Funny how the universe often seems to work that way.  Like how everyone else is always arriving at the grocery store at the same time, and/or leaving it at the same time.)

August 2 question: Have you ever written something that afterwards you felt conflicted about? If so, did you let it stay how it was, take it out, or rewrite it?

    So... so much to say.

    Technically, I can think of...well, actually, there are a lot of cases, really, but only two that lead anywhere.

    In the first one, which I think I ended up talking about last month as well, I had written a game for a game jam that was...more than a little questionable.  It involved a demon lord who got off on watching  as the handsome hero who had come to slay him died time and again on his way through the monster-infested castle of the demon lord...but the demon lord kept reviving him because he wants him to get to the top eventually, as the demon lord wants to have his way with the hero.  It's not graphic in any way--the deaths are text-only, don't go into any particular detail, and most of them have very little innate sexual component to them (the ones that do, though! 😰 I am honestly horrified that my brain was able to come up with some of that stuff, tame though it was)--but it was still just so innately wrong that I was hesitant to post the game.  Despite that it was for a game jam--with a fast-approaching deadline for submission!--I delayed posting it for three days because I was just so scared of what people would do when they saw it.

    So, yeah, I was very conflicted about that one.  But so far nothing's gone wrong from it being out there (except that it gets way more views and downloads than the rest of my games put together) and it's been out almost a year and a half.

    That isn't what I would have been talking about today, though.

    What I would have been talking about today regardless of the question of the month is the fanfic I started posting on AO3 about a month ago.  Going into posting it, I did have a few misgivings:

• Because the story starts out with the love interest locking up the main character to protect him from his enemies, it could look like Stockholm Syndrome when the hero realizes he's always been in love with the love interest, and yet we're supposed to be on board with this relationship.  (Technically, pretty much anyone who might read it should already be on board with the relationship, since they're the primary romantic pair from the novel it's fan fiction of.)
• It has three distinct arcs with very different tones and themes, so trying to find a way to tag the work on AO3 was somewhere between awkward and impossible.
• I remain a bit fuzzy on some finer details of how the magic system of the original novel works, so some of what I had happening was probably borderline impossible or otherwise contrary to canon.

    However, on the whole I was feeling pretty good about it.  And, honestly, I still think there's a lot to it that's good.  Or at least good for me.  I'm very aware of my limitations, and know better than to expect that I can just magically surpass them.  That being said, I even thought I managed to make it look at least somewhat like an actual romantic relationship, which is something I normally cannot do, having no real understanding of what those feelings are like, as I'm quite strongly aromantic.

    Anyway, I got up to the fourth chapter posted, and things seemed to be going acceptably; the comments were mostly positive, at least.  Then came a new comment in a single, enormous paragraph.

    This comment was, as far as I can tell, intended to be positive.

    The person was gushing about what they thought I was writing about.  About how happy they were to see the love interest's young self finally portrayed as selfish and controlling.  About how much they enjoyed watching the drama version of the hero suffer.  On and on.

    I couldn't believe it.  Someone had read what I had written and mistaken it that far?

    Sure, there was some truth to some of what they were saying.  There was, for example, a certain element of controlling to the love interest's character in the fic, just as there is in canon, but it wasn't intended to be his primary character trait!  But most of the rest of it was so far off that I didn't even know what to think.  The idea of the story wasn't to make the hero suffer (and in fact even in what I had already posted he wasn't doing much that could be called suffering!), it was just to take him out of the situation that was about to explode and lead to the death of his adopted sister and her husband, which would lead in turn to numerous other death, including his own--and I wasn't working with the version of the story from the live-action adaptation, but the original novel!  (Heck, I even opened the fic with a direct quote from the novel, which I properly attributed to the official translation, providing a page number and everything!)

    After spending maybe half a day deliberating, I replied to the comment, apologizing that my writing was so bad that the opening--which does admittedly have some unreliable narration from the POV of the hero who feels he's been betrayed by his best friend--had so mislead the reader into thinking the story was going one place when it was actually going somewhere radically different.

    But it was still bothering me.

    That I'd written something that could be so badly misunderstood as to invite character-bashing in the comments, expecting that I agreed with the bashing.

    I ended up deleting the fic off of AO3 entirely.

    And I felt really good about that when I did it.  I even managed to get past some of the writer's block I'm having in the current piece I'm working on.  (Most of which is due to the fact that to tell the story I'm trying to tell, I have to get the characters through a war.  Which it's like...I don't know what would happen in this war, specifically, plus I hate war and don't want to write about one?  It's making it slow as molasses to write, but it's going okay for a first draft.)

    In retrospect, I don't know if that was the right thing to do.  (Certainly, the people I spoke to in between replying to the comment and deleting the fic all told me "don't do it at all" when I asked for advice regarding whether I should finish posting it all really quickly, like two or three chapters a day, and then delete it, or if I should just delete it immediately.  I had thought, in response to what they said, that maybe I could leave it up if I just turned off the comments, but...by the next day I was convinced again that deleting it was the only path forwards.)

    It does feel like that by deleting something I had noted in the summary was already fully written and edited (which is true!) that people will assume I deleted it because it wasn't finished and I didn't know what to do next, and that they will thus never again believe me if I post something with a note on it saying it's already been written.  Which probably doesn't actually matter, of course.

    On the other hand, I do feel like if anyone actually cared about the story, they probably would have clicked on one of my other fics and left a comment asking what happened to the one I just deleted.  And so far they haven't.  (I also noted in the summary that I would be posting every weekend, so they know that a chapter is post-due.)  Although I'm not 100% sure how much of that is "no one gives a fetid dingo's kidney" and how much of that is "AO3 keeps crashing."  Though it's probably the former, not the latter.  (Though the fact that AO3 keeps returning a timeout error is alarming, to say the least!)

    It's an awkward situation where it feels like no matter what I did, it would have been the wrong decision.  Leaving it up would have been wrong, but maybe taking it down was, too.

    All this is probably not what I should be saying in response to this month's question.

    I should be trying to come up with some time that I was feeling like I'd gone in a wrong direction and so I rewrote and ended up with something better.  There have probably been times like that.  There have certainly been rewrites that were radically different than the first draft, and a vast improvement over it, but I don't recall off-hand if I felt conflicted about any of the first draft stuff that ended up being changed.  (And, like I said, I'd have been talking about this anyway, even if the month's question had been something like "have you ever sent your characters to the beach?")

Words have meanings, and they matter

 So.

Bit of a rant here.

I'm still slogging my way through the novel I started in June, the one that promised me a lesbian love story in and around the epic fantasy novel.

And it's clear that yes, eventually there will be romance between the two female leads.

Though given the number 1 on the spine of the novel (which I somehow didn't notice until I was over 100 pages into the book) it may not get very far into said romance until a later book in the series.  (If so, I guess I'll miss out on it, 'cause it is not working out between us.)

This morning, I got to a passage exposing a secret of the sinister woman who (without specifically meaning to but also without caring in the least) ruined the girls' young lives.  Said woman always wears gloves, and did at one point move to take them off in a threatening way, but events prevented her from doing so.  Well, she finally took one off, and of course exposed a hand that was not human.

Well, duh.

But the way that hand is described?

In the paragraph where she takes the glove off, it's described as being "amphibious."

On the next page, it's described as "reptilian."

Those are two, completely different, mutually exclusive adjectives!!!

ARGH!!!!!!!

{pant, pant}

Okay, sorry.

I'm calm now.

But that really gets to me, because they're both powerfully evocative words, and they call up wildly different images!

Amphibious:  soft, smooth, moist, possibly slimy, porous, and without any kind of claws or nails.

Reptilian:  hard, scaly, dry (usually), typically with claws.

But this book wants it both ways.  How?!  How could that ever be possible?!?

Since the initial description says the hand has razor-sharp "talons" (which are a bird thing, not a reptile thing, unless you're talking dinosaurs), I'm guessing that "reptilian" was the word the author actually wanted, but I shouldn't have to guess that!

The editors on this book were really sleeping on the job, and I don't just mean the amphibious/reptilian gaffe.  I mean cases where two words or phrases were used when only one was wanted.  I don't recall where any of the passages were in the 356 pages I've slogged through so far, but I can give a very close approximation.  Things like "She turned to look at the girl young woman and smiled."  So, you know, cases where the author changed their mind about what word to use and forgot to delete the old one...and then somehow no one noticed.  (Goodness knows, I've done that myself, but I'm not a professionally published author!  And I typically notice that kind of mistake before posting something to AO3 or itch.io.)

And that happened more than once, along with other annoying little errors that wouldn't bug me so much if I was actually enjoying the book.

...sigh.

I shouldn't be complaining, of course.

It's a sprawling fantasy with two female leads, both strong in different ways, both determined to control their own lives, etc.  And they're in love with each other, which is great.

It's just...

...well, the prose is a lot.  So much more description than we really need.

Though I think what really soured me on it was when we caught up to one of the girls after their separation and learned that she was actually half-succubus.

I'm sorry, but I don't want a lesbian heroine who sleeps with men to drain them of their energy and turn them into her slaves.  That is just a no-go for me.  (Honestly, I'm not sure I'd want to read about a straight woman who did that, either.  Magical seduction is not cool all around, as it's decidedly borderline on the whole consent issue.)

Okay, I'm done now.

I just needed to vent.

(I won't be identifying the book, obviously, because that's pretty uncool, to post nasty things about a book and thus discourage people from reading it.)

EDIT:  I did eventually finish reading the novel.  And, as I had feared, the two heroines didn't get much more than a few kisses before they were separated again, and they were still separated at the end of the book.  But one of the final scenes.  OMG, talk about the editor falling down on the job!  One of those scenes literally referred to one of the heroines by the other heroine's name.  Seriously.  Any good will the last 75ish pages had given me (as the story finally started, you know, going somewhere) was blasted to smithereens with that one.

IWSG - no idea for a title this month

 

    My heart thing is still stopping me from working on any of my original projects (had a massive flare-up due to writing out the idea for a no-pressure, not-jam-related game!) so I don't have much to talk about in my own writing life right now, so I guess I'll be answering the monthly question instead.  (Though I will be seeing my doctor again next week, and I'm hopeful that my friend was right and menopause might be playing a role in it.  That would both give a direction for treatment and guarantee that the problem would eventually go away on its own.  Also it would mean not dealing with being tested for sleep apnea.)

    Anyway!

July 5 question - 99% of my story ideas come from dreams. Where do yours predominantly come from?

    Most of my story ideas come from things I encounter in my daily life...though that includes things I "encounter" by reading about them, seeing them on TV, etc.  Sometimes that's a pretty straightforward process (I do end up writing a lot of fanfiction, after all, so there's a lot of "what if the hero's parents didn't die?" or "what if the characters from this show met the ones from that movie?" type of things), while sometimes it's also more of a train of thought bouncing around off of something I've seen until it's something new.

    I'm trying to remember a good example, but...that's the sort of thing that--oh, no, I have one!

    So, there's this game called Persona 5 Strikers in English.  (Its Japanese title is slightly less stupid, maybe, if you squint.)  The plot of the game is way too much to explain, but it involves a group of teenagers (and one cop after a while) literally entering someone's mental landscape to find out why it's gone screwy and to alter it so that they'll stop doing terrible, slightly supernatural things to others.  (Not a very good description of the story, but...)  In one case, they've entered the mind of a guy who wrote a really awful, exceedingly generic fantasy novel, which has become a massive bestseller because he's essentially magically brainwashed thousands of readers.  In order to defeat his mental image of himself (it almost makes sense in context) they have to get into the Demon Lord's castle from his novel.  The only one of them who actually read the novel explains that if it works the same way as the castle in the novel, then they'll have to go to all these other places and do these other things to open the way in.  One of the others in the party asks why the Demon Lord wouldn't just have a door that can't open so the hero trying to kill him can't get in.

    My immediate response to that character was "well, he must be into the hero, obviously!"

    That, uh, was not the explanation in the game.  But it set my mind in motion with "what would that be like, if the demon lord allowed the hero out to get him into his castle because he wanted to bang said hero?"

    That led me to write a rather questionable visual novel wherein the player is the Demon Lord who decides that the Hero looking to kill him is very handsome and totally his type, so he allows him into his castle and revives him every time he gets killed by the assorted minions so that eventually the Hero will fight his way up to the top floor of the castle and the Demon Lord can have his way with him. 😅

    This, um, is not typical of my writing.  But it was fun to write something so different from my usual fare.

    And more importantly, hopefully that illustrated the way I derived a more-or-less original story idea from something else.

    (Not gonna share the link to the game, 'cause it's exceedingly embarrassing, as it's technically NSFW because the descriptions of some of the hero's many deaths are fairly sexualized. 😰  I was so embarrassed by it that it took me three days to post it after I finished the game.  (Humiliatingly, it's by far the most popular thing I've posted to my itch.io account.))

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.

IWSG: (clever title goes here)

 

EDIT: evidently if you put < > brackets around part of your post title it just gets ignored by the system. 😓  I've replaced the < and > with ( and ) so hopefully now the whole post title will show...

    As my health problems are starting to stabilize (or at least I've realized that they're coming every two weeks, which suggests that maybe my high school friend was right when she suggested it might be connected to menopause), I'm going to try answering the monthly question for a change.

June 7 question - If you ever did stop writing, what would you replace it with?

    I've spent so much of my life writing, it's hard to imagine what I'd do if I stopped!  (Other than totally lose my mind.)  I suppose I'd have to depend on one of the other creative endeavors that I have occasionally flirted with:  maybe making things with resin, maybe working more on making box rooms (though I'd need a bigger house first if I wanted to have a place to store/display them!), or just devote myself to game dev.  (Though game dev is also writing for me, since I'm a writer and you have to write the game before you can make it, but...)  I could maybe actually dive into one of the two Humble Bundles I've bought with content to teach a person how to use Blender (one a set of video courses and the other a set of books) and maybe finally learn how to do 3D art and hope that I'd be less garbage at it than 2D art.  Maybe I could keep mucking around in that mapmaking program until I got to be slightly less awful at it.

    I suppose I could also just lose myself in my non-creative hobbies, but I feel like that would get old pretty quick.  These days, I can't even make it all the way through a turn-based JRPG without finding myself wanting to do something else while the battle animations play.  (And until my heart issues are resolved, I don't know if I can play anything that isn't turn-based.  Though hopefully I could at least handle the low-level action combat in, say, Stardew Valley, or its myriad imitators.  Hopefully.  (I'm in trouble if I can't, 'cause I've backed a lot of them on Kickstarter and some of them may actually release this year (if I'm lucky)!)  But maybe I'd finally get back to trying to learn another language (probably German, 'cause it's easiest, plus many years ago I bought an untranslated copy of The Neverending Story and I am determined to someday actually read it!) and actually follow through for once.

    But yeah...mostly I think I would go insane if I stopped writing.  Unlike a lot of other writers, I don't have any intention of trying to publish my work, aside from releasing a few things free on itch.io or AO3, so I sort of approach it differently than many others.  I write because I have stories jostling around in my head and wanting to get out; I write to get them out of my head so maybe it'll be less cluttered in there.  (Of course by the time I finish writing one story, five or six more have taken its place, so it's a never-ending struggle...)

More Fanfic Stuff (MDZS/The Untamed)

     So, my heart is still giving me trouble, and I don't really dare go back to writing anything but light fanfic.  (Well, not all that light, given that I'm now trying to write about a war that no version of canon ever actually gave a detailed account of.  And I suck at the whole "war" thing...)

    In keeping with this being Pride Month, I kind of wonder how "right" it is for me to be writing stuff like this, and even if maybe there's something a little...how should I put it?  Mo Dao Zu Shi is danmei, which was largely inspired by the Japanese genre of BL/yaoi, and thus is largely (but not entirely) written by women for women, despite being about romances between men.  It feels like maybe that's actually sort of...wrong?  Like the sexuality equivalent of cultural appropriation?  (For that matter is it cultural appropriation for me to write fanfic set in ancient China when I'm of European descent?  The original work was written by a Chinese person, so...I have no idea if that makes it okay.  I mean, I'm kinda obsessed right now so I'm going to keep writing it anyway; I'm just wondering how guilty I ought to feel about it.  I am, at least, trying to depict the culture as accurately as I'm able (and I have done some research), which hopefully counts for something.)

    In my own defense, I'm trying for the most part to represent the romance between the two leads as realistically to an actual gay relationship as I can, but as I'm female, aromantic, asexual and not really very well versed in humanity (as I tend to hide in my house whenever possible because people are mean, scary creatures I would prefer to avoid at all costs), that's not really all that realistic, I fear.

    Ironically, the live-action adaptation, The Untamed, in some ways portrays the romance more realistically despite that it's been all but removed.  In the novel, we get a thoroughly narrated picture of how the hero is feeling towards his love interest at all times, and thus we see the rather hasty change from "he's practically my enemy" to "he's my friend" to "wait, was I teasing him all the time because I secretly liked him" to "I'm gonna marry him," with that last step taking about twenty-four hours.  (Maybe forty-eight, but definitely not more than that.)  In the drama, however, all we get to indicate their feelings for each other is a lot of longing glances, the occasional action to risk their lives for each other, the near-constant (in the second half) actions of the love interest to step in between the hero and anything that might threaten him, and a few moments that are decidedly suggestive of romantic affection (like when the love interest gets drunk and steals a couple of roosters to give to the hero as a gift 🤣).  By making it entirely subtext, it actually feels more natural, because we, the audience, can assign it the progression that seems most plausible to us, instead of being told a specific romantic chronology that might ring a bit more falsely to our individual perceptions.  (Which is why this current fic I'm working on is probably going to be the one with the most realistic romance of all the fics I'll end up writing for this fandom, because in this one the novel's lead is not the fic's lead, so his romance is in the background and we just catch glimpses of it at different stages, without seeing the progression of it at all.  (In fact it moves from "just friends" to "kissing but calling it energy transfer because we're not ready to admit how we feel yet" during a three month gap in which they're off traveling alone together.)  Not that I'm advocating for relegating romances to the subtext (unless they're straight romances), just saying that it's sort of ironic that the attempt to delete the romance actually made it in some ways better.

    In other random ramblings because I'm sort of blocked as to what the next scene should be and whose POV it should be in, last time I talked about this I showed the map I was working on so I'd have an idea of where various places were in relation to each other.  This was that map:

    Well, I've kept working on it periodically since then.  This is the current iteration:

    The biggest change is that I've fixed up the waterways.  I found a way to superimpose the river-specific maps from Wikipedia's articles on the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, so I was able to add a lot more and more accurate rivers and lakes.  And I think it makes it look like I actually got the cities in the right place, since all of them are either on or near water.  (Of course, it's also got rivers coming out of a freaking volcano, but...at least I established in the text that the volcano is actually a magical illusion created by the bad guys so they'll seem scarier.🤣)  Admittedly, I kind of wonder if maybe I went a little overboard on the rivers, but...if they're real, they're real, right?  Besides, I think it helps to give a sense of just how big an area this is covering.  (For reference, the real places of Qishan and Gusu are over 700 miles away from each other!)

    The next biggest change is probably adding the ominous effect around the mountain beside Yiling.  That's there to represent the Burial Mounds, a super-haunted mountain that plays a huge role in the hero's story.  Smaller role in this AU fic, but...🤷  I do hope to reuse the basic map for later fics...albeit with the volcano removed. 🤣

    I guess I didn't really have anything more to say than that.  I was just sort of hoping that if I wrote for a while I'd come up with a plan for the next scene, but I didn't. 😭  Hopefully I'll think of something by tomorrow.