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.

"Sword and Fairy: Together Forever" - my random, rambling thoughts on same

    So.  I mentioned before that I've been playing Sword and Fairy 7 (in its English release the 7 was dropped in favor of the subtitle "Together Forever" but it's faster and easier to use 7 instead, so...) and as of a few days ago, I have won the game. There's still a few things I need to do to feel "finished" with it (mostly the @&$!?&! card game) but I've beaten the final boss and witnessed the cutscene after the end credits, so...I feel I can now talk about it from a more knowledgeable position.

    When I mentioned it before, it was mostly to complain that increasing the size of the subtitles does not increase the size of any of the UI's tiny text.  Sadly, there's no work-around for that except to get closer to the TV if you need to read the UI.  😰  But at least the subtitles are more legible than the ones in the previous game!  And they're better translated...though they put a lot more effort into getting the main dialog right than the other stuff.  'Cause while most of the dialog that's required for you to read is basically correct and logical, in talking to random NPCs you can get stuff like this:

    Which was so funny I had to whip out my phone and take a picture of it.  😅  (If there's a screenshot button on the PS4, I don't know where it is.  And actually even if I did, I wouldn't know how to get the pictures from the PS4 to the computer anyway.  For the best, really:  my system would have been glutted with screenshots of this game if it was on the Switch...)  Honestly, I have to wonder about the guy who spoke that line, and what his life must be like if we pretend that line is actually what he wanted to say:  did he used to get bad BO from eating steamed bread?  And if so, why did he still eat it? 🤣 (Or maybe he ate steamed buns to fight off BO? 🤔)

I don't even know what this one is trying to say...

    A more pertinent comment about the translation is that it's somewhat reductive about how characters address each other.  For example, the second female party member, Bai Moqing.  For the most part, the subtitles have characters calling her "Miss Bai" or "Moqing."  "Miss Bai" is an appropriate translation of Bai-guniang, but "Moqing" is far less illustrative of character relationships than "Qing-mei" ("Qing younger sister") and "xiao-Qing" ("little Qing") and "shimei" ("younger sect sister") or...huh, I don't quite recall what her brothers called her, might have been "xiao-mei" ("little(st) younger sister").  The subtitles also have her addressing her elder brothers by their given names (a huge no-no culturally!) instead of as "da-ge" ("big(gest) elder brother") and "er-ge" ("second elder brother").  For the most part, I do get why they were so reductive (people looking to play a video game are not necessarily looking for a lesson in another culture/language) but I do think it deprives the average player of some of the flavor and nuance of the setting and relationships.  So there's definitely an added benefit when playing this if you're already familiar with the wuxia/xianxia setting and the most basic linguistic aspects like how the more commonly used honorifics work.  (Which is certainly the only linguistic aspect I have even the least grasp on!)  I expect it's not a problem for those with no background info, though.  (The fact that they don't really explain about what cultivation sects are/do might be slightly confusing, but I'd expect most people would quickly come to a "rival magic schools" conclusion, which is, again, reductive but functional.)

    Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about.  Mostly, I wanted to say how incredibly gorgeous it is!  It's not just that the graphics are really good (though they are) but the aesthetics of the visuals themselves.  Most fantasy video games--especially non-indies--have either a generic European-inspired setting or a Japanese-inspired one, so just getting one with this level of graphical detail in any other setting is already a breath of fresh air.  (Makes me especially sad that the demo for...I think it's called Raiji?...so quickly established that it would kick my hindquarters not just to the curb but right on through it and into someone's house.  Because that, too, had a gorgeous visual aesthetic, in that case an Indian one, with the game's story rooted in the Hindu mythic structure.  But there was no point trying to play the game if I couldn't even make it through the demo... 😭)  The locations in Sword and Fairy 6 were already quite lovely, but the ones in Sword and Fairy 7 are leaps and bounds better.  The details everywhere are just breathtaking!

The home of the sect that Yue Qingshu is heir to

The Tianshi sect.  These guys remind me of the Jin Clan (they even wear yellow!)

This one and the next two are the Xianxia sect, one of the most beautiful locations in the game

Who needs an airship when you can fly on the back of a magic bird? 😆

Being able to stand on trees like this is relatively unusual in this game, unlike in 6

Random guest room at an inn.

This vase gave me a huge "wait, what?!" moment because until you look close enough to see the figures it looks ancient Greek.

(*ahem*  Sorry about all the phone photos.  I was spending a long time hunting down bits of lore for the library and found myself snapping more pics to share even though they do it less than no justice.  Even a good screencap wouldn't really do it justice, because it's just less effective when it's not in motion, and then these are crappy cell-phone-photos-of-the-TV-screen, so they're pretty bad all around... 😅)

    As to gameplay, it's all around much more smooth.  The massive errors I kept encountering in 6 are absent, and I can't recall any particular bugs off the top of my head, in fact. (Though there was one boss fight that I hope was bugged and not that it was actually supposed to lift two of the party members into the air and hold them there where they can't reach the enemy and then disable the attack buttons for one of the remaining two party members, as that's sadistic.)  The combat is now a basic action RPG combat, instead of what was in the previous game, which was...weird?  (It was like you had this timer gauge that filled up and once it was full you could use it to launch your skills, but there was literally no way to just use an ordinary attack:  it was skills (and items) only.  And you only controlled one party member (though you could usually choose which one to control), with mere tactics to suggest the behavior of the others, which was not always effective. 😰)  The jumping mechanics have also been refined, which is good, since they put in a Breath of the Wild-inspired series of jumping puzzles you have to take part in to impress some fluffy little fairies (a variant on the one pictured below); in the previous game, you had little to no control over how far you jumped, and yet it had these glowing spots in hard to reach places that you got a reward for reaching, most of which seemed categorically impossible to get to with that jumping engine.  Thankfully, this time you have at least some control over distance when you're jumping.  (Not quite as much as I would have liked, considering the platforming sequences, but enough to make them not tear-out-your-hair frustrating.)

    Like the previous game, Sword and Fairy 7 added some additional game mechanics to "spice things up" periodically.  In the early section of the game, this included some quicktime events (not my favorite), and then in several places later on there are stealth sequences (which I may hate even more than QTEs) and there are also more involved mandatory platforming sequences than the ones in the previous game (which at least is balanced out by the better jumping engine).  All these "spicier" game mechanics can be skipped if you fail them enough times.  (Though I'm glad to say that I never actually failed any of them enough times to be offered that choice.  Uh, except one puzzle late game where I thought you had to jump your way up this spindle of rock to get the proper angle to do a thing and kept falling into the bottomless pit beside it, only it turned out I just had to walk to the far end of the platform and look up (instead of down) to get the right angle, so...that was just me being a dumbass, but at least I figured it out eventually.)  You also move faster, which is a great relief, particularly because the two actual cities you visit are really huge; if you were still poking along at the speed of the characters in Sword and Fairy 6 it would take forever to comb those cities for the people you have to talk to in order to unlock extra entries in the library.  (I ended up talking to everyone in one of them like two or three times 'cause the guy I needed to talk to was sitting down behind a building at the edge of the section of the city with the fewest people in it. 😰)  As to that card game I mentioned earlier...it's really badly explained, and at this point (four opponents left to beat), I think I've mostly figured out how to do it right, but no matter how good you are at the game's strategy, there's still so much luck involved that it's just miserable to play.  Triple Triad from Final Fantasy VIII is probably always going to be the best invented card game in an RPG, but at least this one is better than Tetra Master or whatever the one in Final Fantasy IX was called.

    Another nice quality of life upgrade from the previous game was an improved game map (especially where sidequests are concerned!) and an accessory that made all the items hidden in an area show on the map.  (It's possible there was such an item in the previous game and I just never acquired it and/or couldn't read what it did because the text was so tiny.)  Given how much of the library was unlocked by picking up books in sects and towns, that accessory was vital!  (Also vital for collecting the materials needed to forge new equipment...)

    The story feels a little more straight forward than the previous game's story did:  the idea of trying to give a capsule summary of what Sword and Fairy 6 is about (or even who its villains are) gives me a headache, but I think it would be a much easier task for Sword and Fairy 7.  (Though I tend to like going in blind, myself, so...)  That's not to say that there are no plot twists, of course, but more of them are surprises to the characters than to the player. 😅  There was a little more focus on the game's two romances than I'd have preferred, but they did at least work as romances.  (It helped that one was pre-existing at the start of the game, though.  It's always easier to accept "these two young people have had unspoken but utterly obvious crushes on each other for years" than "these two people just met and now they're so deeply in love that it's the most beautiful thing ever for reals," you know?)

    The only caveat I'd want to offer regarding the story is that the ending might be a bit frustrating, depending on how one likes endings to work.  (If anyone is actually reading this, there are some detail-free spoilers in the middle of this paragraph (also some for the previous game just before that), so take due precautions if you're thinking of playing the game and want to be 100% spoiler-free.)  If you've played a lot of JRPGs, then you're probably familiar with the trend (which may have started with Final Fantasy VII, and has certainly been used ever since then in the Final Fantasy series) of having an ambiguous and/or unsatisfying ending before the credits, then putting the clarifying/happier ending in an additional scene after the credits.  As China's answer to Final Fantasy, the Sword and Fairy series seems to embrace this trend as well:  the previous game went from an implication that something 100% unacceptable was about to happen before the credits to a scene after the credits which revealed that thankfully the foresight of another character had been sufficient to prevent the tragedy that was threatened, and that everyone seemed to be doing pretty well a few years down the line (and even that the dead character had already been reincarnated).  So, in this game they carried the ambiguity a little too far:  when the credits start, the fate of one of the main characters is bleak, and two of the others' fates are unknown (but probably okay), and then the scene after the credits establishes that the other two are totally fine and happy, and then the scene ends with the implication that the bleak situation is about to rectify itself.  In other words, the post-credits scene kinda cuts off where you'd expect the pre-credits scene to cut off.  Honestly, it's sort of "to be expected" in a video game that terrible things that happened to the party members after the final battle will be auto-corrected at the end, but actually getting to see the confirmation of that is always appreciated, you know?  I, personally, found it very frustrating in the moment, but the more I look back on it the more okay I am with it, given how strong the implication was.

    EDIT:  Now that I've read the whole library (which took like 2-3 hours across two nights, because there's just so much of it!) I can say that my initial thoughts of "well, duh" about the bittersweet ending turning to a happy one may have been incorrect.  I mean, I still think we're meant to take it that everything is going to become a happy ending promptly after the cutscene ends, but having read about the characters and events of previous games, I'm getting the feeling that bittersweet and even tragic endings may actually be the norm in this series. 😰 I'm hoping I'm wrong, of course, but there were a lot of characters whose entries in the library mention them sacrificing themselves.  Also a lot of them are mentioned as disappearing after accomplishing whatever it is they've set out to do, but that might just mean the ending sets them up as going on a journey and then no later game ever has them show up or mentions where they went.  (It turns out that these games are actually much more interconnected than I had initially thought.  I mean, they're still stand-alone, but various places, people and organizations come up repeatedly.  For example, two of the incidental characters you meet in this one are actually former party members (since the library seems to only have entries for party members, I feel like I can say this with certainty), and both the Tianshi and Xianxia sects originated in previous games.

    Just wanted to include these two other phone photos I took of the game, just because I loved how adorable this enemy type is!  🥰  Thankfully, they're among the "they only fight you if you hit them first" types that live around the first town in the game.  (You still have to fight them once to add them to the enemies list in the library section of the menu, but that's the only time you have to fight them.)

    Yes, they look like giant peaches with faces, arms, and leafy bunny ears.  They are definitely among the cutest RPG enemies I've ever encountered, and I very much want a plushie of one.  😁  Dunno if there are any, though; I've encountered three pieces of official merch for this game (two Nendoroids and a doll) online but they're all of characters, not monsters.  (Weirdly, one of the Nendoroids is for a demon lord you only encounter a handful of times.  I wonder if he's actually in some of the other games as well?  The other Nendoroid is of the heroine, Yue Qingshu (seen above), and the doll is of Bai Moqing.  I've actually ordered the doll, but haven't made up my mind about the Nendos, though; they're much pricier than the doll, after all.)  EDIT:  yup, it turns out the demon lord was in a previous game, and it seems he was even a party member.  That's probably why the listing for his Nendoroid doesn't specify what game he's from, 'cause he's from more than one!  (Still haven't made up my mind about buying either Nendo, though.  Esp. since I'm more leaning towards the heroine's than the demon lord's (after all, I don't know him all that well as a character), and she's much more expensive, since I wouldn't be buying her direct from Good Smile.)

    Oh, I should probably talk about the characters!  The four party members are all likable, and the game did a good job of keeping the heroine focused on both the task in hand and on her duties to/the survival of her cultivation sect even after she becomes aware that she's falling in love.  (So much in the world of fiction has female characters forgetting anything else exists once they fall in love. 😫)  And I can confirm what I suspected when I discussed this game before:  Xiu Wu is absolutely a heterosexual Lan Wangji.  (Or maybe demisexual/demiromantic really.  He takes a while to figure out that such things even exist and apply to him.)  He's probably got more alcohol tolerance, though. 🤣

    Oh, but speaking of MDZS characters, I was looking through the library section in the game's menu where it gives brief entries on characters from previous games.  (I haven't read most of the library yet; waiting for it to be full, since the type is so tiny I'll have to sit/stand nearer to the TV to be able to read all the text, so I wanted to wait and do that all in one go.)  Anyway, one entry caught my eye--or rather gave me a double-take!

    I'm sure the name is spelled with different characters, but still!  What are the odds?   (Especially with him being connected to someone named Ouyang Ying:  'Ying' is the birth name of MZDS's hero, Wei Wuxian, and the Ouyang Clan in MZDS was based in Baling, very near Yunmeng where the Jiang Clan was located...and in the novel's present Jiang Cheng kind of verbally bullied the leader of the Ouyang Clan, because of how nearby the two clans are and how much weaker the Ouyang Clan is than the Jiang Clan.)  Of course, no matter which previous game he came from, he probably doesn't look like this:

The only way Jiang Cheng should look. 😊

    

    (Wow, Netflix is great for screencaps!  Though maybe I should have been pickier about the particular moment to screencap... 😅)

    Soooooo....yeah, tl;dr version is "I liked."  🤣

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.