Edit - mistakenly thought Meng Xi Shi wrote the Untamed books lol
But anyway it looks like I just like this author better maybe because it feels like a very classic wuxia tale and the characters better developed. I found Yan Wushi interesting even if I found Shen Qiao annoying for his boy scout ways.
@liztai ah, Meng Xi Shi didn't write Mo Dao Zu Shi—that was Moxiang Tongxiu.
Meng Xi Shi has written The Fourteenth Year of Chenghua, Thousand Autumns, and Peerless (Wushuang)... and also other books I can't think of right now, hehe. Maybe you'll enjoy one of those!
So far I've only finished reading The Fourteenth Year of Chenghua, and I thought it was great. The romance is very slowburn and understated, and most of the plot is about politics and family issues, which really worked for me. :) I'm reading Thousand Autumns but not got very far with it yet.
@liztai no, not yet, but I've heard it's great! I really love how the book is grounded in real history (the Northern and Southern Dynasties, coincidentally one of my favourite time periods) and how it's very much wuxia rather than xianxia. Don't get me wrong, I love both, but I think wuxia works really well for telling this story!
Like the weisswurst line in Germany that I've been told is a thing by a friend, I think we need a CNY dumpling dividing line on the map of China, along with sweet/savory/spicy douhua dividing line, and a sweet/savory zhongzi line, and a sweet/savory tangyuan line
@geraineon I’m well inside the rösti section! 😄 near the big lake in the north of the orange part of that map. Lucky for me, because rösti is delicious.
Gone down a rabbit hole trying to find videos that explains the whys of Cantonese slangs, and then some are kinda off tune to my ears (possible pronunciation drift and all). And I still haven't found the answer to my questions but here's a video for some Cantonese slangs if anyone is interested (with pronunciation that doesn't sound off tune to me)
The birb is either laying an egg or sitting on an egg or meditating about life's deepest secrets. Definitely do not have smartphone addiction, this one.
It is indeed an odd experience to be part of the 1% of the human population who was not swept up by the #Untamed craze and kept failing to be swept up by it despite numerous times trying to.
I tried reading the novel, watched the donghua and even the #Cdrama and could not last more than a couple of episodes. People tell me to "soldier on" for a few more EPs but I couldn't I just couldn't.
Also tried reading the author's other books & just 😴
@liztai MDZS was my first webnovel and CQL was my first modern cdrama, so it's hard to say how I'd have found them if that hadn't been the case. I definitely think it helped at first that the fandom was so intense (first just me and my girlfriend being intense about it at home, and then I found out people were talking about it a lot online), because there was a lot of analysis and meta about the stories and characters that pulled me in to thinking about it more and more. That's something very specific to the time when it came out that you couldn't really replicate otherwise, imo.
Oh, and I personally was especially happy to find MDZS/CQL because xianxia was new to me, but I'd been into wuxia for a while—I was just struggling to find a way in to any wider community for it. Again, that's something that MDZS/CQL becoming a craze helped me with that's more on the personal side. I'm pretty sure you didn't need that way in!
@liztai I definitely understand the feeling of everyone around you being extremely into something you don't understand, and wanting to know what they see in it!! That's me with kpop 99% of the time. All my friends are posting about kpop bands and I'm just :blobcatfakeverified:
#ZhangGongAn: after putting this book aside for several weeks, I’m back!
Many thanks to past me for writing this thread so I could refresh my memory of what’s going on. Unfortunately, the current mystery is deeply connected to nuances of Daoist texts, the bagua, feng shui, and character riddles, none of which Google Translate has handled well. I’ve been skimming through Lan Peizhi, Wang Mowen and Zhang Ping being impressed with one another’s cleverness & just assuming they’re correct about it.
@geraineon I finally watched the whole video this morning and that was really cute - I subscribed to her channel. :) (Although that's pretty much symbolic with the amount of youtube I watch.)
