soph_sol

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon I do wonder that, it's true! I'm very impressed by it tbh

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon that makes a lot of sense! my first couple years of pandemic reading was a combination of books that had been sitting unread on my bookshelf for a long time (a lot of nonfiction and poetry and fairy tale collections and elderly children's books) and a bunch of modern romance novels. But I read my first ever danmei (svsss) in 2021!

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon I actually managed to cull several hundred books from my bookshelves over that time and it was very satisfying!

if I recall correctly: I started reading CQL fanfic because it was everywhere and it looked fun (and it was fun! and then I watched the show and it was great!).

then I branched out from that into reading SVSSS fanfic because some CQL people were also writing it, and I enjoyed the SV fic enough that I decided to give the book a try because I kind of wanted to give a try to writing SV fic, and I felt I'd better be familiar with the canon before doing that!

CQL gave me juuuuuust enough of a grounding in the right reading protocol to approach the genre with that I did enjoy SV, but I definitely didn't get everything out of it on my first read and I ended it pretty confused; I genuinely couldn't tell that sqq was deeply in love with lbh and that it was a happy ending for them both, lol

anyway I've learned a lot since then and when I reread SV in 2022 I LOVED it!

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon yeah I would absolutely not recommend SVSSS as anyone's first danmei novel to read! it relies so much on the reader's understanding of the genre. it didn't scare me off of danmei but it definitely wasn't the ideal starting place

both CQL/MDZS and SV have so many interesting characters to explore, so there's a lot of scope for fandom, and I love it! I've read so many excellent fics for both fandoms and am always delighted to read more

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@villainousfriend @geraineon that's amazing, I'm so delighted it worked that well for you!

for me it was my first danmei, first webnovel, second xianxia (thank you cql), and only the third written work translated from chinese I'd ever read, which is a bit embarrassing to admit! (the first was Ten Years A Peasant - Memories of Libeishang, by Xia Jianfeng, translated by Sushu and John, and the second was Stories from a Ming Collection, by Feng Menglong, translated by Cyril Birch). I think SV was introducing me to too many different things at once when I read it!

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@villainousfriend @geraineon I did overall enjoy myself when reading it, but I can't recommend the specific edition I read, which cherry-picked only a few specific stories to include from the original collection, and was edited and translated by one of those old-school white dude translators who bowdlerizes the text, so I feel like I might have gotten a skewed sense of what Feng Menglong actually wrote!

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon @villainousfriend unfortunately I don't think I'm a good resource to say for certain how bad it was, since I don't know enough about the original text to recognize what all the translator/editor did! but he mentioned in his afterword without shame that he "omitt[ed] a few phrases, which add nothing but might be found offensive" which does not give me confidence in his general approach to translation overall.

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon @villainousfriend yeah due to my interest in stories from folk traditions around the world I've had to get good at inferring from translators' forewords and afterwords just how dubious I am about the collection I have in hand, and there are sooooooo many red flags in so many translators of this kind of collection! After I read this particular Feng Menglong collection I got rid of it because I just did not trust it.

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon @villainousfriend I do think things have improved a lot since that era, yes! which is very exciting, and I hope things only continue to go up from here

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon huh, interesting! I feel like what I'd want the most is a balance between the two!

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon yes, your ratio also sounds good to me! though I agree it's also at least in part a matter of mood, and also of whether I've read too much of just one sort recently and I'm getting exasperated and bored of the monofocus

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon as long as there are other strong and important relationships that the story pays attention to, like family or friends or best enemies; sometimes plot-focused books are so focused on plot that the characters are more like game-pieces being moved according to what needs to happen, than like people for me to care about. and ultimately I almost always prefer a book that makes me feel things about its characters, no matter what it's doing with its plot

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon I am hard-pressed to finish a book with cardboard characters! though a particularly well done setting can sometimes take that place for me. but I'm much more able to enjoy a plotless book than a characterless book!

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon "A well thought out setting and plot, with characters who are interesting and alive, with relationships that matter outside their romantic relationship" THE DREAM. the perfect book!

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@villainousfriend @geraineon yes!!!!! DITTO. I can and do sometimes also enjoy non-queer romances but they have a much higher bar to clear

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon @villainousfriend yeah. YEAH. I do find that cishet romances are on average a lot more bland; it's just slotting a collection of expected traits into expected character roles, rather than developing actual characters.

though I also find that within the anglosphere romance genre, nonwhite authors more likely to be writing interesting romance than the white authors are, and some of them have written cishet romances worth reading!

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon @villainousfriend Cordelia and Aral are wonderful! and defs not cishet despite being m/f :D

some of my favourite m/f romance novels (I can't recall if any of the leads in these are bi so they're not necessarily all het, sorry!): True Pretenses by Rose Lerner, Open House by Ruby Lang, After the Wedding by Courtney Milan, Rebel by Beverly Jenkins, The Wedding Party by Jasmine Guillory, The Right Swipe by Alisha Rai, That Kind of Guy by Talia Hibbert

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon @villainousfriend yeah I'd agree one that as a factor in why it tends to be more bland on average! and actually I wonder if something similar is part of why poc cishet romance is slightly more likely to be interesting; when writing in the context of a racist culture, which provides messaging that people of colour are less desirable romantic partners than white people, authors of colour are more likely to put that kind of work in to make it believable as well

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon @villainousfriend oh yeah absolutely, multiple factors going on there for sure!

YES it's so weird and horrible the men/women socialization expectations in the US/Canada! unfraught platonic friendship across genders is so non-normative and it's so sad! I think it's also tied to a certain level of expectation that your sexual/romantic partner is supposed to be EVERYTHING to you and fulfill all of your emotional needs, while friends are merely a nice-to-have but ultimately not actually necessary. which is also super weird and awful. One person can't be your everything!

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon @villainousfriend oh gosh, yeah, that must be a real cultural shock for you and the other international students you know!!

I have had similar experiences in my life, just due to being slow to internalize certain social norms. my best friend when I was about 5-7 years old was a boy and I was presenting female at that time in my life, so everyone assumed we were romantically interested in each other as well, including the other kids our age, which is just so weird an assumption to make about such young children! when I was a few years older I tried making friends with boys again but mostly they didn't want to hang out with me, probably because they'd all firmly gotten the memo that it's not the thing you're supposed to do.

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon @villainousfriend YES!

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon @villainousfriend yeah my close friends are pretty much entirely queer and majority neurodivergent, which means that these kinds of toxic gender norms around relationships are much less present. During a time in my life when my main social circle was entirely white cishet people I found it exhausting to hang out with them all the time, nice though they all were individually

soph_sol, 4 months ago

@geraineon @villainousfriend yes, agreed! and I'm very glad too 💖

soph_sol, 4 months ago

my piece is about pining for all the yuri of traditional folklore that has been lost and cannot be accessed today, and also about how great budur/hayat is from one of the stories in the 1001 nights