A Fan's Playground

Over on mastodon I'm participating in a group readalong of TGCF, one chapter per week, and a few weeks ago we finished the first volume of the official translation so I might as well crosspost all my thoughts over to here as like, my book review? Yeah okay here we go! Putting it all below a cut to save your reading page


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Whew, I'm done reading TGCF!!! I read the first half in the officially published translation, and the second half in a fan translation since the official one isn't all published yet, but let me tell you I am ABSOLUTELY going to be rereading the whole dang thing once the official tl is all out.

Anyway! What a book! What a lot of book in which a lot of things happened! I've been reading this thing for over a month, fairly consistently, and it took me this long because I gather the english translation is something like 750,000 words long?!? That is Long.

But what this means is that I feel like I do NOT remember everything that happened well enough to feel like I have a good grasp on the Things that the book is trying to do as a whole. How do all the themes tie into each other? What ARE the themes? This is hard to say when I had trouble even keeping track of who was who amongst all the different secondary characters, because a book this size can fit SO many secondary characters in it, and most of them have at least two completely different names if not more.

(Mu Qing and Feng Xin were particularly bad for this because they go by those names, and also by Nan Yang and Xuan Zhen, and ALSO by pseudonyms where they're pretending to be their own underlings. I absolutely 100% could not keep track of them by all these different names and as a result have very little sense of which is which between them, which I can tell is Problems!)

Anyway anyway! This is a chinese danmei webnovel about a guy who becomes a god (and then stops being a god, and then goes through that cycle a few more times...), and about heavenly politics between all the different gods, and also about the ghost who loves him. And I LOVED it.

There were some parts that got a bit tedious (some of the fight scenes went on a bit long, I will not lie, but then I think this about MOST fight scenes, lol) but overall it was remarkably moreish for the entire very long length.

It's a book about how choices make you who you are, I think, and about the importance of having people in your life whom you can love and trust and rely on. And the way these themes are intertwined with the love story between our hero Xie Lian and the ghost king Hua Cheng is just completely delightful. I adore Xie Lian as a main character and a viewpoint character. He's so endlessly fascinating! He's 800 years old by the time of the main events of the novel, and he's been through a lot (understatement), and he's made very definite and deliberate choices about what kind of person he wants to be. But at the same time, he's spent most of those 800 years living a life where he prioritizes the well-being of pretty much everyone except himself, because he sees that as his job - and in his relationship with Hua Cheng, he finally is introduced to the idea that it doesn't have to be selfish for him to allow happiness into his life, and to have someone prioritize him. I love them both very very much.

I feel like there's a whole enormous thread of another theme I cannot comment on though because I do not know enough about either a) Chinese cosmology or b) cultivation novels as a genre. Which is that although it seems to be the goal of all cultivators to cultivate successfully enough to ascend into godhood, in this book godhood does not uhhhhhhhh seem to be that great. Heaven is full of petty squabbles, a lot of the gods kinda suck in an exciting variety of ways, and you still have jobs to do and paperwork to complete and roles to live up to and asshole coworkers to try to get along with, and so on and so forth. Basically: it doesn't seem to be any better than ordinary human life, except that you get fancy palaces and exclusive access to Brain Twitter (dubious prize). There definitely seems to be questioning of like, why is this the goal? Is this worthwhile? Should we be aiming for something else instead? But again! I do not have enough context for this entire thread of questions to be sure of WHAT it's saying with all this!

Other characters in this book I had strenuous feelings about:

- Ling Wen! I find her FASCINATING. A civil god who is really really really good at administrative work, such that when she rebels, the entirety of heaven is kind of lost without her! It was sooooo funny that when she and Xie Lian are fighting at one point, Xie Lian automatically goes to update Ling Wen about the situation because as the administrative manager of heaven she needs to know, and then is like. Uh. Right. She knows because she's HERE. FIGHTING ME. But we get remarkably little of her internal life and I want to know more about what's going on with her!

- He Xuan and Shi Qingxuan. Obviously! Beefleaf!!!!! God their story is so deliciously painful. One of those things where there is no way for there to be a happy ending but you can't help hoping anyway.

- Guzi - the poor kid! I spent so much of the book being like, auuuughhhhhhh this is so horrible that he's so attached to his dad but that asshole qi rong is possessing his dad and so he's running around after QI RONG endlessly, and then you get just this tiny info drop near the end that actually his dad was the worst and he's so attached to qi rong as his father because qi rong is actually the best dad he's ever had? (low, low bar) Anyway I still hate qi rong but. I want guzi to be able to have a better experience of family :(

The last volume of scum villain!!!! Can't believe it's actually over. The first three volumes contained the entirety of the main story, so this one is a collection of all the extras. I hadn't read all the extras before, only the ones that were posted as additional chapters to the story, so I got to read new-to-me content, not just a new translation!

I had a variety of reactions to the various stories in this collection. There were plenty of great details and fun character stuff, and I was delighted to get to reread the Airplane extras! I love the Airplane extras. But not all the stories were of particular interest to me, as is kind of inevitable in short story collections. And also.....one of the stories, the succubus extra, contained an unpleasant slur for trans people, and that kind of threw me off.

My understanding is that in the original text, a slur is also used, so the translation is accurate in that respect. But I do think that there are other ways the translation could have handled this, to make it clear what the narrative is doing without just confronting the reader with a word like that unexpectedly.

Anyway my other main response to that is to be even more interested in sqq being weird about his own gender and also lbh's, lol. (will never be over acernor's wife life!!!)

Overall I do still definitely recommend this book, but just, like, be prepared. (also: be prepared for bingqiu sex to um...not be a shining example of healthy communication about their needs and desires. it's very them! and also dear lord.)

The second volume of the official version of scum villain is finally out!! obviously I read the whole thing the very day I got my hands on it.

This volume starts at the point where Luo Binghe returns from the endless abyss, though, and wowwww had I ever forgotten the degree to which Shen Qingqiu acts against his own interests in this part of the story. He's SO convinced he understands lbh due to having read the original PIDW that he makes no efforts to actually communicate, and his silences and dismissive statements are guaranteed to make sure lbh can't see the truth of what's in sqq's heart!

I spent a lot of time slamming this volume shut because I couldn't bear to read about sqq's latest bad choices, lol. My heart panged to see how much lbh was clearly hurt by sqq's treatment of him! And sqq couldn't even see how much he was hurting lbh, despite how much sqq cares about him!!

I mean, don't get me wrong, lbh makes some bad choices too (....the implications of necrophilia are definitely stronger than I remembered, among other things!!), but sqq is the worst (affectionate).

This book was a lot easier to read back when I didn't actually care about sqq or lbh :P

Anyway, a lot of the actual events of this part of the story had kind of flowed by me without registering when I first read the fan translation, so I found myself generally surprised by a number of plot developments, oops. Also I was much worse at keeping track of secondary characters, and now I'm charmed by a lot of them. (yang yixuan, for example!)

Many things in this volume to delight and infuriate and now we all have to wait for MONTHS before the next volume is released and I am already dying!

I have been ignoring the existence of the Chinese web novel The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System for QUITE a while now. I kept hearing about it but it just didn't seem to work for me when I tried the fic, and when I attempted to read the novel I bounced off the first chapter fairly hard. But it turns out I just needed the right introduction!!

You know how it goes, you accidentally get really into the fic for a minor pairing (thanks B!), read all the extant decent fic for the ship, read the relevant canon extras, start daydreaming about writing fic, and decide you had better actually read the full canon if you're going to even make the attempt at writing anything.

So here we are! It took me a bit to get into the novel, since the main characters are in fact not Shang Qinghua and Mobei-Jun, but I found it a surprisingly fun read.

The premise: Shen Yuan is the hate-reader of a bad Chinese web novel, who finds himself transmigrated into the world of that novel! Unfortunately, he's transmigrated into the character of a villain in the novel, and there's a System controlling his actions, assigning him missions and keeping him from being able to act too OOC.

Shen Yuan's goal in the character of Shen Qingqiu, the scum villain: change the story enough so that he can make sure the protagonist Luo Binghe doesn't murder him!

The System's goal: get Shen Qingqiu to fix all the plot holes and missing characterization from the original novel to make a better story.

Luo Binghe's goal: to get his shizun (Shen Qingqiu) to pay attention to him!!

There are a lot of extremely charming things in reading this. The novel as a whole is a fun and funny parody, written lovingly by the author, with lots of great details and jokes.

And the main character Shen Qingqiu is an endearing nerd who, in his previous life as Shen Yuan, read this extremely bad extremely long and extremely porny webnovel for the worldbuilding, and once he's in the world of the novel, he's a veritable encyclopedia of all the interesting monsters the world has to offer. And at one point when he's off on an errand to pick a rare and special magical plant that only grows in one place, he actually worries about the implications on the ecosystem if he picks the plant! I love him.

Also, he spends a lot of time internally raging against a) the System and b) the author who wrote the piece of crap narrative he's currently trying to live through, but he hides everything behind a great deal of fussiness over his appearance and a stern facial expression and an unwillingness to say anything of substance, so everyone thinks he's so cool and elegant and impressive. Maintaining this outward appearance is helped by his inability to admit even to himself that he might have Feelings about anything that's going on, of course. And the contrast between these sides of him is a delight.

It is frustrating that his inability to admit his feelings to himself continues right to the very end of his romance arc, which makes for a very unromantic conclusion to it. It's hard to feel invested in a relationship as a reader when one of the romantic leads spends all of his time thinking about his partner in very distancing terms!

And speaking of his romantic partner......( is the identity of the romantic interest a spoiler? I mean it is to sqq! )

Apparently this is author MXTX's first novel, and in some respects it reminds me of some of Jane Austen's earlier works, where the focus is more on Being A Funny Parody than on making sure the emotional heart of the story gets appropriate attention and a full conclusion. (I'd put it somewhere between Love and Freindship [sic] and Northanger Abbey in that respect.) But there's still enough heart in there to make it something I can enjoy reading.

( cut for spoilers for a background plot point )

Now let's talk about my ship! Shang Qinghua and Mobei-Jun, who I mentioned above, are a popular secondary character ship, and I love them very very much. Shang Qinghua is also a person transmigrated from our world into the world of the novel, but instead of being a reader, he's the author, who feels very defensive about the quality of the narrative he wrote. (He just wrote what the readers wanted! He had bills to pay! Writing lots of terrible sex and no character development is what got him paying readers!) And Mobei-Jun is the minor character he wrote for his own pleasure, to fulfill his ideals of attractive masculinity, even while everything else he wrote was according to his readers' whims. Mobei-Jun also happens to be an ice demon lord. In this ship you get: cross-cultural communication problems! Competency mixed with obliviousness! Hijinks! Questions of identity and power! Loyalty!

Okay yes this is a list of things that are also all present to varying degrees in the Luo Binghe/Shen Qingqiu ship, but it's a lot more charming in the context of Shang Qinghua/Mobei-Jun, at least in this reader's humble opinion. Possibly due to the lack of Luo Binghe. Also you get fun ice-themed aesthetics and a character who actually talks about things (badly)! It's great. I want to reread all the moshang fic again now.

Though I also now want to read fic about Yue Qingyuan? Yeah fine I guess that checks out.

In conclusion, do I recommend this novel? Yeah! Can I recommend my way as a good way to approach it if you're someone who has never read cnovels before? Ehhhhh, it was more than a little roundabout.......But I have fic recs if you're interested!