Read-in-Progress Wednesday

[geraineon]

This is your weekly read-in-progress post for you to talk about what you're currently reading and reactions and feelings (if any)!

For spoilers:

<details><summary>insert summary</summary>Your spoilers goes here</details>

<b>For comments: Highlight for spoilers!</b> *<span style="background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #FFFFFF">Your spoilers goes here.</span>*

Comments

[geraineon]

I continue to be unable to read anything, like a switch has been turned off!

But a friend brought up Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity, so I reread that. It's not a novel, but a journal article. Still somewhat relevant to the comm I guess! Haha

Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/303809

(Note, I can send you the article if you want it. Just PM me your email address)

[duckprintspress]

that absolutely counts imo...it's reading! all reading is good reading!

[lessonsinescapology]

I think there's a missing tag or something.

[geraineon]

Oops! I should probably try not to copy and paste on the phone... Thanks for letting me know! I think it's fixed now.

[anne]

Not a cnovel, but relevant to the comm--Zen Cho's new one dropped yesterday! It's a strictly real-world no-magic romance, with maybe some thriller angles? I'm not sure, but there's definitely a corrupt tycoon that the hero has beef with. I haven't really been in the romance mood lately, but it's Zen Cho! I'd read her grocery list.

[geraineon]

Oh, awesome! I'll check it out. I liked Zen Cho's other works, and she's an author I trust~

[duckprintspress]

I finally have started How to Survive as a Villain by Yi Yi Yi Yi. I really am enjoying it so far, and am quite pleased with the Rosmei translation (in terms of readability - I can't speak to accuracy).

I also received my print copy of the first volume of the Xiao Mogu manhua, and I read that IN CHINESE. I didn't read super carefully/didn't use a dictionary, so when I encountered words I didn't know I just, eh, kept going, and I skipped some pages that my brain was like nopenopenope too hard, but still, I read most of it, and it's the first time I've read that much of a volume in Chinese, I'm pretty pleased. I was surprised by how much I could understand without a dictionary. It certainly helped that I've read the book. My favorite thing? The reading app I've used has only introduced a handful of Chinese "spellings" for Western names... but one of the ones they've introduced was one I needed for this! 安东尼! When I saved that flashcard I was like, "okay but when will I ever need to know this?" and here we are, lmao.

I think it's time for me to start poking at some of my other Chinese manhua volumes more seriously. I have TGCF 1 through 4, two volumes of Global Examination, and the first volume of Copper Coins. All of these (unlike Xiao Mogu) I've previously read the manhua in English.

And I also read Chapter 6 of LOCH, and am still enjoying it a lot.

[geraineon]

That's very exciting and I'm happy for you! The initial "nope" is hard and it's great that you kept pushing through it~

I really like How To Survive As A Villain and I'm glad that you're enjoying it too~

[duckprintspress]

Ah, I just realized I didn't write here, tho did other places where I reported in about my reading, that I was about 2/3rds through vol. 1 of How to Survive as a Villain and while everything had been pretty chill up that point, it definitely felt like we were building rapidly toward The Knives.

I was not wrong, lmao.

I finished vol. 1 last night and there were genuine tears involved. I'm gonna be switching to a fantranslation now for the rest.

[geraineon]

yes, expect more Knives (besides child death, are there other things you need to be warned about? i'll try to dig through my memory of the novel)

[duckprintspress]

in general, I like to know about MCD ahead of time - if it's a character I'm likely to get attached to, I'd rather know they're gonna die (examples in this would be, like, Yang Liu'an, Xiao Fengyue, the Princess and her wife...).

For triggers, my only major and common trigger is harm to children/death of a child, especially when it's solely to serve the plot or to set ~atmosphere~ (like, Zhou Zishu in Qi Ye, the kid who gets eaten by his mom in 2ha, all the kids who randomly starve in the background of Thousand Autumns, the dead baby in the first TGCF flashback, those are all examples of instances I found triggering).

in other news I dug into the fantranslation last night and read another 10% of the book or so. these idiots really need to use words.
My other serious trigger is extremely unlikely to come up in this context, and is hard to explain without sounding absurd, so I'm not gonna worry about lmao.

[geraineon]

Okay, here are some MCD that I remember:

CW for How to Survive as a Villain

Suicide: Xie Chungui, Xiao Yu'an (it's okay, this book is HE)

I don't remember harm to children, but I don't tend to notice this... so this is def not me saying there's no harm to children.

[duckprintspress]

Oh dang, really?

cw related chatter

Xie Chungui? That's sad. Not that I really saw a way for that to end well, but oof. Also, I mean, Xiao Yu'an has already committed suicide once, what's one or two more times lmao...

Thank you for that info! This hasn't really felt like a "harm to children" book so I thought I was probably safe? But, then, I thought that about Qiye, so danmei has definitely made me leery about trusting that it won't get sprung on me. Fortunately, I had a pretty severe phobia as a kid (of the dark) which forced me to develop a lot of coping mechanisms, so even when I'm triggered I'm usually pretty able to compartmentalize and deal. :D

[geraineon]

Hm actually,

More cw related chatter

I am not 100% sure about Xie Chungui (memory is very bad when I rush through books) because shit hit the fan ahaha. but that whole part is ow, so prepare tissues I guess?

I wonder if there's a trigger warning/content warning database for cnovels... I see some carrds listing them for specific titles but they are all so scattered and it'll be probably be useful for lots of people.

[duckprintspress]

nodnod I already shed a couple tears during the war and related, uh. incidents. (I don't feel like spoiler tagging and I think that's vague enough to...not...) I definitely expect to shed more.

And no, afaik there isn't a specific one, but there's a few ways around it.

1. Carrds often have trigger warnings. Like, I just tossed "how to survive as a villain carrd" into ddg and it popped up this - https://hsav.carrd.co/#summary - and yep there are TWs there.

2. Storygraph includes trigger warning tagging capabilities, but it's user-dependent/user-submitted, so the less-read-by-people-who-use-storygraph a book is, the less likely it is to be tagged/thoroughly tagged. But if you scroll down to the bottom - https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/8e851fd6-f8bf-4076-8ac9-097a5bd53fa8 - you'll see there are similar tags down there.

Storygraph is probably the closest to a "one stop shop" database for such things, as most stories that are read in the West/fantranslated are likely to have at least a partial tag list on there, but afaik there's no master list for such things. :D

[duckprintspress]

(tho if you wanted to crowdsource such a list ourselves... it's not something I have time to take the lead on but I'd be happy to contribute for things I've read. I know something I'd love is more like what we've been discussing here - like, different tiers of spoilers, one level that's just "here are overarching tws" and another that's like "here's who specifically dies or is tortured or whatever" and also, like. unhappy ending kind of spoilers (I've only read one danmei that had an unhappy/ambiguous ending, and I actually didn't mind it, but it would have been nice to know that going in...)

[geraineon]

Mm, I'll have to have a think on this. It's probably a good resource to have, consolidated all in one place... I'm not very fond of storygraph's UI right now.

[larryhammer]

Dao De Jing through chapter 12. (I'm posting draft translations here.) Classical Chinese remains stupid hard. I keep finding dumb grammar errors in past chapters. And there's times when Loazi is, no not being cryptic, just outright pompous. Ugh.

I wanna go back to Tang poetry.

[duckprintspress]

that sounds so so so hard

[larryhammer]

ngl getting a better handle on Classical Chinese is helping level my Medieval/Literary Chinese, which I really need to glow up -- so much prose to finish translating for this manuscript. But whyyyyyy is my brain insisting on using THIS as my obstacle course???

[duckprintspress]

brains really be like that sometimes. still, it's incredible you're doing all this historical language stuff. where I'm at with studying Chinese, it's all I can do to read new modern things. So help me if anything is even in a different font, I'm lost.

[larryhammer]

I am ass at anything handwritten, both reading and writing. (My sixth grader mocks my written Chinese, and they write like a sixth-grader.) (They also mock my accent. Which, fair.)

[duckprintspress]

lmaoooo... True story, I have a friend who lives in Beijing with her family (husband and two kids) 10 months of the year. The kids have lived much of their lives there, so their Chinese is excellent. They're, like. 9 years old and 6 years old. And the SHADE the directed at my stuttery attempts at pronouncing any of what I've learned...

(also fair, to be clear. my accent is a atrocious.)

[geraineon]

+1 that sounds hard! Thank you for sharing your translations. I enjoyed reading your notes/thoughts for each chapter.

[larryhammer]

I'm trying to keep my comments minimal because DDJ has too much commentary to synthesize. Ugh.

橋頭樓上 14-15 + manhua things

[halfcactus]

I had a lot of thoughts going in but by the time I got to the end of chapter 15 I was wrecked. A lot of the details are still ambiguous (I guess that's what the next 15+ chapters are for??), but somehow it still messed me up!!! I don't know how to move on from this and I'm afraid to!!!!

Key takeaways

Tang Guo being a tsundere friend ;_____;

Qian Li what a good girl ;____;

That group chat thing, and the way it probably ties in with the present-day readers and maybe the "water ghost"??? Idk what's going on it's so creepy. ;A;

"Every [time unit] I'm looking at her" was also really creepy.

-

Manhua things:

你的工作&你的休假 (Your Work and Your Day Off) by 日輪 (nichirinko/rilun) (BL): I've been following the Twitter art, but I just found that it's being serialized on Creative Comics whose setup is quite different! The concept is that Work and Day Off/Holiday are anthropomorphized, and the main character ends up in a love triangle situation where he routinely gets railed by Work. The Twitter comics go full NC-17 all the time, but the Creative Comics version still seems to be building up to Work attaining his final form. ^^; Anyway so far there are only 3 chapters in Creative Comic so I got to challenge myself into reading them without looking up words in the dictionary without feeling overwhelmed. XD It's been a while since I read in traditional too, so that was fun.

她們的故事 (Their Story) by Tan Jiu (GL): Just found out that people (manga readers) have recently cancelled this (long-discontinued, I think!) manhua because of a chapter where Sun Jing is being Problematique, which makes me feel distraught lol. I have such fondness for it though so I hope that new readers still give it a chance and form their own opinions on it.

Re: 橋頭樓上 14-15 + manhua things

[geraineon]

The concept is that Work and Day Off/Holiday are anthropomorphized, and the main character ends up in a love triangle situation where he routinely gets railed by Work.

This is such an interesting concept! ... I wonder what the final form of Work is.

And *sigh* why are people so quick to make trouble for anything that's not squeaky clean soft sweet nowadays. Hope the author is okay (people in which language spaces causing trouble?)

Re: 橋頭樓上 14-15 + manhua things

[halfcactus]

Lol normally he looks like this, but right now he's still like like this.

This was Twitter discourse on the Anglo side (general manga/yuri readers who don't usually consume Chinese media)—and though the artist is also on Twitter, the discourse thread at least had the decency not to tag them.

Re: 橋頭樓上 14-15 + manhua things

[geraineon]

lol the poses and relative size!

i'm gonna regret asking but ... what exactly is the discourse even on?

Re: 橋頭樓上 14-15 + manhua things

[dayadhvam_triad]

the water ghost!!!! /CRIES

full of anticipation for what's coming up :')

Re: 橋頭樓上 14-15 + manhua things

[halfcactus]

“替活人” 😭😭😭

Lol I’m still gathering all my bearings from all the revelations in the next chapter. Suddenly so much is happening!

[alterkrmn]

I am really happy because I think I finally got to the pint in Global Examination wheere I need to keep reading. I'm on chapter 31 and trying very hard not to read at night because I'm a bit of a chicken but I end up reading a bit at night too.

During the first arc I didn't think it was that scary but this time the atmosphere is creepier this time. I am curious about how scary this story will get and I'm so looking forward to it 👀​ 😁​

[duckprintspress]

the second arc is soooooooo good, I'm glad it's grabbed you.

[alterkrmn]

I really like the feeling of not knowing where it's gonna end. It's thrilling and I am genuinely curious about the next exam subjects. *Spoilers for second arc*In this arc, the fact that foreing language wasn't English caught me by surprise. But it makes sense and also makes it extra scary

[geraineon]

Hahaha, happy zooming through the whole story! Hm, I think there's one more arc that might be scary, since this arc is scary to you, but the others should be less scary, I think.

[duckprintspress]

hmm...idk, I think three of the arcs total are somewhat scary (second, third, and fourth? the first act is eerie and kinda horror movie-y without being all that scary imo)? tho ymmv depending on what you find frightening.

[geraineon]

Mm, I think my tolerance for scary is also pretty high. The second arc, which is where alterkrmn is at (i think) has similar style of scariness with another arc, which is why i think two. but yeah, maybe others might be scary too.

[alterkrmn]

Ohhhh. Nice, nice. I admit scary stories are to me like spicy food: I don't have a high tolerance to it but I enjoy it and sometimes I seek it on purpose because brain gets tired of the same things and needs exciting new stuff. It doesn't matter if my tongue ends up numb after or if I can't go downstairs for water without turning all the lights on for a couple of days lol.

Although I didn't think it was very scary in the end, but the sole mention of dolls of any kind freaks me out, haha. I have story with creepy dolls. *Spoilers for second arc*The crawling limbs also freaked me out a little, not as much as the dolls, tho. And now that Yu Yao/Shu Xue explained what happened to her I am also 👀​ .

[geraineon]

Haha, the spicy food analogy really fits! I guess for spicy food and horror, there are thrill seekers too.

I will wait for you to get to the arc I think will be scary for you XD