Discussion Friday

[geraineon]

Discussion Friday is back!

A few questions related to illnesses for discussion!

1. C-media seems to have a lot of sickly protagonists. When it comes to sickly protagonists and hurt/comfort in stories, what makes these work for you and when does it not work for you?

2. Are there any c-novels that you think did a good job in portraying physical or mental illness?

Feel free to talk at length about your comfort reads when you are ill too! Or unusual cnovel diseases (I'm staring at you, wuxia).

Cross-posted to fedi (check out the responses there too): https://sakurajima.social/notes/a3emjhdf5v

Comments

[aurumcalendula]

Now that I think of it, physical illnesses and sickly protagonists have turned up a bunch in novels I've read (not to mention cdramas)! Hurt/comfort tends to work best for me when there's a decent amount of both (I'm not usually into stuff with a ton of hurt and little comfort).

[geraineon]

They do appear a lot, don't they? Some injury, some illness, sometimes they even start the story extremely sick!

Yeah, I like it when there's some comfort to the hurt. I also like it when it's everyone else who is concerned about the MC, who has 0 concern about their dwindling health.

[silverblade219]

This is more for the c drama, but marathoning Nirvana in Fire when I had a bad sinus infection was very cathartic even though Mei Changsu’s health issues were very different lol.

[geraineon]

I think that counts! It's adapted from a novel after all, and is a pretty close adaptation. I love MCS sickly protagonist type!

[ehyde]

My husband (who's still adjusting to various long covid things) related so hard to Mei Changsu that he had to stop watching at one point.

[kolleh]

We've just started reading Mistakenly Saving the Villain for one of my book clubs, and a few of us were happy that the MC had a specific condition in his past life (ALS) rather than just being "sickly." I feel like it would add a bit of depth if that happened more often, even in historical/fantasy settings where the characters don't recognize the illness by that name. I'm not sure how accurately the ALS is being portrayed, but the author's notes did say that they were open to corrections on all the medical aspects in their work since they were just going off of what they'd found on Baidu.

I do generally like stories about people pushing themselves through difficult circumstances, and being sickly fits that, though I tend to like curses even better because they can have more fun effects.

[geraineon]

I do like that the condition is specific in MisVil though I can take a lot of random fantasy illnesses in xianxia/wuxia-verses (so much fun can be had just making random illnesses up!).

Thanks for sharing~