(no subject)
May. 11th, 2020 11:41 pmI've seen like three posts in the past week about the m/m romance cnovel Guide on How to Fail at Online Dating, so apparently I'm right in the zeitgeist, but for the record the first one I saw and the one that started me reading it was this one from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
littlerhymes!
The premise: Our Hero Jin Huan's cousin got her heart broken by a dirtbag online boyfriend in her favorite MMORPG, so Jin Huan decides! he must get revenge! by sinking all his free time into posing as a cute gamer girl in the MMORPG so that he can catfish the dirtbag and then break his heart in return!!! clearly there are absolutely no potential downsides for Jin Huan to this plan!!!!
Unfortunately for Jin Huan:
a.) he thinks he is far, far better than he is at pretending to be a cute gamer girl
b.) due to a misunderstanding, his target, Xian Huazhi, is not in fact the person who broke his cousin's heart
c.) but he is, it turns out, a perfectly nice upperclassman who goes to Jin Huan's college and lives up the hall from his best friends' dorm!
Obviously this premise as comedy has potential to verge on transphobic and, like, it's not great (in that there's no acknowledgment that trans identities are a thing that exists in any way) but it also could definitely be worse, given givens. Xian Huazhi actually finds out that his new buddy Jin Huan is the same person who's spent weeks following him around in game and professing her love for him relatively early on; his initial reaction: "boy, this kid must really be going through it if he's projecting all his queer feelings onto aggressively pursuing a safely unattainable cool gamer figure in this online space! I'd better make sure to be extra supportive and try to give him a safe environment to work through whatever he needs to!"
This is extremely sweet and Xian Huazhi is deeply endearing, but nonetheless the middle section of the book in which Xian Huazhi is earnestly trying-to-protect-and-support-while-falling-for Jin Huan was my least favorite. Normally I love identity porn but to be honest a fair amount of this made me squirm, partly just because contact embarrassment but partly also I think perhaps because of how the power-and-gender dynamics line up when Huazhi is the only one of the two of them who knows their real identities, AND also taller and older and physically and socially protective, AND also playing a powerful high-stats male character in-game to Jin Huan's low-ranked healer girl? ( spoilers )
HOWEVER, once all the misunderstandings are cleared up and everybody knows what's what, the power dynamics even out a fair bit almost immediately! The last third or so of the novel is just an extremely cute story about two good dudes who love basketball and video games and also each other figuring out the romance thing, with some flailing but vast amounts of mutual enthusiasm, and I enjoyed it so much I more or less forgot all the contact embarrassment of the previous section. ( spoilers again )
(I also enjoyed Jin Huan and Xian Huazhi's college pals, who are all completely believable assholes in the way that college boys are assholes, but also, like, very supportive assholes when it counted!)
littlerhymes! The premise: Our Hero Jin Huan's cousin got her heart broken by a dirtbag online boyfriend in her favorite MMORPG, so Jin Huan decides! he must get revenge! by sinking all his free time into posing as a cute gamer girl in the MMORPG so that he can catfish the dirtbag and then break his heart in return!!! clearly there are absolutely no potential downsides for Jin Huan to this plan!!!!
Unfortunately for Jin Huan:
a.) he thinks he is far, far better than he is at pretending to be a cute gamer girl
b.) due to a misunderstanding, his target, Xian Huazhi, is not in fact the person who broke his cousin's heart
c.) but he is, it turns out, a perfectly nice upperclassman who goes to Jin Huan's college and lives up the hall from his best friends' dorm!
Obviously this premise as comedy has potential to verge on transphobic and, like, it's not great (in that there's no acknowledgment that trans identities are a thing that exists in any way) but it also could definitely be worse, given givens. Xian Huazhi actually finds out that his new buddy Jin Huan is the same person who's spent weeks following him around in game and professing her love for him relatively early on; his initial reaction: "boy, this kid must really be going through it if he's projecting all his queer feelings onto aggressively pursuing a safely unattainable cool gamer figure in this online space! I'd better make sure to be extra supportive and try to give him a safe environment to work through whatever he needs to!"
This is extremely sweet and Xian Huazhi is deeply endearing, but nonetheless the middle section of the book in which Xian Huazhi is earnestly trying-to-protect-and-support-while-falling-for Jin Huan was my least favorite. Normally I love identity porn but to be honest a fair amount of this made me squirm, partly just because contact embarrassment but partly also I think perhaps because of how the power-and-gender dynamics line up when Huazhi is the only one of the two of them who knows their real identities, AND also taller and older and physically and socially protective, AND also playing a powerful high-stats male character in-game to Jin Huan's low-ranked healer girl? ( spoilers )
HOWEVER, once all the misunderstandings are cleared up and everybody knows what's what, the power dynamics even out a fair bit almost immediately! The last third or so of the novel is just an extremely cute story about two good dudes who love basketball and video games and also each other figuring out the romance thing, with some flailing but vast amounts of mutual enthusiasm, and I enjoyed it so much I more or less forgot all the contact embarrassment of the previous section. ( spoilers again )
(I also enjoyed Jin Huan and Xian Huazhi's college pals, who are all completely believable assholes in the way that college boys are assholes, but also, like, very supportive assholes when it counted!)
