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Oct. 23rd, 2019 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe Scum Villain's Self-Saving System is (I think) the first gay wuxia web novel by the author of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation; it is definitely not as good as the latter but it is for sure much wackier ....
So the premise is that our hero, Shen Yuan, is just a long-suffering reader of bad web novels who, upon his tragic and accidental death, immediately gets transmigrated into the role of Shen Qingqiu, the villain of the bad harem web novel he was hate-reading on the day that he died.
My understanding is that 'portal fantasy transmigration specifically into the story of a web novel' is a not uncommon trend in contemporary Chinese fantasy. I don't know how many of them are, specifically, frustratingly mediocre-to-bad novels -- this could also be a very common trend and I'm just not aware of it -- but either way it's kind of amazing. Shen Qingqiu as an evil character in the original book projects a serenely competent image; Shen Yuan does his best to keep this up on the outside while fuming internally about the constant assault of nonsense plot points, and his wildly frustrated sarcastic running commentary is extremely funny.
There's also a deus ex machina system in Shen Yuan's head that prevents him from going dramatically OOC and hands out points for a.) staying in character and b.) fixing plot holes or filling out significant backstory in the original novel. There's absolutely no explanation for any of this, much to Shen Yuan's frustration, but it's all very meta!
Anyway! Shen Yuan's main concern is to alter the plot enough to prevent himself from being murdered in the future by Luo Binghe, the novel's original protagonist: at the point Shen Yuan has entered the novel, Luo Binghe is a cluelessly powerful half-demon sweetheart who's one of Shen Qingqiu's students, but Shen Yuan knows that after several years of Shen Qingqiu's bullying and sabotage, Luo Binghe will fall into the underworld and come out a cold revenge-driven antihero!
Although the deus ex machina system in Shen Yuan's head forces him to subsequently hand out several of Shen Qingqiu's plot-relevant betrayals, Shen Yuan's genre-savviness means that he's perfectly aware that Luo Binghe's plot armor is going to protect him from everything he throws at him, which results in a lot of early scenes like this:
PERIL: [threatens]
SHEN YUAN: oh Luo Binghe can take care of that
OTHER CHARACTERS: how can you let that hapless youth fight that peril, he'll die
SHEN YUAN: oh no, trust me, he'll be absolutely fine
LUO BINGHE: omg teacher no one's ever believed in me like you *__*
SHEN YUAN: what?
LUO BINGHE: nothing! oh hey teacher look I killed the peril!
It takes about half the book for Shen Yuan to realize the inevitable-to-the-reader fact that the various small ways he's been changing the plot have resulted in Luo Binghe completely ignoring all the other love interests scattered around the novel in favor of becoming absolutely fixated on Shen Qingqiu -- and once Shen Yuan does figure it out, he's more chagrined than anything else. He ruined a perfectly good harem novel protagonist, is what he did! Look at him, he's got gay obsession!
And, I mean, one of the stranger things about the structure of the book is that the romance never really ... like, Shen Qingqiu doesn't so much 'fall in love' with Luo Binghe as accept, with a mildly inconvenienced sigh, that if the genre of the novel has well and truly changed to 'gay romance' then he might as well get with the program. Oh, we've come to the bit of the plot when it's time to save the protagonist with the power of love? Ah, well, he always more or less knew this day would come, if we must have the magical healing sex then I suppose we must. It's wildly unromantic but it did make me laugh, so points for you, I guess, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu ...
Like The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, it looks like this book is going to be made into a Chinese tv series. I am if possible even more curious about this than I was the other, because there's enough plot in The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation that it's really not that difficult to sieve a workable non-gay storyline out of it (not that the live-action show that we've been watching has tried very hard -- more on this anon) but the entire point of The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System is "protagonist accidentally turns harem novel into gay romance" so how do you censor that?!
So the premise is that our hero, Shen Yuan, is just a long-suffering reader of bad web novels who, upon his tragic and accidental death, immediately gets transmigrated into the role of Shen Qingqiu, the villain of the bad harem web novel he was hate-reading on the day that he died.
My understanding is that 'portal fantasy transmigration specifically into the story of a web novel' is a not uncommon trend in contemporary Chinese fantasy. I don't know how many of them are, specifically, frustratingly mediocre-to-bad novels -- this could also be a very common trend and I'm just not aware of it -- but either way it's kind of amazing. Shen Qingqiu as an evil character in the original book projects a serenely competent image; Shen Yuan does his best to keep this up on the outside while fuming internally about the constant assault of nonsense plot points, and his wildly frustrated sarcastic running commentary is extremely funny.
There's also a deus ex machina system in Shen Yuan's head that prevents him from going dramatically OOC and hands out points for a.) staying in character and b.) fixing plot holes or filling out significant backstory in the original novel. There's absolutely no explanation for any of this, much to Shen Yuan's frustration, but it's all very meta!
Anyway! Shen Yuan's main concern is to alter the plot enough to prevent himself from being murdered in the future by Luo Binghe, the novel's original protagonist: at the point Shen Yuan has entered the novel, Luo Binghe is a cluelessly powerful half-demon sweetheart who's one of Shen Qingqiu's students, but Shen Yuan knows that after several years of Shen Qingqiu's bullying and sabotage, Luo Binghe will fall into the underworld and come out a cold revenge-driven antihero!
Although the deus ex machina system in Shen Yuan's head forces him to subsequently hand out several of Shen Qingqiu's plot-relevant betrayals, Shen Yuan's genre-savviness means that he's perfectly aware that Luo Binghe's plot armor is going to protect him from everything he throws at him, which results in a lot of early scenes like this:
PERIL: [threatens]
SHEN YUAN: oh Luo Binghe can take care of that
OTHER CHARACTERS: how can you let that hapless youth fight that peril, he'll die
SHEN YUAN: oh no, trust me, he'll be absolutely fine
LUO BINGHE: omg teacher no one's ever believed in me like you *__*
SHEN YUAN: what?
LUO BINGHE: nothing! oh hey teacher look I killed the peril!
It takes about half the book for Shen Yuan to realize the inevitable-to-the-reader fact that the various small ways he's been changing the plot have resulted in Luo Binghe completely ignoring all the other love interests scattered around the novel in favor of becoming absolutely fixated on Shen Qingqiu -- and once Shen Yuan does figure it out, he's more chagrined than anything else. He ruined a perfectly good harem novel protagonist, is what he did! Look at him, he's got gay obsession!
And, I mean, one of the stranger things about the structure of the book is that the romance never really ... like, Shen Qingqiu doesn't so much 'fall in love' with Luo Binghe as accept, with a mildly inconvenienced sigh, that if the genre of the novel has well and truly changed to 'gay romance' then he might as well get with the program. Oh, we've come to the bit of the plot when it's time to save the protagonist with the power of love? Ah, well, he always more or less knew this day would come, if we must have the magical healing sex then I suppose we must. It's wildly unromantic but it did make me laugh, so points for you, I guess, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu ...
Like The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, it looks like this book is going to be made into a Chinese tv series. I am if possible even more curious about this than I was the other, because there's enough plot in The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation that it's really not that difficult to sieve a workable non-gay storyline out of it (not that the live-action show that we've been watching has tried very hard -- more on this anon) but the entire point of The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System is "protagonist accidentally turns harem novel into gay romance" so how do you censor that?!
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Date: 2019-10-24 01:47 am (UTC)I don't know that this is at all the sort of thing I want to read, but I am tremendously entertained that it exists.
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Date: 2019-10-24 04:16 am (UTC)The book you're describing sounds a lot more like the former than the latter, since the villain-protag is aware of the general plot points of his story and is trying to figure out the least bad option if possible!
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Date: 2019-10-24 11:21 am (UTC)One thing I felt like there was a surprising lack of in Scum Villain is any opportunities for Shen Yuan to use his skills or personality from his previous life to change the plot of the game; the only thing that's ever really relevant or useful is his genre-savviness about web novels in general and this novel in particular.
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Date: 2019-10-24 03:17 pm (UTC)(Fair warning, if this inspires anybody to look it up: It's by L. Ron Hubbard. Early career Hubbard, and as far as I recall it's a fun and well-paced read with none of Hubbard's later idiosyncrasies, but it's been a few years since I read it and I may have forgotten something.)
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Date: 2019-10-26 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-07-18 07:48 pm (UTC)L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's Harold Shea stories (1940–54), which I read decades ago in the omnibus The Compleat Enchanter (1975), find their protagonists crashing magically and somewhat accidentally through assorted epics, by which I mean the Norse sagas, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Lönnrot's Kalevala, and the Táin Bó Cúailnge, trying at all times to survive through genre savvy, common sense, and dumb luck. As far as I can recall, their presence in these canons functions more like self-insert than transmigration, but it may have been my first exposure to the idea of a person falling into their favorite fiction with all the attendant meta complications, as opposed to the idea of characters fighting their creators, which I probably got from the musical City of Angels (1989). Extra-relevantly to this conversation, L. Ron Hubbard actually bumped off the character of Harold Shea as an intertextual joke in one of his own short stories, for which de Camp and Pratt were justifiably pissed with him.
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Date: 2019-10-26 04:09 am (UTC)The one that comes quickest to mind for the latter category is “My Disciple Died Yet Again.” It has a semi-sequel, “My Master Disconnected Yet Again” that’s supposedly just as funny, but I haven’t tried it yet.
For reincarnation into a video game, I’ll have to check my computer.
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Date: 2019-10-26 06:46 pm (UTC)The Empress’s Livestream.
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Date: 2019-10-26 11:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-24 09:26 pm (UTC)I have found I have trouble continuing or finishing a lot of transmigration stories. Sometimes the strongest relationship seems to be between the POV character and the System. I stopped reading "The Reader and Protagonist Definitely Have to Be in True Love" because I got tired of the repetitive metacommentary. Other times with the transmigration to multiple worlds type, the first two or three transmigrations may be interesting, but then it just seems to collapse down into a series of short stories with the same plot, slightly different settings.
"Quickly Wear the Face of the Devil" turns this trope a bit upside down, by having the transmigrator "hack" the system and run around intentionally messing up the plots. LOL
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Date: 2019-10-26 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-28 12:22 am (UTC)I kind of stumbled into Transmigration fics because I was reading Xianxia translations and a lot of them take place in "cultivation" worlds. (This is not a transmigration novel, but is one of my favorites: https://www.novelupdates.com/series/heavy-sweetness-ash-like-frost/?pg=7 – it is a short, fast read and is the book that the series, "Ashes of Love" is based on.)
So far, the Transmigration fic I have liked best is, "A Wave of Exes Came for Me." It reverses the multi-world transmigration story by bringing each of the POV character's ex-lovers from their world to earth. Many of the past stories are skimmed over, but I really liked the last world – a zombie apocalypse story which was told in more detail. The ending of "Exes" also goes into the mechanics of the transmigration universe.
Chapters 1-6: https://matchashortcake.wordpress.com/2017/12/03/wave-of-exes-what-to-do-chapter-1/
The rest is here: https://whiteskytranslations.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/the-journey-begins/
Exes is tangentially related to one called all "Must Propose to Seven Men" which starts out really rapey, much more than the standard possessive, dubious consent story that seems to pervade the web novel world. That one is not necessary to read for Exes – also, it hasn't been completely translated.
I am also enjoying, "Quickly Wear the Face of the Devil." It is another one that plays with the multiple world transmigration tropes. Like the one you described its plot also seems to start with the POV character just messing with the universe, not trying to be part of the main plot, but inadvertently ending up in a torrid love affair each time. This one has a lot of parts translated by different people, so it is probably easiest to track it through novelupdates.com. Actually, a lot of them are easier to track through that site. https://www.novelupdates.com/series/quickly-wear-the-face-of-the-devil/?pg=19
The system interface seems to be nearly universal. I think the only one I have read that does not have it is "The Legendary Master's Wife." That one held my interest for quite a long time because it was one of the first I read and the world building was interesting. It sets out a lot of the basic rules that seem to apply to Xianxia stories in an almost videogame format. It really does feel like you are reading the narrative of someone playing a videogame. At a certain point though, reading about the character grinding through his power ups felt too much like I was actually grinding levels in a videogame and I needed a break. LOL However, it is very popular and highly recommended, I also feel like it may be influential in the genre. https://exiledrebelsscanlations.com/novels/the-legendary-masters-wife/
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Date: 2019-10-28 12:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-25 01:24 am (UTC)Anyway, yeah. I am very curious to see how they make this Not Gay. I guess they could make it more of an angsty father-son type relationship, but that would feel very weird with the heavy romantic subtext.
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Date: 2019-10-26 02:40 am (UTC)The MZDS adaptations have seemed to lean very hard on "they're soulmates! in a cough platonic sort of way!" but it's really quite difficult to get there from Scum Villain; in some ways making it less emotionally romantic makes it more difficult to maintain the dynamic while technically removing the romance!
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Date: 2019-10-26 04:47 am (UTC)Oh, yes, it's hilarious. It's a gift to fandom, too, the more ridiculous the trope the more it works when he's all "Sex pollen AGAIN? Ugh, fine."
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Date: 2024-06-05 02:13 am (UTC)I mean (she says, continuing this conversation five years later, about halfway through the extras/side stories in volume 4 as published by Seven Seas), SQQ literally realizes that he's LBH's replacement father figure pretty close to the end of the main arc? (The start of the "Impending War" chapter.) And keeps calling him "child"?
I don't think an angsty father-son relationship is particularly far from canon, is all.
(obviously no live-action has ever materialized; I know nothing about the CG-animated series other than that it exists.)
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Date: 2024-06-05 02:42 am (UTC)Oh, absolutely. But it's a very horny and romantic quasi-father/son dynamic, and if they lean into the father/son-ness without aggressively cutting down the romance/horniness the result could be kinda like when they tried to cut down the queerness in Sailor Moon by making a ship cousins: no less gay, but now with extra incest vibes (in this case, on top of the existing ones)
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Date: 2019-10-26 08:15 am (UTC)Of all her novels, this seems the hardest one to get past the censors. I look forward to applauding their attempts!
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