skygiants

I just finished reading this one. I loved it for all the reasons you state – especially XH's rather intelligent and sensitive analysis of what he thought JH was doing. I did like that in the end XH and JH didn't replicate oppressive male/female gender roles in their RL relationship. Sadly, this is pretty revolutionary for a Chinese web novel.

Actually, XH is pretty revolutionary as a non-asshole male lead in general. I think that enabled me to gloss over a lot of the other cringey things.

Despite the fact that a lot of the female characters fell into the stereotypical mean girls squad roles, I found it kind of telling that they were all "WTF?" about JH's portrayal of what he thought a girl was. Maybe I was thinking too deeply, but I thought it was interesting that the women felt like they had moved beyond being cloying and flattering accessories, but that is still what the men perceive them as.

I honestly thought the pregnancy subplot was because the author wanted to do MPEG but couldn't bring herself to be THAT RIDICULOUS.