(no subject)

[skygiants]

Deeply appreciative of happydork for making sure to alert me that Cyan Wings, of Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know, had a new and also charming book out and translated right in time for me to zoom through it while hanging out with my family in the Poconos!

This one's called Something's Not Right, and the protagonist is a very dutiful and responsible* young emperor who gets conked on the head one day during some Plucky Young Girl Shenanigans and wakes up with a deep sense of existential unease related to the world around him. The most notable thing is that he has suddenly noticed that his respectable and virtuous empress is mysteriously tall and buff and square-jawed and prone to conducting sword dances and athletic routines early in the morning, but no one else seems to find this weird, so probably she was always tall and buff and square-jawed and prone to conducting sword dances and athletic routines early in the morning? Anyway as far as he's concerned this is actually quite hot, so no problems there.

More concerning is the fact that most of the other people he usually spends time with in the palace -- including not just his courtesans but also several scholars, eunuchs, etc. -- have all become obsessed with him to the exclusion of their other duties and hobbies and it's Very Irritating and Quite Concerning. It's all very well for the captain of his guard to offer to become his personal bodyguard, but that isn't his job, actually? His job is to be the captain of the guard? It's deeply irresponsible for him to start hyperfixating on the Emperor instead?

Also, the plucky young girl with the shenanigans appears to have supernatural good luck of the kind that means that when she decides to [for example] sneak out of the palace in disguise, everyone around her temporarily becomes completely incompetent. This is so troubling! What if an enemy decides to use her talents to undermine the nation?

The astute reader will obviously have guessed that there are some Metafictional Shenanigans going on here and indeed they would be right! The Emperor and the plucky young girl with the shenanigans are the original intended romantic protagonists; many of the other characters are from the modern day and competing to get the Emperor to fall in love with them instead; the Empress, in an extra layer of deception, is pretending to be a contestant, but is in fact pursuing another secret mission entirely, which means of course that the Empress is the one who is going to fall in love with the Emperor on accident.

What's actually going on is that they are all part of a highly immersive video game and the creator of the video game has gotten himself lost in it and forgotten who he is. The Empress is on a search-and-retrieval mission and is rather weirded out to be developing Feelings about an NPC, and once the Emperor figures out what's going on he also has some quite affecting angst about the fact that he is an NPC and the levels of reality thereof. But of course it turns out in the end that the Emperor is really the doctor after all so no one has to feel weird about falling in love with data, and in the end they both pop out of the game into the real world, but also make a commitment to preserve the game data so the people who ARE sims living there can continue to preserve the integrity of their own universe which is real in its own way.

I do have some questions about what we learn there about the video game trial that everyone has been playing in for years ... everyone seems to be coming out deeply traumatized from spending subjective years in Imperial China .... maybe you guys should have built some more safety protocols in?? I think??? Given that the Emperor's main character trait is that he's Highly Responsible I'm handwaving this setup as being developed by Much Less Responsible Guys At the Company after he was already stuck there.

The Empress is also of course a man* -- asterisking because the translation starts using he-pronouns as soon as the Emperor figures it out, because this is a danmei, but the Empress also never stops using 'your servant wife' in dialogue and has some internal monologue late in the book about preferring Empress to any other title, so IMO there's some room for ambiguity. (Also one of my favorite bonus notes from the epilogue is the fact that, because of the Empress' great renown, beauty standards eventually evolve to favor tall buff square-jawed women above all others.)

Anyway, I think Devil Venerable is more fun as a narrative but I very much appreciate this one's Thematic Emphasis on duty and trust and respecting your partner's commitment to their priorities, even if those priorities are not things that make any sense in your own personal context. Also it's still very funny!

[*nota bene the novel takes a firm stance that being a Responsible Emperor often means being harsh with individuals in favor of the greater good, which I mention so nobody is surprised to find some Responsible Torture in the middle of their light fantasy rom-com]

Comments

[brownbetty]

I was really enjoying the "I'm falling in love with an NPC?" and was kind of let down by the swerve to "No it's all fine, don't worry about it," at the end. There's a point where it's like "Wait, did we invent a new kind of people and war-crime them? Have we traumatized all our beta-testers? Was making low-key sexual assault the victory condition a bad idea?" and then it's like "Nah, they signed a waiver, it's fine!"

The emperor was never hotter to me than when he was like "I guess if I'm an NPC that's out of my hands, but being a good emperor is still a thing that is my responsibility."

[skygiants]

Honestly I was disappointed in myself for being relieved to find out the Emperor was not in fact an NPC at the end -- it's not that I'm not rooting for sim-character personhood! it's just also that my feelings about it are messier at This Time of AI Shenanigans than they have been at previous points in my life! -- but then that rapidly switched to being disappointed in everyone else at the end for not being much more interested in the ethics of all of this. It's fine! He's just going to go work for the military! D:

BUT THAT SCENE WAS BY FAR THE BEST SCENE IN THE BOOK

[sovay]

What's actually going on is that they are all part of a highly immersive video game and the creator of the video game has gotten himself lost in it and forgotten who he is.

This is an incredibly Diana Wynne Jones premise, as is the reveal of the Emperor's identity.

(Also one of my favorite bonus notes from the epilogue is the fact that, because of the Empress' great renown, beauty standards eventually evolve to favor tall buff square-jawed women above all others.)

That is great.

[skygiants]

omg you're absolutely right. Huge Deep Secret energy!!

[aurumcalendula]

I think Something's Not Right is neck and neck with They All Say I've Met A Ghost for my favorite of Cyan Wings' novels!

(also this post reminds me I should read Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know - I've only read what E. Danglars has translated so far)

[skygiants]

I've not even heard of They All Say I've Met a Ghost until now! What's the premise?

[aurumcalendula]

Down on his luck (and in need of a job) after finishing grad school with a focus on political education, Shen Jianguo gets a job teaching night classes to malevolent and/or vengeful ghosts.

However, since he firmly does not believe in supernatural, he is oblivious to the fact that they are ghosts (to basically every other character (both living and dead)'s bewilderment). He also keeps running into Ning Tiance, a cultivator who was assigned to exorcise the ghosts.

(I read translation that's here)

[chestnut_pod]

This one's called Something's Not Right, and the protagonist is a very dutiful and responsible* young emperor who gets conked on the head one day during some Plucky Young Girl Shenanigans and wakes up with a deep sense of existential unease related to the world around him. -- this is, honestly, a setup that more stories of every kind should use.

[skygiants]

HARD AGREE (& one of my favorite things about the two Cyan Wings novels I've read is how much fun they have in playing around with other people's reactions to the reality-warping protagonist powers of the Plucky Young Girl while also still giving said Plucky Young Girl a compelling character arc of her own.)

[dhampyresa]

Oh that sounds fun!

Btw, I keep forgetting to tell you, but Joann Sfar (of Chat du Rabbin fame) has also written some novels.

[skygiants]

omg, I had no idea he had also written novels -- any in particular you'd recommend?