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Feb. 23rd, 2025 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI really enjoyed the transmigration cnovel this is ridiculous -- extremely funny starting premise that gradually gets more serious and more interested into digging Thematically into The Problem of Transmigration.
The story kicks off, of course, with our genre-savvy, pragmatic office-worker transmigrating into the mediocre book she was reading on the subway. The book is, itself, a transmigration novel in which a plucky modern heroine transmigrates into the villainess of a court drama, defeats the original heroine, wins the love of the heroic prince, helps him overthrow the evil tyrant emperor, etc.
Now our heroine has transmigrated back into the original heroine of the book-within-the-novel, who is, of course, the villainess of the transmigration novel. She promptly gets summoned to spend an evening with the evil tyrant emperor, notices that he's acting weird, and immediately susses him out as another transmigrator who readily confesses that he's a modern CEO who transmigrated after starting to read the same mediocre transmigration novel that she did. Knowing that they're both doomed by the narrative, they immediately start scheming: can they recruit the transmigrator heroine of the transmigration novel to their team, or is she just a bit too fictional to deviate from the plot? Is it possible that the heroic prince who's destined to overthrow and murder the evil tyrant emperor is also a transmigrator -- and if so, is he on their level, or is he even one more meta level up from them, and are they just characters in his bad transmigration novel? If they get really lucky, instead of competing to the death in palace drama they can all hang out and play cards and eat hotpot? And if not, can they both possibly keep a straight face when the fictional transmigrator heroine whips out her oh-I-just-invented-this-instrument-called-a-guitar and plays her oh-I-just-composed-this-little-Bach-cantata at the big festival?
So far, so good; the office worker is Not Particularly Enjoying being in historical court drama land but it would be so much worse without a normal pal to hang out with in the evenings and trade jokes about how absurd this all is and occasionally do some moderate normal person flirting. However! There is something weird about her new bud! He's definitely from the future, but he does not really give off CEO energy, and something about his backstory does not add up ...
It turns out: our guy is definitely not a CEO, nor is he the transmigration naif that he has been portraying himself as. Instead, he transmigrated into the imperial heir when he was in MIDDLE SCHOOL, and has been trapped in horrible court drama land for TWENTY YEARS, knowing that eventually a [fictional] transmigrator would show up but not when or how. Is he an evil tyrant emperor for real? Well, the circumstances and the plot have demanded certain actions and he certainly is not proud of them! Also being poisoned as a child has given him debilitating migraines and he has perhaps not always been his best self as a result! Definitely there has been a body count! Certainly he would prefer that his new normal person office worker crush, who still hopes to get out of all this with minimal murder, does not know about any of this! After twenty years it's a huge open question whether the nice middle school kid that he used to be is more or less 'real' than the tyrant emperor that the environment has been pruning him into ever since, but he likes being the normal person a lot more and that has to count for something, right?
Obviously I am an easy sell on layered meta jokes and identity confusion, I enjoyed the romance, and I thought the plot's gradual shift from shenanigans to serious stakes and tension was well paced and satisfying. But mostly I am just genuinely a big fan of our incredibly pragmatic normal person office worker -- compared to the female protagonists she read about, her romantic inclinations were only a third as strong, and her courage was only a twentieth -- and I was rooting all the way through for her to get to clock out, go home, and have some modern hot pot.
The story kicks off, of course, with our genre-savvy, pragmatic office-worker transmigrating into the mediocre book she was reading on the subway. The book is, itself, a transmigration novel in which a plucky modern heroine transmigrates into the villainess of a court drama, defeats the original heroine, wins the love of the heroic prince, helps him overthrow the evil tyrant emperor, etc.
Now our heroine has transmigrated back into the original heroine of the book-within-the-novel, who is, of course, the villainess of the transmigration novel. She promptly gets summoned to spend an evening with the evil tyrant emperor, notices that he's acting weird, and immediately susses him out as another transmigrator who readily confesses that he's a modern CEO who transmigrated after starting to read the same mediocre transmigration novel that she did. Knowing that they're both doomed by the narrative, they immediately start scheming: can they recruit the transmigrator heroine of the transmigration novel to their team, or is she just a bit too fictional to deviate from the plot? Is it possible that the heroic prince who's destined to overthrow and murder the evil tyrant emperor is also a transmigrator -- and if so, is he on their level, or is he even one more meta level up from them, and are they just characters in his bad transmigration novel? If they get really lucky, instead of competing to the death in palace drama they can all hang out and play cards and eat hotpot? And if not, can they both possibly keep a straight face when the fictional transmigrator heroine whips out her oh-I-just-invented-this-instrument-called-a-guitar and plays her oh-I-just-composed-this-little-Bach-cantata at the big festival?
So far, so good; the office worker is Not Particularly Enjoying being in historical court drama land but it would be so much worse without a normal pal to hang out with in the evenings and trade jokes about how absurd this all is and occasionally do some moderate normal person flirting. However! There is something weird about her new bud! He's definitely from the future, but he does not really give off CEO energy, and something about his backstory does not add up ...
It turns out: our guy is definitely not a CEO, nor is he the transmigration naif that he has been portraying himself as. Instead, he transmigrated into the imperial heir when he was in MIDDLE SCHOOL, and has been trapped in horrible court drama land for TWENTY YEARS, knowing that eventually a [fictional] transmigrator would show up but not when or how. Is he an evil tyrant emperor for real? Well, the circumstances and the plot have demanded certain actions and he certainly is not proud of them! Also being poisoned as a child has given him debilitating migraines and he has perhaps not always been his best self as a result! Definitely there has been a body count! Certainly he would prefer that his new normal person office worker crush, who still hopes to get out of all this with minimal murder, does not know about any of this! After twenty years it's a huge open question whether the nice middle school kid that he used to be is more or less 'real' than the tyrant emperor that the environment has been pruning him into ever since, but he likes being the normal person a lot more and that has to count for something, right?
Obviously I am an easy sell on layered meta jokes and identity confusion, I enjoyed the romance, and I thought the plot's gradual shift from shenanigans to serious stakes and tension was well paced and satisfying. But mostly I am just genuinely a big fan of our incredibly pragmatic normal person office worker -- compared to the female protagonists she read about, her romantic inclinations were only a third as strong, and her courage was only a twentieth -- and I was rooting all the way through for her to get to clock out, go home, and have some modern hot pot.
