when night is on the hills

In a move both surprising and inevitable, I've found myself in the BTS fandom– or at least, in parts of it. I'm reading fic for exactly one pairing, I've fallen down multiple video rabbit-holes, and I'm learning more about both the group and the idol industry as a whole. I've been expecting this to happen since... 2018? Meaning there's a massive backlog of stuff to catch up on, and a number of different ways to interact with & approach the material. Meaning I'm having a massive amount of fun. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

the amazing BTS Primer by adoremouse on AO3

a breakdown of every era of BTS at The Ringer

an official dance practice playlist

the 'cooking with Jin' tag on a fan translation site

One Week // One Band has two series on them

The 91 Series: an analysis & history of the idol pop industry through the lens of a Qpop group

more miscellaneously, there's 2018's performance of Idol at the MMAs, their appearance on Running Man (where Jimin turns a piggyback into an offensive weapon), and Namjoon's well-documented love of small things.

( Read more... )

On December 5th, Li Xuezheng said there would be news in 20 days, and now here I am on Christmas Eve crying over a photo of someone’s thumb. Or, to give a clearer idea of things, Zhang Zhehan has filed a case for review with the Beijing police. They’ll announce their decision on whether to proceed with it in 7 days, on New Year’s Eve. In the meantime, this can join the Merlin series finale on the list of Fandom Things I’ve Had Feelings About on Christmas Eve. (Thankfully, it’s a short list.)

The last six weeks have been a bit of a rollercoaster (there’s a timeline of events here). Sadness, fury, hope, & worry— I’ve veered through all of them, though not as deeply as I could’ve done. LXZ is so good at what he does that I keep pulling back from my own emotional response, wanting to look closer at what he’s doing instead. He hits his chosen notes so hard and so well, it’s just impressive to watch. It’s also concerning. As has been the case since August, I don’t know what a good outcome would be here. My very basic hope is that ZZH will have options, and the time to choose which one is best for him. With everything happening it can be easy to forget that there’s a very real person trapped in the heart of this, in a situation that’s growing more complicated with each passing week.

Well.

I don't think anyone had predicted 'total career annihilation' for August, but here we are. I'm keeping a post with names and summaries firmly under lock, but it seems appropriate to have some sort of public marker for myself to see.

It feels terribly weird and disorienting to have something that brought me so much delight over the last five months suddenly cause so much sadness. I've burst into tears, frantically downloaded things, and dipped in and out of what a Victorian might call a 'nervous state'. From beginning to possible end, this fandom has surprised me. While I don't regret a moment of it, I think this will have an effect on my interests going forward. The novels will stay, the live actions will possibly be engaged with, but any new actors will have to stay at a remove. What's happened is an option I didn't really understand to be on the table, and I'm not willing to go through this again. It probably couldn't be duplicated anyway, but who knows. The world's a strange place.

Word of Honor! Has been such a delight!

And such a surprise too. I started the first episode out of curiosity, got interested fairly quickly, and was totally locked in by somewhere around episode 3. Of course it varies from the book, but the two leads are so good and have such amazing chemistry that I can't help but appreciate what they've created. I'm also regularly shocked by what they've gotten past the censors. There have been moments when I actually clapped my hands over my mouth in amazement (the hand caress... I'm in awe). The English-subbed episodes are released fairly quickly, but I've found it better to do a total boycott of my usual lurking around social media. My reactions to the show are stronger when I experience everything for the first time in the episode, as opposed to seeing a dozen gifs first- and I'm invested enough that I'll make that small sacrifice.

( Commentary behind the cut )

Wary of the angst warning, I procrastinated in even starting Thousand Autumns, but by the time the knives came out, I was so engrossed that they only made it more compelling. The story follows Shen Qiao, the leader of a Daoist sect, who has the dubious fortune of being picked up by a renowned demonic cultivator after a duel sends him crashing down to earth. It's very much an unstoppable force meets immoveable object type of situation, though which is who may be up for debate.

Meng Xi Shi's novels tend to follow a pattern with me, which is that I find them slow to get into and then hard to put down. Their works always feel very fleshed out, as if the adventure you’re reading is only one of a thousand that have happened and are happening all the time. Case in point, this bit:

Duan Wenyang lamented, “Speaking of it, I should have addressed you as my senior martial sister. Unfortunately, Master has already driven you out after you escaped Tujue with his ring. I heard that in those days, Master cared a great deal about you that he even intended to pass his mantle to you. Lady Qin first enticed Master with your beauty, then stole his ring and left. Thinking back on it today, don’t you feel guilty for what you’ve done?”

“Shut up!” Hearing him insult their mother, the Su brothers were naturally exasperated.

Yet Lady Qin only replied with a sarcastic smile, “Since when did a junior like you have a say in the history between me and Hulugu?! Does Tujue lack so much talent that Hulugu had to take in disciples like you who can only fight with their mouths?”

She said to Su Wei, “Bring me your brother’s sword!”

I would read an entire novel about Lady Qin.

In the same vein, the ML, Yan Wushi, definitely has A Backstory, but it's never explicitly addressed in the main story or used as an excuse for his behaviour. It's simply there in the background, working with all the other details to create a world.

Just finished Barbara Demick’s Eat the Buddha, a nonfiction account of life in Tibet over the last century, with a focus on the town of Ngaba- the site of a large number of self-immolations. It was a well-written book and the timing for reading it turned out to be a little on the nose. A week afterwards, I watched a short series of documentaries about traditional Chinese dancing. I enjoyed the series overall (Yang Liping’s peacock dance, and the troupe of deaf/hoh dancers were highlights), but the episode about Tibet felt like standing on the other side of a mirror.

Two particular bits from the book that I found interesting, the first about flexible households:

Polygamy and polyandry were acceptable among rural Tibetans, particularly when it was a matter of practicality rather than lust. In Meruma, two brothers shared a wife, an arrangement that prevented the family’s property from being divided and allowed one man to earn money trading while the other maintained the family’s land and herds. Unmarried women frequently had children of their own; in fact, one anthropologist who studied a Tibetan village found that half of the unmarried women had given birth. Unlike Chinese women similarly situated, they […] were treated as heads of households in their own right.

And the second, about monastery life:

The young monks engaged in a ritualized form of debating, as integral to their studies as it is among Talmudic scholars. One group of monks would be assigned to defend a thesis, and the others to challenge it- punctuating the question with a sharp clap of the hands. If one took too long to answer a question, the other monks would protest with a round of three claps, indicating disapproval. A successful defence of a thesis would be approved with a vigorous round of stomping on the pavement, the monastic equivalent of a high five.

Humour, wonder, and a planet-sized amount of angst, Little Mushroom (NU).

It stands complete at 84 chapters and 5 extras. This was.. SO GOOD. I’m lacking words, I’m teary-eyed, I’m full on verklempt. I’m going to have to cut mushrooms out of my diet for a while, because if I look down at the cutting board and see one there I’ll probably start crying.

As the translator notes, the official summary is deceptively fluffy, which kept me from picking it up while the translation was in progress. This turned out to be a good thing, because reading this novel from start to finish was an experience, and I’m glad to have had it.

On an apocalyptic Earth, a little mushroom gains sentience and grows a spore- but before it can mature the spore is stolen away by a research team from one of the last surviving human outposts. After a chance meeting with a dying mercenary, the mushroom learns to change its form and sets off to the outpost to rescue its spore, and fulfill its life’s purpose. However, humanity is tricky to mimic and the head Judge of the Northern Base is always searching for monsters in disguise.

The main relationship is odd, unexpected, and charming:

Then An Zhe saw Lu Feng take off his coat and put it to one side. Lu Feng rolled up the sleeves of his uniform shirt and raised his hand to turn off the black sluice above the water pipe, a place that was out of An Zhe’s reach. Then he unscrewed the tap.

An Zhe watched silently. He felt that Lu Feng’s move had only two possibilities. One was to completely destroy his tap while the other was to help him repair it. He felt intellectually that it was the former but he emotionally preferred to believe it was the latter.

The author’s written a couple of other novels which are in translation, but given their reviews and how much I enjoyed reading this one from start to end, I’ll probably hold off until they’re complete.

Finished Don’t You Like Me, in which high school student Lin Feiran has the dubious honour of inheriting his family’s secret gift: the ability to see ghosts. Unfortunately, his school is built on a graveyard, and he can’t tell anyone what’s going on. How convenient that his roommate’s strong yang energy naturally repels ghosts! How unfortunate that it requires almost constant physical contact in order to work!

The moment he touched Gu Kaifeng, the world became quiet.

Gu Kaifeng tilted his head to look at Lin Feiran. Raising the hand that was being grasped firmly, he asked, “What’s this?”

“It’s nothing.” Lin Feiran awkwardly released his hand. Though the ghosts were no longer in sight, his head was still reeling with thoughts of ghosts and he absent-mindedly explained to Gu Kaifeng, “I just grabbed the wrong thing.”

Gu Kaifeng raised his eyebrow and asked, “Then what did you want to grab?”

It’s cute, funny, and complete- and the ML does the quickest zero to ‘call me husband’ that I’ve ever seen.

*

While reading the above, my attention got snagged in the sidebar by a novel with the extremely accurate title of Reborn As the Villain President’s Lover. How could I resist?

The unlucky protagonist, Ji Qingzhou, has “crossed into a book of dog blood scum and abuse,” but it’s early enough that he can change the plot. Instead of going along with the original (terrible) gong, he chooses option B and stays with the cannon fodder villain. Their agreement is meant to be a simple sex-for-money/support type of thing, but of course it gets complicated.

It’s early days for the translation, but JQZ is a charming protagonist. In his original world, he picked up the novel looking for a good story and a happy ending. After over a hundred chapters of people behaving in increasingly awful ways and a romance that didn’t deserve the name, he closed the tab and walked away. And then...

Given the ‘source’ material there’re some things that made me go “!!! Inappropriate behaviour !!!”, but I chose to roll with it. The further the story goes, the more reasonably the characters behave as they diverge from the novel and get fleshed out.

*

Continuing in the theme of ‘novels with extremely blunt titles featuring characters who transmigrate into low-quality novels about the entertainment industry’ (A+ niche), there’s My Husband Is Suffering From a Terminal Illness. I was genuinely baffled by that title, but it has a HE tag so presumably it’s less ‘terminal’ and more ‘secretly being poisoned’ or ‘too tsundere to live’.

Xie Yang was fighting to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, when he suddenly awoke inside the novel he’d been reading in a safehouse. Unfortunately, he’s not the protagonist with a golden finger- he’s the sidelined ‘wife’ of the novel’s main villain. However, everything’s a matter of perspective and Xie Yang is delighted to find himself in such a welcoming world, and willing to do whatever it takes to keep his place there.

I love the use of the ‘accidentally in the wrong genre’ trope, and the novel’s at its strongest when it leans into it. When it doesn’t, things become more generic and Xie Yang’s background seems to translate into a straightforward ruthlessness and inability to be intimidated.