excitable reread liveblog
Aug. 29th, 2020 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pengwernThe (definitely dubious consent type) twist in 星际奶爸 Space!Number One Dad by 袖侧 was....so delicious, g o s h (spies and deep cover agents and an entire cauldron of identity drama) and the dynamic -- I'd try slapping it everywhere but do I really need to see other characters re-enact it, when the originals are already this wonderful @_@
This novel is....exhilarating. satisfying. The scope goes far beyond the blurb, AND it features the line "help! what to do when there's always hunks volunteering to bear my children!"
Our brave Main Character is a girl portal-fantasied (the webnovel term is transmigration) to one of those space utopias, where there are always scare quotes hanging around. She decides to have a kid, is assigned a guy whom she gets on with -- up to the sixty percent mark,this is an adorable, respectful and fairly charming het romance. He volunteers to bear the kid *\o/* you can tell it's mutual on both sides *\o/* so much fluff *\o/*
............ until the explosions start, at which point he 1) turns out to be a spy from the other space federation 2) has been disguised from body to voice as a pre-existing soldier from MC's nation and 3)....decided to actually have a kid? with her?? using his DNA rather than the original person's??? Everyone else, upon hearing of this: This does not sound professional! "A REAL secret agent would never have a kid with someone from an enemy nation in a mission!"
Current Male Lead (the doppelganger) moved to the capital planet to avoid being detected, so at least the romance on screen was all him. The little personality quirks (ability to cook, ability to do seventeen more pushups, decision to buy a fancy car with the original soldier's credit card) was him, if not his voice (which she made into her AI's), nor his face (screensaver iirc) or any of the many biographical details. There's enough dodginess here for at least 30k or short character studies, BUT THEN XDDDDDDDD --
The original lieutenant shows up -- he made it out from his imprisonment at the hand of enemy federation, and is assigned to be her bodyguard/guard to see if the agent would try to come back for her, or if MC has any means of communication with the enemy. There was fully a month of cat-and-mouse where the actual real guy steps into a life he never got to experience, faking a romance that was once sugary enough for an entire bakery, knowing that this should have been the way it was from the start --
I'm so into the dynamic between her and the guy whose identity was stolen tbh-- the repressed mutual play-acting/honey-trapping! with the cinders of real passion and hurt simmering beneath there, as his recover from the interrogation and the prisoner of war experience are shoved beneath a tarp for the on-going crisis! They were matched by algorithm to be good co-parents, and they're definitely each other's type! She's dealing with the selfsame betrayal, and their emotional traumas would clash in terrible ways -- if it wasn't for the fact that neither of them can afford to have a breakdown right now :3c He was a doppelganger, false down to the skin, but at least, their hands are different. :3c So much bitterness! But then original guy actually gets over it and goes back to his life amidst the ruin, and I was charmed still further.
Obviously there are.... consistent levels of non-ideal relationships under the false sugar layer on the seemingly perfect one, but all three main characters are pretty much (eventually) respectful of everyone else, and gain the maturity to learn to negotiate and change for the others, against the backdrop of their conflicting loyalties, and by the end I don't feel like drop kicking the original ML into the nearest sun as much! In these romance novels, one thing I can't accept is using children to coerce a parent (back into a relationship, whichever) and.....she gets her own back.
The conclusion she comes to at the 80% mark was just....such a balm. She's neither a warprize nor a traitor. She's only here to retrieve her kid, as agreed on in the contract she had doppelganger agent sign in the beginning, and in the end he realises this. He knew, once she came to his nation, that her dependency on him would be absolute. That selfishness of his act - while he loves her, those around him are only acting on his behalf. In the end, the subconscious underestimation of someone who turns out to have motives that do not, in fact, align with his goals 100% is what allows her to escape and achieve her goals. And it was SO satisfying to watch a dude face up to his assumptions like that, and apologize -- and at the moment she figures out why she was so angry, when their reunion is about to be complete -- in walks original guy XDDDDDDDDD I LOVE HIS TIMING
Best friend watching at the videoscreens (fully six of them) going popcorn dot gif, I GET YOU. The tiny bab introducing his uncle Yan He to his dad! when the latter had to get reconstructive surgery and full out training for YEARS... the dynamic was ......will I ever see a fandom covering every possible scenario from six different angles for this novel one day, please all the little fishes in the sea
The grudging respect between POW guy and the doppelganger too. All of them are fairly reasonable adults who understand this situation isn't personal -- they were proxies in the conflict between two states, in other circumstances they'd be good enemies -- but when they actually meet -- even their names sound like the reverse of each other's. Mutually gritting their teeth over the other person’s traits! (Which they have all had the opportunity to become more than familiar with, doppelganger guy when he was studying his target, and original dude when he sees all the traces of the life MC had with her co-parent, from tea vs coffee preferences to the habits the enemy agent had picked up, to the car that he approves of, only to be informed that "it was purchased with your money.") Also under the serious conflicts there's petty shit like "he did a handstand for 17 mins longer than I did!", which also cutely served as one of a constant stream of foreshadowing. Eventually, they become comrades in arms......those months of training when they're each other's only tie to MC...please author I just want to see them get it on without cheating issues at play.
MC isn't polyamorous and that's fine, but it feels like....Miles never responding to Bel Thorne.The fact that they don't end up an OT3 I will choose to lay at the feet of "depressing stuff like how JJW XC doesn't allow for anything other than 1v1 romances nowadays, and a number of :< things from the purity brigade people." I will sit here and contemplate the 100k AUs where they do get together instead.
...they do end up a family unit <3 I'd forgotten how good this gets! (and!!! there was SEVERAL CHAPTERS of Yan He is the actual ML, scatter flowers) Eventually the original guy did have a kid with her, using their respective dna because they all thought he had been killed, but doppelganger guy still has some vinegar to sip! His solution: volunteer to bear the baby with the magic of space mpreg \o/\o/\o/ All five of them (three of them, two kids) head out to explore the galaxy, and it ends up very sweet. I cackled through the last two pages. “The universe is so big,” she said, smiling. “C’mon, let's go see it together with dad, mom, and dad.”
Of course, if there was a translation, or if I did try one, you'd need a full list of warnings as usual. the 'government assigns you a co-parent' thing is always tied to eugenics which many of these self-pub romance authors are happy to trip blithely over, and here -- they do at least make it a subplot, but ...it's definitely something to poke at :\\\ The other thing is that MC is ....as a transmigrated person from modern times (China), there is a greater expectation towards family and children that some western readers might not see as often, but I understand her and thank my stars that I haven't had to deal with that much. MC's desire for a kid is partly her longing for familial bonds, as the creepy AI that rules her state has tried to make a strawman society where everyone is super individualistic and people are discouraged from contacting their parents after coming of age. But at least mpreg is just one more quotidian tech?
This author I mostly trust. If you can read chinese or are willing to machine translate raws, I can absolutely rec this! The frequency of lines during the reread that I wanted to share (and translate) was far too high. .....how do people get fan-translations started these days do I need to personally translate this whole thing to get fic of all the stuff I want to see QAQ
This novel is....exhilarating. satisfying. The scope goes far beyond the blurb, AND it features the line "help! what to do when there's always hunks volunteering to bear my children!"
Our brave Main Character is a girl portal-fantasied (the webnovel term is transmigration) to one of those space utopias, where there are always scare quotes hanging around. She decides to have a kid, is assigned a guy whom she gets on with -- up to the sixty percent mark,this is an adorable, respectful and fairly charming het romance. He volunteers to bear the kid *\o/* you can tell it's mutual on both sides *\o/* so much fluff *\o/*
............ until the explosions start, at which point he 1) turns out to be a spy from the other space federation 2) has been disguised from body to voice as a pre-existing soldier from MC's nation and 3)....decided to actually have a kid? with her?? using his DNA rather than the original person's??? Everyone else, upon hearing of this: This does not sound professional! "A REAL secret agent would never have a kid with someone from an enemy nation in a mission!"
Current Male Lead (the doppelganger) moved to the capital planet to avoid being detected, so at least the romance on screen was all him. The little personality quirks (ability to cook, ability to do seventeen more pushups, decision to buy a fancy car with the original soldier's credit card) was him, if not his voice (which she made into her AI's), nor his face (screensaver iirc) or any of the many biographical details. There's enough dodginess here for at least 30k or short character studies, BUT THEN XDDDDDDDD --
The original lieutenant shows up -- he made it out from his imprisonment at the hand of enemy federation, and is assigned to be her bodyguard/guard to see if the agent would try to come back for her, or if MC has any means of communication with the enemy. There was fully a month of cat-and-mouse where the actual real guy steps into a life he never got to experience, faking a romance that was once sugary enough for an entire bakery, knowing that this should have been the way it was from the start --
I'm so into the dynamic between her and the guy whose identity was stolen tbh-- the repressed mutual play-acting/honey-trapping! with the cinders of real passion and hurt simmering beneath there, as his recover from the interrogation and the prisoner of war experience are shoved beneath a tarp for the on-going crisis! They were matched by algorithm to be good co-parents, and they're definitely each other's type! She's dealing with the selfsame betrayal, and their emotional traumas would clash in terrible ways -- if it wasn't for the fact that neither of them can afford to have a breakdown right now :3c He was a doppelganger, false down to the skin, but at least, their hands are different. :3c So much bitterness! But then original guy actually gets over it and goes back to his life amidst the ruin, and I was charmed still further.
Obviously there are.... consistent levels of non-ideal relationships under the false sugar layer on the seemingly perfect one, but all three main characters are pretty much (eventually) respectful of everyone else, and gain the maturity to learn to negotiate and change for the others, against the backdrop of their conflicting loyalties, and by the end I don't feel like drop kicking the original ML into the nearest sun as much! In these romance novels, one thing I can't accept is using children to coerce a parent (back into a relationship, whichever) and.....she gets her own back.
The conclusion she comes to at the 80% mark was just....such a balm. She's neither a warprize nor a traitor. She's only here to retrieve her kid, as agreed on in the contract she had doppelganger agent sign in the beginning, and in the end he realises this. He knew, once she came to his nation, that her dependency on him would be absolute. That selfishness of his act - while he loves her, those around him are only acting on his behalf. In the end, the subconscious underestimation of someone who turns out to have motives that do not, in fact, align with his goals 100% is what allows her to escape and achieve her goals. And it was SO satisfying to watch a dude face up to his assumptions like that, and apologize -- and at the moment she figures out why she was so angry, when their reunion is about to be complete -- in walks original guy XDDDDDDDDD I LOVE HIS TIMING
Best friend watching at the videoscreens (fully six of them) going popcorn dot gif, I GET YOU. The tiny bab introducing his uncle Yan He to his dad! when the latter had to get reconstructive surgery and full out training for YEARS... the dynamic was ......will I ever see a fandom covering every possible scenario from six different angles for this novel one day, please all the little fishes in the sea
The grudging respect between POW guy and the doppelganger too. All of them are fairly reasonable adults who understand this situation isn't personal -- they were proxies in the conflict between two states, in other circumstances they'd be good enemies -- but when they actually meet -- even their names sound like the reverse of each other's. Mutually gritting their teeth over the other person’s traits! (Which they have all had the opportunity to become more than familiar with, doppelganger guy when he was studying his target, and original dude when he sees all the traces of the life MC had with her co-parent, from tea vs coffee preferences to the habits the enemy agent had picked up, to the car that he approves of, only to be informed that "it was purchased with your money.") Also under the serious conflicts there's petty shit like "he did a handstand for 17 mins longer than I did!", which also cutely served as one of a constant stream of foreshadowing. Eventually, they become comrades in arms......those months of training when they're each other's only tie to MC...please author I just want to see them get it on without cheating issues at play.
MC isn't polyamorous and that's fine, but it feels like....Miles never responding to Bel Thorne.The fact that they don't end up an OT3 I will choose to lay at the feet of "depressing stuff like how JJW XC doesn't allow for anything other than 1v1 romances nowadays, and a number of :< things from the purity brigade people." I will sit here and contemplate the 100k AUs where they do get together instead.
...they do end up a family unit <3 I'd forgotten how good this gets! (and!!! there was SEVERAL CHAPTERS of Yan He is the actual ML, scatter flowers) Eventually the original guy did have a kid with her, using their respective dna because they all thought he had been killed, but doppelganger guy still has some vinegar to sip! His solution: volunteer to bear the baby with the magic of space mpreg \o/\o/\o/ All five of them (three of them, two kids) head out to explore the galaxy, and it ends up very sweet. I cackled through the last two pages. “The universe is so big,” she said, smiling. “C’mon, let's go see it together with dad, mom, and dad.”
Of course, if there was a translation, or if I did try one, you'd need a full list of warnings as usual. the 'government assigns you a co-parent' thing is always tied to eugenics which many of these self-pub romance authors are happy to trip blithely over, and here -- they do at least make it a subplot, but ...it's definitely something to poke at :\\\ The other thing is that MC is ....as a transmigrated person from modern times (China), there is a greater expectation towards family and children that some western readers might not see as often, but I understand her and thank my stars that I haven't had to deal with that much. MC's desire for a kid is partly her longing for familial bonds, as the creepy AI that rules her state has tried to make a strawman society where everyone is super individualistic and people are discouraged from contacting their parents after coming of age. But at least mpreg is just one more quotidian tech?
This author I mostly trust. If you can read chinese or are willing to machine translate raws, I can absolutely rec this! The frequency of lines during the reread that I wanted to share (and translate) was far too high. .....how do people get fan-translations started these days do I need to personally translate this whole thing to get fic of all the stuff I want to see QAQ
no subject
Date: 2020-08-29 07:55 am (UTC)I do not read Chinese, but if you do personally translate this whole thing, I would read it, because minus the canonical absence of OT3 it sounds incredible.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-29 10:00 am (UTC)Out of the handful of space webnovels I've read, this is... honestly the best one - unlike the horde of generic omegaverse and fighting the bugs or empire vs federation romances, the author actually ....puts thought into the setting. There was an armor the main character and her colleagues came up with one drunk science party named "When I am Kidnapped", and the kid version "When My Child Is Kidnapped" baby carriage. There was a "future space man learns earnestly about the archaic process of menstruation for his partner" scene! Way more impactful than yet another mecha battle \o/
no subject
Date: 2020-08-29 07:04 pm (UTC)A legitimate obstacle! My month has consisted mostly of being exhausted.
There was an armor the main character and her colleagues came up with one drunk science party named "When I am Kidnapped", and the kid version "When My Child Is Kidnapped" baby carriage.
That's brilliant.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-31 06:17 am (UTC)