pengwern | Entries tagged with webnovels

Baseless claims I would need to do a lot more research on but that I'm throwing here for later:
Oscar Wilde's Salome or Green Knight influencing the kiss in Lu Xun's Mei Jianchi/Forging the Swords” (Zhu Jian 铸剑) (1926).

CW for fairytale gore:
(short rundown on Lu Xun: one of the most famous republic era literati and revolutionary writer, the story is a retelling of a mythological story where a swordmaker is inevitably killed by the king he forged a masterblade for bc swords = weapon development, but this guy made two swords and his son has the other as he grows up for his revenge -- only to meet some guy promising to fulfill his revenge if the son will let himself be beheaded, to be taken along with the other sword as a gift to the king. Dark stranger goes to court, promises the king entertainment if he provides a cauldron full of boiling water (cauldrons being significant objects in ancient bronze age culture) and tosses the head in like a little light garnish, whereupon it sings sweetly in the swirling waters; the king approaches and is beheaded by dark stranger, who beheads himself as well so that all three heads spin around in a death match within the boiling vessel. And finally when they all sink to the bottom, spent, the horrified court fishes out fragments that cannot be identified and everything is eventually buried in the same tomb) I read this when I was eight and went @_____@ somehow I am not the most horrified at this story in the collection!

there's a lot of precedent for "let me bring the head of your enemy to you as a token of my sincerity" in cn narratives/history - see all the stuff in the Three Kingdoms era, or even the pre-unification times where some guy will literally say "let me borrow your head" to someone else (apocryphal)

BUT kissing does seems....not...to be a part of it? not so much no homo, even, it's just that kissing isn't a motif in general unlike lays or medieval (european) customs, which is what makes it interesting - I need to compare the description in the story to Salome. Time matches up...? The story is very clearly allegorical, and I see articles talking about how the three dead men represent the oppressed, the rulers, and agitators like Lu Xun himself (the dark stranger introducing himself with a pen name that Lu Xun once used), where nobody makes it out alive _(:з)∠)_

Quote from the story to compare - I don't know if there's some other (western) modernist work also involving kisses that I might be missing as well.
“呵呵!”他一手接剑，一手捏着头发，提起眉间尺的头来，对着那热*的死掉的嘴唇，接吻两次，并且冷冷地尖利地笑。
"Heh!" He took the sword in one hand, grabbed the hair in the other, and lifting Mei Jiancun's head up, kissed twice the warm lips that had died, and coldly and sharply laughed.

...man looking at Lu Xun again it definitely reads....like...more western tinged? In the way his vocab and possibly even sentences are formed. (Classical and vernacular but historical chinese have grammar and other stuff that makes it difficult to translate directly.)

(Side note that there was a hilarious part in Lu Xun's memoirs about him learning English and German:
him learning english: 几乎四整天是英文：“It is a cat。”“Is it a rat？(Almost four whole days of english.)
这回不是It is a cat了，是Der Mann，Die Weib，Das Kind。.(This time it wasn't It is a cat)

*(lit, hot dead lips in YOUR menacing wolf filled forest)

Current Mood: is it a rat?

Remembered about that one space opera webnovel....that had a number of descriptors to made it stand out.
1) The friends to foes to honey trap and honey trappee/simultaneous lord and rebellious general to lovers to satisfy my entire soul. Just incredible. The deadly faceoffs between their wills...I looked up after five chapters to start raving about it. Dubcon all over, but it was scorchingly intense. (ymmv obviously)
2) at which point (chapter 6) it started on its second noteworthy aspect, ON SCREEN LOVE NIKKI LET'S PLAY. For, I think I counted, at least 6/87 chapters? There was later a showdown that involved competing in Love Nikki as though it were an e-sport??
???????
??????????????????????????????????????????
Fully accurate and memeable pastiche too.
3) which then at the 60% mark vrooshes down the tired trope tracks of the space opera genre and cnovels in general. ...thing is, those tropes include: the Empire and the Federation*; a return to monarchy that makes sense only for historical genres; insect people invasion and mecha to battle them, but also fantasy RPG kitchen sink for whatever reason, and for the generic cnovel elements, your typical race of cannibalized enslaved mermaids. ,,,,,,,,,,,
4) and finally its title, Sweet flavored Alpha, and the cover, a pink confection with molangs and rows of dancing desserts, which is what you'd expect for a pure fluff bakery setting fic. [F R A U D I N A D V E R T I S I N G]
I had a GREAT time.

Summary and quotes later - I am off to pluck their current anthology wip, Thanatos x Judge of Hell, the two wuchang psychopomps falling in love after a shot from Cupid, Love god x Ocean god (this makes more sense with a cn web term naming people with lots of admirers sea kings who keep many fish in their fishery), and Lucifer x Morningstar (as the term for selfcest goes, narcissus romance, bless)
*(I think descended in fandom lineage from the anime legend of galactic heroes?)
link two
This author 浮白曲 also did a duology of sweet gods/powers-that-be dating, and also an apparently amazing generic historical foe-xxx novel that I haven't devoured still because I am a cowardly pudding, even though this author is nowhere on the level of stabs as some people (将进酒 author I am staring at u)

Current Location: this really doesn't normally happen although to be fair I also don't generally
Current Music: go for space settings bc they're all either omegaverse or mecha fights or the oc

The (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!"

( (Spoilers for a novel that doesn't have a translation but really should) )

Current Location: not in a galaxy far away

Impressions of MXTX's three novels which I read a while ago, from...... an incredibly spoilt child who can read raws, sorry XD I'm meaner simply because there are more options available /o\ I will however read them again at some point! Eventually! At least HOB. Once all the (many) warnings are noted, Heavenly Official's Blessing is the one I could recommend.

Possible spoilers?

Scum Villain: Generic. I don't doubt that it caused the continued popularity of teacher/pupil where the pupil is the initiator. Some days I couldn't skim the list of new releases without seeing infinite revamps on the same setup. There was however a nice chapter in the epilogue where the writer of the fic comes to the conclusion that "he did love this world of his," freely, with joy, even if it's been trying to murder him for nearly all the time since his transmigration into that world - a rather meta reflection that I would expect more to see in fic than in the canon. And of course the fanworks have been A+++ given the millennial nature of the MC, meaning infinite memes.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: solid, with the intricacies of all those plot threads coming together, but it does a bunch of things I don't care for -- she loves flashback sections in a way that I do not enjoy, I wasn't hugely invested in the theme of reputation/infamy and all the grief that brings down upon you, even if it was well done, and I'm really not into pushy/overbearing gongs -- lan wangji slides towards that end of the scale. But the set pieces (Yi City, the statue) were fun, as it's not particularly common to see suspense/horror done effectively in cultivation novels.

Heavenly Official's Blessing: HUALIAN INVENTED LOVE I put off reading this for quite a while given the summary (a demon king stalker) and how the other two MLs were, but Hua Cheng, after centuries of obsession, ends up managing the feat of paying attention to the needs and desires of his beloved. Placing them above his own intents actually that's not super great for him but this is tragically rare in the romance section, let alone anywhere else. Not sure about how the parts about belief and everything hangs together - it seems to...help facilitate the incredibly iddy bits where ML swears all the romantic oaths, like dying in battle \o/ (when one partner is a ghost, does willingness to die for someone circle back to being their reason for existence? Hua Hua will find out for his highness!)

The supporting cast is full of charming people, and I was very fond of the side plots (with comedy gems like calling the person you intend to arrest because she was (until a minute ago) the coordinator of all away missions). She kept me invested in most of the threads in the present day - you have the typical revenge cycles, and forgiveness bestowed with an open hand, tangles of debt which can't be resolved by any of the parties involved, and precious tiny revenants cooking inedible scorpion snake casseroles -- Each early case of the week led back into the showering of dog food in the adorable romance of someone who was believably eight hundred years old, battered, and optimistic, and the mysterious hot ghost who loves to troll the rest of Heaven.

You can actually see mxtx's skill grow over the course of three novels! There was only maybe one part towards the end where I felt it dragged a little. ... In addition to, as always, the interminable flashbacks. It's not simply that I can't deal with switching back and forth between two plot threads, but having seen examples that worked for me (priest, in Silent Reading*), the fatal flaw here was a) we had enough clues/summaries to get the gist within the first few pages, and b) the protracted and agonizing fall from the height of glory into an abyss constantly being dug deeper is not...enjoyable....for me to read........especially when I'm much more invested in seeing how they solve it. There were of course some enjoyable bits ( spoiler )so they aren't entirely redundant, but .....fleshed out flashback sections at the fifty percent mark which only added characterization and details to what we could summarize in a few sentence.............. author pls. Leave it for the prequel.

*I guess what Silent Reading did was - priest set up the mystery so that each tiny sip of flashback did actually serve to move the plot forward?

Current Music: cuts ~ hate ~ me~~

Just remembered why Lie Huo Jiao Chou/Inferno Quenching Sorrow/(translation link) was one of the most breathtaking webnovels I had the infinite fortune to read last year, and I should...do a liveblog this time, now that I don't have to wait for updates.
(By Priest who did Guardian and Sha Po Lang, which I think are the two books western fandom is more familiar with? I've rampaged through most of her other works too, and enjoyed them!)

No Public Harm, No Pollution was the contemporary wuxia I didn't know I needed (actually I didn't need that much millennial angst about jobs, housing, relationships in this cold world, ties to the past like ball and chain, debts both financial and moral, ...and so on at 3AM which is why I stopped for several months, but the payoff was worth it.) I'd rec it if the translation wasn't abandoned, but after Lie Huo I think it's probably the best of her works.
Mo Du/Silent Reading is the detective/serial killers one with flashbacks I didn't want to skip ~~unlike MXTX~~
Can Ci Pin/Imperfections is the space opera I read while the Ruin/future housing pav was ongoing (and sideways explaining the random red wine cabinets they seem to require against the chilly ipod color palette (??)
the executive dysfunction one was surprisingly.......arrow to the knee/mood, despite a bit I disagreed with about the medication, but for a webnovel I was very satisfied.
The historical steampunk Sha Po Lang felt unevenly paced, but which also....increased its resemblance to a chronicle of a real war. Campaigns that drag on, internal reversals, the times when everything seems to happen and crush your brave protags, the random people and threads that wander in and out...I'm glad I didn't have to follow it through updates, though.
Guardian was an enjoyable urban fantasy, but it's not the best place to start with her works or with webnovels in general.
Shan He Biao Li, which I'd localize to King of Infinite Space, was the random adventure thriller story, with lots of timey-spacey shenanigans, and a made up ethnic group which I....don't know enough to side-eye.
Liu Yao/The Revitalization of Fuyao Sect is one of those webnovels that does the unexpected thing of allowing bad things to happen to protagonists. Not just the appealing ones like getting one's heart's blood drained, but actual setbacks! Incredible. Webnovels are a genre where 'Sue' as in Mary Sue is a valid trope descriptor so......(Also I remember the little shimei getting named Water Puddle by her loving shixiongs. Realism is so hard to find.............)
Qi Ye and Faraway Wanderers are her very early works, and tbh they show the age by being generic wuxia fics.

I'm very fond of priest's jokes and her voice, and her ability for landing solid, stunning finales is undeniable! Her flaws might be....pacing? This is hard, especially with translations. Also her plots get rather convoluted at times, which is fine for repeat reads but not most webnovels where people tear through the archives.
I'd recommend Lie Huo over her other more translated works because now that I'm looking at the lengths, they do seem to be trilogy sized when traditionally published. It's also easier imo to follow than Guardian with all the kitchen sink underworld mythology references. But of course Lie Huo doesn't yet have a delicious show with chicken-swords and idiots burning out the back of their sweaters with flaming ~~hot~~ wings and beauties reviving from sealed tombs yet.

Current Music: crying over flaming chickens and emperors, again

I haven't read this webnovel yet but wanted to share as many places as humanly possible: a fic where the main pair can have snex (snail/snake sex)

( Read more... )

I'll never manage to make a single post here if I wait for full reviews to appear, so some cn webnovels from jjwxc that I'm currently following:

The adorable Changan Bistro (no translation :<) is finished, scatter flowers \o/ A Tang dynasty gourmet novel where the MC makes her way out of being a palace attendant and sets up her own restaurant business. Belongs to the 市井生活 genre, lit. life in the city markets, or fic about running businesses (pretty much the coffee shop genre, just historical). There's more focus on her franchise and delicious food than in coffee shop aus, but the cute customer to slowburn flirt with and the found family that MC gathers, those CAN be found here! along with a slight assassination plot and the redeeming of her father's name.

I'm really very charmed by the author's style + grasp of classic texts, and of course the loving food descriptions. The pining (on ML's end) and mostly lighthearted banter on MC's end was excellent! Benefits of dating confucian scholars is flirting via philosophy ;> An example: they used that sensual quote from Zhuangzi where "It's better for two fish to forget one another in the rivers and lakes than to depend on each other for survival by wetting their companion with foam in dried springs," and MC points out that to part in freedom they'd have to...have done the other part first ;> ;> ;>

C Language Cultivation: SCREEEEE T_____T the forty meters long knives is dropping on us today. Even a cute meta nod at hello world was not enough to distract me from the part where MC is deciding to ( spoilers )

Palace Intrigue Counterattack Livestream: this fic never fails to hang the reader off a cliff. Their plots tend to go haywire later on, as the secret identities turn into a twenty car pileup, but the beginnings are always fun and we have a while to go yet!

There was another fic I subscribed to but it's not a great time to read about an emperor grooming one of his officials to accept his romantic advances, especially when it's the notoriously paranoid, bloody handed Yongle. Their Yinzhen x strategist one was better but :\ Like I was following this one because......of the author....It's the nature of the romance genre, obviously, to present some relationships that makes the reader queasy, but -- I could have a whole post on 君臣 (sovereign x official) relationships because it's a loyalty kink that's not common in western media. I'd also have to plaster huge warnings over a good half or more over the stuff I've seen, some of which is terrible from miles away in orbit and other which...require the protracted ignoring of stuff that made me as a reader uncomfortable because it's probably going to end up in a happy end, surely? :\

After the late emperor passed: by the author who wrote my beloved [Lu Xiluan's seven ex/con bfs and one she didn't arrest] updating randomly still ;-; The beginning was so full of hijinks and hilarity! Then we hit the past and the plot has been heavy serious defend the nation against invaders without and treasonous officials within, with a huge body count. This has a lovely sovereign x minister in the emperor and her childhood best friend/high noble/general too, which I could love more if not for how I've forgotten everything that happened earlier.

I'm starting to get why the Qidian novels can go on for thousands of chapters of dreck (sorry dudes but it's the majority) now that I have daily updating fic in my reading list. What the daily reader wants is have a dose of these characters and setting on the regular, whereas plot progression results in much wailing and gnashing of teeth when a cliffhanger happens (like Vlad I generalise from myself and adhd brain wants everything now now NOW). I can't compare this to any experience of reading fanfiction since (besides the free vs paid thing) it's rare to find fanfic of this novel sized length that updates in similarly sized chunks, also I avoid wips -- I should probably be thinking of Dickens, if anything.

Current Music: wow even if I try to do cuts the normal way they still hate me??

First, a link to tags on the fiction posting platform JJWXC translated by tumblr user firstchaptertranslations! Some are settings, some are fandom, some are types of relationship or dynamics.

I personally care mostly about historical settings that have people in flowing hair and robes because I am exactly that shallow, and so will broadly divide them here into four categories: the authorities, jianghu, myths/legends, and common life.

Jerks at the top of the pyramid:

Palace Intrigue/宫斗: Centered on the Inner Palace, where the immediate family of the emperor lives, and mostly about the conflict within the harem. As other people also live there, such as the crown prince, other imperial offspring, dowager empresses, and the occasional emperor emeritus, I'm using a more expansive term. Examples include Tale of Yanxi Palace, Legend of Zhenhuan, Princess Returning Pearl
Romancing the emperor/嫖皇帝 (Not an actual term): All relationships involving the emperor. (Several teary paragraphs about how difficult it is to find non-awful emperor x minister/general/wangye removed.) One okay example is this cute and short emperor x fox spirit fic, also the author's other hilarious emperor x awkward rpf writer who slandered the length of his dragon root as long enough to wrap around his waist. (More petty beeping about how bad smut scenes get T__T)
Political Intrigue/权谋: this could be split into further subcategories, depending on the focus - members of the royal family, an official in the civil government (朝堂), a general on the martial side of things, secretive sects, etc. Nirvana In Fire is a great example, or Hero.
Estate intrigue/宅斗: Great families of historical China lived together on the same estate, and the conflicts between concubines and the children of the family are just as fierce and stifling as the Inner Palace. Dream of the Red Chamber is probably the ur-estate intrigue novel.
I've also trawled for fic that deal with women as officials, which tend to include crossdressing a la Mulan. Some are “you can be the male heir we don’t have”, when it comes to members of nobility and royalty. Some have them move up the ranks after passing the meritocracy exams. And some are women as ministers outright, like my absolute favorite [Promotions Bonuses and Dead Reverse Harem], or [Seven love interests that Lu Xiluan arrested and one she didn't], subtitled [Yikes, I still haven't gotten over Terezi Pyrope, a Lu Xiluan and Three Seagrass story]. (It doesn't have a translation yet T___T However please note that Baidu Fanyi is a much better machine translation app than google translate for chinese.)
sub-sub-category: Meritocracy Examinations Fic. It's relaxing to read about people doing well on tests \o/ What it says on the tin: scholars passing the national exams for getting into the bureaucracy. Every so often there's a scrap of classical humanities knowledge that's pretty much the mental equivalent of mashing up mcnuggets to make an awful omelet, but I end up knowing more than I did before, so, \o/

Jianghu/江湖/The pugilist world

I'm placing both cultivation and wuxia novels in this category, as they share some similarities in the societal set-up: far away from the imperial/central authorities, sects and groups abound, along with wandering swordsmen, mysterious hermits or eccentrics, and the odd sweeper.

Wuxia: A more familiar term to western audiences, where people zip around midair totally not because of wires, exciting leveling up opportunities are to be had once you fall off a cliff, and something something wacky stuff about meridians mean that you can disrobe for healing sessions. ...lbr wuxia is halfway to fantasy already, unless it's a low tech one and all you have for flavouring are the blood feuds and bitter entanglements of favors and debt. Jin Yong pretty much revitalised this genre for the modern era, and a modern setting version is [No Public Harm, No Pollution] by priest.
Cultivation/修仙: Cultivation/xianxia stories are Daoism fantasy in the way that vampire stories and works like Good Omens are Christian fantasy. The main purpose is to meditate, practice, and seek opportunities to improve yourself in order to level up in immortality, which can be done under the guidance of a shifu who may be part of a sect/group. You can find demons, ghosts, animal/plant/mineral/location/inanimate object spirits 妖/精/怪, as well as 仙 immortals, as well pure benevolent spirits 灵 around here. Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation and Scum Villain's Self Saving System are both cultivation settings, despite variations in the world-building details. There are fusions with modern or future settings, such as [My five elements lack YOU], or this excellent [C Language Cultivation] I'm following, where the main character levels up through coding! And venture capital! .... (Brief soapbox: generic-spirits/demons ought to be translated into fae, because spirits are more 灵, while demons are 魔, and fae conveys the nature connection better than spirit.)

Mythology:

Cultivation has connections but is not identical to myth fic, as the former rarely uses 'canon' characters from mythology sources, such as the Classic of Mountains and Sea, Investiture of the Gods, Stories from a Chinese Studio, and Journey to the West, although that's not really what differentiates them to me -- mythology fic are the ones with angsty romances doomed by the fates, or ancient beasties in the modern world, or crackfic involving unreliable spirits and yet more unreliable gods. I would place Heavenly Official's Blessing here, along with that one show with the grape spirit Ashes of Love?, and the (based on a plagarized work) Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms, which ripped off the melancholy, atmospheric m/m work Peach Blossom Debt by Dafengguaguo.

Everyday life/布衣生活 (lit. plain clothed lives, in contrast to the brocades of nobility):

Away from the centers of power or the unfettered jianghu, people still have to make a living, and so you have the stories about farmers tending their crops, scholars planning to take their exams, widows labouring at their small businesses in the cities, or random hunter households in the mountain who end up taking in a mysterious wounded figure and tending to them for weeks, before, on a night with wild winds and no moon, a group of assassins come to....and there it slipped back into the other three categories, whoops ;0

All of the above are set in either real historical China or a generic pureed version of the same.

Other settings I've read in:

Urban Fantasy: Guardian, my beloved Lie Huo Jiao Chou/Inferno quenching Sorrow
Escape rooms: Individuals are pulled into pocket universes and required to battle bosses and find a way out without dying in the process. Mostly horror. Examples include Death Kaleidoscope, Global Exams
Narcissus fic水仙: Selfcest, mostly involves time travel and/or rebirth. I've only read one fic in this but it's such a charming name, even if translating it into english removes a layer of allusiveness since it's using the name of the flower.
Republican Era China: end of Qing Dynasty to second world war

Settings I don't care about:

Modern day:

Entertainment circles: Acting, music, livestreamers, internet celebrities. I ship My Adversary X Me was adorable.
Billionaires
School (from high school to universities)
E-sports: The King's Avatar is supposed to be the paragon of this genre, but, it's also more than a thousand chapters long and I don't have that much life in me.
年代文 Decade/era fic. Everything from the fifties to the noughties. (Set in China, mostly transmigration/rebirth)

Future:

Space AUs, including mecha: So much boring ABO T__T Most of the modern genres, with a thin layer of Space! slapped on, with some space empires and insect aliens. Whenever I think about reading one I remember Three Body Problem is still on my TBR list at which point I slink away. However I did see a space lawyers thing that was...good..... Priest's Can Ci Pin/Imperfections was a solid space opera.
Zombie apocalypses: Elemental based mutation/magic and evolved ‘zombie kings’ are a staple.

Other:

Western Fantasy
self insert fic for MCU and other fandoms
Animal transformation: Cats, foxes, and pandas obviously, but hamsters are also popular for some inexplicable reason, also silver tailed mountain tits, no wolves that I can recall, apparently dolphins?
Mermaid AUs: ...... I saw a generic pre-unification Spring and Autumn era one with a head of state turned into a mermaid and being found by her enemy head of state once, and that's the only way you'll get me to look at those.

Additional setups that may be combined with all of the above:

Gourmand/美食: The only one I've seen in western works is in Dzur from Dragaera, where Vlad describes his meal at Valabar in sumptuous detail, with at best tenuous connection to the plot. Kinda like an entire novel's worth of 'storytime before a recipe' strung together! Fantasy Farm cracked me up every time they put narrating the plot on hold so MC could focus on making a delicious dish. There's also Palace Full of Delicacies, where the imperial family are werecats and MC is a fish chef.
Transmigration/穿越: Someone being transferred to a different setting from their original one, mostly historical ones and in-universe books. They can do so as themselves, as a new character, or as the spirit taking up the life of a pre-existing individual, who may be dead or alive. (Sometimes you get the original character recovering their bodies after a transmigrator fucks their life up.) Popular genres include Qing Dynasty transmigration, probably the root of all these; book transmigration, in which someone gets plunked into a plot which they can follow or disobey as they will; and quick transmigration, where the individual only stays a short time in each setting/AU, like Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles.
If it's the historical time travel type, there's a tendency for them to import shit like gunpowdersaltextractionsoapcornpotatoeschilipeppersadvertisementschemesalcoholdistillationimprovedbowsnovels all in the same book, which now reads like an essay by someone in junior high: "And Here's How Potatoes Alleviated The Problem of Crop Failures." "If Only Our Nation Had Made Preparations Earlier." Prime Directive? Butterfly Effect? Can those be cooked with hot pot. >_> No expansion of the social effects of copy-pasting the next thousand years or so of technological advancements beyond the superficial. And to think that I used to secondhand cringe at the summary of 1632.
Rebirth重生: Someone who dies (probably in pieces) gets to go back to a time before everything went wrong
System系统: Deux ex machina for making the main character follow the plot. A typical system can be one where regular joe MC is required to fulfill the plot of a character in a book, or to accomplish a certain type of task.
Mary Sue and Refreshing 爽: it doesn't really register any more ;___; With transmigration, rebirth, system, and gold finger (aka advantage buff), it's rarer to find a fic where the author doesn't have their thumb on the scales in their protag's favor. Most of the time it's more like a Hannibal crime scene of arms on the scale >-<
Villain Redemption反派洗白: subcategory of transmigration/rebirth/system popular these days - you can't move without hitting one of these.

As an example of trope smorgasbord, I'm currently following a Book transmigration/Animal transformation/Broadcasting System/Gourmand/Cultivation/Political Intrigue/BL romance entitled [Transmigrating into the Villain Tyrant's Pet Crane], in which our brave MC gets transmigrated into a book in which he is the cranefucking tyrant...'s pet magic crane. Luckily, he has a System to help him gain powers! His task: run a cooking channel. As a crane. In a thinly veiled version of pre-unification China, where resources like food are scarce, and the emperor is being puppeted by an evil magic chancellor. MC has to contend with all of those in addition to the buddy he picked up on the run, who seems to have a growing crush on him, who also lives in the palace and never appears when the emperor is around.....

It's actually pretty fun! And this is where webnovels are today, I guess? Tropes being infinitely combined without infinite diversity, since most of these works are being serialised on website where you have to pay for them, and authors do chase markets. See the flood of shou shizuns vs their terrible disciples they raised, following in the wake of works like Scum Villain. You could honestly fill a generator with the titles commonly used. Mostly I've read works posted on jjwxc, which has majority female reader base. In contrast, Qidian is supposed to have mostly male writers? Novels over there are ridiculously long and.......very much not to my taste. I'm fairly satisfied with where I'm looking for works. Gongzicp is another site, and Saowen, and Longma for explicit works ~~you'll need brain bleach for~~.

Next post I complain about the lack of fic that isn't awful in the palace shenaniganry genre.