#and someone on the firstprince weibo tag wrote an idea for a firstprince this novel au

[meraki-yao]

Heads up this is a little different from what I usually post and it's not RWRB related, i completely wrote this for fun

There's a rom-com danmei web novel (danmei, a genre of queer/mlm literature popular in China) that I wished more people here knew about because it's hilarious, sweet, unhinged, and honestly a really good template for fanfics, in fact over here most of the popular gay ships have a fanfic/ fan edits of it

It's called Mister Dior (it has nothing to do with the luxury brand) and it's set in a world pretty much like ours, with the exception that everyone has a thing called a smartbrain, which is essentially a smartphone directly implanted into a human brain (don't think too much about it)

The main characters of the story I'll simplify to Zhang (top, yes these things are fairly fixed in this genre and contribute to their personality) and Jiao (bottom) who have been married for seven years. They're both CEOs of big companies, but while Jiao has rich parents, Zhang built up his company by himself. At the beginning of the story, their relationship isn't bad per se, but they are having communication issues and drifting apart slightly.

One day Zhang gets into a mild car accident causing a concussion, but also a side effect which is the point of the story: before the collision, he was browsing trashy, tropey romance novels using his smart brain, and the collision hit his head so hard that the novels and his own consciousness got mixed up

The consequence is for a variable period of time, he will think he is the main character of a certain novel, Jiao is his love interest, and everyone around assimilates into some role from the story

Each novel is called a "script" and it's all hilariously tropey, you have ABO, Mafia, Vampire etc, all together 9 AUs, plus he's still in the real world, so it's like 10 stories in one web novel, all of which turn into comedy because the real world is still the real world and Jiao is trying really hard to deal with each script without setting off anyone else's alarms

And at the same time, because he has no filter when in character, Zhang ends up revealing certain things about their relationship that help them learn more about each other, understand each other better and improve their relationship, they come out stronger than ever

So TL DR: you have one half of the couple jumping through 9 AUs and the other half desperately trying to play along while still living their daily lives of prominent CEOs and semi public figures, all while learning more about and improving their relationships

It's sweet, it's kinky, it's fun and it's fucking hilarious.

And more than the novel, there's a completed radio drama and an ongoing comic of the novel. The radio drama, although in Mandarin, is an amazing production, one of the most popular on the radio drama platform, passing one hundred million plays earlier this year. It's how I learned about this novel as well. Me re-listening to the radio drama these days is what prompted me to write this lol

And the thing is because of the structure of the story, it's really easy to change the "script" and put in other ships, I wish more people explored this

Yeah anyway I wish more people knew about this it's just amusing

Plus nearly everyone's name is a pun lmao