#and this slowburn realization of 'holy fucking shit this book is GENIUS' came for me in the week after I closed the book

[hunxi-after-hours]

Hello! Firstly, thank you for everything that you do- your meta is always fascinating and your fic may have gotten me into ballet. Secondly- She Who Became The Sun: why is that book so good? I went in with such high expectations and yet somehow it completely met them!

words cannot contain how excited I am that folks are enjoying She Who Became the Sun!!!! look I just want the best things for Shelley Parker-Chan, all the time, okay

I feel like the reason SWBTS is so good is because it's so goshdarned competent on multiple levels of fiction writing, like:

plot: did you see that second-to-third act twist coming because I sure didn't

character: I feel like a lot of epic fantasy (or historical epic!) can struggle with humanizing their characters and allowing them to be flawed, hesitant people beyond their epic, prophesied purpose, but SPC manages to strike that careful balance between human and legend

themes: sometimes you read a book with excellent plot and characterization but then you get to the end of it and you're like "well, guess that was that" because when you actually look at it, the ideas and concepts in the book aren't all that complex. and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that! I love rollicking good yarns! but SWBTS deals with some very morally gray characters and situations, especially with its main characters (love it when authors make their protagonists morally gray in a morally gray world, instead of morally pure in a morally gray world), and that's what gives it staying power in my mind

language: I lost my goddamn mind over SPC's use of translation and style in this book, the absolutely mind-boggling thing is that SWBTS reads like it's in translation and I'm just. yelling

content/concept: I mean, just like "founding of the Ming Dynasty but make it queer/historical fantasy/not at all what you'd expect" is just. SPC your MIND. and the fact that SPC sets their novel in identifiably Ming Dynasty China, from material details (can we talk about the scene where Ma is repairing armor with pages torn from books because holy shit) to place names to twists of language is so fucking cool. look, I respect authors who take their East Asian inspirations and set them in secondary world SF/F. in fact, I prefer those works (Ninefox Gambit my beloved), but for SPC to go "nah, I'm going to set it in what is identifiably China" is super fucking kickass, okay

novelty: Brandon Sanderson wrote a wild epilogue in Stormlight Archive where one of his characters (Hoid, I love you) muses on the nature of art, asking what is the most important thing in establishing the greatness of a work? And he comes to the conclusion that's not quality, nor is it ingenuity--it's novelty. It's doing something before anyone else does it. And I don't think anyone is doing it quite like SPC is--not Ken Liu, not R.F. Kuang, not Zen Cho (though don't get me wrong, those three authors are also creating incredible content). SPC really was like "I couldn't find any cdrama-like stories in English so I wrote my own" and then proceeded to do exactly that

tl;dr SWBTS is a tour de force on multiple levels