whitebearcom

[feiyukicchi]

These two idiots are definitely tempting fate in some way 💀

[orphiclovers]

Second time Yoo Joonghyuk's name appears in the entire novel and he's already called the tragedy of the world. Brother it's so over. Most doomed by the narrative guy to ever exist

[salmonsaur]

you may not look directly at god. (July 2023)

[dumbass-tm]

*twirls my hair* hiii tged fandom :3

idfk anymore im so tired 😭😭😭

[dyinggirldied]

It might be just me but I feel sad that Shang Qinghua is a footnote of a character from his own novel. Yes, he is the cute, loser, overworked, pathetic hamster that the fandom loves to pick on and coos and relates to at times. But within the SVSSS universe, he is the creator of the world but is sidelined and dismissed, MXTX doesn't care about giving him a name outside of his villain (og SQ)'s name, not even a mention like she does with Shen Yuan, the now Shen Qingqiu.

You might argue that at least there is Mobei Jun, the only one who love SQ is his literal dream man which is great but their relationship gonna needs a lot of therapy/advice from their friends because unlike with Luo Binghe, who is half human and has spent time as human in human world enough to understand human culture and needs, which is wildly different from the violent demon world.

[lynn-tged-posting]

so i've been working through the tged webnovel (really, really slowly) (but im getting there!) (it's been REALLY fun i love their banter so so much i wish there was more of it in the webtoon)

and i keep thinking back to chapter 43, where lloyd is surveying the wetlands and arcos comes with him

i don't really have much new insight, i just think about their interaction in this chapter a lot, especially since it's one that doesn't show up in the webtoon adaptation

arcos going out of his way to spend time with his son, and making him a lunch that he knows his son loved, all as an unspoken apology

because "how could he", right? how could a father hate his son and only start to love him again when success has been found? that's so haunting to realize; that someone you loved so much, someone you raised and nurtured, someone you knew the favorite foods of and why, could become someone you hate. and then, the son you once raised, the son who became a stranger, went and grew up without you.

did i give up too soon? did i abandon my own son? ... what kind of father does that? ... right?

and so he does what he can to offer repentance. he takes time out of his day to engage with what his son is doing. he shows that he still remembers his son, the boy who would rather eat boiled eggs and tomatoes over any other dish. he offers it all in a basket, carrying the love he feels he should've given to lloyd a long, long time ago.

... and it's not even the original lloyd frontera who receives it.

we don't get to know what suho is thinking in this moment, but i think his silence speaks volumes.

... because "how could he", right? how could this fraud in another man's body accept this silent apology that isn't truly owed to him? this man, this baron, this father, is asking for forgiveness when he had every right to be angry with the original owner of this body. and he doesn't even realize, because how would he possibly know his original fate? only you do.

this wasn't meant for me ... right?

but suho doesn't reject him, either. he doesn't interrupt arcos, he doesn't leave. they sit together and eat boiled eggs with honeyed tomatoes in silence.

it makes me wonder what suho is thinking about, what he's feeling, what he's remembering...

because (and call me crazy, call me speculative) heaven knows the love language of an asian parent.

here's some cut fruit. here's your favorite snack. here's dinner. i've brought it here to you.

you're working so, so hard. i'll support you, i'll be here. don't worry about anything else, just keep growing.

i love you, i love you, i love you, attached to every plate.

"this was your favorite food when you were young. ... i should have given you as many boiled eggs and tomatoes as you wanted."

and again, it's a little bit of speculation from me, but i think that's why suho doesn't say no, why he lets arcos make this apology. it's a piece of what he misses most.

and so they both leave a little bit healed. "the basket was lighter on the way home. and albeit very slightly, their steps became lighter as well." it might not have been between the right souls, but it's a weight lifted nonetheless.

... all this to say that i am absolutely MOURNING that this didn't make it into the adaptation!!!

i understand that with comic adaptations, there are going to be some cuts to ensure pacing and workload stays reasonable, but this would've been absolutely devastatingly emotional (/pos) to witness visually,

because what would lloyd's (suho's) face look like? what expression would he make, can we visually see how he feels? and arcos, what does he see when he looks at his son? fatherly love and solemn regret, painted all over his face, what does that look like to the adapter? to the artist? to us?

and in general too, we lost the characterization and relationship of arcos to suho; i really, really wish it made it in :(

end post

[transsongtaewon]

I think it's fun that the explanation for why the system is the way it is, is that "it's something the people in this world would understand because it's reminiscent of video games etc." It's really funny because the way it plays out in canon is very much localised to korean media (and a few other places) specifically.

Like, in the context of a south korean webnovel, the ranking system makes a lot of sense, but it's not really a trope in, say, usamerican media. Imagine a 72 year old who almost had an aneurysm helping their nephew set up a wii console in 2008 trying to parse a system interface that assumes you've played an rpg before.

Try explaining why S is above A in the rankings.

[kiddokori]

seeing a mutual that you became mutuals with over an entirely unrelated piece of media start reblogging posts from your current obsession makes me feel like the sickos window guy like yes YES!!!!

[yaoigoddess9158]

I just realized…

600 chapters is a fucking lot of chapters to read

600 is a lot of PAGES to read

I’m pretty sure if I looked at a 600 page novel in real life I would refuse to read it

What am I doing with 600 chapters?!??!?

[miinteaa]

Sskk redraw of a panel from The Disabled Tyrants Beloved Pet Fish

[yellowocaballero]

dude psyched ur reading orv, insanely curious about ur takes

My friend @charterandbarter put it best.

ORV is pretty fascinating to me. It's really just a self-insert isekai OP webnovel, and it is nothing else. Its medium is trashy and lowbrow, and its genre is almost devoid of high art. OP isekais are 'id' stories, meant to be satisfying and fun and contain very little of substance. ORV is a very well executed OP isekai - it contains the elements of the genre that make it satisfying, it understands why people read the genre and enjoy it, it reproduces those elements very well, and it is very concerned with telling an enjoyable story. ORV really, really loves webnovels and isekais and shitty wishfuillment stories. There's a lot more to ORV than the 'fist pump' moments of kdj doing something cool or pulling a fast one on a shmuck, but those moments are the undoubtedly the point of ORV, as they are the point of all SIOC isekai OP webnovels. And that's the point of ORV.

Metanarrative stories are cheap. Neil Gaiman's written 30 and millenials love waxing philosophical about the power of narratives. These metanarratives tend to describe stories as a theoretical framework through which we understand the world and our lives. Therefore, stories are tremendously important and valuable because they contain the totality of religion, history, culture, relationships, and lives. ORV says this too. But this theory tends to land at mystifying and exalting stories on virtue of them being stories, which I think misses the point. Stories aren't special because they're stories. They're not more sacred for containing our lives. What ORV says is that stories are important, because our lives are important. I like that a lot more.

ORV says that stories are our way of ordering a disordered world. A history, culture, nation, and religion are stories. None of those stories are true or real, because histories/cultures/nations/religions are constructs - they're how we interface with reality. They're created with a purpose, told for a point, pulled together into a narrative, and are satisfying or dissatisfying based on certain factors. ORV's perspective on fiction is deeply seeped in its own nature as 'low art'. There's something very cynical and commercialized about narratives in ORV, and every narrative in ORV is being told for a quick buck or to try and spread an idea for an individual's gains. It's a very unromantic, unimpressed view of narratives and fiction. It's pretty much the only way a SIOC OP isekai webnovel like ORV can talk about it without being disingenuous. And it's remarkably raw and visceral as a result, because ORV loves SIOC OP isekai webnovels like kdj loves yjh. Fiercely, insanely, like breathing, exactly for what it is. No pretensions.

It's bizarre, because ORV is about love. It's not about love for anything that deserves it. Not for a story with a lot of literary merit, a main character who is a remotely kind or lovable person, or art itself outside of its commercial or philosophical value. kdj really, really, really fucked loved TWS - because it was there, and because it lasted 15 years, and because it was fake, and because it was what he had. He loves yjh because yjh was his only companion in a dark world. That's fiction. Fiction helped him survive, because love is a way of ordering a disordered world.

I'm still reading myself, but ORV seems to be about how we manage to live in a hard world, and how to find it within ourselves to love each other and find meaning in that hard world. I see why kdj's the protagonist: he can find merit in something for existing, and loving it for being there, and he holds onto something because he has it. He sees the value in that. He read it in a book.

TL;DR: ORV is well-executed trashy commercialized art that is so obsessed with trashy commercialized art that it's looped straight back around into being somehow the most raw and visceral depiction of love I've seen in a long time.

[ot3]

"should I read orv" it is longer than the Bible ma'am

using the bible as a metric to make any decisions in life. L.

[fellamarsh]

another thing i've been trying to do recently is read more self-published stuff. "but fell," you say, "you're a self-published author. surely you've been reading self-published stuff all along" and then i laugh for so long in response we both become uncomfortable.

see, the fear (which has for a long time been killing my mind) that i'll read other self-published stuff and find out that it's so much better than mine that i might as well stop writing forever kept me from doing that basically ever. i have a hard time not unfavorably comparing my work to others and had convinced myself i was being smart by withholding an avenue of de-motivation (reader: i was not being smart). it also doesn't help that i'm pretty low income and have a hard time spending money on books i haven't already read, and that self-published stuff isn't always available at the library---but really a lot of it was just me being a coward. which i'm working on. i could talk about how this particular cowardice is Very Silly, but i think enough has been said about it on writeblr and in the Writing Space in general that i don't feel the need to (though i will if anyone wants me to).

instead, i wanna talk about the self-published things i have read in the past few months and ask about the self-published things you love!

so: what happened was i got real sick, and while i was real sick i (naturally) read over 200,000 words of ace attorney fan fiction in the span of a few days. eventually i got bored of it (and also maybe annoyed at how people were characterizing some of my guys), but i still wanted to read something gay and romantic and nice, something i knew was gonna end happily, which isn't my typical fare.

now you may be saying (having gotten over all the uncomfortable laughter from earlier) "fell, you write gay romance. what do you mean that's not your typical fare?" listen. until a couple months ago i hadn't read a cut and dry romance novel since before i finished college. for context: i graduated in 2015. i know it doesn't make sense. i'm a guy who doesn't make sense.

but in this case it worked to my advantage. not the not making sense thing, but the not having read Published Romance in 1000 years thing. I didn't know where to start. I was very skeptical of everything the library had Available Now in the Gay Fantasy Romance category. what if it was all bad and also not good?

and then i scrolled past the familiar cover of our very own @ashen-crest's A Rival Most Vial.

now this was comfortable territory! this was a novel by a very nice writeblr person whose posts i enjoy! i already loosely knew the plot, i was familiar with the characters, i knew the names of things like rosemond street and the griffin's claw and that ambrose had blue hair and that at the end of it all there would definitely be Boyfriends. i didn't have to worry that this would be bad! i only had to worry that it would be really good!

but i wasn't worried about that, because i was officially Not Writing at the time, and because why the hell hadn't i read this book yet Ash literally emailed me some very kind words last year when my cat died??

Y'all, I devoured ARMV. If you haven't read it yet---especially if cozy fantasy is more your thing than it is mine---you should check it out Immediately. It was fun! It was heartwarming! It was sweet and earnest and confident! I was delighted to find it was occasionally hot! Ambrose and Eli snuggled up into my sick exhausted heart and found a permanent little place there. (Especially Ambrose. I have such a thing for Stiff Guys who Kind of Suck for Tragic Backstory Reasons and are So So Lonely They Don't Even Realize It. gawd)

(And a very small part of my brain spent the whole time wondering why I had been so afraid to really engage with the work my community is doing. The community that I'm in. The one I'm a part of. Why?! Maybe more on that later.)

But from there the curse was broken! I immediately devoured @stjohnstarling's What Manner of Man in a similar sort of frenzy (and hooooly shit guys am I excited for the expanded, finalized version to come out at the end of next month!) and started digging into @lurinatftbn's The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere (which I can already tell is going to be an All Time Favorite).

And now I want to ask you what your favorite self-published books are so that I can read them, too, but I think I will in another post that doesn't dedicate so much space to talking about my various and sundry Issues and isn't Terminally Long

[rigelmejo]

On a lighter note. If you're a language learner browsing forums and sites, some fairly chill ones to check out:

Chinese-Forums.com: there are a lot of good study suggestions on here, and people who have shared their progress and stuff they did to study X skills. Even if you are not studying Chinese, a lot of their discussions can apply to learning other languages. And if you've ever been on some japanese learner forums where people tended to attack more over "study MY way, not X way," this forum has much less of that. So I've found the ideas shared on here have also been useful for applying to how I study other languages. Some great tips on reading here.

forum.language-learners.org: this site may be easier to find posts for, if you go to a web search site (google, duckduckgo, searx.space) and search this site's name as well as the question you have. So for example "language-learners.org how to improve reading skill" or "language-learners.org listening reading method." This forum has posts by many language learners, who share experiences with study methods, progress they've made, language challenges and study methods and how they went progress wise. It's very useful for looking up study methods and how they've worked/not worked for people, and seeing people's progress they share. The forum seems a bit less ready to attack others compared to some subreddits on reddit.

reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish: Dreaming Spanish is a youtube channel and website that teaches Spanish through pure comprehensible input designed lessons (and the creator designed the lessons for Automatic Language Growth, but people use DS in a variety ways including as practice to supplement explicit study so the community is somewhat open to people studying DS in ways besides purely comprehensible-input). The subreddit is more focused on pure ALG method, so no looking words up and no trying to translate in your head and no explicit vocabulary and grammar study, because that's how DS instructs students to study using it. But their study suggestions still work very well with other study methods, so if you are a learner doing a lot of explicit study like anki flashcards and textbooks, the Spanish resources suggested on DS subreddit are still useful for practicing listening to Spanish or reading Spanish. It's also cool to see people share their progress doing an ALG method, and a lot of people on DS subreddit share how they're doing, what they've done so far, progress during different stages. I did a lot of digging a while back, to try and see if any learners who did the ALG method shared WHEN they spoke, and how they improved their speaking over time. And also, when they found content made for native speakers understandable. DS subreddit has a lot of learners sharing that stuff - when they started speaking, how they're practicing it, how it's improved over time, when they could understand X content and how well they could understand it and how it's improving.

Heavenly Path Notion Site: excellent resource for finding recommendations of content to read/listen to in Chinese. I think their ranking of difficulty on their website is incredibly useful, and matches well to my own experiences. Their recommendations for how to start learning to read Chinese are also super solid, from mentioning Pleco and graded reader options to suggesting when to transition to materials for native speakers around (1000-2000 words learned/HSK 4) and which materials to start with (their Newcomer recommendations are way easier than the novels I started trying to read with). MoonIvy has posted recommendations on Heavenly Path, and shared their progress on reddit and other forums as well, and their journey and progress learning is something I'm hoping to follow along after lol. They're a great example of progress through reading Chinese. There's other people involved in Heavenly Path who also made amazing progress, someone shared they read SaYe within a few months of starting to learn Chinese, then increased novel difficulty from there! If you are learning to Chinese and wish to eventually read webnovels, I highly encourage you to check out this site and start working on reading as soon as possible. Their guide on reading has a place to start for anyone (beginner graded reader suggestions even if you only know 300 words like Mandarin Companion, and up), and if you follow that guide I do think it's entirely reasonable you will be reading a novel for kids by the end of the year (like TuTu DaWang) and a webnovel by an author you love in 2 years (or sooner, if you read a lot or aren't an absolute beginner... after all, I read some of a Priest novel within 1 year, and some people who referenced Heavenly Path's recommendations read bl webnovels Within the first year of studying). Reading that novel you love in Chinese is not an unobtainable goal, it's something you can do in 1-2 years. Please check out Heavenly Path's recommendations for a path to achieving that, with reading material that may not feel as hard as if you randomly selected novels.

[fangirlingmoments]

I may not know much about them but these two images give me life

[park-seobang]

Thinking about episode 11 and 12 together and how both Jihyuk and Jiwon self-sabotaged in each

In ep 11, Jihyuk pushed her away after the confession because he still thinks that he doesn’t deserve her (despite the fact that he was brought back for her)

And in ep 12, Jiwon pushed him away after seeing Yura because she’s traumatized and conditioned into thinking she doesn’t deserve good things (…despite the fact that he was litchrally brought back for her)