#the thing about asking for Shui Hu Zhuan rep here is what if I hit the monkey's paw and Song Jiang ends up being a good person 🥶

[melonymint753]

oh yeah I finished Iron Widow around 2 months ago - I guess it's okay? It was great fun to see names I already know but I definitely wouldn't have been as into it otherwise. My brain is also too steeped in longer books (really this just means Agatha Christie) so the probably-YA-genre-induced pace felt almost breakneck, like wait how is this chapter already over wha--

<awkward segue time>

Seeing this was hilarious because my main complaint (besides not having any main Shui H- *smashed by bunny mecha pestle*) is that the book cannot tonally decide whether it's a modern/future setting where the characters are Chinese, but do speak English, or still a traditional ancient Chinese setting in a futuristic environment, that's translated into English on a meta level. There's words like "alpha male" which is very modern English, but then there's literal Chinese from various time periods so which is it?

(plus the Chinese isn't translated at places so non-speakers have to look stuff up themselves. So it's trying to appeal to Chinese speakers with those "easter eggs" but also has modern western words to appeal to non-Chinese people which results in the vibes clashing. Also I get that "skies" as an exclamation is from 天呐 but there's "heavens" which is more natural in English, so what do you want to be, book??)

anyway I feel that knowing Chinese both cursed me and also meant I actually could like it.

Read it for book 2 Di Renjie, please be good/10

forgot to add: I'm glad that Gao Qiu ended up being a dipshit and was killed off, but this just ups my standards that the original Gao Qiu was a *conniving* kind of dipshit in a quick and dirty sense, and not the spider web sense, and his death was too painless, but we can't have everything.