i literally love saying "ON IT BOSS!!!!!" whenever someone asks me to do something like i'm some sort of henchman. it doesn't matter if they're my boss or not for real even because in the moment they are, and whatever they requested of me i'm on it
Sorry, my what? My pronouns? Oh, yeah I'm between genders at the moment. No, it's cool, I quit my last gender a little while ago because it really wasn't working out. I don't know if I even have a dream gender anymore.
Oh yeah, it did come with benefits, but they weren't really worth it. The culture was really toxic. To be honest I think I'd prefer a part-time gender so I can just be self-described in my spare time.
I mean, in a perfect world we wouldn't need gender, you know? We could just voluntarily be perceived as much as we're able, as much as makes us feel fulfilled. Having a full-time gender shouldn't be a prerequisite for food, shelter, and healthcare.
yeah i drive the truck that isekais all those lonely 20yo NEETs and bored salarymen. it’s a really hard job. they keep sending me to workplace counselling after each hit. “it’s normal to feel guilt at ending someone’s life,” they say. how do i tell them that’s not what makes me feel guilty? “but it’s okay. he’ll live a better life in another world.” yeah, with 100 girls who could have lived normal lives but got drafted into being in these boring dudes’ harems. how many women’s lives have i ruined. and they don’t even know. they don’t even know
Sounds like you need "His Soul is Marching On to Another World; or, the John Brown Isekai" by CabbagePreacher, an actual fic on AO3 about famed abolitionist martyr John Brown getting isekaied to such a world and going on a rampage abolishing harems.
Look, this is my litmus test: I pretend I am the original Earl of Sandwich. I have asked for non-bread foods to be brought to me inside bread, that I might more easily consume them one-handed while gambling.
This does not enable my wretched regency habits. This is not what I asked for. I do not deign to grace it with the name of my house.
I remember seeing a reddit post going around that compared pidw to the popular light novel Against the Gods to great comic effect, and the whole thing might honestly be more comical than what the memes suggest.
Because as far as I can tell, these two novels started serializing at almost exactly the same time.
If the publicly available info is correct, this means that neither work could be directly inspired by the other, and goes to show just how derivative and predictable this genre of power fantasy has become at this point in time.
A more direct translation of this type of fiction is the "stud novel", initially said with some humor and probably some self-deprecation. The thing about the word "zhongma" (种马), or stud, is that it doesn't have the same kind of situationally flattering connotations as its English counterpart, and literally just means a male horse used for breeding. You'd never see a popular lady's man and say "ah, what a zhongma." The more romantic translation of "stallion" came later. It's considered a sub-genre of the broader "YY novel" genre (lit. translation "mentally masturbatory novel), which just means fantastical wish-fulfillment light novels with no interest in realism, and does not necessarily have to do with sex.
(As a side note, "shooting airplane" literally means "to masturbate". It's not so much a metaphor as just one of the most common and direct euphemisms for masturbation.)
I've seen too many "stallion" novels, mostly from the 2000s, that follow the exact same formula as both pidw and Against the Gods that I honestly can't tell you which ones probably went into inspiring pidw, because they all blur together into a giant skinner box of never-ending dopamine loops and same-y story arcs.
One thing about these books is that most (successful ones) were not the kind of ultra pornographic, out-there kinky stories we sometimes associate pidw with, and they were more concerned with massaging the (default straight male) reader's ego and their dopamine addiction than their cucumber. Some had decent female followings, too, though women were clearly not the main target audience. One story I do still remember, funnily enough, had a protagonist also named Bing something, and I remember it mostly because it was a sort of bizarre combination of Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen, high fantasy wizard fights, revenge drama, and the usual harem shenanigans.
That is to say, the idea of a gary stu demon emperor who also mains cooking isn't all that strange for a Chinese power fantasy protagonist. Most of these protagonists all share very similar origin stories. The secret heir of some great power, a pretty-boy blessed with a special "golden finger", which only unlocks after a obligatory whump period to make the eventual payoff all the sweeter.
Many of these protagonists, a stereotypical "straight dude" Western™️ reader might find goofy, or strange, or straight up effeminate. They embody a very Chinese millennial kind of machismo that's less Batman and more Monkey King but unimaginably conventionally attractive--conventionally attractive as in tall, athletic but still slender, pretty but not girl-pretty. The truly androgynous sort of look is usually reserved for antagonists (hi, Dongfang Bubai). The hunks are usually the sidekicks (hello, mobei-jun).
But don't mistake most of these "softer" harem novel mcs for anything but raging misogynists; it's just that often times, when looking in from another culture, their brand of misogyny might appear to flip flop between cartoonishly heinous to too subtle to notice. To be fair, I don't think most of these authors were deliberately writing misogynistic stories to make some kind of political point, it's just that the end result is usually no less grim or revealing. It was a sort of "naive art," especially during the early days when the genre was still consolidating into the cultural behemoth it eventually became, and direct engagement with gender discourse was low.
So here comes Bingge, who could almost, almost be considered a working class hero if you disregard the fact that he is literally royalty, and that he acquires inconceivable wealth, and that he eventually becomes the absolute monarch of the entire known universe. He supposedly comes from nothing, and was probably considered no better than a slave during his early childhood arc (all we know is that his mother was a washerwoman who worked for some noble house. This was usually a slave or indentured servant's job.)
The brief facade of an underdog narrative is all but mandatory in these types of stories, and it speaks of the contradictory impulses that demand the protagonist be simultaneously relatable and all-powerful. He should become the preeminent establishment, but also be anti-establishment in a cool rebellious way. He should destroy all the corrupt sects, kill all the evil shizuns, slay all the unjust gods, but only if he gets to replace the gods and be even more powerful than all of them combined.
The harem part of the stories also hone in on the same kind of contradictions. The protagonist spends pages waxing poetics about the women he meets, but is too cool for school and usually doesn't care much for actual believable relationships. He's kind of down-to-earth, but also an untouchable sex god. Everybody he non-cons falls in love with him eventually. He is also non-conned sometimes but it's fine because he likes it. There's this palpable sense of earnest anguish to the whole sex god thing that you'd probably immediately pick up on if you read one of these stories, in that it's painfully clear that neither the writer nor the intended reader has any idea what a plausible sex god might look like from their own pov.
This leaves Bingge in a bit of a strange place, because svsss' parody of a stallion novel is more or less a perfect copy of these patterns, until it all falls apart the moment Bingge gets displaced into the "main" svsss world. It takes him all of two hours to start questioning it all, leading to one of the most weirdly macabre moments of the novel. I don't think the Bingge vs Bingmei incident was even meant to be all that disturbing, but it ends up creating something that comes across as indescribably miserable, as the fandom is deeply aware. This cheerfully fan-servicy wish-fulfilment story, created by some (probably closeted) young author to cheer up, de-stress, and numb the pain of millions of readers with gratuitous dopamine loops, accidentally results in existential dread so uncontainable that it breaks dimensions and grows genuinely monstrous in all its assumptions and implications.
RIP Bingge. To yall reading this, thanks for coming along for the rambling ride, and I hope you never find yourself stuck at home and your family keeps buying you random stallion novels off the bestselling rack because they seem to be popular with the Kids. Unless you're into that kind of thing, of course. Fiction!
#I think the fandom would benefit from reading more genuine stallion novels and/or webtoons#bc it really does enhance one's understanding of bingge AND shen Yuan#ALSO bingmei ie how he very much diverges from a “stallion protag” in both his purposeful actions like whining/crying#and his more genuine moments where he's emotionally volatile and clearly hates himself#(not to mention that he dreams of domestic peace and bliss above all else) - via @ruri-rari
OP: I accidentally wandered into a scenic spot at night right before they turned off the lights, and it triggered my megalophobia. It really looked just like the backrooms. (cr幸运Sally) (This location is the food court at Yangshuo Romance Park. The footage is 100% real on-location shooting, with zero special effects or post-editing of any kind.)
the first chapter of Moby Dick rewritten in tiresome modern idiom
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - it's none of your business how many - being mostly broke, and bored with the land part of the world, I thought I would sail around a little and look at the watery part of the world. I'm probably the most mentally healthy person you know. Whenever I feel my face getting grim; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself accidentally reading the ads in the window of funeral homes, and following funeral processions through traffic; and especially when I'm hangry, and only my extremely strong moral principles stop me from deliberately going out in public and methodically slapping people's earbuds out - then I know it's high time to get to sea, ASAP. This is my substitute for getting in fights. I'm too mentally healthy to kill myself; I quietly and considerately put myself on a ship and sail myself away instead. There is nothing surprising in this. Everyone feels exactly the same way, and if they don't, they're lying.
You think I'm lying? Exhibit A: a city. Go to your local coastal city. Everyone is looking at the water. They drive over from other neighborhoods just to come to the water. They make a day of it. They're not doing anything, they're just staring at the ocean. Why? Is it because they all work office jobs? No! Here come more of them! They cram themselves up to the edge of the water and stare at it. WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING AT. Perhaps the ships themselves all packed together, each one with several compasses on it, creates some kind of critical mass - all of the small compass-magnets on all the ships in the harbor combining into one really big magnetic field - and the people get sucked into the field and trapped there. That's science.
Exhibit 2: the countryside with lakes in it. Every path you follow in the countryside brings you to some water, such as a stream. There is magic in it. If you take your standard fool with ADHD dissociating in the middle of a supermarket and put them outside and give them a shove, they'll automatically lead you to water (if there is any nearby) (try it). Another good experiment to try is to get lost in the great American desert in a caravan supplied with a metaphysical professor! Try it in the great American desert at home!
Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are a match made in heaven. Married forever. That's science.
Here's an artist who wants to paint you the dreamiest, most enchanting landscape. What does he put in it? Trees, meadow, cows, a cottage with smoke coming from the chimney, obviously. He will probably put a path in it and make lots of triangular mountains in rows and have them be different shades of blue (naturally.) But there's gotta be a stream in it. Go visit the prairies in June, and wade for forty miles through knee-deep through tiger lilies. What's missing from this picture? Water!
If Niagara Falls was made of sand instead of water, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why would a guy given a handful of cash have trouble deciding whether to buy a coat (which he needed) or go to the beach? Why are all the best, healthiest, sexiest and most mentally healthy people obsessed with the sea? (You get me.) When you were first on a boat, did you not succumb to VIBES? Consider ancient Persia. Consider ancient Greece. They understood about vibes, and also gods.
SURELY ALL OF THIS IS NOT WITHOUT MEANING.
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all! You get me! You understand it now.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I get weird, don't you dare imply that I buy a ticket and get on a boat. I have never had money in my life. How dare you. Anyway I don't go as a passenger - that's bougie, and something boring people do. Passengers never have a good time. And although my C.V. is incredible - I go to sea SO MUCH, you guys, I have lots of experience - I don't go as a boss, or a cook. That sounds like far too much work. Hard work. Disgusting, respectable, bougie, and far too responsible. I can literally only look after myself. Do not ask me to look after ships or shit. In fact, I have only a vague idea of what a ship is. There's so many different kinds of ships - don't get me started and DO NOT GET INVOLVED. Also, I'm allergic to glory.
It's kind of attractive to go as a cook. I mean, I'm allergic to glory and there's some glory attached to the position of the ship's cook, but, like, you're not management-track and so it's still credible. But I don't really want to cook (say) roast chicken. I really fucking love to eat roast chicken. I'm one of the best at doing it actually. I really appreciate when people go out of their way to butter, season, baste and roast a chicken for me. Picture a roast chicken and I am Looking Respectfully at it. Maybe something more, maybe I'm worshipping it. Don't make this weird. If you want to get weird about my relationship with roasted chicken, why aren't you getting weird about the ancient Egyptians? They ate roasted hippos (look it up) and the pyramids were basically pizza ovens. So it's pretty hypocritical to think that I'm being weird about roasted chicken when I've never made mummies out of chickens or built a religious pizza oven dedicated to honoring them: check and mate, haters.
Anyway - I like to go to sea as a manual laborer. A simple sailor. Salt of the earth… er… sea. Yeah, true: as a job it sucks. They make you jump around, order you around, treat you like shit. They expect you to jump around the boat like a grasshopper. And yes, at first, this sucks. It's degrading, especially if you come from a middle-class family. Worse, it's awful if you've already had some kind of professional job before signing on to be the dirt on the boss's boots - like, if you went to college and worked as a teacher and actually got kids to pay attention to you, really feeling this connection to work/teaching/identity or some shit, and now you are just literally the scum on this captain's boots, in the lowest possible job in the world. It hurts! It hurts your dignity. But the hurt, and also the dignity, both wear off in time.
So what if some old bastard sea captain orders me - ME! - to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, compared to the shit in the Bible, compared to the shit in the news, compared to the shit everyone else has to take. Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. We're all just serfs under capitalism, right, so why not just be honest about it: I prefer the honesty. Anyway, however the old sea captains may order me about - slapping and punching of course - I have the satisfaction of knowing that it's the same experience everyone else on Earth has, but more honest. Everyone else in the world is being served the exact same way. Either in a physical or a metaphysical way - sometimes people get the shit beaten out of them in person, sometimes online, sometimes emotionally, it happens to you in EVERY JOB, you sign on to get pushed around and slapped in the teeth: so the point is that when you're a sailor, it's a clean and honest slap. All the workers of the world share the same universal slap to the face that gets passed round, one slap passed all 'round the chain, like paying it forward, but it's a slap; and we should all accept this Universal Slap as the price of living, and then offer each other healing back massages, brother to brother, and slap each other and then kissed the places we slapped, and be happy.
I could examine that but I'm not going to.
Anyway: I always go to sea as a sailor. I've said that already. You're welcome. BUT THE POINT IS, they pay you. If you're a passenger, they don't pay you, at least, not that I've ever heard of [citation needed] (do they pay passengers?? Is there a job I can get where I can be a passenger and get paid?? Look this up.) Yeah so passengers have to pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. (That's Adam and Eve. You get it.) But BEING PAID. GETTING PAID IS THE BEST. NOTHING COMPARES TO GETTING PAID. EVERYONE LOVES THAT SHIT. Which is surprising, since we also apparently believe that money is the root of all evil, and isn't there something in the bible about "no rich people can get into heaven," right? And yet it's universal, literally everyone loves payday. Ah! How cheerfully we send ourselves to hell.
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor (I've said this already) because it's FRESH AIR AND EXERCISE. Okay so think about ships. Normally, bosses stand on the "bridge" thing, and because we're sailing a boat, the nose is going into the wind and the butt part of the boat is at the back. That's how wind works. But if you think about it, winds usually go in one direction more than other directions (unless the men have been eating beans and farting: it's Pythagoras, look it up) SO if you're a boss standing on the boss-deck, the wind is blowing FROM the sailors TOWARDS you, and YOU ARE ACTUALLY BREATHING THE AIR THAT SAILORS ALREADY BREATHED. The boss THINKS he breathes it first, but he doesn't. He gets the air at the BACK of the boat and sailors get the air at the FRONT. So it's better to be at the front of the boat (sailor) for health reasons. This is a metaphor for life and work, etc.
But I have smelled the sea lots of times as a paid sailor and WHY I should decide to go on a whaling expedition - ok so you know how there's an invisible police officer of the Fates who has me under constant surveillance, who secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way? YOU get me. You know him. "The poor FBI agent tasked with reading my search engine history" YOU GET ME. Anyway, "Ishmael, why, after having a perfectly well-reasoned, and very smart of you, part-time job as a spontaneous random sailor, did you decide to escalate that to joining a WHALING EXPEDITION, which is worse in every way?" Well, ask my fucking secret FBI agent, he can answer better than anyone else. Including me. You get me. Also, obviously, this was predestined, part of the Universe's Grand Programme for its talent show, which was all scheduled way before our time. The concept of sending me on the whaling voyage comes in as a kind of interlude or solo between the main performances of the Universe's great talent show. I bet it was advertised llike,
"PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF THE UNITED STATES EMBROILED IN ONGOING LEGAL DISPUTE.
Whaling voyage by some guy called Ishmael.
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN."
Like a commercial break in between the big acts. A filler episode. Lightens the load for everyone else. Though I can't explain why the stage managers - the Fates - chose such a shitty role for me, a WHALING VOYAGE of all things, when it feels like others were given magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces - it seems a little unreasonable at first. Why doth Ishmael get shat upon, etc. But then I think about all the circumstances, the plot points and motivations that were cunningly presented to me under various disguises - FBI agents, bouts of random hanger, gay awakenings, you get me - and you can see that actually, I was set up. And worse, between them all, these Fates and Circumstances conspired to make me believe it was all my own choice and good judgment. Is Free Will an illusion? Are my decisions bad? We will NEVER know because I, Ishmael, am just a little guy that the Universe plays head games with.
One of the ways the Universe tricked me into starring in this performance and then mocking me for it was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself (whaling expeditions usually contain whales.) Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then of course, if you have a whale, you have the wild and distant seas where the whale rolls around with his body-the-size-of-an-island; the dangers and nameless perils of the whale; whales are also found in interesting places I haven't seen; this all tipped me over the edge. Maybe normal people could've resisted, but I am tormented with an everlasting itch for obscurity. I hate everyone else's oceans. I want the forbidden seas.
You know The Horrors? Of course you do. You might be surprised that I, the most mentally healthy person you've ever met, a person who is self-aware enough to go to sea when they're at their fucking limits, a guy who likes fresh air and manual labor and normal things, is familiar with The Horrors. Well, you'd be surprised. I know what's good, I'm an extrovert. But I'm still quick to perceive The Horrors. And how I deal with the horrors is a very extroverted thing: I'm social with them, if they'll let me. It's smart to be on good terms with The Horrors. You should always be on good terms with your permanent neighbors. That's how extroverts deal with The Horrors, and I recommend it.
I think that's enough explanation for why I welcomed the whaling voyage. The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild figments of imagination that pushed me into doing it, the whales came marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah. They marched into my innermost soul in endless processions and occupied it, you see, I was quite helpless under this occupation - I consented to the haunting and the whales marched in to haunt me - and amidst them all was one grand shrouded white phantom, like a snowy mountain in the air.
You get it.
You know how it is, with whales.
(read the actual first chapter of Moby Dick here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm)
So due to other Moby-Dick bookbinding reasons I was remembering this post and then I of course also remembered I have the power to do uh. this.
illustrations (including cover) from the Rockwell Kent edition (1930)
the truly important thing to remember when typesetting a tumblr post is matching the seriousness of the text (you get it) and i think Ishmael would approve and MAYBE just maybe when i finally typeset the whole darn brick i'll pick up the vibes from this post and this typeset and just CONTINUE it in the actual text so thank you @elodieunderglass for this beautiful nonsense
I was going more for "the modern influence of the translator superimposed upon the traditional forms of the original" but your interpretation is MUCH funnier
You, a literary sophisticate: the modern influence of the translator superimposed upon the traditional forms of the original
Me, a clown: herman melville LIVES and has invented an elaborate fake backstory to give himself free rein to write the gay horse racing stories he has always dreamed of
amandla
areudirty
dailybridgerton
jacobvanloon
2087
prguitarman
