Just finished Mistakenly Saving the Villain, and I like the diversity of queer realization in this text:
You have Song Qingshi, the transmigrated main character, who—between having a progressive, fatal illness and an all-consuming love of medical knowledge—forewent any romantic attraction for any gender in the pursuit of learning all that he could with his waning energy and short lifespan. Then suddenly he is given a healthy body with all the time and (eventually) resources in the world, and he is finally able to slow down and think about his feelings. But he has no reference point except for other (straight) people’s courting rituals, he only knows of other queer male romances through secondhand stories (and only that they exist, no specifics), and the men who do like him don’t ever plainly tell him as he’s coming to his own realizations. So he’s essentially on his own to figure out his feelings, but he nonetheless still finds his way there.
You have An Long, a secondary character and best friend to the original (and now transmigrated) Song Qingshi, who has only ever seduced women but is now suddenly confronted with the fact that he loves his best friend who is also a man. Sure, An Long isn’t new to romance, per se, and he’s definitely not innocent to sex, but being with a man has to be different from being with a woman, right? While he, too, has no frame of reference for a queer relationship, his main struggle is not necessarily in being queer, but in whether to preserve his already hard-won friendship with the (supposedly) aroace Song Qingshi—the reason for his queer awakening—or to take the plunge and confess, putting said friendship on the line at the risk of losing everything.
You have Yue Wuhuan, the love interest. Putting aside all of his life trauma for the moment, Yue Wuhuan is a person who knew he was queer from childhood. He never has any doubts, no imaginings that he’d eventually end up with a woman, and even in his fantasy world, he sees himself pursuing the vague idea of a husband that eventually takes the shape of Song Qingshi. It is everyone else around him (pre-fucked up traumatic years) who imagined he’d eventually take a wife, but he, himself, was sure and steady in his queerness from the moment he could conceive of non-platonic relationships.
Then you have false protagonist Bai Zihao who came from a conservative community and into his queer “realization” through a traumatic circumstance. Because this realization was through coercion, he doesn’t consider it an actual realization and instead internalizes it as a thing he is capable of for survival. When he is no longer “gay for survival,” he struggles to accept that yes, he really does like men and no this isn’t a manifestation of trauma. He must grapple with the conservative nature of his upbringing and the trauma of his awakening in order to eventually have a functioning relationship with another man.
So despite the fact that all four characters are queer men, they each come into that realization through vastly different routes and experiences, and none of them are considered more valid than the other by the narrative. It’s pretty neat.
