The contrast in the body language and overall demeanor of the serving women in Jinlintai between when Jin Guangshan was in charge and when Jin Guangyao is in charge is so stark. In the earlier timeline, they are tense, fearful, looking down, bent at the waist to emphasize their servant status. In the present, they are standing straight, they look professional but relaxed, they're smiling a little. Just. Oof.
Backs straight! Shoulders away from ears! Looking gentry guests in the eye! The tensest person here is JGY himself because he has just seen NHS hurtling towards him.
Meanwhile, under Chief Cultivator Jin Guangshan:
Heads bowed, waists bent, shoulders hunched... and JGY himself is mirroring them, which makes me insane.
my family has had some pretty interesting encounters with psychics/mediums that seem genuine in the past, but nothing will ever be funnier to me than the last guy my mom talked to who was so definitely bullshitting, because she said "I was hoping to hear from my husband" and the guy went "he said....it's okay to Move On" and like. every single person my mom has recounted this too has been like "He Would Not Fucking Say That". as if this was an ooc fanfic about my father. it's just so fucking funny. fake psychic dude take your shitty headcanons about my ghost dad and LEAVE!!!
like, my parents were legitimately insane about each other. I cannot stress how much he wouldn't say that. I have to assume his ghost was standing right next to this fake psychic yelling "WHAT THE FUCK!!!!" when he told my mom to move on lmfao
actually. funnier to imagine he was a Real Psychic who was just trying to put a move on my mom and didn't think the ghost would do anything about it and now is now dealing with a violently angry haunting for the rest of his days lmfao
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.
(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" Westernā¢ļø 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!
"impulse buy" (noun) anything I have been low-key thinking about purchasing for 3 months, an item that subsequently spent 24-48 hours in my cart as I went through each and every state of grief, and which I then bought, in a desperate, the-guilt-can't-get-me-if-I'm-fast-enough rush.
how do i say "horror novels these days are too woke" without sounding like a right winger. what i mean is: this one is about a woman serial killer who kills Bad Men, that one is about ~anticapitalist activists~, this one is ~queer~, that one is about *spins wheel* someone dealing with the ghosts of their immigrant roots, all of them are about intergenerational traumaaaaa. okay. cool. but is it good though. is it fucking scary
something something, losing the ability to convey horror through abstraction, through metaphor, through symbolism, through allegory, through raw unexamined un-psychiatrized feeling. if the real horror is.... dun dun dun! the patriarchy then i just feel preached to. don't use fiction as a vehicle for Saying Something About Society. write with total vulnerability and then see what it says. it will be probably be far more interesting and horrifying than what if the monster was uhh my mom's abuse or whatever. this brand of new horror writers are all so terrified of actually disclosing anything about themselves. it's like if an instagram infographic performance was a mediocre contemporary novel
studying history is like. here's to another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be. thank you women who fight for abortion and contraception and independance from men for another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be
titsay
discoholicmusic
germansingergirl
stormborns
2087
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snowghoul
