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I read the extras, and seeing as I’ve seen some posts pop up about it, I thought I’d take the time to for the first time break my lurking streak and formulate my own opinions to put them out in the world, because I am a profoundly opinionated person!

My general conclusion is that while it certainly isn’t bad — the writing is charming, and the idea of going back to the modern world is a fun one often visited in fan fiction and the likes — it does carry some retroactive implications for the actual body of svsss that I’m not too fond of. I’ve laid out my various critiques below, but I’d like to preface it all by saying that at the end of the day, a new extra is a new extra, and I did enjoy reading it. I won’t be taking it as canon or anything but I love to see that even now mxtx still thinks of svsss and cares about it enough to write so much. I will be very harsh in some parts below so I really want to make clear that this really isn’t a big deal, because an addition so far after the publication of the main story will always be taken with dubious canonicity, as fans of the media will have operated for years developing their own analyses and ideas and conceptions of the work, which will inevitably not line up fully with the author’s conceptions. Especially as the author has also changed over such a long length of time — after all, mxtx is just a person, so it’s inevitable there will be some change over time in regards to how she views the story after a while, much less after 10 whole years have passed. At the end of the day, I really do like these extras — 25k new words of svsss content is nothing to scoff at!

But without further ado, let’s delve into the depths of my nitpicking.

DISCLAIMER: I’m aware of this extra accompanying a censored version of SVSSS. I’m not sure which critiques can be attributed to this censorship and which cannot; these are just my thoughts taking the text at face value!

PART 1) The System Reveal

To say it plainly, the system didn’t need a reveal. Fundamentally, in the context of svsss, the system was the hand of the narrative/reader/author, and thus went against any canonical concrete in-universe explanation. That’s the function of any system in transmigration novels, and it’s why it’s so common in them to begin with — transmigration novels function on meta acknowledgment, tacit fourth-wall breaking, by inviting the reader to imagine an ordinary person from our reality transported into a work of fiction; systems riff on this theme further by presenting this alternate reality through a video-game interface, all but stating ‘this is all fake! This all exists on the obverse of our present-world-concrete-reality-truth!’ By invoking the real world from the beginning, it reinforces the utter ludicrousness of the entire rest of the story, essentially gives it a ‘starting momentum’, which is then carried through by the system. They work in tandem. Transmigration novels (or any novel with a system) which explain the system’s existence in-universe exist first and foremost as genre subversion (see: orv) — and while svsss can be construed as a genre subversion in some sense, it subverts it in the complete opposite direction, so to explain the system’s existence makes no sense. Svsss takes this initial transmigration/system theme and runs with it, pushes it to the extremes — the system initiates events solely for the voyeuristic eye of the reader, it’s irreverent, it uses kaomoji and internet slang. It forces Shen yuan to push Binghe into the abyss not for whatever flimsy justification it might have given sy in the novel — I don't even recall if it did — but because it needed to create a climax, a point of tension for the story. It’s saying, as plainly as possible, this event occurred only so that you enjoy the novel (ergo, so that mxtx can get paid.) There’s no other justification. The climax is a climax because we needed a climax, so we made a climax. Deal with it! Furthermore, in creating the character of Airplane, an author who has this exact mindset but approaches it in a different way (choosing to cater lowest-denominator slop, rather than weaponizing this unbridled frankness) mxtx literally pushes this idea to the forefront, strips it of all pretense. There is no deeper meaning, no further reason, beyond your enjoyment; if you have a problem with that, you can leave! This injects a layer of tongue-in-cheek self-aware absurdity into the world of svsss, makes it all seem arbitrary and meaningless — and thus makes Binghe and Shen Qingqiu’s relationship shine even brighter in the sea of nonsense, that they choose each other, that they choose to care, even still. And at the same time, this honest directness is a huge part of the draw of svsss — it feels as if it is a conversation between mxtx and you, the reader; she isn’t putting on any airs, presenting her story with complete truth. It’s refreshing.

For other such blatant examples of this see the water prison scene with the clothes-ripping; Shen yuan and Luo Binghe aren’t aware they’re in a danmei novel, but the system is. It is inviting you to be in on the joke, saying, isn’t this what you came here for? Isn’t this what you wanted to see? The same can be said of Shen Yuan’s punishment at the hands of Bingge — who doesn’t love some good whump, etc? If you approach these choices of the system from an in-universe standpoint, it’s nonsensical. This is why the system is so comedic — Shen yuan has no idea why it’s acting like this! He isn’t capable of understanding its motives — from where he and the rest of the characters are standing, the system really does have no reason to do these things, completely opaque and unpredictable. But we don’t approach it from an in-universe standpoint, because we all understand implicitly, whether consciously or not, that the system is catering to us directly. And so the humor comes from dramatic irony, from us knowing something the characters don’t; we are in on the joke. That’s the point of the system, again; to facilitate conversation with the author and the reader, to invite the reader a path to step inside. So when you provide the system some in-universe explanation, some reason for its existence — you are enclosing svsss again back into the box of ‘fiction’. You are closing off that path. Suddenly, the system doesn’t act in the interest of the reader, but instead in the interest of bingzu, a character within the canon (and thus the constraints) of the novel, a character who is born and dies in, like, 10 lines. Who is also apparently, inexplicably, a fujoshi from beyond the grave. This is completely out of left field. And to make it even more strange, the rest of the extra is packed chock full of tongue-in-cheek meta moments and fourth wall breaks, even more frank and direct than in the main body of svsss. Mxtx clearly remembers that svsss is predicated off of this stuff, that it’s characterized and made special by how close it dares to get to the reader; the extra is so lovingly written with the reader in mind! So why, then, does she retroactively cordon off the main avenue of this sort of communication in the actual body of the novel? For the sake of a surface-level more ‘cohesive’ and well-explained story? Maybe the censorship, somehow? I really don’t know…

PART 2) Binghe Knew It Was Shen Yuan All Along (because he’s special)

I will echo @/baixue-temple’s sentiment here and say that more intelligent people than me have spoken on the topic — and I include them in that tally! (Link here for their post on the subject— I recommend you give it a quick read. It’s certainly more concise than my long-winded rambling).

To lay it out plainly: The fact that Binghe would fall in love with someone who abused and mistreated him for years is a fundamental aspect of his character. It’s incredibly revealing and visceral — it immediately gives you an idea of who he is at the core of him. He’s someone who’s desperate for love; so desperate that he’s willing to forgive instantly anyone who shows him a scrap of kindness, so desperate that he’ll fall in love with the first person who treats him with a modicum of care. And I’d also like to reference this post by localizationed (read the tags!), which very succinctly explains how important that implication is to the rest of Binghe’s character, and the impact of the abyss scene as a whole. In effect, Binghe internalizes from day one that Shen Qingqiu’s love is conditional, and thus can be stripped away just as suddenly as it arrived, and furthermore, can be earned. This is a root cause of where his insecurity stems from and it drives much of his later actions. It’s incredibly realistic, impactful, and integral to his character. To say ‘oh well he knew Shen yuan wasn’t the same guy from day one—‘ well. Hold on now. Suddenly that makes his nearly obsessive attachment to Shen yuan much less interesting, makes it seem less driven, less desperate. It makes their relationship less thematically impactful; Shen yuan and Luo Binghe both are unable to see the other over their personal conceptions of each other for the vast majority of the novel, and only when they are able to mutually trust and understand each other as people rather than as a set of ideas can they find their happy ending. (The warning tale of what occurs if you don’t move past that stage of regarding the other as a set of notions/ideas is of course found in qijiu, which i could and have expounded at length about, but i digress. (Qijiu is the prime example, but it’s also found in the relationships between Qiu haitang and Qiu jianluo, & Shen Jiu and Ning Yingying. In effect Shen Jiu = Qiu Haitang = Ning Yingying = Luo Binghe. I’m digressing again.)) The point is that without Shen Qingqiu’s ‘previous’ (read: og) behavior, the only point which Luo Binghe can ‘misunderstand’ about is the abyss scene — which, don’t get me wrong, is a big deal; but without the foundation laid out so painstakingly by Shen jiu (everyone say thank you Shen jiu ^-^) it’s just much less grounded; Luo Binghe would have more reason to be confused than betrayed.

And also, if I can say: ‘white lotus’ Luo Binghe is willing to believe the best of anyone — he’s pure and innocent. That’s why Shen yuan calls him a white lotus. Of course he hides some hidden depths — he did start cultivating demonically in secret, after all, and he was already incredibly horny for sqq even then — but these are all comparatively minor things, and don’t overthrow the main characterization of him as someone who is forgiving, not out of naivety, but desperation for connection. We don’t ever really see him resenting Ming Fan or OG SQQ, as far as I can recall. He will take all blame onto himself, because he doesn’t want to believe that there’s nothing he could have done to make people like him. Isn’t that way worse, to think that it’s hopeless he could ever be loved, that nothing he ever did would make a difference? Better to believe that it was some wrong decision on his part that made him unworthy of care. So he would probably be the most quick out of anyone to take Shen Qingqiu’s sudden mood change towards him at face value! As far as he’s concerned, his patience has finally paid off; he’s been rewarded with a nice shizun after he passed some sort of unspoken and unnamed trial, he’s finally made the right decision. His self-blaming worldview fits very neatly into this frame, and is in fact reinforced by this event; there’s not a thing to be questioned. Why would he ever be suspicious at all…?

There is also, of course, the matter of the greatest cultivators in the jianghu being unable to figure it out and concluding that a qi deviation was the most likely event, but little 12 year old lbh being able to instantly clock that Shen yuan was a different soul. That’s just a bit silly.

PART 3) The Base World (I don’t know what to call it, because it’s not SVSSS or PIDW) Existing Independent of SQH/Xiang Fei’s Authorship

I feel like this massively diminishes SQH/Xiang Fei’s’s character and retroactively seriously hampers his extra, the closing lines of which were some of the most impactful in all of svsss for me. A very poignant message in SVSSS which it itself also embodies is the fact that you can find value in anything, that nothing is truly ‘bad’ if it means something to you — though he of course surface level lambasted it, Shen Yuan loved PIDW beyond anything, despite its status as a dogshit schlocky braindead novel. And when we enter the world of PIDW through SVSSS, (as it seemed we did in the main body of svsss, although these extras alter that) we find that it’s full of complex characters and fantastical settings and moments of beauty and peace. From a metanarrative standpoint, then, SVSSS provides a third layer — despite its status as an absurd danmei novel constantly narrated by a snarky young adult using slang and internet references all over the place, despite the stupid shit that goes down, svsss still invites you to find a deeper meaning, to revel in the joy of human connection. Svsss tells us that even the ‘worst’ most ‘unserious’ art still has value. And then suddenly, in the extras, all that value is attributed not to the wonders of human creativity, but to, like, this other guy that existed in this other world. And SQH is left with the rotten parts, saddled with the sin of tarnishing bingzu’s pre-lived out world — actually, he never created anything of value. In fact, he took a good thing and made it worse! The idea that there was some sort of ontologically pure and wonderful story out there that he ruined with nonstop gratuitous sex and power fantasy is ridiculous and goes against one of the central conceits of svsss — the point was that PIDW was unable to be separated from the sex and the overpowered protagonist and the cheap corny tropes, and that it could still be seen as good. The point was that PIDW made Luo Binghe, and made Liu Qingge, and made Yue Qingyuan, and made Liu Mingyan and Mu Qingfang and Qi Qingqi and Ning Yingying and Ming Fan and Mobei-Jun and yes, even Shen Jiu, terrible person she might have been. And isn’t that wonderful? But actually, no, it didn’t make them, they just existed wholesale elsewhere and in fact Xiang Fei made them stupider. Alright. I have a suspicion this one is likely because of the censorship? But it’s pretty damaging to the original work, in my opinion.

Also, it gets rid of the story-inside-a-story transmigration setup that svsss riffs on so heavily, because they’re no longer transmigrating into a book, but a wholesale other world. Refer to part 1 — transmigration is by necessity a meta genre, and the story-inside-a-story subtype (where a character ostensibly from our world transmigrates into a novel they read) even more so. Svsss is all about meta-ness. This only serves svsss’ central themes. To knock that one down — well, it isn’t super serious or impactful, but it’s still damaging. Again, I can only assume it might have been because of the transmigration censorship?

In general it seems like although this extra still carries so much fourth-wall referencing material, the actual canon it instates seem to inexplicably want to go the orv-type genre subversion i mentioned earlier in part 1, despite svsss as a novel already having gone the complete opposite direction for four whole volumes. It’s so confusing. It conflicts with the rest of the novel, and even within the extra it’s still sending mixed signals!

PART 4) The System’s Actual Function (as opposed to the very existence of an in-universe explanation, covered in pt. 1)

Revealing that the system’s purpose is to manufacture a better ending for Luo Binghe is startling and, once again, completely against the themes of the original work in svsss, at least in my view. I feel like in general the fatalistic nature of the system explanation greatly diminishes that central message i briefly touched on in part 1 and part 3; that is, the idea that the world exists at the whim of us, the reader, and thus for the characters inside is utterly inexplicable and meaningless, silly and absurd, impossible to take seriously . At times, our world also feels like this! And so svsss becomes about finding meaning within that meaninglessness, becomes about Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe choosing to find each other over and over again, choosing to put in the work to understand one another, to fight for each other; to forgive and to learn and to continue onwards side by side, despite their chaotic and uncontrollable mess of a world, despite the turbulence around them, and the arbitrary absurdity of it all. To say that the system hand-picked Shen Yuan for the task diminishes his agency in this. Certainly, Shen Yuan still made all the choices, of course — but it’s because he was hand-selected to, because he was vetted by the systems to be up to the task. Shen Yuan’s kindness becomes his ‘special trait’, unable to be generalized to the rest of humanity; this love is not possible for everyone, is what it’s essentially saying. It was only possible because a bunch of supernatural fairy-like consciousnesses handpicked someone to be able to love this one person. It’s like being told that some random person on tv was able to spontaneously create a really meaningful poem, the interviewer just selected them off the street and they started saying the most soulful lines you ever did hear, and thinking to yourself — woah, i guess the capability for meaning and art is within all of us, and even I can do it! And then you find out that that so called random person actually passed a rigorous interview process where they looked at all their previous writings and determined them up to the task to create a really good poem on the spot. They still did it completely authentically of course, but still. Sort of removes the central idea, doesn’t it.

Furthermore, making the world revolve around Luo Binghe kind of echos the very thing svsss mocks repeatedly — the system being powered by the protagonist is at first presented as an intentionally silly and exaggerated idea, tongue-in-cheek. Luo Binghe’s world-defying overpowered-ness is a point of comedy and repeatedly poked fun at. Binghe himself is demystified, stripped of his badass protagonist characterization — despite keeping the same power level, he’s made more ‘human’. For the extra to suddenly turn around and completely unironically declare that no, for real, svsss revolves entirely around Binghe, keeping him happy, giving him a good ending — that’s a bit of an about-face. Suddenly the system being powered by the protagonist is supposed to be treated with the seriousness of actual foreshadowing and world building, instead of a funny rationale for an in-narrative event. The world of SVSSS is revealed to, in a very literal sense, bend around Luo Binghe, more than it ever did in PIDW. After so much work deconstructing the idea that lbh is an untouchable fated protagonist, that lbh is actually just a person, someone scarred from their childhood and desperate for human connection, same as any other — it just feels strange to reinstate it again like this, even with the added provision of his protagonist nature also being contingent on his trauma and victimhood (which technically is a step up from the initial ‘badass protagonist’ conceptualization.)

PART 5) The Longest Part Where I Talk About The Two Sentences Total Indirectly Kind Of Implying Shen Jiu That I Care An Unconscionable Degree About Because I Have A Deep Parasocial Obsession With Her Not As A Character But As An Archetype/Concept/Set Of Ideas, Ironically Mirroring The Very Thing Which Doomed Her (I’m Normal)

Preface 1: Skip this part if you don’t want to hear me ramble at length about my own personal conception of Shen Jiu and her psyche. It’s not particularly important to my overall analysis because, again, Shen Jiu is referenced very lightly in the extra. I just care a lot because I care a lot about her.

Preface 2: I unerringly refer to Shen Jiu with she/her pronouns because she is one of the eggiest characters i have ever read about. Her transfemininity IS canon to me and i do not care what mxtx actually intended. Thank you for your understanding ^^

I’ve seen people take umbrage with this part already, but despite this I still believe I have something new to say because I’m The Only One That Understands Shen Jiu In The World (normal about her). It’s unclear if Shen jiu agreed to that deal to send her soul elsewhere (not explicitly transmigration, if i had to place my bets I wouldn’t think it was), but even the implication/suggestion of it is enough to make me feel a bit of unease. It’s true, like everyone’s already said — Shen Jiu would NOT take that deal to go elsewhere and give up on her life. The thing i think people are missing with the Shen jiu thing that makes it so egregious is that Shen jiu would want to take the deal! Very desperately! And she is defined by the fact that she would never, in a million years, take it! It’s essentially the same reason she would never kill herself; a sense of parallel inertia, or, ah, sunk cost. Which i think everyone gets. But she would not view it as ‘abandoning’ Yue Qingyuan; from her point of view, Yue Qingyuan has long abandoned her, and only tolerates her from his guilt & regard for her as a vessel/object/anchor. which is not a belief entirely unfounded (See part 2: this belief is true but is also reciprocated by her, so, you know. Stones from glass houses; pot calling the kettle black). So obviously she doesn’t think she would be capable of abandoning him; you can’t abandon someone who’s not with you. From her point of view she is foolishly/childishly/selfishly ‘clinging onto’ Yue Qingyuan, even as she is the one pushing him away, and he is the one constantly seeking. She is the one who is longing for Yue Qi through him, and Yue Qingyuan only acts these things out hollowly, devoid of real sentiment. As far as she’s concerned, her being replaced would literally be only a boon to everyone concerned. Yue Qingyuan would finally have his guilt entertained and assuaged, and everyone else wouldn’t have to deal with Shen Jiu.

The reason she wouldn’t take it, even though in her view it would be unquestionably the ‘right decision’, would be twofold: 1) the fear of confirmation that it could be better. To become ‘better’ means it was, in effect, always her choice to be ‘worse’; that there had been some hidden pathway to sainthood she wasn’t taking, but was always present. She can’t accept that; she knows it to be true, she knows this to be the case, but she can’t bring herself to reify such a fact and bring it into the world, and every second she keeps herself from bringing it into the world is another weight added to the scale as to why she shouldn’t improve; every delay means that she was only dragging it out if she chooses to live a happier life. So she can’t become better. She HAS to shut down every possibility of improvement. And 2) to give up on this life would mean that everything she’s done up to this point has been meaningless, that she really was just that worthless slave in the Qiu manor, slavering for things beyond her reach. To say — ‘yes, this existence of mine is so bad that I really want to abandon it’, to admit defeat, is a complete impossibility. Shen Jiu has never admitted defeat even once. She is stubborn in her belief that she has complete control; it’s a rebound instinct from her powerlessness experienced in childhood. Every fault she has is intentional and borne with pride. She likes to think herself completely unaffected by her environment — alien particle, clean and without context. ergo, she is incapable of regret or misstep. Thus to admit defeat means to admit that there is something fundamentally wrong with her — which, again, she knows, but does not wish to fully accept/internalize. The most important part is that she knows everything I just said; that is, if she read this paragraph, she would be — well, angry — but she would ultimately know, consciously, that I was right, and furthermore, it would tell her nothing new. She would have thought all of this before — I believe she’s too intelligent and clear-headed to not have thought of it all. Her awareness of her own psyche is what makes her spiral into a pit of recursive contradictory behavior and self hate. (You will notice that both points listed rely entirely on the sunk-cost fallacy; again, she moves by inertia alone.)

What I’m saying is that every action she takes will always fundamentally feed into her self-hatred. That’s a necessity of her existence. Every tiny thing to every huge decision will all make her hate herself, and struggle even more furiously to deny this hatred of herself in turn. This is no different…! The decision is ultimately born of selfishness, which she recognizes and despises, but enacts anyway in spite, and also because, of this contempt for her own movements. This is how she’s defined — by this relentless pit-digging instinct. There is no rock bottom for her. She stubbornly acts against herself; she lashes out against her own thoughts forever into perpetuity. To suddenly overturn this and have her feelings and actions align enough for her to make this sort of deal — isn’t that too out of character ?

Furthermore, thematically, it’s far more interesting for her to die so quietly. Here I delve more into my personal view of her character. (As if I haven’t already, you may be saying. YOU HAVE NO IDEA- It’s fine. I’m normal. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH-)

First, it must be said that her fate in SVSSS is far worse than her fate in PIDW. In PIDW, she may have been tortured and hurt endlessly, but she was an undeniable presence; the most powerful person in the world was obsessed with torturing her, and the other most powerful person in the world died trying to save her. She was impactful — and she held on to her name, Shen Qingqiu, to the end. In SVSSS she fades away so easily, it’s like she was never there at all. The peak lords raise a bit of a fuss, but ultimately nothing comes of it, and Shen Yuan slots into place seamlessly. The name Shen Qingqiu is stripped of her entirely. She can only be meaningfully referred to as Shen Jiu in this context. Remember — Shen Jiu’s greatest fear is being powerless, being small and helpless and less-than-human. (She already feels like this always, and always tries in vain to push against the feeling.) Were she given the choice between the two, even if she could fully comprehend the depths of her suffering in PIDW, I have no doubt she would choose to die in the PIDW way in a heartbeat. (For largely the same reasons as covered above in the first paragraph of this part. And then she would hate herself for it etc because to die in the svsss way is to spare everyone of her presence, but she selfishly chooses PIDW — this is already covered above also.)

This creates a meaningful dichotomy; for the rest of the world to reach a largely ‘happy ending,’ (No merging of the realms, no conquest of the world by Binghe, Liu Qingge lives, Yue Qingyuan lives, Tianlang-Jun lives, Zhuzhi-lang dies but in like a meaningful and sentimental way, Gongyi Xiao dies too but whoops let’s all collectively forget about him.) Shen Jiu must die, cruelly, in the worst way. For Shen Yuan to descend upon the world and fix everything (except for Gongyi Xiao and Zhuzhi-lang), all that has to be sacrificed is Shen Jiu. And it’s undeniably, morally, a very easy choice — Shen Jiu is a child abuser with no real close relationships, who lashes out repeatedly, has hostile relationships with everyone on planet earth, and loves to hurt everyone she has a modicum of power over to reify and remind herself own ability to act. Sure, she may have tried something every once in a while — she helped Yue Qingyuan there, saved Liu Qingge there. But by and large, Shen Yuan has much more of a ‘good’ impact than her. So the sacrifice is ‘easy’. There is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ answer here. So it asks the question: what does it mean to be the wrong answer? What does it mean to know, almost undeniably, that you are not worthy of your own life, your own body? And this makes her a very, very interesting character.

Anyway, my point is that if she didn’t die but got transmigrated elsewhere — and furthermore, if she actually chose such a thing — it removes a major part of why I love her character so much.

(I’m not kidding, dead SVSSS Shen jiu (as in, assuming that after Shen yuan transmigrated into her, Shen jiu just died) is my favorite character, and it’s so hard because no one writes about her, or cares about her, because dead SVSSS Shen jiu is characterized by being dead and not there and forever a ghost on the plane, in life unto death. PIDW Shen Jiu is fine but she’s a person, where SVSSS Shen Jiu is entirely defined by her lack of personhood, which is just so much more interesting, but no one cares, because she’s dead!! And I can’t do it myself because I haven’t figured out a way to write about dead characters without having to necessarily filter it through the view of a different character thinking about the dead person (which is basically just writing about that other character because every relation defines the person before the other) or having to talk about it through a third-person omniscient view, which is too high above and is incapable of addressing the matter properly. The moment I figure out how to colour in a white shape on white paper without having to colour in the space around it I’ll let you guys know. If you’re reading this PLEASE produce content about how nonexistent SVSSS Shen jiu is. She’s literally not even there. She wasn’t there at all. She was never there at all. All those years— on the streets, then the Qiu manor, then on the run, then at Cang Qiong mountain — and she had never even been there at all.)

PART 6) Miscellaneous Comments

Undeniably, the ending of the extras did touch my heart a bit, because, inexplicably, it seems to suddenly rebound back to that theme it just finished throwing away, about the arbitrary nature of the universe!

“Shen Qingqiu wondered, “Do you like this rewritten ending?”

He didn’t even know who he was asking.

Should we ask Luo Binghe, or the world?

Of course the world won’t answer.

The world simply stopped seeking another ending and gently continued on.”

What an ending! I’m not even being ironic. I do like this excerpt a lot. But didn’t you just finish establishing that the world was in fact seeking an ending, that the systems sought to engineer an ending, that all of this was predetermined by the hand of a Binghe that died thousands of years ago??? What’s with that??? Suddenly you return to theme?? If you put this at the end of the main body of svsss I’d think it was incredibly poignant and got right to the point, but putting it at the end of these new extras I just feel a sense of sharp dissonance. I’m getting whiplash here — you may have noticed from the previous parts. Mxtx can’t seem to decide whether to keep the original direction of svsss or veer the other way, and it makes for a bit of a strange reading.

Anyway, I’ll also put my praise here. I’m much less verbose in my praise than I am my complaints because I am a bit of a hater, and also, I don’t actually care that much about Bingqiu and Moshang, I fear, because I am entirely obsessed solely with The Nonexistent Presence of SVSSS Shen Jiu.

That being said, the Bingqiu and Moshang interactions are undeniably very funny. Seeing Shen Yuan’s irl family dynamics in action is also very charming and captures sibling relationships quite well. The bit where Binghe and Mobei look over PIDW with disdain and SY and Xiang Fei enter a mutual truce to pretend they had nothing to do with it was really really good. The cumplane interactions were hilarious.

I mentioned them earlier, but the fourth-wall wink-wink-nudge-nudges in the extras are also very fun to me — mxtx mentioning that writing extras years after a completed work will never not be divisive was funny, as was Xiang Fei’s brief existential crisis, and Shen Yuan’s worry that someone really did see all the humiliating things that occurred to him (we did see them, Shen Yuan, sorry.) The whole reading PIDW bit was also one big meta joke, of course, which I did appreciate.

Conclusion:

If you really took the time to read all of that, I want to first thank you, wow, your patience for my nonsense is unparalleled — and second, reiterate that all this being said, I really did like the extras! All of this is a nonissue for me at the end of the day because I will simply just proceed without regarding the extras as canon, and all will be well. Mxtx’ afterword was incredibly charming and full of love for the work and the reader, and I don’t think she did all this out of some malicious intent to ruin her own story, or anything. And at the end of the day, I don’t think there was any way she could have written an extra that would be satisfactory to everyone, or even meet my standards specifically — svsss and its original extras I feel stands very well as a complete work on its own, so it would be hard to find a meaningful place to elaborate that would completely please me without a single word of critique. As it is, it’s a work that has its own merits and charms, irrespective of its canonicity — after all, isn’t that one of the themes of svsss? I had a fun time reading it, and I’m really so glad Mxtx still thinks of svsss enough for new content like this!! I feel like I’m repeating myself but despite how opinionated I am I really don’t want people to get the idea that I’m unhappy this extra came out. This is only a boon, as far as I’m concerned!

And again, to anyone who’s made it this far, thanks for entertaining my thoughts! ^-^

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