Hello again! Forgive me if you've talked about this before with me, I have the memory of a goldfish. Faraway Wanderers book spoiler question ahead, (if you haven't read the book this won't really apply to the show Word of Honor):
What are your thoughts on Zhou Zishu and his willingness to enter into a relationship with Wen Kexing? For the majority of the novel Tian Ya Ke, he seems to be interested in and annoyed by and tolerant of and amused by Wen Kexing, but even at the moment when the two "get together" at the end, it seems he's still reluctant. As a reader that feels unsatisfying and maybe uncomfortable that he only gets to the point of tolerating Wen Kexing's physical sexual contact. Did I miss something earlier? I know he doesn't mind physical touch in general from WKX over time, but I am curious about your thoughts. Thank you!
Hi Hi!
Sorry I don't read OC 90% of the time. Occasionally something will come out of Japan where I have actually read the manga but only if it had print publication in the USA.
I didn't even know danmei existed until my dash blew up with Untamed. Cdramas were probubly the last piece of Asian content I picked up, and I still dither over watching them.
I went something like:
Yaoi -> JBL (forgot about it) (distracted by life) emotional crisis -> YouTube -> Thai BL + (Kpop) -> Taiwanese BL -> Pinoy BL & Vietnamese BL -> grey sites and illegal content acquisition -> (Korean dramas via Kpop) -> Viki sub -> KBL -> JBL rediscovery (GaGa sub & back catalogue) -> Cdramas (mostly on the perennial hunt of noona romances and because of the pretty robes).
Some of the early CBLs were sprinkled in there when I found them on YT but I didn't really think of them as belonging to a greater oeuvre until much later when I started seriously blogging here and decided to spend all of 2020 watching every scrap of BL content I could get hold of (and developing a tracking system for it).
Frankly the film side took all my focus.
But also, one of my degrees focused on literature so OC (Y-novels or danmai etc...) and fanfic have never been my thing. What I find tolerable or amusing in captions and graphic adaptations, I find intolerable in the full written translation form. Broadly speaking, the characters and plot aren't enough to distract me from problematic prose. (And by that I mean just sentence structure, repeat word use, incorrect word choices, odd grammar.) And before you ask yes I include Twilight, 50 Shades, and quite a few English pillars of fandom in this mix.
Which is not to say I don't enjoy commercial fiction, just that i prefer it if the English is well written at core. Which usually means the translator needs to have English as their first language or be entirely bilingual, and that's just really rare especially with OC BL content.
I know this makes me snobbish. I genuinely love so many other languages, particularly when spoken and as artifacts of socio cultural interaction/representation, but when I read something in English (and that's the only language I read fluently) I get too judgey and it limits my enjoyment.
What we have in English is an excess of nuance due excess vocabulary (and our predilection for bashing other languages on the head and ruthlessly stealing their words). I don't think, in its spoken form, that English is a very pretty language. But in its written form? Its beauty is in its capacity for nuance and flexibility, and a lot of directly translated stuff (particularly that which is done by or for fans) is awkward and almost brutal with my native tongue. It pains me to read and so I... don't.
Like there are subtle use pattern differences between many English words that the thesaurus claims are equal (dour/glum actually mean subtly different things, so too sullen vs surly). So picking the wrong one because you just never learned the alternative makes me wince. Also knowing when really only the original language word will work (like for honorifics) or when a very very old English word is a superior choice because of historical context.
I guess I just get annoyed because it feels clumsy and while I can readily forgive this one medium I can't in another.
Hang ups.
We all got 'em.
