君子盟 - thoughts

[cashew]

So, finished binging the series, some thoughts:

• Episodes 15 & 16 dragged on a bit needlessly. I get the show was trying to do character development, but since the story is a mystery first, keeping up cliffhangers and having one mystery leading into the next is kind of important for the genre. Also it was veering into the melodramatic a bit needlessly.

• Overall, the first three cases were pretty good. Fourth case started off well, but once we got to the plot of switching emperor babies, it became too ridiculous for me.

• 辜清章 was an annoying villain. Once again writers are too sympathetic to emo man-babies who kill thousands of innocent people just because they're saaaaad. Like yes, you got screwed over by life. That doesn't give you the right to throw a temper tantrum and kill thousands of unrelated people for vengeance. On that note...

• Holy shit, fandom does not ship the villain?! I mean, there's always going to be a few, but thank goodness as a rule fandom was not taken in by the sad backstory or pretty face and basically ignores 辜清章 as a rule. Not every fandom ships the psychotic character! Hurrah!

• 王砚 is a precious cinnamon bun who puts up with a shocking amount of BS from and for his friend. 王砚 deserves better. Man is literally putting his life on the line repeatedly just so 兰珏 can clear his dad's name. The fandom is far more aware of the political dangers than the show is willing to address.

• While I understand why 张屏 gets shipped...no. Just no.

• I don't understand why TV show slash fandom keep their fics behind paywalls. Is a bit annoying. Like, girls, your fic is not good enough for me to pay for it. I've also never encountered this except in TV show fandoms. Game fandoms don't do this.

• Also growing more cynical when I realized how much of TV show fandoms are propped up by monetization rather than fannish interest. The vast amounts of writing accounts that chase after popular TV series whilst locking slashfic behind paywalls is disproportionately large. Makes me seriously question how much these people are shipping because they like the pairing and how much of this is because readers are waaay too willing to pay for slashfic.

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In short, gonna probably stop looking for alternatives to HSR for my period piece fix. The outlook is a bit grim. Sadly, now I want mysteries and that genre is even deader.

Comments

[tanithryudo]

Regarding fic paywalls, are you talking about Lofter? Because I have read a lot of HSR fics on Lofter that made me pay for the second half/ending part. -_-

[cashew]

Shock! I have not hit upon any 景枫/景恒 fics that locked the second half behind paywalls yet.

Lofter seems to be mostly the promotional platform. The actual pay platform is at Ifdian.

[tanithryudo]

Is ifdian a fic archive site? I can't seem to navigate it to find anything...

[cashew]

Ifdian functions more like a patreon-clone than a fic archive. I usually see authors post part of the fic (or even just the title of the fic) on their Lofter account then direct readers to go search their Ifdian handle. I've looked up a few authors on ifdian, and without exception all of them have a list of fics behind a paywall. There's even a button to list public (aka non-pay) posts, but those almost always are just promotional entries. The posts with fics are all locked behind payments.

In terms of true searchable archive sites, it's jjwxc & qidian, but those are geared towards original fiction, not fan creations.

For CN fics, best I can figure is Lofter and Weibo (超话). Ironically, posts on Lofter/Weibo tend to redirect the reader to the other site (Weibo/Lofter)...or to Ifdian, which is always a paywall. At least Lofter has a function that allows posts to be sorted by "most popular" and Lofter culture seems to studiously tag "#fandom IP #pairing #character", so it's slightly searchable. Wland works for HSR fics (at least searching by character then selecting 18 or 18+ category returns a lot of results), but the TV fandom doesn't seem to exist on Wland at all. I think I found all of one fic between 《御赐小仵作》and《君子盟》, so outlook is kinda grim...