Fever come, fever go

[cashew]

Struck by some kind of bug, don't know what. Going through bouts of feeling OK followed immediately by a day of fever. Drinking lots of fluids but is barely helping. Subsisting mostly on fruit. Am fairly certain the visiting relatives (from overseas) have brought some foreign bug and it's wreaking havoc on the entire family. Everyone is sick at the moment.

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Meanwhile, have gone through all 668 archived BL novels' summaries on 耽美小说网>古代架空 and found nothing appealing. (If you're wondering about the previous 《将倾》 novel I was reading, the pacing slowed to a crawl as the author spent multiple chapters focusing on banal shit, so I moved on.) As I've asserted before, for some reason, authors are just really bad at writing romances and can't seem to juggle the romantic emotional development along side a plot that is remotely engaging. This shouldn't, in theory, be this difficult, but apparently most people can't make it happen.

(It doesn't help that web novels incentivizes slow ass pacing to keep readership coming back week after week. But one would think that the serialized form means the author needs to be good at keeping up cliffhangers to guarantee that readership won't give up on their works, especially with so much competition out there. But for some reason, there's an excessive amount of banal nothing burgers in BL web novels that honestly just baffles me.)

So, after reading through a digital metric ton of crappy BL period drama web novels, I'm noticing these following trends:

1. Age-gap is hugely popular. By my estimate, some 95% of the stuff features a main couple that is at least seven years apart in age (more often 10-12 years apart). When taken into consideration that the older person in the couple is usually no more than 30-years-old (more often around 25), 7-12 years age gap is huge. The desire to have one guy effectively babysit another guy in the BL genre is the default. If you want a semi-equal relationship (in a historical setting), good luck finding anything.

2. There's more than expected number of stories focused on the everyday life of peasants. Personally, am not really a fan of those types of stories, if only because there's not much romance to the peasant life. It's a struggle to survive, so trying to inject romance into trying to grow enough food to keep the family alive while not accidentally pissing off whatever local official is just not exactly the ideal set up for romantic drama. Not to mention, historically, for the peasantry, marriage is about making babies to produce more physical labor to keep the family alive and much less about love and romance. So BL just feels...well, intensely anachronistic. Peasants just did not have the luxury to pursue romance most of the time.

3. The obsession with emperors. I mean, I get it, emperors have the luxury to pursue a BL relationship and there's no one who can do anything about it. Except for how emperors actually have to play the court politics and keep the powerful people on his side if he doesn't want to have to deal with a coup, and part of that political game is making sure to have a bunch of sons (hence needing a back court) and maintaining the "ideal man" appearance, which means adhering to Confucian teachings, and one of the big things being "make babies as part of your social responsibility". So any kind of "open" relationship is a no-go, but this seems to not really matter to most writers, which begs the question of why set the story in a historical setting in the first place.

4. Despite a cultural obsession with scholars as an aesthetic, the BL sector seems to be genuinely baffled at what purpose civil officers serve in governance. If the writers do some research, they seem to realize oh, hey, delivering justice is part of the civil officer's job. If not, apparently civil officers just stand around all day, bow to the emperor, and bitch about other people's spending habits. Imperial China has a long, long history of civil bureaucracy with tons of checks and balances on the civil officer's power. Why set the BL couple to take place in a court drama if the actual politics never feature and it's just a bunch of people being petty over inane shit?

5. Way, way too many people write "geniuses" without the actual know how to write a genius. The narration would tell me how a guy is a well read and well educated child genius who got number one (or three, because apparently fuck no. 2 榜眼, that's not pretty sounding enough) in the imperial exams and has a silver tongue that can defeat all of his opponents...and then when it comes to the actual dialogue he sounds like a teenager throwing a temper tantrum. What happened to citing historical examples? Or quoting the sages? Or being able recite passages from the classics? Or writing poetry at the drop of a hat? For fuck's sake, don't tell me a guy is a literary genius and have him talk like he hasn't even graduated from grammar school! I have literally read HSR fanfic where 景元 speaks more formally and more classically than the "geniuses" in these stories. And fanfic is a really low bar...

Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. Or the good writing is in other sub-genres. But dear god the historical sub-genre of BL web novels is absolute shit.

Comments

[tanithryudo]

It's not COVID related, is it? Hope you get better soon!

As for BL... yeah, it's really tough to find good stories there. The only BL I've been reading/following in the last year or so is a cultivation setting one (though one where the protagonists don't have an age gap, surprisingly). But I read it more for that particular author's world building than anything else.

[cashew]

I don't think it's COVID...there hasn't been any upper respiratory responses other than a sore throat. Crossing fingers...

Re: BL - I just don't get why the genre sucks so hard. I mean it might be the historical drama stuff just sucks in general, and not the result of BL in specific. Which is weird given how much period dramas have been adapted from novels during the 80s, 90s, 2000s... You'd think millennials growing up with that stuff would be producing some similar types of material (just with BL couples instead), but no. Characters are either petty and focus on banal, insignificant details, or the story is set in an alternate universe where everything is made up and history doesn't matter.

Also I don't understand why the writing, on a technical level, is always so long-winded. Classical Chinese is very concise and values metaphor over literal description. Yet these writers keep adding a bunch of filler words to their sentences, like they're trying to pad word count in a NaNo draft rather than construct a meaningful sentence.

[tanithryudo]

The problem with setting historical drama stories in actual historical times are primarily the writer doesn't want to do the research it would require to be historically accurate. If they just want to have ancient China as a background setting, then it's easier to set it in a made up dynasty, where you are free to be anachronistic.

Most stories I've seen which takes place in actual historical times are ironically alt-history stories. And those...tend to be power fantasies, of the main character self insert beating up (or showing up) all the famous historical figures on their rise to power using the power of modern knowledge, etc. These are also very YMMV.

As for the verbosity, it's probably the same reason Dickens is long-winded. Most story sites pay by the word count.

[cashew]

If they just want to have ancient China as a background setting, then it's easier to set it in a made up dynasty, where you are free to be anachronistic.

The problem is that even with a made up dynasty there's still an issue of what types of phrase appeared in "ancient" times. Just like a trope-y "medieval Euro fantasy" story is going to shake the reader out of the story's atmosphere if the characters use modern slang (such as "OK" or "cool"), so too will "fake dynasty" stories feel out of place if characters suddenly pop up with words like "碰瓷" or "么么哒". Like, there are just phrases that are obviously anachronistic, even with "fake dynasty" as a cover. And that's the type of language that keeps showing up over and over in these "fake dynasty" stories.

Also, I don't really need the writing to be historically accurate, I just want it to not feel obviously modern. (T_T) But even that is too much to ask.

power fantasies, of the main character self insert beating up (or showing up) all the famous historical figures on their rise to power using the power of modern knowledge, etc.

Yeah, this is why I don't bother reading transmigration/time travel stuff. The "using modern knowledge to hax history" plot is...utterly uninteresting to me and not the reason I'm watching period dramas.

...same reason Dickens is long-winded. Most story sites pay by the word count.

Reading Dickens doesn't feel like the author is deliberately destroying the English language as we know it. For some of these web novels, on the other hand... (T_T)

[tanithryudo]

> characters suddenly pop up with words like "碰瓷" or "么么哒".

Ok, yeah, that's purely a skill issue on the author's side. People can't be bothered to remember their high school literature class I guess. :p