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yeliahkim's review
adventurous
emotional
funny
lighthearted
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
leafblade's review
3.0
Buckle up bitches, I have opinions!!!
But first, disclaimers:
1) I read the english fan translation that we all know about. I can't read nor speak Chinese.
2) I did watch The untamed before reading the book, and I liked it more than... whatever this was
3) One of my favorite characters is Jin Guangyao. No, really!!! He's a rat but I love him for what he is. Yes this is just a disclaimer bc I think that by putting this before the actual review, someone who also appreciates him can find me and come screech about him
4) My English has been all over the place lately, sorry in advance
And then, trigger warnings:
-blood, injuries, pretty heavy stuff
-EXPLICIT sex (between minors and MAYBE I don't remember well I blocked it from my mind, also a minor and an adult)
-rape
-incest
-body horror. lots.
-a lot of corpses, ghosts, spirits and stuff like that
-death of every kind of character you can think of (but NOT THE MAIN CHARACTERS, WE DON'T BURY THE GAYS IN THIS HOUSEHOLD)
-alcohol, drunk people
-slurs for gay people, but very specific to Chinese culture (you won't find the F word here)
-my English slipped, how the fuck do you call the place where all the prostitutes are........
-necrophilia I wish I was fucking joking
-poverty
-suicide
SO, uh, where to start.
Maybe from The Untamed? I initially wanted to read this book to fill in the blanks the show has. And that it mostly didn't, but that just means the show is really well done, not that the book is inherently bad because of that. Apart from the "explicit" scenes (not just sex, but kisses, slurs, porn talk, that absolutely hilarious scene where a wasted LWJ wraps his headband around WWX's wrists in front of the whole junior squad), it really didn't add much. If anything, I'd say it lacked the compelling factor from the show, but that could've been because I revisited this story so shortly after finishing it for the first time. By this I mean I wasn't even close to crying while reading the book, but dehydrated myself for 4 episodes straight while watching the show.
My favorite scene from The Untamed is sadly made up by the (amazing) screenwriter. I'm talking about the lanterns scene at Cloud Recesses. For me, it made WWX and LWJ's every decision make sense, opened an opportunity to go back to it when we find out what LWJ's promise was, and also warmed my heart quite a bit. Not only because it gave us LWJ's first smile (BABY BOY ;;), but also because my motto in life is very similar to their promises, and it drove me closer to the main characters. It's unfair to blame the book for not having it, though, but I wish we'd gotten something like that because sometimes WWX's actions specially felt all over the place.
It's also SO funny how they amped up Xiyao and the Yi City gang in The Untamed. Book!JGY is a gaslighting asshole, but TVshow!JGY is absolutely IN LOVE (in the only way he knows how to be, not that healthy, etc etc that's not the point) with Lan Xichen and I just. I read that the author doesn't write secondary gay couples but she did and we all saw that and luckily the screenwriter for The Untamed saw it too. You can't not say Xue Yang wasn't also (disturbingly, wickedly, unhealthily) in love with Xiao Xingchen, too, and it wasn't just Song Lan. Which, I mean, aren't we all, but also I think that by making a few of the secondary characters more visibly queer, it added a lot to the story.
Also, uh, how could The Untamed forget the small little detail that XXC might actually come back to life?????? He's my FAVORITE CHARACTER AND Y'ALL MADE ME THINK HE WAS GONE FOREVER???? EVERY HEADCANON TREATS HIM LIKE HE'S GONE FOREVER AND HE'S NOT???? It's said that with time, and being taken care of, he could potentially choose to come back instead of being lost forever. Do you think so low of Song Lan that you are willing to believe he's going to go above and beyond to make this happen??? Do you think he's just some emo boy??? He's giving a pep talk to the spirit-trapping pouch 12 hours a day every single day until he gets his boyfriend back. And they get a happy ending. For fuck's sake.
The women and Wen Ning were heavily mistreated in this, it almost susprised me lmao. Jiang Yanli gets maybe five scenes before she dies, Wen Qing gets maybe six, luckily Mianmian's iconic kick in the patriarchy's balls is still there but besides from that we don't really see her. And Wen Ning is introduced so late??? And two chapters later he's WWX's only friend because everyone else is dead and it's been so long, and it felt a bit forced. I thought the show had no hope of ever passing the Bechdel test but damn, it could lecture the book for a hundred hours about it. JIANG YANLI DIDN'T EVEN GO TO THE CLOUD RECESSES WITH THEM!!! How am I supposed to even CARE about her if all I've seen her do is cook and marry the stupidest man alive??????
Okay so it's JGY's end appreciation hours. Yeah this is just another paragraph talking about the show, I'm sorry I swear I will talk specifically about the book later on this review lol. SO in the book JGY drags LXC to where danger is, and then pushes him away. By doing this he gives him the illusion of having been saved by JGY, but actually LXC was just pushed away from the dangerous situation JGY just dragged him into. So, it's just another item in the long gaslighting list. There's still the "I've never thought about hurting you" talk which RIPS MY HEART APART IN A THOUSAND PIECES, but you read it and you're supposed to go "yeah sure, BITCH". I mean, JGY wouldn't have let NMJ's corpse kill LXC, even if he dragged him towards it, but still. It's fucked up. BUT IN THE UNTAMED we still get the emotional speech, AND we see JGY actually put those words to use. When he asks LXC to die with him, he's still old JGY. But he gets terrified when LXC agrees, and pushes him away at the last second. That gay angst juice hit hard
The last thing about The Untamed: I literally begged out loud for them to give me one (1) single scene of LWJ laughing. And they didn't. AND THE BOOK DID!!!! I'M SO HAPPY FOR BOOK!LWJ I HOPE HE GETS TO LAUGH AS MUCH AS HE WANTS THROUGHOUT HIS SECOND CHANCE AT LOVE. HE DESERVES IT AND WE ALL KNOW IT. If I had a gif of Wang Yibo playing LWJ and laughing out loud I wouldn't talk about anything else though, so maybe it's for the best.
Just to get this out of the way: yeah, the author is awful in all the ways that people say she is. I'm done with the author talk after JKR's whole ass mess so I'm not gonna go too deep into it but, to summarize: sexualizing gay men is wrong, almost all of the sex scenes here are literally and morally illegal and she shouldn't be romantizicing them as much as she is. Also she planned Yi City to be another book but ended up putting it in MDZS and I just... girl, they deserved their own 1100 pages worth of content. Probably from now on I'll just try to ignore the fact that this book exists and focus on the other adaptations instead, specially The Untamed.
So while we're at it, the extra chapters...... they were not good. I'm sex repulsed most of the time, and I know I'm coming back to this review when I'm more sex repulsed than I am now so I won't ellaborate much but... yikes. BIG yikes. The yikest ones ruined the normal ones, like the juniors' night hunt and the lotus seed pods. And tween Xue Yang. I mean, if you want to imagine your characters doing certain things, sure, you're fucked up but go off, I guess. If you want to write it, go on!!! They're your characters you can do whatever you want with them. But some of this stuff was WILDLY OOC, and also not appropiate?? Risking sounding like a prude, but like, come on. You KNOW where the line was and you crossed it multiple times. LWJ would kill himself if he had to see himself like this. Just respect your husband, bro, it's not that hard.
The timeline/chronology/order of events/idk how to call it was also WAY off. Maybe not the actual order, but the order things were presented in. It felt like the author was minding her own business writing some scene, then a thought of a flashback crossed her mind and he wrote it right then and there without a care about the scene she was initially writing or about if it makes sense to put that flashback there. It felt like she was planning it as she went. The only reason I could even begin to grasp where she hopped back and forth in time was because I watched The Untamed. The info dumping was MASSIVE, and the author made no effort to notify you she was jumping into a flashback. This is already a long book, it won't hurt to put a little "13 years before" at the beginning of flashbacks. Yeah, flashbackS, because it wasn't one long as hell flashback of terror like in The Untamed, but rather multiple ones scattered throughout the story. Heck, she could've even just written "now" and "then" and let us figure out if by "then" she means before or after Burial Mounds. JUST GIVE ME A SIGN, I'LL MANAGE AFTER THAT
Oh I think I mentioned it before, but I found the translation a bit tacky. I saw someone said that in the original the sentences just flow, and it could be that that's just their perception and the original one is just as confusing as the English fan translation (highlighting: FAN translation, these people DID IT FOR FREE). But the fight scenes were impossible to follow, and it made no aesthetic attempt to catch my attention at all, ever. The only trackable stylistic choice were exclamation points in odd places (which are most likely from the original). If you're reading a scene with characters you don't care about, you're doomed. I'm saying this as someone who doesn't care about Nie Mingjue and that consistently fell asleep during his episodes and chapters. Moustache man just doesn't do it for me, but there's a character like that in every book I read, and the author just works harder to grasp your attention.
It also was EXTREMELY ANNOYING how the translator but translator notes in the middle of a chapter. Or just random notes. Like, three paragraphs before they have sex for the first time WWX says something along the lines of "noooo Hanguang-jun I'll be good I won't do anything I swear :((" and there was an asterisc next to that that just said "are you sure?". Like, don't you realize you're pulling people out of the story??? I don't need internet slang in the middle of a chapter, just like I don't need translator notes to be there, you can just put them at the end of each chapter. Or just ommit them entirely, tbh. I'll google what I don't understand, like I do with every professionally translated book that has words in a language I don't speak, or that represents a culture I'm not a part of. I SPECIALLY don't care nor need the etimology of every character's name. I really don't. My name's Serena and I don't put an asteric (asterisk???) next to my name every time I write it to tell you very anticlimatically that it means "calm" in Spanish. Her putting her signature and a disclaimer not to pirate I could handle, but the rest of it was just bullshit.
The book also felt a bit flat for me compared to The Untamed because it didn't take advantage of its lenght. I saw in The Untamed that they can make a full-fledged story and characters out of 36 hours or so, but that's also what the book takes to read (according to my Kindle), and I didn't feel like it used that time well at all. It had the same character development and worldbuilding depth as a 500-pages YA fantasy novel.
I could almost feel the holes where more secondary characters should be. Ouyang Zizhen obviously demanded a bigger voice, but there should also have been more recognizable people at Lotus Pier, to make us feel like WWX really lost something big when deciding to not longer be a part of the sect. Not that his family isn't enough of a high stake, but we see him fooling around with other Yunmeng disciples when he was a teen, and he says he recognizes most of the youngest ones when they're shooting at kites. And he's such a people's person that I simply can't believe that he went through his life at Lotus Pier not making good friends, just limiting himself to his family. A few more people studying with them at Gusu would've also been nice, but I don't think that part feels as empty as Yunmeng does.
Also, please, character depth. I felt like I was being laughed at. WWX went through death, 13 years in limbo, waking up in a different body than his, meeting with all of his previous acquaitances (idk how to write that word and I'll never learn, sorry lmao), having to see how everything he did to the Wen remnants was for (almost) nothing... and the best thing you can give me is "ooohhh he flirt with lan zhan!!!"?????? It's almost a disservice to the characters that are begging you to explore their trauma. Jiang Cheng became a sect leader at a very young age and with no one besides him to keep him company, let alone give him a piece of advice. Maybe we see LWJ's struggles the most, what with forced seclusion and all that. Jin Ling has like a thousand relatives, is a star child that everyone expects big things of, doesn't have a permanent home and his best friend is a dog. Song Lan went through THAT WHOLE THING. Wen Ning wakes up alone in a world without his sister, without his family, without his best friend (is WWX his best friend??), knowing that when he went into deep slumber or whatever he had all that, he can't speak, he's potentially only a puppet, and he doesn't even sell radishes in the book!!!!!! There's a lot going on and the author doesn't see it because she's too busy fantasizing over gay men and going on tangents and overexplaining the simplets of things.
Like, this book is ELEVEN HUNDRED PAGES LONG. THAT'S MORE THAN A THOUSAND. And it still lacks in the character study department. You can't do everything you want, even in a thousand pages, but I'd like to think you'd care about your main character enough to let him ellaborate on his feelings after being dead and brought back to life?????
Anyway that's it I think
No wait, also if you call WWX a wife I will shoot you on sight
Now that's it
But first, disclaimers:
1) I read the english fan translation that we all know about. I can't read nor speak Chinese.
2) I did watch The untamed before reading the book, and I liked it more than... whatever this was
3) One of my favorite characters is Jin Guangyao. No, really!!! He's a rat but I love him for what he is. Yes this is just a disclaimer bc I think that by putting this before the actual review, someone who also appreciates him can find me and come screech about him
4) My English has been all over the place lately, sorry in advance
And then, trigger warnings:
-blood, injuries, pretty heavy stuff
-EXPLICIT sex (between minors and MAYBE I don't remember well I blocked it from my mind, also a minor and an adult)
-rape
-incest
-body horror. lots.
-a lot of corpses, ghosts, spirits and stuff like that
-death of every kind of character you can think of (but NOT THE MAIN CHARACTERS, WE DON'T BURY THE GAYS IN THIS HOUSEHOLD)
-alcohol, drunk people
-slurs for gay people, but very specific to Chinese culture (you won't find the F word here)
-my English slipped, how the fuck do you call the place where all the prostitutes are........
-necrophilia I wish I was fucking joking
-poverty
-suicide
SO, uh, where to start.
Maybe from The Untamed? I initially wanted to read this book to fill in the blanks the show has. And that it mostly didn't, but that just means the show is really well done, not that the book is inherently bad because of that. Apart from the "explicit" scenes (not just sex, but kisses, slurs, porn talk, that absolutely hilarious scene where a wasted LWJ wraps his headband around WWX's wrists in front of the whole junior squad), it really didn't add much. If anything, I'd say it lacked the compelling factor from the show, but that could've been because I revisited this story so shortly after finishing it for the first time. By this I mean I wasn't even close to crying while reading the book, but dehydrated myself for 4 episodes straight while watching the show.
My favorite scene from The Untamed is sadly made up by the (amazing) screenwriter. I'm talking about the lanterns scene at Cloud Recesses. For me, it made WWX and LWJ's every decision make sense, opened an opportunity to go back to it when we find out what LWJ's promise was, and also warmed my heart quite a bit. Not only because it gave us LWJ's first smile (BABY BOY ;;), but also because my motto in life is very similar to their promises, and it drove me closer to the main characters. It's unfair to blame the book for not having it, though, but I wish we'd gotten something like that because sometimes WWX's actions specially felt all over the place.
It's also SO funny how they amped up Xiyao and the Yi City gang in The Untamed. Book!JGY is a gaslighting asshole, but TVshow!JGY is absolutely IN LOVE (in the only way he knows how to be, not that healthy, etc etc that's not the point) with Lan Xichen and I just. I read that the author doesn't write secondary gay couples but she did and we all saw that and luckily the screenwriter for The Untamed saw it too. You can't not say Xue Yang wasn't also (disturbingly, wickedly, unhealthily) in love with Xiao Xingchen, too, and it wasn't just Song Lan. Which, I mean, aren't we all, but also I think that by making a few of the secondary characters more visibly queer, it added a lot to the story.
Also, uh, how could The Untamed forget the small little detail that XXC might actually come back to life?????? He's my FAVORITE CHARACTER AND Y'ALL MADE ME THINK HE WAS GONE FOREVER???? EVERY HEADCANON TREATS HIM LIKE HE'S GONE FOREVER AND HE'S NOT???? It's said that with time, and being taken care of, he could potentially choose to come back instead of being lost forever. Do you think so low of Song Lan that you are willing to believe he's going to go above and beyond to make this happen??? Do you think he's just some emo boy??? He's giving a pep talk to the spirit-trapping pouch 12 hours a day every single day until he gets his boyfriend back. And they get a happy ending. For fuck's sake.
The women and Wen Ning were heavily mistreated in this, it almost susprised me lmao. Jiang Yanli gets maybe five scenes before she dies, Wen Qing gets maybe six, luckily Mianmian's iconic kick in the patriarchy's balls is still there but besides from that we don't really see her. And Wen Ning is introduced so late??? And two chapters later he's WWX's only friend because everyone else is dead and it's been so long, and it felt a bit forced. I thought the show had no hope of ever passing the Bechdel test but damn, it could lecture the book for a hundred hours about it. JIANG YANLI DIDN'T EVEN GO TO THE CLOUD RECESSES WITH THEM!!! How am I supposed to even CARE about her if all I've seen her do is cook and marry the stupidest man alive??????
Okay so it's JGY's end appreciation hours. Yeah this is just another paragraph talking about the show, I'm sorry I swear I will talk specifically about the book later on this review lol. SO in the book JGY drags LXC to where danger is, and then pushes him away. By doing this he gives him the illusion of having been saved by JGY, but actually LXC was just pushed away from the dangerous situation JGY just dragged him into. So, it's just another item in the long gaslighting list. There's still the "I've never thought about hurting you" talk which RIPS MY HEART APART IN A THOUSAND PIECES, but you read it and you're supposed to go "yeah sure, BITCH". I mean, JGY wouldn't have let NMJ's corpse kill LXC, even if he dragged him towards it, but still. It's fucked up. BUT IN THE UNTAMED we still get the emotional speech, AND we see JGY actually put those words to use. When he asks LXC to die with him, he's still old JGY. But he gets terrified when LXC agrees, and pushes him away at the last second. That gay angst juice hit hard
The last thing about The Untamed: I literally begged out loud for them to give me one (1) single scene of LWJ laughing. And they didn't. AND THE BOOK DID!!!! I'M SO HAPPY FOR BOOK!LWJ I HOPE HE GETS TO LAUGH AS MUCH AS HE WANTS THROUGHOUT HIS SECOND CHANCE AT LOVE. HE DESERVES IT AND WE ALL KNOW IT. If I had a gif of Wang Yibo playing LWJ and laughing out loud I wouldn't talk about anything else though, so maybe it's for the best.
Just to get this out of the way: yeah, the author is awful in all the ways that people say she is. I'm done with the author talk after JKR's whole ass mess so I'm not gonna go too deep into it but, to summarize: sexualizing gay men is wrong, almost all of the sex scenes here are literally and morally illegal and she shouldn't be romantizicing them as much as she is. Also she planned Yi City to be another book but ended up putting it in MDZS and I just... girl, they deserved their own 1100 pages worth of content. Probably from now on I'll just try to ignore the fact that this book exists and focus on the other adaptations instead, specially The Untamed.
So while we're at it, the extra chapters...... they were not good. I'm sex repulsed most of the time, and I know I'm coming back to this review when I'm more sex repulsed than I am now so I won't ellaborate much but... yikes. BIG yikes. The yikest ones ruined the normal ones, like the juniors' night hunt and the lotus seed pods. And tween Xue Yang. I mean, if you want to imagine your characters doing certain things, sure, you're fucked up but go off, I guess. If you want to write it, go on!!! They're your characters you can do whatever you want with them. But some of this stuff was WILDLY OOC, and also not appropiate?? Risking sounding like a prude, but like, come on. You KNOW where the line was and you crossed it multiple times. LWJ would kill himself if he had to see himself like this. Just respect your husband, bro, it's not that hard.
The timeline/chronology/order of events/idk how to call it was also WAY off. Maybe not the actual order, but the order things were presented in. It felt like the author was minding her own business writing some scene, then a thought of a flashback crossed her mind and he wrote it right then and there without a care about the scene she was initially writing or about if it makes sense to put that flashback there. It felt like she was planning it as she went. The only reason I could even begin to grasp where she hopped back and forth in time was because I watched The Untamed. The info dumping was MASSIVE, and the author made no effort to notify you she was jumping into a flashback. This is already a long book, it won't hurt to put a little "13 years before" at the beginning of flashbacks. Yeah, flashbackS, because it wasn't one long as hell flashback of terror like in The Untamed, but rather multiple ones scattered throughout the story. Heck, she could've even just written "now" and "then" and let us figure out if by "then" she means before or after Burial Mounds. JUST GIVE ME A SIGN, I'LL MANAGE AFTER THAT
Oh I think I mentioned it before, but I found the translation a bit tacky. I saw someone said that in the original the sentences just flow, and it could be that that's just their perception and the original one is just as confusing as the English fan translation (highlighting: FAN translation, these people DID IT FOR FREE). But the fight scenes were impossible to follow, and it made no aesthetic attempt to catch my attention at all, ever. The only trackable stylistic choice were exclamation points in odd places (which are most likely from the original). If you're reading a scene with characters you don't care about, you're doomed. I'm saying this as someone who doesn't care about Nie Mingjue and that consistently fell asleep during his episodes and chapters. Moustache man just doesn't do it for me, but there's a character like that in every book I read, and the author just works harder to grasp your attention.
It also was EXTREMELY ANNOYING how the translator but translator notes in the middle of a chapter. Or just random notes. Like, three paragraphs before they have sex for the first time WWX says something along the lines of "noooo Hanguang-jun I'll be good I won't do anything I swear :((" and there was an asterisc next to that that just said "are you sure?". Like, don't you realize you're pulling people out of the story??? I don't need internet slang in the middle of a chapter, just like I don't need translator notes to be there, you can just put them at the end of each chapter. Or just ommit them entirely, tbh. I'll google what I don't understand, like I do with every professionally translated book that has words in a language I don't speak, or that represents a culture I'm not a part of. I SPECIALLY don't care nor need the etimology of every character's name. I really don't. My name's Serena and I don't put an asteric (asterisk???) next to my name every time I write it to tell you very anticlimatically that it means "calm" in Spanish. Her putting her signature and a disclaimer not to pirate I could handle, but the rest of it was just bullshit.
The book also felt a bit flat for me compared to The Untamed because it didn't take advantage of its lenght. I saw in The Untamed that they can make a full-fledged story and characters out of 36 hours or so, but that's also what the book takes to read (according to my Kindle), and I didn't feel like it used that time well at all. It had the same character development and worldbuilding depth as a 500-pages YA fantasy novel.
I could almost feel the holes where more secondary characters should be. Ouyang Zizhen obviously demanded a bigger voice, but there should also have been more recognizable people at Lotus Pier, to make us feel like WWX really lost something big when deciding to not longer be a part of the sect. Not that his family isn't enough of a high stake, but we see him fooling around with other Yunmeng disciples when he was a teen, and he says he recognizes most of the youngest ones when they're shooting at kites. And he's such a people's person that I simply can't believe that he went through his life at Lotus Pier not making good friends, just limiting himself to his family. A few more people studying with them at Gusu would've also been nice, but I don't think that part feels as empty as Yunmeng does.
Also, please, character depth. I felt like I was being laughed at. WWX went through death, 13 years in limbo, waking up in a different body than his, meeting with all of his previous acquaitances (idk how to write that word and I'll never learn, sorry lmao), having to see how everything he did to the Wen remnants was for (almost) nothing... and the best thing you can give me is "ooohhh he flirt with lan zhan!!!"?????? It's almost a disservice to the characters that are begging you to explore their trauma. Jiang Cheng became a sect leader at a very young age and with no one besides him to keep him company, let alone give him a piece of advice. Maybe we see LWJ's struggles the most, what with forced seclusion and all that. Jin Ling has like a thousand relatives, is a star child that everyone expects big things of, doesn't have a permanent home and his best friend is a dog. Song Lan went through THAT WHOLE THING. Wen Ning wakes up alone in a world without his sister, without his family, without his best friend (is WWX his best friend??), knowing that when he went into deep slumber or whatever he had all that, he can't speak, he's potentially only a puppet, and he doesn't even sell radishes in the book!!!!!! There's a lot going on and the author doesn't see it because she's too busy fantasizing over gay men and going on tangents and overexplaining the simplets of things.
Like, this book is ELEVEN HUNDRED PAGES LONG. THAT'S MORE THAN A THOUSAND. And it still lacks in the character study department. You can't do everything you want, even in a thousand pages, but I'd like to think you'd care about your main character enough to let him ellaborate on his feelings after being dead and brought back to life?????
Anyway that's it I think
No wait, also if you call WWX a wife I will shoot you on sight
Now that's it
leroyuhuhu's review
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
mawwn's review
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
kdjsfav's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
temporarei's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
WEI WUXIAN MY FOREVER FAVORITE TWINK I LOVE YOU MY IJBOL UNBOTHERED KING
saturn26's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Alcohol, Blood, Death, and Sexual content
Moderate: Bullying, Death of parent, Cursing, Injury/Injury detail, and War
Minor: Child death and Incest
some_random_person_hi's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
sad
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
FINALLY DONE
Man, that first section was such a drag. It was so boring up tilllotus pier burned and then from then onwards it was splendid. All around really solid, I just didn't enjoy the main ship's interactions set when they were young. Really wish we'd gotten to see more of Wei Wuxian being in yiling patriarch mode
First chinese novel I actually read from start to finish (skipping non-age appropriate sections) purely for enjoyment so it's a nice milestone for me.
Really really liked theburial mounds scenes with the Wens , that was my favourite section of CQL and it's somehow even better here. I feel like a fake fan but I like CQL!Wangxian more šš novel!Wangxian was just so plain compared to all the plot going on in the book. Also, the sheer amount of times Wei Wuxian directly or indirectly got Lan Wangji drunk was somewhat annoying . Uh, I think CQL is not a faithful adaptation when going by tone.
Moving on, when the angst hit it really hit.When I got to the Qiongqi path section, it was hard to convince myself to continue reading.
Man, that first section was such a drag. It was so boring up till
First chinese novel I actually read from start to finish (skipping non-age appropriate sections) purely for enjoyment so it's a nice milestone for me.
Really really liked the
Moving on, when the angst hit it really hit.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Abandonment, Murder, Sexual content, Grief, Torture, Alcohol, Blood, Body horror, Gore, and Violence
Moderate: Injury/Injury detail, Misogyny, Sexual assault, Self harm, Confinement, Incest, Infidelity, Sexism, Genocide, Child abuse, Death of parent, Homophobia, War, Sexual violence, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Physical abuse, and Classism
Minor: Slavery and Sexual harassment
Self harm is to get blood to do magic things. Happened quite a few times. Also, technically not drug use so didn't warn for it but I feel like demonic cultivation has many many similarities to drug use.dmsnnrx's review against another edition
4.0
wei wuxian is one of the best main characters i've ever read