voodoocactus 's review for:

Mr. Melancholy Wants to Live a Peaceful Life 忧郁先生想过平静生活 by Cyan Wings, 青色羽翼

4.0

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Spoiler

Basically in this world, there are special humans aka Protectors who protect the Earth from Destroyers who, you know, want to destroy the world. In reality, the Universe is ruled by Chief Deity who runs The System, a game-like setting in which levelers travel from one Opened World (aka ruled by The System) to another on missions, gather points, until they clear all the levels, gain basically unlimited powers and immortality and are granted one wish. You guessed it, Yu Hua’s wish was to be left alone to live a quiet and peaceful life with a husband.

So, Mr. and Mr. Smith both try their damnedest to sugardaddy their hubs with money they have stashed away while keeping up the appearance of a humble man with a low-income job. Such hardship! Yu Hua finds out very soon that his hubs is a Protector, You Zhengping finds out around halfway through the book and then holds back because “if I don’t say it aloud it’s not true.” The story soon evolves to gathering a cadre of defecting Destroyers to fight against the machine aka The System, and the Destroyers and Protectors uniting their forces for common good.

This is mostly fun and games (literally), until the story takes a darker tone around Ch 87 with a flashback of how Yu Hua became what he is. And then it evolves to heroic men sacrificing themselves for their comrades, city, and country (they don’t die but they lose their special powers). Two of the three extras are blatantly fatphobic and I skipped them, but extra 3 sheds some light on the World Law thing, it was interesting.

This is such a fun romp! Speical powers! Identity porn! Immortals (or something something)! It has very SCI Mystery team dynamics feels, it’s silly and over-dramatic, sometimes stupid, and it cheerfully ignores things like basic laws of physics and, you know, common sense. The language is often pointedly childish (which I think goes with the comedy genre), the author’s chapter endnotes made me giggle and snort a lot. At times I raised my brows at what must be culturally appropriate comments and reactions but that felt very very weird to my Western self. I’m glad I happened to see the article about Unlimited Flow because it cleared up quite a lot…