illuvium

arguably this can't be generalized to the whole genre of fantasy because today's subject is only a branch of that, but i think there's a lot to be said about historical fantasy as you see it in manhwas/gas. for those unfamiliar, there's a lot of webcomics and webnovels that circulate around which are generally women-targeted. i can't recall if i've ever posted about those here, but i think about them all the time and i love doing trope dissections with them in mind.

some key aspects of these sorts of works are usually a monarchy, some sort of magic-based societal hierarchy, some religious institution, and some blend between the medieval prioritization of local lords over the land's "king" and renaissance-typical advances in art and architecture. naturally, these romances tend to fall into wish fulfillment and don't prioritize historical accuracy (which, in fairness, is hard to consider anyway when you're also dealing with magic, as i've detailed in my previous post surrounding the conditions of the world in a magical setting). however, i still think there are interesting things to consider about this. number one is that, when working with a historical setting like that (and admittedly today as well), there will always be a degree of exploitation baked into the story. it's most obvious when looking at a historical setting because, well, serfs exist. some rofans tend to ignore the existence of serfdom as a facet of european history. that's okay, but even then, there's still this perpetual group of peasants who buzz about in the background, dressed in drab clothing. that's the undeniable fact, and so the next question is: does that matter? like i've said, even anything in a modern setting will have the capitalism-typical exploitation of workers and miserable working conditions, and there's not really a shortage of stories that surround high-profile businessmen falling in love. sure. the case i'd like to make regarding why rofan and isekai are special is that the female protagonist will often be set up as some sort of angel. not literally (most times), but there'll always be an aspect where you're meant to praise the main character for their altruism. i don't mind this either; when you're dealing with a story fundamentally built around wish-fulfillment and which is marketed to romance enjoyers, i think it's mainly natural to want your main character to be of some moral superiority. i think that the setting undermines this, though. as established before, there's prominent serfdom, or at the very least a prominent inequality, that doesn't ever and can't ever be resolved in a rofan manhwa because a fundamental selling point of the genre is its luxury and its impermeability to the regular joe. this is even acknowledged through the isekai portion: the people who get transported to a new world are never at the top of the socioeconomic food chain. they're wage slaves, and this is naturally intentional and meant to feed into the luxury of the world they then are transported to. like most of my posts that revolve tropes and their mechanics, there's not much i have to say regarding what happens next. nobody's going to stop wanting their main character to be portrayed as an angelic giving person just because i'm suggesting that there's further exploitation that goes unacknowledged in the work. i don't mind that, either, but something that does genuinely tickle me is when the main character is said to want to change the system; things like feminism will go acknowledged without any attention paid towards the intersectionality of feminism and classism.

on the subject of misogyny as well, there's another interesting part of fantasy romances to me, which is that the female main character will, basically without fail, always be of a lower standing than the male lead. admittedly, many of these stories and webnovels are written by women, so it's not as though it's an intentionally insidious move meant to make the case that men are always superior to women. nor is it a case of critique wherein the easier access of men to these higher positions is called to attention. it's a facet of the genre, and ties back into the basic idea that outlines every creative's work: wish fulfillment. i still think that there's something of interest within that guideline, though. as in, even within their fantasies, it almost seems to be an incredulous thing that a woman can reach such a high standing of her own ability (ridiculous thing to say within such a bloodline-dictated setting) that i think reflects on the actual society in south korea especially a lot, given sk's rampant and dire misogyny. while i don't think that any of this is intentionally touting misogynistic ideals and that a large portion of it is simply wish-fulfillment in having a handsome guy save you from a miserable reality, i think that it's undeniable that a lot of it is baked on a misogynistic premise.

onto religion. this is a more varied thing; a common similarity is that all of the religious organizations are vaguely christian (more specifically catholic, given the kind of luxury you see in churches that's less fitting of the protestant-style utilitarian nature). the prominence in society, relation to the main character, and nature of the church (as good [usually] or evil [less likely, but still exists]) tend to vary a lot. if i spoke too much on this, the post would dip away from the rofan/isekai subject matter into a discussion on christianity in general (about which i'm decidedly less versed in), but i do have a few pennies to offer regarding this matter. the first is that, in a classically religious manner, there's an upsetting amount of purity culture being touted. lots of protagonists in a religious story will eventually bear the moniker of saintess, and i'm kind of irked by these stories because i dislike the fixation of a woman's so-called purity and moral virtuousness (which, i mean, i guess is a fixture of christianity). that's one thing i dislike. the other thing i dislike is that this is a really odd part of a magical society. aside from the typical questions of how magic exists in the first place and is regulated, i think the existence of a church with such prominence becomes something to question. how does faith play a role with the existence of magic? is it something credited to their god? i'd be interested in the mechanisms of that, but most of the time, it seems to be something that coexists without much interrogation, which bores me, frankly.

this is more abrupt and fits more earlier in the post, but i also like that a facet of the setting is that main characters tend to be categorized as a villainess. this is a secondary reason to why i think the fixation on morality (from earlier, with the serfdom & peasant discussion) is so funny. the way stories are set up, with having the original character be a villainess (often misunderstood, but the villainess title holds nonetheless), there is almost a trope-dictated necessity for the protagonist to then be really morally good. there's a contrast inherently set up and expected in these sorts of cases: the original person was a villain, so naturally the protagonist has to shine and be better in response. that's my little tidbit, at least. there are a lot more aspects to rofans & isekais that i like to mull over, so consider this a part one. i just think that it's always so fun to see the way subjects like classism and misogyny will bleed into the fiction that surrounds us.

this was technically before mother mary comes to me, but my thoughts have solidified. i think that i'll give it about a four out of five star rating; it was good, and i do think it deserves its spot as a science fiction classic (of sorts? there's no real designation for that, i think, but it's got a lot of references made in popular series so i count it as one). i thought the first chapter was pretty brilliant, and i liked the thematic set up of trying to define what humanity is. however, i felt that the book's premise limited it. there was too much to the setting and too little time to thoroughly review it all. what i mean by that is that, thinking very lightly, there were threads about: religion (both about its nature as technically "fake" or disingenuous but nonetheless trusted in as well as its further impacts re: people relying on it to instill morality), humanity (too many spill off threads to count, including the overarching one of if androids are technically on the level of humans, human obsession with social standing, and then re: androids and being "human", if cruelty is just a part of the human experience), and scifi-typical forays into emotion & autonomy (via the machine mentioned in the first chapter to "schedule depression"), plus the concept of social stratification by some arbitrary "test" (talented versus untalented). which, i don't know, might not sound like a lot, but i thought that it was an exceptional amount to cover given the fact that the book is a total of 200 pages and deals with a total length of twenty four hours (even less if you consider the fact that he didn't get up at the ripe hour of 12 am to start "retiring" androids).

the book has the 1900s scifi typical misogyny, but i think it's as lowkey as possible. still noticeable, though; it really could've done without the excessive descriptions about breasts. i think that the book really just suffered from an excess of ideas, which is something i rarely say given how boring i find a lot of concepts. there's just too little time to make anything meaningful, which is why i was more confused than moved when our protagonist started hallucinating merced after he'd finished killing off all the androids. tailoring it to my particular tastes, i'd just argue that the two threads that could have been pursued in tandem were cruelty as a part of the human experience and the obsession with social standing attained through the purchase and possession of desired objects. i feel as though the religion aspect and the emotional autonomy bits just don't work as well. the religious aspect fails because it's difficult to meaningfully make a character who seems to scorn mercedism at the start have a realistic (as real as it can get for science fiction, lmao) "change of heart" or further exploration of it. the emotional autonomy thing fails because, well, that's just a set-up that's more primed for his wife. i just wish the book kept the same feel as the first chapter did. my biggest qualm overall was just that, for all of the references to the electric animals as a prime example of humans seeking to attain social validation, i felt that it was a genuinely small part of the book. yes, he's going on the hunt for androids to try and get money to purchase a real animal, but the way the perspectives also swap frequently really inhibit any consistent messaging from getting across. i still liked it and don't regret having read it, but it's just a book that had more potential than it really lived up to.

hate to not have updated in Quite the while, but anyway, i've been reading some books, including but not limited to: mother mary comes to me (arundhati roy), hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy (AT LAST), do androids dream of electric sheep? (i finished this one, surprisingly), and some ambiguous others that i'm forgetting at the moment. i thought the memoir by roy had excellent writing (from what i've read so far, which is... not much at all!!) and was unfortunately very relatable minus the whole inspiring and engaging conversations with your muse-mother part, and i'm really enjoying hitchhiker's guide as a palate cleanser of sorts. i like a good comedy, especially when romance doesn't happen to be involved. you'd probably not guess it from the extensive trope talk centering around romance, but i'm not a very romantic person and i dislike it in most novels. finally, i thought that do androids dream of electric sheep? was pretty good. i didn't think it so relevant with the ai discussion, because it centered more around empathy as a marker of (or really, on the contrary; i found it to be something of a critique on religion), but i think it was still a neat novel! i loved the concept used, and i thought the first chapter was super stellar. i'd probably recommend it, but i do think there are better books out in the wild, and that that book was mildly polemic for its depiction and descriptions of women. then again, this sounds pretty bad, but i find that most books from the time period are at least a little misogynistic. that's just how things tend to roll, right?

disregarding the evident heteronormativity and misogyny that's baked into a lot of the way people approach same sex ships (especially m/m ships) in fandoms today, i think there's also a really interesting aspect to current fandom where even shipping a m/f ship gets colored through the lens of trying to stray from heteronormativity. you see a great deal of posts trying to subvert societal norms by making the woman the dominant one, and making her super assertive and dubbing the man in the relationship a malewife, but i find these to be rather distasteful as well, because it's become another form of misogyny on its own. the thing about trying to stray from making women unilaterally submissive is that people end up on the extreme opposite of the spectrum, which doesn't do anything about the core issue of ignoring the actual character in favor of cartoonish extremes of what their personality actually is, which, to me, is a brand of misogyny in being unable to recognize what a girl character is actually like underneath all of this girlboss talk.

the thing about fandom is that this isn't strictly limited to female characters; with male characters, you get a very similar feeling that they've been sanded down into constituent parts that are then amplified to fit them into certain tropes that they quite literally do not fit into otherwise, but the thing about female characters is that they also get hit with the extra treatment of "not being interesting enough" as a justification. i'm sure there is some movie or show or book or whatever out there where this is a legitimate thing to claim, but 95% of the time, it's a take that stems from an unwillingness to interact with the female character as someone who isn't just there to move the male character forward. there's an active effort made to find something of substance in a male character even if they're giving you literally nothing (looking at you, kpop demon hunters) while female characters get reduced to a third wheel in mlm ships. so while yes, mischaracterization is basically a fundamental pillar in fandom, i still do think female characters have it worse in that regard.

additionally, there's something to be said about how the idealized happy ending is one of a nuclear family. even with mlm ships, things boil down to finding romance, getting married, and then settling with children. i don't universally hate this, actually. i'm sure there are characters out there who legitimately might want this and it might count as a happy ending to them, but in my mind, there's a far greater amount of characters who would sooner die than fit into a "normal" nuclear family, and so this is a kind of horror in itself in my mind. i think that despite the inherent sort of "wokeness" (which i don't actually think is woke; gay relationships are natural etc etc) in same sex works that the really heteronormative conclusion of settling with a family and children undermines that. it's not like every piece of fiction ever is going to be some masterclass protest against social norms, but i would like for people to question why it is that this specific scenario is regarded as the true version of "happiness" as opposed to some other nonconventional ending. my personal qualm here is also that some of these characters would simply not make for good parents. and there's nothing you can do about that, really.

going back to my roots here, but i'll be talking about a gesture life today :) i really adored this book, actually. the writing style was gorgeous and i love reading introspection, and there's just so much to discuss. i think the book has three major things it can be broken down into: hata's relationship with his daughter (& lover mary burns), hata's relationship with society at large (liv crawford, lenny), and of course, his relationship with k.

the book itself revolves around a man currently living in new york. he's retired, and is basically the poster boy for an unreliable narrator, which is always pretty fun. addressing his relationship with his daughter at first: i thought this was so excellently written. it's probably a tad bit of projection on my end, but i adored seeing hata's own view of his treatment of sunny, and how that's also colored by his own impressions of his childhood. he's also an adoptee, like sunny, and it clearly shows. there's a line in the book where he's talking about how it would be more shameful for him to die and have illicit photos sent to his parents because he was adopted, and you see a similar sort of standard applied onto sunny the whole while. a lot of the book is detached, and purposefully so: even when he's meditating on his treatment of sunny and of her piano-playing in her childhood (which naturally becomes a point of contention when he keeps insisting that keeping the piano is for himself when it's clear that he does want her to continue playing) and when he's thinking about how she behaves later (which is, i guess, promiscuous but exaggerated by hata himself). naturally, a book in this format needs its protagonist to be multifaceted in order to be interesting, but i just loved seeing the constant flipflops hata makes between his insistence on conforming to social norms, his prioritization of sunny out of perceived obligation over mary burns, and his later scorn of her being driven from his idea of her being dirtied for having sex (mr misogyny over here being awfully stereotypical about things). his reunion with her made me quite satisfied, really. i hate stories where the children are expected to suck it up and passively deal with what happened to them back then, and so i think the half-strained, half-not relationship they had towards the end was perhaps for the better.

anyway, with society at large: the beginning of the book sets you up with the image of him as someone awfully fixated on being perceived well by society. at the start, his first meeting with mary burns is one where he is awfully aware of her being on his porch. he overthinks the welcome letters he receives, and he over thinks the get well soon cards he receives as well. this also becomes better towards the end, but i feel like it's within reason. the wikipedia summary of the book basically makes it appear as though he's fully healed by the end of the book, but i take issue with this. even at the very last few pages, you get reflections from him on how he'd like to be remembered, even if only in a passing line from liv crawford, his real estate agent. and in fact, it's not really a state of healing at all. the reason he's removing himself from everyone else is essentially because of his bad luck. he's overly paranoid about drawing harm to sunny and her son (which honestly, i don't actually mind as much anymore. least he could do). he's almost in a worse place than when the book started, to me. anyway, i thought it interesting that his hollowness was such a prominent part of the novel. there's little substance to him outside of fretting about the wants of society, and that's even true when he's a wwii soldier, which is a nice leadin to the third part.

this is probably the most contentious bit. i think so far that i've made it seem like i'm relatively neutral on him. mostly, i am, but i do lean towards hating the guy. i did really enjoy the book as a whole, but my outstanding critique would probably involve the fact that he doesn't actually seem to do much meditation on how fucking terrible of a person he was during the war. he passively drank the propaganda fed to him and didn't bat an eye at the word volunteers in reference to literal "comfort women", or more aptly put, sex slaves. a key component of his character is essentially cowardice: he's too cowardly and too confined by societal regulation to really do much of anything. sunny thought of herself as an unwanted child because of hata's rigid conformity to making his house so perfect (which doesn't take a genius to figure out; she tells him pointblank that all her friends like him better than they do her); mary burns can't tolerate hata for his passivity; the outstanding reason for liv crawford approaching him originally was because she was a businesswoman after his house (which she gets. i would say bless her, but i've little respect for realtors). this is true back then, too; the whole situation with k is the result of him being blinded and awfully naive for a person so empty and so cowardly. she asked him multiple times to give her the knife, or a gun, or some variation of that so that she could at least choose her own death. he doesn't even grant her this, and i felt that it was so revolting of him. she ultimately dies, by the way. horribly gruesome death, and then there's nothing expanded on afterwards (one of my other qualms with the book). it's the kind of thing where you knew it'd end that way, and he's so gross in his passivity and in his insistence on conforming to the norms and his discarding of humanity in pursuit of that. i think that's ultimately what the book is about; he values connection but only to the point where he can be remembered, and in pursuit of that shallow sort of thing, he both sabotages any possibility of a meaningful relationship and also is a horridly passive person, which might be the worst thing of all to be

while thinking about what i find interesting about aus, i inevitably have to go into what the difference between fanfic and published fiction is. i think a lot of people have complexes about published fiction being better than fanfic, and while i agree wholeheartedly at some levels (as in, published fiction has access to editors because it's being written for the sake of profit & things like that), i think the actual difference between the two can be summed up as this: fanfic is blatantly derivative, and published fiction is not (or, well, not to the same extent).

the reason fanfic works for me even as someone so critical of books is because i keep those two things in mind. fanfic to me has a higher floor, because if i'm reading fanfic, it's already established that i like the characters it focuses around. much of the struggle in writing published fiction is trying to create genuinely compelling characters, so the fact that you're working both with preestablished characters and an audience who already likes those characters as well gives fanfic a boost. i don't know if i would argue that published fiction (which i guess i'll refer to as pubfic for the sake of convenience) has a higher ceiling. i think that if you compared the type of fanfic to the same type of pubfic that they're kind of evenly matched.

that's to say that if you took the average romance fanfic, because fanfic tends to be romance (for a variety of reasons not limited just to queerbait), and slotted it up against the average romance pubfic, i don't actually know that there'd be a huge difference. i'll disregard the quality argument in hopes that the earlier preface that editors deal with improving published works serves as a blanket, but i guess i'm trying to argue that both of these things are equally affected by the circumstances the writer is in. this ties into the derivative line i wrote earlier; fanfic and pubfic writers will both be influenced by what's most common. if enemies to lovers is the most common trope, there's a higher chance they'll like it just from exposure, and things happen from there on out.

i think the biggest reason people are so quick to deride fanfic in favor of pubfic is because they're thinking of classic books used as an example of good writing, like lolita, or something along those lines. i don't necessarily fault them for thinking that, but i think the better comparison is to slot fanfic against its counterpart in contemporary fiction. in that case, i actually don't think there's so much of a difference. ultimately, fanfic is wish fulfillment. so is romantic pubfic. unless you look at quality only (which i mean, given the state of contemporary romance, i also find it hard to truly argue that it's much better), i truly don't think there's such a distinct difference between fanfic and pubfic aside from reception.

with regards to reception, i'll elaborate more on the derivative point. fanfic needs no explanation here. it's taken straight from a book or movie or game or something like that, and the connection is made obvious. pubfic is less clear, but it's still undeniable that it is derivative. just look at books being marketed as (adjective) (other, classic book/series). it's been happening a lot with the hunger games (and in fairness, that was sort of a defining work of the genre), where you'll see things being marketed as a spicy version of the hunger games or something along those lines. that's a derivative work! when you write something and absentmindedly use a phrase from a poster you saw three years ago, that's derivative, too! and i think the real reason people prefer to look down on fanfic is because it's the purest example of appreciation for something; i think that in a society whose members are increasingly tending to hide their interests and their effort that fanmade creations are so easy to write off as cringe. that's really all

alluded to in my last post, i've been thinking a lot about this lately. i understand the origins of the terms of yuri and yaoi as being very helpful in that girls & boys love are both things that stray from the heterosexual norm and as such will have different aspects by virtue of not sharing aspects of i guess straight culture. i still do think that such terms are more obsolete; the true value of those tags has really faded and does stories that get categorized as yuri or as yaoi a disservice. i feel like this is probably going to have some certain pushback just because that sort of overrides their status as like, pushing against societal norms, but i do feel like it's not ideally meant to be a genre. the relationship type tells you (mostly) nothing specifically. the most i can think of only really applies to yuri and would then involve the interplay between homophobia and misogyny (which i can also fathom an argument for even for m/m couples, but which is more clearly prevalent if they're both girls), but that's never a common subject matter for things in my experience. i think just grouping something as yuri or yaoi as opposed to actual genre tags like scifi and whatnot can be so limiting for legitimately good stories. this might be limited just to myself, but when i personally come across a recommendation post for something and the key point is that it's about two girls or two guys, i get slightly uninterested. tell me more about what the actual premise of the story is, for god's sake. this is seeping into a trope talk post more than anything, and i feel the same about the yuri/yaoi tags as i do about monikers like enemies to lovers and the one bed trope and whatever else, which is to really say that the tropes themselves can work and i don't hate them by themselves, but that more elaboration really has to be done aside from just the label. i don't think that everything needs to have some grand theme and message that must reach everyone in the audience, but i do think that if it's a story that's trying to take itself seriously (and it's totally fine not to, i think; it just shouldn't be everything that's out there in the literary sphere) that it should actually try to do something fresh with the tropes. anyway, pardon the discursive post (though most of my posts tend to end up this way). hope you've all been doing well!!

partly in my effort to write more fanfic (lol... i've considered reading the bible for that purpose as an atheist but like, that's doing a lot), i've been throwing myself back into reading. i've already mentioned pale fire (which i still Am reading and am enjoying very much; charles kinbote is delightfully funny). anyway, aside from that, i've also mentioned that in the dream house is one of my favorite books ever. reading her body & other parties, that idea is reinforced; i adore the way carmen maria machado writes. it's not as flowery as nabokov's prose is, but it's still so sharp and cutting and i can't help but adore it. i'm about midway through her body & other parties (but i've owned it for years, really, and just never finished) and i think my favorite short story so far is "eight bites". especially as someone who's struggled with body image & the general expectation nowadays for women to be exceptionally skinny and to regulate their bmis (now having a resurgence augmented by the rapid rise of fascism and conservatism), the story just really bites you to the core. i think another aspect that i truly adored beyond words is the fact that the mother, the protagonist in the story, enforces these values onto her own daughter. i've no interest in relationships or children at all, but it just reminds me a lot of my own mother & the remarks she'll throw my way. there are so many excellent lines but i find myself particularly drawn to "a new woman does not just slough off her old self; she tosses it aside with force". there's just such lovely implications there; i love the world "slough" in particular for the image of it evokes which when paired with the story's reality of that being her prior not-skinniness...! she's really an excellent writer. this is a post about "eight bites" in particular but i really do insist that people read in the dream house. the format of that memoir is so haunting and unique and i've not yet read another book like that.

anywaaaay! i finished 1984 & am still under the impression that animal farm was better. i would italicize & capitalize properly, but i'm honestly too fatigued to bother with the html things. now that i'm done with 1984, i'd love to get back to reading pale fire, which i do intend to do, but i've been really busy lately and have been getting back into writing. i feel like i always feel ashamed of writing something self-indulgent, which really sucks since the majority of why i write is to be self-indulgent. i don't really know, nor do i particularly care to air all of my introspection out in public like this. as far as my takes on recent situations, i do think that the cheating fiasco aired out at the coldplay concert got taken too far. i understand making jokes about it given that that's the nature of the internet, but it's taken to such an extreme. people are so desperate for this easy serotonin (if that's even the right term... i doubt people actually feel happy, it's just this sort of mix of wanting to be in the know, or even worse, wanting this exclusivity to be the First to know) that they've gone to the wife's facebook account and started flooding her there. it's really shameless! and i hope people realize this. it makes me grimace seeing all sorts of posts everywhere online, but perhaps this was really expected. it's not exactly atypical of the internet to act this way, but i just still believe it's in such poor taste.

so! i've been reading 1984 recently (i'll try and get around to pale fire & the hitchhiker's guide eventually when i'm done...!). i'm about two chapters into part two and still am firmly under the impression that animal farm was orwell's better work. i can see why 1984 is regarded so highly, but i'm just not a big fan of the protagonist. one thing that i do really enjoy is the description of language use in the book. i found the appendix bit awfully fascinating to read about. i like thinking about the role language plays in society (but i'm not an expert by any means and usually this is surface level thinking), so i found it really interesting to see how the goal of the book's "new" language was to slim down the vocabulary you can use to express an idea. it's not a foreign idea by any means and is very reminiscent of how certain people tend to group tons of minorities into just undesirables or illegals in order to undertake genocides, but i liked how it was laid out. i've got a couple of more thoughts regarding the actual characters themselves, but since this is a general update post, that's not such a big deal.
i've also been playing a game recently, which i'll just talk about vaguely. i got recommended it by a friend, and since i finally have time on my hands now, i was able to play it. it's actually really good. i think i was originally put off by the expectation that it would be somehow lacking in writing (since i've shied away from the game developer's past games), but i've actually been endeared to the characters. i think it's especially surprising given the kind of person i am that i'm so interested in a relationship between two of the characters, too. it's usually difficult to get me to care so much about a relationship two characters share since i find that i tend to be a very character-focused person with regards to what i'm into. the writing isn't always stellar, but it gives me enough to chew on that it'll probably be a 10/10 anyway, but then again, i'm less particular with my ratings than the way i word things would leave someone to believe.