fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5219 ]

[ SECRET POST #5219 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5219 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[Wind in the Willows]

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03.

["A Little Princess" by Frances Hodgson Burnett]

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04.

[Live-action Powerpuff girls reboot]

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05.

[Shadow and Bone]

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06.

[Vivy - Fluorite Eye's Song]

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07.

(The Queen's Gambit)

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 27 secrets from Secret Submission Post #747.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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01. https://i.imgur.com/3ik1lYH.jpg

It's not just you. I was super happy to find out there are lots of translated webnovels online and then... I actually tried to read them. :-/

Lol you're not racist. You don't have those novels because they're Chinese, you hate those particular Chinese novels because they're badly written.

If you were racist, you wouldn't be interested in checking out this media in the first place.

Having read only a translated Romance of the Three Kingdoms (lol yeah I know), there is a lot I'm willing to chalk up to a culture's entire concept of literature and what they've been accustomed to in writing for centuries without influence from other modes of writing. It makes me actually really worried about trying to read modern novels, because how do I determine what is actually poorly written versus written in a way I'm not accustomed to but speakers of this language have been writing that way for 2500 years? RotTK is at least old enough that I can also chalk it up to history but...still.

On the flip side, reasons Lord of the Rings never caught on in Japan until the movies is exactly this - the writing is hard to translate into Japanese in such a way as to preserve what Tolkien's original language(s) was conveying, such that a lot of people in Japan just weren't interested. Despite writing their own fantasy novels about creatures and wars and magic powers. So is it bad or is it just...a style I haven't learned to appreciate?

Yeah, though I've had no problems with professional translations of older stuff. The novels available online should be vastly more relevant to my interests but the translations are so bad! No slight on hobby translators who are just getting the content out there, but are there any professional translations of any of these popular novels yet?

As someone who is almost fluent in Japanese, absolutely. The different languages have very different writing styles, and as such it can be very hard to translate from one into the other and preserve the same overall linguistic feeling. It's just due to the natures of the languages involved - what feels totally natural to a native speaker of Japanese (or English) will come across as feeling strange and possibly stilted to a native speaker of the other language.

Yeah, this. I'm ESL and reading a book in spanish, then reading it again in english is like reading a completely different book. There's a lot of stuff that gets lost in translation because there is no way to convey what the author was saying in another language.
It's not OP's fault, of course. It's just stuff about language.

Edit: also adding that it's the difference between doing a literal translation of the text vs. doing an interpretation on what the author meant in some cases. Translating can be quite hard when you're stuck between wanting to convey what the author is saying while keeping the text intact.

Edited (spaninsh is, indeed, not a language) 2021-04-21 01:19 (UTC)

They're trash. Like I don't think anyone is pretending they're not? Some of them are explicitly meta making fun of how trashy they are. Most things fandom goes gaga for are trash, so this should not be a surprise.

But I was afraid I was being racist for hating most of the high-concept SF coming out of China (like Liu Cixin) and it was reassuring to try some Danmei and realize that no, I just prefer trash, as usual.

I never took a note on a name so fast. Hopefully these will satisfy me. (a fair reason: I need to get into chinese novels! How am I going to fare when/if my Chinese kpop boy ever becomes an actor in China goddamn?!)

There's a lot of critically beloved SF being professionally translated out of China since Liu Cixin won the Hugo, if you like him you can keep going! I will stick with SVSSS and kin. :P

Happy to know!

You're not racist necessarily but let's not pretend western original webnovels/self published novels wrote by amateurs aren't shit just as much, even without needing to be translated from an entirely different language. That's kinda the thing with self published stuff. Pretending like only the Chinese stuff is especially bad would be kinda racist. As would be assuming all Chinese webnovels are shit just because the few you've tried weren't great, considering there are thousands of those novels around.

What I dislike about these secrets (of which we've had a few by now) is this weirdly smug satisfaction shining through about how them Chinese novels are so especially crappy after all. That is a bit sus, not gonna lie. (I also don't necessarily agree btw. - very few people actually say they're great, flawlessly written literature but not all of them are as terrible as some people pretend. They tend to be low-brow entertainment, which is what they're written for and at the very least, they have fairly novel plots/topics for western readers, which is the main appeal imo.)

This. They're not meant to be great works of literature any more than Western romances/fantasy novels are. They're meant to fill a niche and be enjoyable, and they do that just fine.

Personally as someone who is into BL manga and whatnot the HUGE influx of danmei fans in the last 2 (?) years probably gave me high expectations for it. I tried to read a couple and I thought I'd LOVE them because I am heavily into June novels, but - nah, they just don't do it for me smh. Most danmei titles I found rely on tropes I don't like to begin with (yes I'm very particular about fantasy books...) so, I don't get it. I never wrote a secret about this myself but I really, REALLY don't get what should be so great about it.

But when you put it like this, I guess I can agree. Yeah, I've never been into YA Twilightesque novels either, even as a teen/younger adult. And here you have the same kind of "over-the-top beauty" descriptors, the stories that seem to make fun of themselves, the silly fantasy - pretty much everything I never liked about those self-published teenage fantasy stories to begin with. And, well, I assume I ain't siding with the majority here because those books were/are all the rage, many were adapted into movies, earned authors big money and all that.

I mean, if they don't do it for you, they don't, that's okay. I'm personally pretty much done with BL manga and can't stand the vast majority of Japanese BL novels but have found quite a few Chinese ones that I enjoy. It really is a matter of personal taste.

I admit it can be hard if you don't like certain tropes, especially since there are quite a lot of those novels out there and after finding 10-20 where you don't like the tropes, it's easy to just give up on looking for others you might like. I kinda found my method of filtering out the things I don't like and I'm mostly fairing well with it but depending on the genre, some tropes seem kinda omnipresent so if you don't like one, it's possible you won't like the others either.

I'm perfectly okay with people saying they don't like them and since I know how annyoing it is to say "sorry, don't like it" and then get countless "Oh but try this, this and this - you just haven't found the right one yet!" as a reply I'm not going to continue trying to convince someone of the opposite.
What I don't love is people saying everything about those novels objectively sucks as if they're some sort of highly acclaimed literary critics. Especially if they maybe tried 3-4 novels out of the thousands that are out there and base their opinion on that. That's just kinda pathetic.

Yeah, it all boils down to personal preferences. And it's OK.
My taste in BL manga isn't very usual either (in other words I hate many popular series with a burning passion!) so I'm not new to not seeing "what's so great about this new thing my fandom has been enjoying" and I hated BL manga for years before I found those I liked, and that was 15 years ago.
In the end, I feel frustrated BECAUSE I'm almost sure there's a danmei niche for me out there and I just haven't found it yet, and I'm sad about it because I know I'll probably find it only when nobody cares about danmei anymore because that's how I roll........

If I may ask - don't have to reply if you don't want to - but which novels have you tried? Just out of general interest for a different POV.

Oh my I can't remember the names and I'm not sure I'd find them among my messy and lengthy bookmarks :( ... I can remember some plots though, but I found them mostly skimming through extensive lists of danmei translations and checking those with plots that interested me ; they were mostly realistic(ish?), and involved stuff like getting trapped in an MMO or online dating etc. I also gave MDZS a try because my friend loves it but fantasy/historical settings aren't for me tbh and it's the same for non-Chinese works.

Ah okay, those are the novels I'm not into personally so I have no idea about their quality haha!

Aw, that's unfortunate! If you ever see anyone recommending this brand, please do share!

Is anyone in this discussion actually pretending that there aren't a lot of western self published novels that are shit? Where in the secret are you seeing this?

Much of the scene can effectively be likened to 'Chinese Harlequin Romance'. There's a huge market for it and it's totally cool to be or not to be into them.

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[ SECRET POST #5219 ]

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