[ SECRET POST #5395 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5395 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 14 secrets from Secret Submission Post #772.
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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

It may be satire, but does it still adhere strongly to some of the more annoying tropes of danmei? I mean like sometimes misogynistic portrayals of women, gender essentialist stuff, seme/uke dynamics, etc.?

I'm interested in this story, and I'm not expecting it to be perfectly free of anything that might be problematic/annoying to me, but I'm wondering both how much is in there, and if being a satirical story means that there'd be less of it than in a story that plays its tropes straight.

[(Anonymous)]

I was wondering the same thing, hope anyone who's read it can give us details...?

[(Anonymous)]

It's... got a lot of problematic elements, with the narrative understanding that they *are* problematic? In that they get unpacked and dug into and worked with.

It's a little short of female characters but I found the ones that were there pretty rad. (Song Qiutong is a *nasty* piece of work, but I, uh, do get where she's coming from. And Ye Wangxi... *kisses fingers*) It's got seme/uke dynamics, with the (adult) student as the seme - I don't know how common that is in danmei, but it makes for some interesting shifting power dynamics.

There's some *graphic* violence, and some *graphic* noncon scenes, fair warning. I found the protagonist extremely hateable for a third of the book (if funny), and the rest of it desperately wanting him and the deuteragonist to be okay, and I do feel the author deserves respect for pulling off that dramatic shift in feeling.

And yes, it's very funny.

[(Anonymous)]

Seconding anon above me. Female characters... I mean, there are still not a huge amount of them as is common in the genre but the ones that are there are fairly varied? And it's not like most of the male characters are much more sympathetic.
What I liked about this novel is that some parts of it read like the toxic danmei tropes are played entirely straight only to end up subverted in a very self-conscious way.