genuinely touched when someone reads a book, hates it, remembers "hey didn't Soph write a review last year about how much they hated that book" and then comes and joins me in my hate
anyway A Strange and Stubborn Endurance continues to be a book that is so completely not what I want in a book and it was very fun rereading my review and being like "OH YEAH I'D FORGOTTEN HOW MUCH I HATED THAT"
@soph_sol feeling pretty okay about not getting more than a couple chapters into any of this author's books r/n
@soph_sol although I'm also reading The Goblin Emperor fanfic, which is the most "what if there was an abused character and then he was really nice and then everybody learned that he was abused and felt really bad and was really nice to him?" fic that existed, so obviously no judgement
@Betty
hahaha yes. I have read my fair share of that!! although tbh the goblin emperor is too pro monarchy for me to enjoy as much as I once did, unfortunately
@soph_sol the whole thing is predicated on the assumption that you can just *mean well* hard enough to change, like. A society? For the better?
@Betty
EXACTLY. and like, what frustrates me is that it actively questions monarchy and then is fine with it. and like, does really weird things with the idea of what a workers movement might look like? idk I'm much more okay with fantasies of monarchy if it's clearly just there to have fun with and not interrogate!
@soph_sol I know it's an extremely politically motivated choice, but I enjoy the way Chinese historical dramas are like, "there may be individual decent people within it, but the monarchy itself will always rot everything it touches"
@Betty
hah I clearly need to watch more of these because I haven't come across that yet! very into that pov tbh
@soph_sol have you not watched Nirvana in Fire? I mean, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I extremely took that from it.
@Betty
I did watch NiF, and it's a fabulous show, but the message I saw in it was the same old "monarchy is fine as long as the RIGHT person is in power." which I didn't mind in the context of that show because of the other things it was doing! but I didn't read any critique of the institution as a whole in it
@soph_sol I read the end as a tragedy not just because of the deaths but also because the throne is going to eat price Jing the way it ate his father, but also he has to take the throne to get justice and also everyone else will be worse. Like, the scene where he's invested is very DOOM
@Betty @soph_sol its really interesting, i watched NiF with a group and I remember everyone being about evenly split between thinking the crown (and everything that happened was for him to get it) was going to break Jingyan and thinking he’d be a great emperor
i was in the former camp, but i do think the ambiguity there is intentional
@soph_sol @Betty oh yeah the messing up families is VERY cool, but china can sometimes be into the whole “man nobly sacrifices her personal life For The Nation” type schtick so I don’t think that *automatically* translates into a critique of the structures doing the messing, you know?
That said, his Bixia’s biggest issue was that the power struggle that put him in the throne turned him into a paranoid bastard who couldn’t let his guard down, and therefore couldnt trust/love/empathize with anyone. And that was what made him both a bad husband/father AND a bad emperor
And then in order to put Jingyan on the throne, pretty much everyone he has to lie to and manipulate his family members, and when he can’t do it the people he trusts lie to *him* to ensure he’s say/do the right things. So it does feel like he’s on the right path to develop a very similar kind of paranoia, with potentially very similar results
@soph_sol @Betty i would personally find a prequel about the previous generation, where Bixia is himself the hero and pursuing what he considers justice, learning to navigate court politics even when it goes against his better nature, overthrowing a corrupt previous generation, etc would be super fascinating
