SVSS, especially what is shown of the original flavor novel? (For the Opinion meme.)
Oh, interesting! I've never been clear on if Reverse Unpopular Opinion is still supposed to be original, because a lot of my least popular opinions have been positive already and reverse unpopular opinion ought to be popular, right?? What everyone thinks?
I feel like I never know what everyone thinks unless I disagree with it and/or it's so universally concluded that there's no point saying it. Hm.
So, a really great thing about Scum Villain is it's a satire. It's a fairly affectionate one, for the most part, displaying a facility with the genre tropes involved that can only come from (like transmigration protagonist Shen Yuan) having read extensively, including lots of drek.
Any good parody is after all still a functioning example of the thing.
But Scum Villain goes the extra mile because it is satirizing everything in reach. Transmigration. Danmei. All of xianxia. Cheap power fantasies. The webnovel industry, and the relationship between audience entitlement and author priorities. Romance fiction norms. Porn. Character archetypes. Naming conventions. Protagonism and villainy. Being Doomed By The Narrative and the problem of realism in fiction.
And the output is still something that functions as a story, where it's easy to get invested in the major characters and their happiness, and to break your heart over the backstory tragedy.
About Proud Immortal Demon Way specifically--so, the really interesting thing mxtx did with it is that we find out pretty late that it wasn't supposed to go the way it did. It was originally conceptualized as the story of a man's vengefulness and isolation devouring him alive so that ultimately he stood at the top of the world, with every power and privilege, and died in despair.
It wasn't precisely a rejection or even a critique of the genre of protagonist-turned-vicious-by-life-unlocks-supreme-power-gets-revenge-rules-world, because that part was still intended to be satisfying, but it was I think something of a rebuke of it.
Whether this was more out of literary ambition or personal bitterness on Airplane's part, totally unclear.
But there was some literary ambition. The reason Shen Jiu, the scum villain who dies and is replaced by our protagonist in Scum Villain proper, has a backstory arc that closely parallels Luo Binghe's (except grimmer and comparatively grounded) is that the author had worked it out on purpose that way. That was the point. It was supposed to be revealed at a dramatic moment that this was a cycle of abuse scenario; that Luo Binghe, in obsessing over revenge on his abusive master, had turned himself into the same kind of man, for similar reasons.
And that furthermore he had in the process made league with his birth mother's betrayer and murderer, who also had his father killed by mass violence by blaming the betrayal on him, and caused all Luo Binghe's life's suffering, by leaving him orphaned in infancy.
And then none of this made it into the published work, which was consequently almost indistinguishable from a book that just sucked due to having had no planned direction and devolving into nothing but titillation and padding. With no more complex narrative payoff ever possible after Airplane lost his outline and had to throw something together to keep his paying audience around, and so Luo Binghe murdered both old men without ever learning anything and processed onward through a catalogue of one-note villains and collectible love interests.
Which incidentally validates Shen Yuan's outrage and frustration, because he was right, there had been something there, the ability on the writer's part to do better even as he cut corners; the promise of a story with actual meat, that never materialized.
But also it makes him even funnier, because he supported the shit out of the 'gruesomely murder Shen Qingqiu and keep going' plot event that actually ruined the book.
Basically, the original book gets to be extremely bad without this being a mere function of authorial incompetence, and so both its actual and its intended arcs work to introduce complexity to the cast of the third-option storyline, which is the one we in real life actually wind up reading.
(Note too how the original 'no love interest tragic burnout' story concept represents the author's personal preoccupations and ideas at time of initial writing and the 'gay romance' version enforced by the System turns out to cater to priorities he wasn't consciously acknowledging, while the actual in-story published webnovel centered around cheap thrills catering to the egos of shallow straight men, and reflected the author's preoccupation with getting paid.)
Revealing that the dead villain character actually had more complexity than the narrative acknowledged is, itself, a recurring trope of this specific subtype of isekai-via-the-transmigration-of-souls, but I feel like the way it's 1) tied into the squandered potential of the original novel and 2) meticulously not arranged so as to mean that guy wasn't actually bad or in the wrong leaves it as a standout example.
