Where Webnovels Go To Die

Hello! Welcome to my blog! While there's very clearly nothing here as of now, I've got a few projects currently in the works that'll hopefully spice things up a bit.

Once I actually start posting, I'll try my best to have a tag system for organization. There's of course no posts right now of course, so it wouldn't exactly make sense to define everything right away.

I started this blog to talk about translated webnovels and why I'm fascinated with them, so assume the majority of what I post will be about that.

An important note: Despite my interest in webnovels, I am a reader and critic, not a literary historian. The stories that I'm reading and commenting on have a vast amount of history behind them that informs their creation, much of which I am ignorant on. While I try my best to do my due diligence when making authoritative statements, I can't guarantee everything I say on this blog is accurate.

In the span of 2000 words, Er Gen:

Introduces four characters (The protagonist Meng Hao, two of his friends, and the female lead.)

Establishes the main character's motivations, personality, and past.

Sets in motion the main plot by kidnapping our protagonist.

Loads at least two Chekhov's Guns (Meng Hao was abandoned by his parents, wants to go to the Great Tang in the Eastern Lands, and throws a gourd into a river. All three of these things will come back later.)

The majority of characters in Chinese are compound characters, meaning that they're created by combining multiple components together to create a single resulting character.

Components usually hint at either the meaning or pronunciation of the resulting character, which is kinda weird but also pretty cool.

While there are a lot of characters, there's seemingly nowhere near as many components (which makes sense), so that makes the prospect of learning Chinese far less intimidating.

My current favorite character would have to be the tree/wood radical, mù (木), because it's both super easy to learn and pretty important for the type of novels I read.

A pretty good use of my time, all things considered (since, y'know, this is a blog entirely focused on analyzing novels originally written in Chinese, by a person who doesn't speak Chinese).

i've got a lot more to learn, and my theories are far less developed than ones i've made on other topics, which is super exciting to me

For a variety of reasons that I won't get into (because said 'reasons' consist of pretty much my entire experience living on this earth), I'm fascinated with "communication". It's the closest thing I'd consider to having a special interest, in fact.

Whether it's a story, a piece of educational content, the game/level design of video games, or the development of internet humor, I'm fascinated with how it works. All of that -- every bit of it -- is communication to me, and all of that is thrilling to learn and theorize about.

Chinese Webnovels are particularly interesting from my perspective, because the average webnovel is, to put it lightly, about as subtle as a fucking brick to the face.

While a complete and utter lack of subtlety would usually be considered pretty bad writing (and don't get me wrong, some of it is), it makes Chinese webnovels excellent for analyzing in all types of ways.

(This lack of subtlety can be attributed to a number of factors, but to be honest I don't have the time nor qualifications nor confidence in my knowledge to talk about that authoritatively, so I simply won't.)

That specific quality (which is by no means unique, by the way, and I'm equally interested in other written mediums with similar phenomenon) is what led to the creation of this blog, where I get to talk about how cool I find all of this.

Currently rereading I Shall Seal The Heavens for the purpose of reviewing it. My intention is to provide my thoughts chapter-by-chapter while also collecting notes on plot beats and themes to compile into a longer essay on my opinions at the end of each book.

Currently rereading Reincarnation of the Strongest Sword God, also for the purpose of reviewing it. RotSSG happens to be hideously long even compared to most other webnovels though, so I'll be forgoing chapter-by-chapter updates in favor of longer updates.

In addition to the above items, which are projects I'm currently working on, there's a good number of other project ideas I'll hopefully be able to get to before the heat death of the universe.