OKAY review of series/writer that made me actually go crazy. Remnant's of Filth/The Husky and his White Cat Shizun and Meatbun. This is spoiler free, or shit I don't actually consider to be an important spoiler, but context is needed for my gripes.
Remnant's of Filth (Yuwu): So before we get to this, I need to say some context before I continue. So for Yuwu I actually didn't originally intend to read the series, in fact I didnât even know it existed yet to be honest since I had never seen anything about it online before. I procrastinated buying new physical books to take on a trip where I would be in an internet dead zone.
I went to my local bookstore and after finding nothing I was looking for, I picked up the first two of this series, The 1st Joyful Reunion, and the 4th Erha. I got them all in a fit of fuck it I'm not going to look elsewhere itâs the holiday season get me out of here.
I had read 3 of the Erha's before this, and I quickly read the 4th on my trip (we'll get to that series later...) then I got to this one. I was surprised at how much I liked it given my 'okay Erha's finally picked up a bit' feelings at the time. Yuwu was extremely fucked in all areas I was very shocked. There was at no point I was not afraid of what insane shit Meatbun was going to pull. I'll get into this more later, but I am floored that Erha is the popular one and how little I've seen talk about this series in the grand scheme of things.
When I arrived home I ordered the remaining five and quickly went through those as well. I was not expecting Meatbun to go so insane with horror in there, there were some scenes that were genuinely foul and gruesome. The layers of tragedy in this as you continue this series was really good. Once one problem was resolved there was another layer of âwait even if this is resolved this doesnât fix x problem, made it even worse in some casesâ. I knew she wrote violence a good bit before given my Erha readings, but it was truly something else in this series.
The guoshi of Liao is genuinely one of the coolest characters I've ever read, and St's illustrations made him look so menacing I loved the character design. My biggest complaints are that the racism in this series sucked (fantasy authors LOVE to say âwhat if this race was inherently violent/unintelligent and racism was correct this time?â) and average BL misogyny. Wasnât too terrible in this series, but I fear thatâs because there were very little women in this series, fewer opportunities to be misogynistic towards female characters when there are fewer of them yâknow.
Not a big fan of the last twist in this series due to this lack of female characters (and other reasons I donât like it, but I unfortunately cannot get into that without spoilers. Trope I donât like for a variety of reasons including bigotry is all you need to know from a non spoiler standpoint.). There wasn't that much personality with the main characters as I thought there'd be. Which is WILD given what happens in this series, but I don't feel too bad saying that given Meatbunâs note at the end of this series.
Speaking of which: so like I mentioned I had read 4 of the Erha novels, and I thought the series was okay at the time, some weird shit in there a lot of the characters are cringe but whatever, but I must mention this because Meatbun's end note in Yuwu was truly a sign of what I was going to experience with continuing Erha going forward. So in Meatbunâs end note she mentioned how she wished she had fleshed out Gu Mang and Mo Xi more.
She was short on time and had a lot of problems in attempting to finish the novel. The big head turn for me though in this was that she said originally the series was going to be a longer transmigration novel, with Mo Xi and Gu Mang being cops in the modern day. Mo Xi gets transported into Gu Mangâs book that he was writing. At the time I thought damn that sucks, I don't like to see any author have such a bad time making their stories, but also, I thought the length of Yuwu was great. It did not need to be longer in my opinion.
And also THANK GOD she did not end up doing that and make them cops, because very often in fictional stories characters are not cops because authors want to show a character who works for a violent state, but because they are a protector of the people, or the system they work for is evil, but not them though, theyâre actually protector for real. Which is lol, lmao, even. Little did I know these red flags in her end note was a sign for what was to come reading more of Erha.
The Husky and his White Cat Shizun (Erha): DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT CARE IF YOU LIKE ERHA. From what I have unfortunately seen a lot of people are ride or die for this series and I donât want to get people pissed off trying to word as if I think people who like the series are irredeemable or something. I unfortunately like Danganronpa which is an objectively extremely racist and misogynistic series that cannot be normal about teenagers. I cannot make out fans of this series to inherently be creeps/bigots or whatever. Do not come at me, I donât care if you like it or not this is simply my opinion.
Anyways⌠So my Erha reading of the series was pretty scattered in comparison to other series I've read. I read the first two a couple of years ago, reread them when I got the 3rd because I wanted to make sure I remembered things better, read the 4th on vacation, had a few months break, and then went through the entirety of the rest in a couple of weeks. So my feelings of it aren't as strong as I'd say these other series are given I read the majority of these back to back pretty quickly (which is saying a lot given my Erha experience...).
Erha was the hardest series in this year to read. Thankfully I was not entirely alone and was reading it in close succession with a friend of mine and many friends who were okay with me ranting about it, so I did not have to go online to complain and piss myself and probably a lot of other people off. Erha is so unbelievably frustrating to me because it is a case example to me of 'it would be good if it was good', but it also was sometimes good, great even.
It just wasnât good enough to make it worth it through all the nonsense to me. I am very surprised that finishing the series that the two characters I liked the most were Mo Ran and Chu Wanning, I think they're just so insane and out of all the characters in that series they were the most interesting. They deserve each other. No one else should have to put up with them.
Which is crazy to me, I thought my biggest beef with this series would be Mo ran and Chu wanning, given the former is a serial rapist and the latter is a pedophile, but it was not the case. One problem with this series is that it is just way too long. There was so much shit in there that I genuinely just did not care about or if I did, it still did not need to be that long.
Meatbun has payoffs to weird things that make you raise your eyebrows or have questions about, they do eventually come, but unfortunately the length of time to get to some of them is not justified by what the payoff was in my opinion. Great answer to a thing that happened earlier that was weird/interesting, shame I forgot that even happened or don't care now given how long it has been.
Now onto my biggest problem with the series: The misogyny is so fucking bad. It was so bad. It was so bad that towards the end of this series I genuinely dreaded any time a female character was introduced, what new form of foul misogyny was Meatbun going to do this time. Which is something I, a woman lover, should never want to have. The women in this series are treated so disrespectfully it drives me crazy.
It was the worst out of any BL I have ever read, which is saying a lot given how often of a problem it is in them. I haven't read a series this misogynistic in years. I even made a post on here at the time of me reading saying 'Meatbuns misogyny in erha is like jkr levels of bad I have not seen misogyny so horrid in fiction of this level in a while', and y'all would not believe what happened in the extras in this series...
The extras... I thought the final extra (Chu Wanningâs birthday) was Okay. Liked their dynamic in there, but not crazy, still some filler nonsense I did not care about, but the others... Meatbun said all that misogynistic shit you read during the last 10 novels? Let's up that shit to 100, starting with our first extra.
I said in the past that Meatbun has JKR levels of misogyny, but I was floored when the extras actually confirmed Meatbun being a JKR fan. Canon modern day AU Mo Ran being a Harry Potter fan was NOT a thing I expected in this series, but unfortunately this did answer my question of what the hell Meatbunâs problem with women was.
Chu Wanning modern day was also a cop, which again would be hilarious and accurate given that yeah Chu Wanning as a character absolutely would be a cop given his personality, but unfortunately it was not funny because Meatbun thinks cops are protectors of the people, and that Chu Wanning is a protector of the people, therefore he's a perfect fit. Which again is lol. lmao, even.
I also made jokes with a friend like damn, the average Ao3 user would love this series, and again I predicted this with the modern day extras. First one was âwe have to make Mo Ran straight so he can have babiesâ (including a literal âwhy donât we just put aphrodisiacâs in him and just put him in a room with a girlâ), but they end up failing every time because he and Chu Wanning are always destined soulmates or whatever.
Another extra was Mo Ran's cousin's dating life, and he goes on multiple dates, and they all end up going horribly wrong because he's insanely misogynistic and Meatbun just loves that and thinks its funny. There is a chatfic extra in this series. No further elaboration on that.
It was all just so fucking frustrating because sometimes Erha was really serious and explored things I don't often see in BLâs in depth, particularly the stuff with Mo Ran and Chu Wanningâs fucked up relationship and all its layers like both of their pasts and childhood, but they just had the misfortune of being in a series where the author loves to invent new brands of misogyny every five minutes.
I am very happy and lucky that I read Yuwu in its entirety first, because if I had not, I would not have read it if I had finished Erha first, which is a shame. Erha was just so bad that honestly when writing my review for Yuwu above I thought multiple times, did I just make up it being good, was it just as bad as Erha, but I just didnât read it critically enough?
I want to reread Yuwu again at some point and see if I was just insane. TLDR: Don't read Erha unless you are willing to put a lot of time in, or youâre crazy like me and unfortunately get rid of boredom occasionally by reading slop. If you are going to read it, at the very least don't do so before reading Yuwu first, do not let it turn you away.
ALSO end note: I will not take any âScum Villianâs Self Saving System and The Husky and his White Cat Shizun are alikeâ, in any form. These two series could not be any more unalike and anyone who tries to claim otherwise is lying, donât do Shen Qinggiu and Luo Binghe like that they would rather kill themselves than be like Mo Ran and Chu Wanning.
