TTFeb: Favorite/least favorite c-novel tropes

[superborb]

momijizukamori prompted: Favorite/least favorite c-novel tropes?

I have to caveat that I have not read cnovels widely at ALL. So like, there's a whole bucket of genres/tropes that I have very little exposure to, PLUS I don't have a good sampling of the genres I have read to have a good sense of how they're situated in the genre and/or how they're responding to the zeitgeist.

So at this moment in time, I'd say... It's not that I intrinsically don't like transmigration / portal fantasy / rebirth; it's actually a set of tropes that I am drawn to! (Transmigration is when someone is moved to a new setting, with tons and tons of variation. Portal fantasy is similar with an implication of being able to go back to the original setting. Rebirth involves dying and time travel to an earlier point.) I put them together because they have that similar core of a built in PoV character, who either is providing an outsider perspective or has some built in knowledge of the world.

It's just that-- often it's not saying much new at this point? Plenty of cnovels like to play with trope subversion, of course, but even subverted transmigration often doesn't quite hit the freshness of ideas that I look for in original works. I guess it's a matter of, what does inserting this mechanism add to the story? And sometimes it just feels like, self insert done poorly? It is one of those tropes that can work better for me as a fic, where small incremental newness is perfectly worthwhile reading, vs as an original work, I want more meat on the worldbuilding.

OTOH, I've fallen back in love with political intrigue, because I'm reading the cnovel version of Nirvana in Fire. I prefer my political intrigue as a careful balance of the estate/harem drama with broader political implications; when it's just estate stuff, I get bored, but only political stuff has... too few women. I think it's having that balance of interpersonal drama with broader stakes? The broader stakes seems critical for my enjoyment: purely estate intrigue or like, mythological genre where it's all immortals in their own immortal world, only holds my attention for so long. So lower stakes stuff either needs to be less intrigue heavy or shorter? In any case, political intrigue is a staple genre for a reason, I guess :P

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Comments

[chestnut_pod]

I like your analysis of the personal/national balance in the political intrigue genre!

[superborb]

I spent a lot of time thinking about it, because sometimes it would hit and sometimes be a complete flop and it was tricky to figure out why? (Beyond like, a 'this intrigue is stupid' flop *g*)

[cortue]

Yeah I just recently finished watching The Story of Minglan and was excited that a lot of the novel was translated, but then I saw that it was a transmigration plot with a modern woman and my interest waned a lot from that. It seems to be a vastly different plot.

[superborb]

Right, like, afaict, it's another case where the transmigration doesn't affect the plot at all, so what's the point??

[halfcactus]

Are you reading the NiF cnovel in Chinese? :o

I was like, "have you seen JoL" because political intrigue but then I remembered that was also transmigration with an annoying protagonist (though I think the actor is great) lol

[superborb]

Slowly!

The protag was too annoying for me sdfkljf though the drunk poetry scene was great!

[halfcactus]

The entire show was worth it just for the drunk poetry scene tbh!

Jiayou on the NiF read! \o/