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Sweet Wife in My Arms (Chinese webnovel) – Gave up at chapter 270 (spoilers)

I don’t remember when it was, but I know I promised myself not to start any webnovel with a ridiculous number of chapters. I told myself I would always check first and not start something that was bound to get tedious and stupid. But time passes, people grow old, we forget our promises and then… we end up reading long-winded dreck like Sweet Wife in My Arms.

Summary: For his sake, she was willing to abandon her career as the best actress and be his wife. With her own network, money and unscrupulous methods, she helped him rise to the top of the world. He, on the other hand, held another woman in his embrace and kicked her away with no mercy. It turned out that all he ever wanted was her rare blood type, her six-month-old child’s cord blood. It was her life…

When she opened her eyes again, she returned to her 20-year-old self. Time repeated and her life rewound. In this life, she would live well. [source: Webnovel]

Now, to be absolutely fair to Sweet Wife in My Arms, the first 250 chapters are a decent and enjoyable read. The female lead Yan Huan is definitely a Mary Sue with perfect acting skills, the most beautiful face ever, amazing wire-fu skills, etc. but that is normal for this kind of series and she’s not obnoxious about it. And unlike many trashy series of this sort, she does not fall back in love with the guy who killed her because it was all a big misunderstanding or something.

In the same way, the male lead Lu Yi is your general icy cold super powerful guy who doesn’t like women at all but somehow there’s something special about the heroine… etc etc. You know the drill if you’ve read even one Chinese romance web novel. Lu Yi is miles and away better than most other CEO/Prince MLs. He’s not rapey, not physically or mentally abusive, not over-the-top protective and doesn’t try to force his way into her life. If anything, she’s the one who starts clinging to him even when he has a girlfriend.

Furthermore, the plot isn’t bad. It has the generic “super talented actress” gimmick romance web novels use when they’re not using “super talented doctor” instead. I like this gimmick better because we get to read about the various cheesy, campy movies and series. Yan Huan takes part in. Which the audience laps up, but they sound sooooo bad. Like this one called “Divorced” about a woman whose husband cheats so she finds another man who doesn’t cheat, happily ever after, after all a woman can’t be happy without clinging to some rich man, haha… And somehow it grosses 600 million yuan and makes her a millionaire, lol.

But that’s the thing about the series early on – it doesn’t take itself very seriously. Despite Yan Huan’s sad past and Lu Yi’s coldness, it’s not a mopey or depressing story. It has its dramatic moments, frustrating ones, funny ones, cute ones. It’s no masterpiece, but it was interesting enough to pass the time. To slowly see Yan Huan overcoming her unfounded fear of Lu Yi, Lu Yi learning to stand up for himself a little, Lu Yi bonding with her cat Little Bean, Yan Huan winning him over with her food, etc. Very cute stuff.

So where did it go wrong with Sweet Wife in My Arms? Around chapter 265, when Yan Huan did something very stupid. I mean she had done stupid things before like meeting a ‘director’ in an apartment alone, but this was extra stupid. Here she remembered that a mudslide occurred in her past life, and Lu Yi was trapped in it. Instead of telling him about it, she decided she would look crazy if she did. So what she did was… she borrowed his car… and went there… and almost got caught in the same landslide.

In other words, instead of potentially avoiding millions of dollars in damage, injury, lives and work hours lost, she wanted to play “little rescue heroine” by showing up with food. Look, I get it, in a NORMAL situation, she might sound crazy for saying she had a dream or premonition about a mudslide. But Lu Yi is the kind of guy who absolutely can and would investigate the area if she so much as hinted at it. He told her as much, whatever she needs him for, he’s willing to do it. There was no need to risk his life, her life, many other people’s lives, just so she wouldn’t look crazy.

But see, that incident in itself wasn’t the dealbreaker for Sweet Wife in My Arms. The problem is that the mudslide broke my immersion, so to speak. I sat up and thought, “This is really dumb. Do I really want to read much more of this?” And THEN, only then, did I check the chapter count. Aieeee, 707 chapters translated to date. Over 2500 chapters in Chinese!! Two thousand five hundred! 2500!! I was only 10% of the way through and I was already shaking my head.

So at that point, I thought, eh, I can’t do this. Let me just read spoilers and see their happy ending and then I’m done. But the spoilers for Sweet Wife in my Arms are hooorrible. The series is craaaap!

Highlights include:

Yan Huan still tangling with Lu Qin, Su Muran and other idiots she dealt with in her past life when a sensible person would move halfway round the world to get away from them,
Lu Yi getting amnesia and getting cuddly with another woman,
Switched identities, the usual miscarriages, triplets…
All kinds of shenanigans revolving around Yan Huan’s extra special blood,
Obligatory Yan Huan in a coma scene, and
Yan Huan going through not one, not two, not three but FOUR rebirth sagas before getting her happy ending

And that’s just the spoilers from the thread. I’m sure there were even more ups and downs, especially revolving around annoying side characters like the gluttonous, uncaring manager Yi Ling and her inevitable romance with Lu Yi’s best buddy Lei Qingyi. To be honest, if the series was, say, 400-500 chapters long, I would have stuck it out regardless of the stupidity of the mudslide incident. But 2500 of this and more? Nope, I’m out. Time is precious in 2021. Gotta read better web novels before COVID clobbers us all.

TL;DR – Sweet Wife in My Arms has a passable premise and very likeable main characters. However it goes on waaaay too long and involves waaaaay too much drama. Unless you have nothing better to do with your time, I advise you to read shorter, more compact and more sensibly plotted series.

Log Horizon Season 2 – Thoughts on episodes 1-12

I jumped straight into the next season because, why not? It turns out season 2 of Log Horizon has many of the same issues that stopped season 1 from being a top-tier show. Mainly a tendency to focus on side characters doing things the viewer doesn’t care about and which are only marginally important to the rest of the show as a whole. All the while when something far more interesting is going on with Shiroe and his main party.

This time the problem was a long arc focusing on Akatsuki’s crisis of confidence and her attempts to deal with a “serial killer” on the loose in Akihabara. This would have been okay if it lasted for only an episode or two, but episode after episode after episode of Akatsuki angsting about her own inabilities and her (forced, unconvincing) feelings for Shiroe grew tiresome very quickly. The resulting “girl power!” showdown that was supposed to give the female eye candy of the show something to do might have been interesting if the guys weren’t also having a far more epic and monumental showdown right around the same time. If you want to give characters a day in the limelight, make sure the spotlight is on them, don’t make them a sideshow distraction from ‘the real thing.’

So anyway, that was pretty boring. The whole first half of season 2 has been pretty boring, actually. The best part was the revelation of how much it cost to maintain all those buildings and the resulting plan to find the source of the gold. I enjoy Log Horizon best when it’s focusing on things like basic economics and less when it’s doing generic MMORPG battles, though the battles against the raid monsters were pretty intense. The shock resolution of the whole gold arc is also interesting and unusual and I look forward to finding out the implications.

First, though, it appears I’m going to have to sit through a Valentine’s Day episode… ugh… I’ve been watching anime for almost 20 years at this point and I have never, I repeat never seen a good Valentine’s Day episode. In fact, I’m very tempted to just skip episode 13 and go straight to 14. Why are they doing lovey-dovey hijinks when Rusty has gone missing, his aide has lost an arm and the West is up to shady shenanigans that need attention pronto? It’s this tendency to wander and insert fanservice and slice of life elements at the most inappropriate times that keeps Log Horizon from being the 5-star show it could have been.

Still I just have to suffer through episode 13 and then I’ll be treated to all the action and intrigue and world-building I could ever ask for, riiiiight? Don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath, but the rest of the show should at least be decent. I’ll get round to finishing it one day.

Log Horizon anime review – Spotty quality but enjoyable overall

I finished Sword Art Online and went around looking for something similar. Not that I enjoyed SAO all that much, but the general idea of an overpowered protagonist stuck in another world is one that I still like so I’m still looking out for shows along those lines. Log Horizon came with good recommendations and less of the positive/negative hysteria that accompanies SAO, so I decided to give it a try.

Blurb: Thirty thousand Japanese gamers suddenly find themselves transported into the virtual game world of an MMORPG called Elder Tale. In the midst of the event, a socially awkward gamer named Shiroe, along with his friends, Naotsugu and Akatsuki, decide to team up so that they may face this world, which unfortunately has now become their reality, along with the challenges and obstacles ahead of them.

The good parts of Log Horizon

The main character Shiroe and most of his friends and companions are all level 90 by the time the show starts. The way the game world is set up also means they’re essentially immortal, so they’re usually never in any real danger. Shiroe is also portrayed (somewhat falsely IMO) as a super-strategic genius but he can also do his share in battle, making him the right combination of brains and brawn to satisfy any viewer looking for a character who is overpowered either physically or mentally.

Log Horizon also puts more focus on economic issues, quality of life issues and power balances/relations than most “trapped in a game” shows tend to do. This makes it pretty good for people who care about world building and immersion, though I imagine the light novels would be better for this than the show.

The show also spends some time exploring the lives and politics of the non-player characters (NPCs), the guys you would normally ignore in town and villages in videogames, who only exist to sell you stuff/give you quests/die miserably when the bad guys attack. Turns out they’re “human” just like everyone else with families and tastes and complex political relationships, etc etc. It’s an interesting world to explore. The show is actually a good commercial for the light novels, ‘cos I’m slightly curious now.

Shiroe as a super-strategist is more of an informed attribute than anything that really stands out in the show, but he has his impressive moments. His strategy for getting Akihabara under control and establishing law and order was really quite clever. His use of his scribe skills to change the fate of a particular character was seriously over the top in both a good and bad way but hey, you asked for an overpowered main character and you got one.

The bad parts of Log Horizon

Shiroe stays out of focus in a lot of episodes, especially in the second half of the show. Instead an inordinate amount of time is spent chronicling the escapades of a bunch of level 25 adventurers, which just pisses me off. There are THOUSANDS of shows out there about complete newbies trying to get stronger. I want to watch people who have gone through the grind and are already strong enough. It’s really, really boring to watch those mewling little brats (especially Minori, she is so annoying) squabbling and scrabbling about. Someone should just put them all in a sack and drown them.

This makes it especially annoying when an entire arc is devoted to watching these kids try to defend an NPC town against a bunch of monsters that the level 90 characters could (and eventually do) take out in a few hits. The level 90 guys are presumably standing by because they’re “out of MP”, even though they could just fly back to Akihabara to buy out their entire stock of potions and return in less than time it takes one weakling to kill a single monster.

Speaking of that arc, it’s also painful to see them ignore perfectly valid strategies that were used earlier in the show in favor of just standing around chatting. You have a huge wave of monsters coming. Why not let Naotsugu (level 90) run into their middle, use Anchor Howl so they can’t target anyone but him, have all the healers just focus their healing spells on him and then pick off all the monsters at leisure with the weaker guys? It’s a strategy that was used twice earlier in the show to devastating effect, yet the one time it would actually make a difference it’s ignored in order to manufacture unnecessary drama with the kids! Sooooo annoying.

Other characters the show spent too much time on: Princess Lenessia and Crusty. Enough already, just get married and get off my show. Naotsugu with his constant perverted remarks was also another big drawback, though he thankfully gets a lot less screentime once the focus of the show shifts away from combat. Thank goodness. The Minori-Shiroe-Akatsuki love triangle wasn’t interesting either. There are lots of other love triangle shows out there if that’s what I wanted.

Lastly I’m a little bothered that the show didn’t give any thought at all to what is going on in the “real world” while the gamers are trapped in Elder Tale. Unlike in SAO it seems they have been bodily transported so there’s no need to worry about starving to death. But at the same time you’re telling me nobody has any family to worry about or work to go to or bedridden old grandpa they’re caring for? They all get stuck in the new world and they’re like COOOOL and that’s that? In a show as thoughtful as Log Horizon it’s a pretty glaring oversight, but it might be addressed in season two so I’ll give them a pass for now.

Overall

As I said in the title, the quality of Log Horizon is a bit spotty. When they let Shiroe do what he’s best at – solving problems, inventing clever solutions and exploring the mysteries of the Elder Tale world – it’s a highly enjoyable and engrossing show. Unfortunately that only takes up about 70% of the show and the rest is devoted to dumb love triangles, boring fights, annoying characters and time-wasting forced drama. I’m interested enough in the world that I’m going to watch Season 2, but honestly it could be a much better show. Still worth a try or a buy, just prepare for a bit of frustration and many filler-like episodes.

Remember manhua review

Remember how ‘Red Colored Elegy‘ was supposed to be a highly-influential work? When I reviewed it, I noted that I could see how people would be inspired by it, but the keyword was ‘inspired’ – I never expected someone to flat out copy the whole thing. Until I read Remember by Chinese artist Benjamin, that is…

The blurb goes:

What is the fine line that separates love from hate? How can a broken heart heal from a loss so deep? When is letting go of your inhibitions worth risking your life?

International artist Benjamin depicts profoundl moving portrayals of love and loss that get at the core of what it means to throw your heart into life. The artist doesn’t offer any comfort from the despair we all feel in our lives – while we know there is no answer, we are all better off for asking the question… and remembering the struggle.

Actually the real question they should be asking is “What is the fine line that separates inspiration from plagiarism?” I will give Benjamin props for being a pretty good artist (that cover just screams “Buy Me!” doesn’t it?), but when it comes to storytelling he is utterly bereft of ideas. And he is completely aware of it too, if his self-loathing author’s comments are anything to go by.

Remember is made up of two short stories. The title story ‘Remember’ deals with a Struggling artist with a bad attitude, girl who loves him for no reason, he pushes her away until she does go away and then he hates himself even more than ever, the end. I really didn’t need to summarize that, I should have just pointed to the original story, which for all its flaws does a better job at conveying the doomed relationship and almost, not quite, making the characters relateable.

Anyway, this struggling artist submits story after story to a comic publisher only to have them turned down because they’re not enough like Japanese manga. “Chinese readers don’t want originality! They want plagiarized Japanese manga!” the editor straight-up tells him. So it’s ironic – or maybe meaningful – that the story itself is a straight-up copy of Red Colored Elegy, with better art and with the sex cut out or made ambiguous to avoid censorship.

Is this how low Benjamin had to sink to get his work published in China? Maybe. But what is more likely is that he put that scene in just to cover his inability to write a Chinese manhua that would be accepted by editors. “See it’s not me, it’s the editors, they forced me to plagiarize! Left to my own devices I could totally write a great story!” If that’s the case, why is the copy even worse than the original?

Besides, the Remember collection includes a second short story as well, about students in art school being bullied, but it’s crap. I read about a third of it and then just skimmed through it because it was just more self-loathing navel-gazing twaddle. He probably copied that from a Japanese manga as well, I just don’t know enough manga to spot which one.

In any case, by that time the nice art had lost its effect on me and all of Benjamin’s shortcomings as a writer were on display for all to see. Rambling, incoherent ‘I’m so deep and nobody understands me’ characters dot the pages like so many teenagers at an emo concert. They’re all flat one-note characters – ‘quirky girl’, ‘misunderstood artist’, ‘unreasonable editor’ – one defining characteristic carries them through the whole story. Even in a short story you should be able to flesh characters out a little more than that, especially in slice-of-life kind of stories where enjoyment depends on getting under the character’s skins.

Benjamin can draw, there’s no question about that, but unless he can learn to write as well it really doesn’t profit him very much. The fact that the manga goes for less than $2.00 on Amazon despite being out of print should tell you everything you need to know about that. Still I’m not a mean person, and I can see some budding talent there. I’d advise him to work on his writing skills if he really want to make it as a mangaka (manhuajia?). Failing that, there’s nothing wrong with being a dedicated artist and illustrator, since he does have the skills to back that up. Good luck, Mr. Plagiarizer!

Ayako manga review

Ayako by Osamu Tezuka is supposed to be a classic of the genre by the supposed greatest mangaka of all time. Or so one would suppose to hear the way people go on and on about him. To be honest I’m not that familiar with Tezuka’s works apart from a little Astroboy (the new movie) and a little Black Jack, but if Ayako is anything to go by, I’m not missing much.

Btw, I’m not using the cover as a featured image as I usually do, because the front cover is a naked girl and the back cover is a silhouette of a woman hanging herself. When a ‘classic’ manga has to resort to cheap titillation to sell itself, that should tell you everything you need to know. Anyway, on with the official blurb:

Opening a few years after the end of World War II and covering almost a quarter-century, here is comics master Osamu Tezuka’s most direct and sustained critique of Japan’s fate in the aftermath of total defeat. Unusually devoid of cartoon premises yet shot through with dark voyeuristic humor, Ayako looms as a pinnacle of Naturalist literature in Japan with few peers even in prose, the striking heroine a potent emblem of things left unseen following the war.

The year is 1949. Crushed by the Allied Powers, occupied by General MacArthur’s armies, Japan has been experiencing massive change. Agricultural reform is dissolving large estates and redistributing plots to tenant farmers—terrible news, if you’re landowners like the archconservative Tenge family.

For patriarch Sakuemon, the chagrin of one of his sons coming home alive from a P.O.W. camp instead of having died for the Emperor is topped only by the revelation that another of his is consorting with “the reds.” What solace does he have but his youngest Ayako, apple of his eye, at once daughter and granddaughter?

Delving into some of the period’s true mysteries, which remain murky to this day, Tezuka’s Zolaeqsque tapestry delivers thrill and satisfaction in spades. Another page-turning classic from an irreplaceable artist who was as astute an admirer of the Russian masters and Nordic playwrights as of Walt Disney, Ayako is a must-read for comics connoisseurs and curious literati.

All right, let’s get one thing out of the way first – this is no “sustained critique of Japan’s” blah blah blah anything. For the first three or four chapters, yes, Tezuka does cover some of the tensions brought about by the occupation and the conflicting interests of conqueror and subject.

But that’s just in the very beginning, after that Ayako devolves into a bodice-ripping page-turner in the vein of Sidney Sheldon or V.C. Andrews. Sex, incest, betrayals, conspiracy, more sex and then Tezuka throws in a typically Japanese nonsensical downer ending and bam, we have a classic.

The tl;dr version of the story is that Ayako, the title character is born when Ichiro Tenge offers his wife Su’e up to his dad Sakuemon in exchange for an inheritance. Ayako is unlucky enough to learn too much of a crime committed by her uncle/half-brother Jiro Tenge and is locked away in a basement for 23 years to keep her quiet.

During that time she manages to have an affair with her uncle/half-brother Shiro Tenge, but she eventually breaks out, makes her way over to Jiro, acts crazy for a while, hooks up with the son of Jiro’s sworn enemy and then everybody except Ayako dies in a cave-in caused by Shiro, his way of purging the land of the treacherous, incestuous Tenge clan.

All that took about 600+ pages, but as I said it was quite the page-turner in a train-wreck kind of way, so I read the whole thing in one night. And I suppose it IS a classic, in the way some of Sidney Sheldon’s books are classics – classics of beach literature, that is. I’m comparing it to Sheldon’s stuff because Ayako contains the same mix of sex, crime and tragedy that he was so famous for.

If that’s the kind of drama that appeals to you, Ayako is right up your alley. It’s a different kind of classic from what I was expecting, but I suppose 70’s manga fans like a good twisted drama as much as the next person, which is why this manga is (undeservingly, IMO) famous.

For all that the main character is female, though, the women in this manga come across very poorly indeed. It might have been deliberate, to show how post-war Japan was, and in many ways still is a man’s world. Either way the women in Ayako are all helpless victims and sex objects relegated to one of two roles: housewife or whore (and in one unfortunate case, both).

Oh, but it gets worse. Not only are they helpless whores and housewives but also any attempt they make to break out of those roles is almost immediately punished with death as if to say “Stay in the kitchen/bedroom, woman!”

For example Su’e, Ayako’s mother, spends years as a quiet housewife and the family patriarch’s sex slave. When she finally tries to leave with Ayako, her husband kills her. End of her story.

Then there’s Jiro’s temporary squeeze Michiko (or was it Machiko?). She’s fine when she’s obediently sleeping with military officers on his orders, but the minute she tries to rebel against that, boom kaboom! No more Michiko.

Or let’s take Naoko, the Tenge little sister who spends years as a dutiful housewife. The minute she tries to get revenge on Jiro for killing her old boyfriend she gets drawn back into the family cesspit and alas, no more Naoko.

The two women who do survive the whole fiasco, Ayako herself and her stepmother/grandmother, seemingly only do so because they don’t bother fighting against their roles or against the men in their lives. The stepmother because she never even attempts to resist and Ayako because she gave up after a brief struggle. Sure she runs away from home eventually, but it’s all a matter of jumping from the care of one man (Shiro) to another (Jiro) and to another (Hanao). Just when the manga is about to get interesting, when Ayako is finally all alone, it ends. So… yeah.

Long story short, if you want something tasteful and classy, don’t get Ayako. If you want a trashy page-turner that will leave a bad taste in your mouth and leave you wondering what’s so great about Osamu Tezuka, get Ayako. End of story.