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baihe_mediaThe Favourite (宠爱, pinyin: chong'ai) is chronologically the last of Da Ying's three xuanhuan novels, which I've mentally classified as 'messy supernatural lesbians behaving very, very badly except for the protagonist, who behaves comparatively well'. The other two, which I've also read, are The Puppet Demon (傀儡妖, pinyin: kuilei yao) and Spring on the River (河上春, pinyin: he shang chun).
The Favourite begins on a ship floating on some unnamed part of some unnamed ocean, where our protagonist Qingchan lives with her two jiejie, Xisha and Duanmu (it becomes clear over the course of the novel that they're not blood-related), and their guardian Chen Niang. They survive, basically, on sex work: every month, Chen Niang steers the ship (can you steer a ship? I'm bad at nautical terms. ANYWAY) into a specific part of the ocean, and a few men board it with food and other necessaries, in exchange for sex with the two older girls. It's understood that Qingchan will also do the same work once she reaches the age of sixteen. On her birthday, however, a vast, luxuriously-appointed ship approaches them, and its owner demands Qingchan's company for the night in exchange for frankly ridiculous quantities of high-grade rice, fine fabrics and other provisions. A month later, the ship returns, and its owner, a woman whose name we later discover is Jiang Wuyou, high-handedly buys Qingchan's indenture from Chen Niang and whisks her away.
Structurally, the first half of the novel works as a perfectly decent adventure story. Qingchan is subjected to various mistreatments (for no apparent reason) by the inscrutable Jiang Wuyou, and attempts repeatedly to escape but fails. The action moves along at a fair clip, shifting from the ship to Jiang Wuyou's rather spooky mansion to Baihe (as in 白鹤, white crane) City, which is inhabited by demons and other mystical creatures. Here, the cast expands. Qingchan reunites with Duanmu and Chen Niang (and later, Xisha), and meets Xie Mianfeng, a jobbing exorcist (and the only actual named human in the whole book); Ji Liansheng, the de facto ruler of Baihe City; Yun Hongxiu, its de jure ruler; Zhu Yin, the city's justiciar; and Yu Hanzhen, Chen Niang's old flame and Jiang Wuyou's sworn enemy. The whole party is then whisked off to the aptly named Desert of Death on a quest for a magical MacGuffin. Over the course of this, we learn that Qingchan, Xisha, Duanmu and Chen Niang are mystical creatures known literally as 'half-fish' (半鱼), who have an affinity with water and the inherent ability to charm others into doing their bidding (though this requires honing and practice). The second half of the novel, which is much looser, deals almost entirely with the tangled, fraught relationships between all of these women. Both Jiang Wuyou and Ji Liansheng develop a romantic interest in Qingchan, which the latter is completely oblivious to. Qingchan herself develops feelings for Jiang Wuyou, but keeps telling herself they'll never be reciprocated. Xisha throws herself at Ji Liansheng, who doesn't quite keep her at arm's length. Duanmu gets caught in a love triangle of sorts with Xie Mianfeng and Zhu Yin. Zhu Yin, who doesn't have a physical form, seeks to reach a deal with Duanmu for the use of the latter's body. Yun Hongxiu, wishing to wrest real power, tries to set Jiang Wuyou and Ji Liansheng against each other using the unsuspecting Qingchan as a pawn. This goes around in circles for a while, until the author decides to wrap everything up rather abruptly with an attack by a monster that was neither foreshadowed or otherwise signaled before in the book. Unlike Da Ying's two previous xuanhuan novels, this does close with a happy ending for Qingchan and Jiang Wuyou (and to a lesser and more intriguingly complicated extent, Duanmu and Zhu Yin, who end the book sharing a single body).
There were a lot of interesting (and sometimes downright gruesome) world-building details in the first half of the book, though most of these got somewhat dropped or overlooked in the second half. We find out that half-fish embryos are the key ingredient for a coveted elixir for ensuring agelessness, and there's a suggestion that half-fish women spontaneously abort embryos that are the result of copulating with the 'wrong' kind of man (it's not actually clear what the conditions for a successful half-fish pregnancy are). There's an early section where Duanmu has obviously what is a miscarriage (though Qingchan doesn't realise what it is), and Chen Niang carefully collects the aftermath in a container; we learn later that this is then sold on as an alchemical ingredient. There's an intriguing suggestion that an 'upgraded' form of this elixir will allow the drinker to become immortal, though again details are scarce on this. What's clear is that Jiang Wuyou has partaken of this elixir of immortality — and we know this because another character recounts a perfectly horrific story of having seen Yu Hanzhen flay Jiang Wuyou down to the skeleton, only for Jiang Wuyou to recover fully and be resurrected the following day. There is some suggestion that Jiang Wuyou is desperately seeking another draught of the elixir of immortality in order to resurrect Yun Sutu, a dear friend who gave up her life for Jiang Wuyou (she's presented as Jiang Wuyou's dead girlfriend, but we learn in a post-ending extra that all romantic feelings were entirely one-sided on Yun Sutu's part). There are hints that Qingchan might be descended from the royal line of the half-fish clan, as she's the only one capable of activating the MacGuffin — a weapon left by the last known half-fish monarch — which the party have ventured into the Desert of Death to recover. However, none of these plot strands really go anywhere in the second half, which is entirely taken up with the characters' relationships and power play. There's also a pretty high level of gore: Jiang Wuyou's preferred weapon in the first half of the novel is a flock of ravenous magical birds, and she has no compunctions about using it; Xisha kills and cooks a pet belonging to a fox demon who slighted her, ends up killing the fox demon quite graphically, and is punished by having her face mutilated.
The romance I didn't find particularly well-written, nor the main characters particularly interesting. Qingchan starts out as a Standard Ingenue and pretty much stays in the same role: she doesn't particularly grow in power, intelligence or strategy. Jiang Wuyou, meanwhile, is Mr Darcy-as-perceived-by-fandom: finds it difficult to put words to her feelings, can't help negging Qingchan at almost every turn, and performs romantic gestures which she then immediately undermines. it's also deeply unclear why they fall in love with each other, and Qingchan's feelings are particularly hard to explain away. It's never made clear why Jiang Wuyou is so hell-bent on tormenting her when they first meet, up to and including instructing one of her guards to rape Qingchan (this doesn't happen, but only because the guard feels sorry for Qingchan). Jiang Wuyou never apologises for, or even attempts to justify, any of this. Initially, the reader is led to believe that it's because she needs a half-fish embryo to create the elixir for resurrecting Yun Sutu — but towards the middle of the novel, Jiang Wuyou explicitly explains that she never had any intention of resurrecting Yun Sutu in the first place, as she would then have a better claim to the rulership of Baihe City than her half-sister Yun Hongxiu, and this would throw Baihe City into further chaos. Qingchan is actually more interesting when she's around Ji Liansheng, the de facto ruler of Baihe City, who essentially fills the 'second male lead' role in this novel. Ji Liansheng is the perfect suitor: smooth, courtly, romantic, she'll show you a great time, and when the relationship comes to its natural end, she'll shower you generously with parting gifts. Qingchan is one of the few people who aren't intimidated by Ji Liansheng (whose interest is initially piqued by this), and when she's around Ji Liansheng, she speaks her mind quite bluntly and directly, and sometimes to quite amusing effect. However, Qingchan spends the entire novel completely oblivious to Ji Liansheng's feelings for her, despite the latter's many attempts at dropping subtle — and then increasingly less subtle — hints to that effect.
Despite the many plot holes, dropped plot threads, inconsistencies and not particularly effective romance, I did still enjoy this novel, in much the same way as I enjoyed the k-drama Boys Over Flowers. Structurally, it was a lot more coherent than Spring on the River, which was basically supernatural lesbians going round and round in never-ending emotional circles — at least things happened in the first half of The Favourite! I find I cut Da Ying a lot of slack, partly because I'm perennially entertained by the fact that she went from writing these books to writing She Belongs to Me (她属于我, pinyin: ta shuyu wo), a novel about two completely human women decorously resolving any relationship issues they might have through the Power of Communication, and partly because, as a very early writer (her three xuanhuan novels were first released in 2008, 2009 and 2013 respectively), it's interesting to see how she manages the affordances of both the platform and the genre (even if this is not an outright success), and to think about where her influences come from (I felt that both this novel and Spring on the River had shoujo reverse harem vibes, for instance).
I read the Chinese original of the novel through the uncensored Taiwanese print edition published by morefate. The web version of the novel has been locked in its entirety by JJWXC for content reasons.
The Favourite begins on a ship floating on some unnamed part of some unnamed ocean, where our protagonist Qingchan lives with her two jiejie, Xisha and Duanmu (it becomes clear over the course of the novel that they're not blood-related), and their guardian Chen Niang. They survive, basically, on sex work: every month, Chen Niang steers the ship (can you steer a ship? I'm bad at nautical terms. ANYWAY) into a specific part of the ocean, and a few men board it with food and other necessaries, in exchange for sex with the two older girls. It's understood that Qingchan will also do the same work once she reaches the age of sixteen. On her birthday, however, a vast, luxuriously-appointed ship approaches them, and its owner demands Qingchan's company for the night in exchange for frankly ridiculous quantities of high-grade rice, fine fabrics and other provisions. A month later, the ship returns, and its owner, a woman whose name we later discover is Jiang Wuyou, high-handedly buys Qingchan's indenture from Chen Niang and whisks her away.
Structurally, the first half of the novel works as a perfectly decent adventure story. Qingchan is subjected to various mistreatments (for no apparent reason) by the inscrutable Jiang Wuyou, and attempts repeatedly to escape but fails. The action moves along at a fair clip, shifting from the ship to Jiang Wuyou's rather spooky mansion to Baihe (as in 白鹤, white crane) City, which is inhabited by demons and other mystical creatures. Here, the cast expands. Qingchan reunites with Duanmu and Chen Niang (and later, Xisha), and meets Xie Mianfeng, a jobbing exorcist (and the only actual named human in the whole book); Ji Liansheng, the de facto ruler of Baihe City; Yun Hongxiu, its de jure ruler; Zhu Yin, the city's justiciar; and Yu Hanzhen, Chen Niang's old flame and Jiang Wuyou's sworn enemy. The whole party is then whisked off to the aptly named Desert of Death on a quest for a magical MacGuffin. Over the course of this, we learn that Qingchan, Xisha, Duanmu and Chen Niang are mystical creatures known literally as 'half-fish' (半鱼), who have an affinity with water and the inherent ability to charm others into doing their bidding (though this requires honing and practice). The second half of the novel, which is much looser, deals almost entirely with the tangled, fraught relationships between all of these women. Both Jiang Wuyou and Ji Liansheng develop a romantic interest in Qingchan, which the latter is completely oblivious to. Qingchan herself develops feelings for Jiang Wuyou, but keeps telling herself they'll never be reciprocated. Xisha throws herself at Ji Liansheng, who doesn't quite keep her at arm's length. Duanmu gets caught in a love triangle of sorts with Xie Mianfeng and Zhu Yin. Zhu Yin, who doesn't have a physical form, seeks to reach a deal with Duanmu for the use of the latter's body. Yun Hongxiu, wishing to wrest real power, tries to set Jiang Wuyou and Ji Liansheng against each other using the unsuspecting Qingchan as a pawn. This goes around in circles for a while, until the author decides to wrap everything up rather abruptly with an attack by a monster that was neither foreshadowed or otherwise signaled before in the book. Unlike Da Ying's two previous xuanhuan novels, this does close with a happy ending for Qingchan and Jiang Wuyou (and to a lesser and more intriguingly complicated extent, Duanmu and Zhu Yin, who end the book sharing a single body).
There were a lot of interesting (and sometimes downright gruesome) world-building details in the first half of the book, though most of these got somewhat dropped or overlooked in the second half. We find out that half-fish embryos are the key ingredient for a coveted elixir for ensuring agelessness, and there's a suggestion that half-fish women spontaneously abort embryos that are the result of copulating with the 'wrong' kind of man (it's not actually clear what the conditions for a successful half-fish pregnancy are). There's an early section where Duanmu has obviously what is a miscarriage (though Qingchan doesn't realise what it is), and Chen Niang carefully collects the aftermath in a container; we learn later that this is then sold on as an alchemical ingredient. There's an intriguing suggestion that an 'upgraded' form of this elixir will allow the drinker to become immortal, though again details are scarce on this. What's clear is that Jiang Wuyou has partaken of this elixir of immortality — and we know this because another character recounts a perfectly horrific story of having seen Yu Hanzhen flay Jiang Wuyou down to the skeleton, only for Jiang Wuyou to recover fully and be resurrected the following day. There is some suggestion that Jiang Wuyou is desperately seeking another draught of the elixir of immortality in order to resurrect Yun Sutu, a dear friend who gave up her life for Jiang Wuyou (she's presented as Jiang Wuyou's dead girlfriend, but we learn in a post-ending extra that all romantic feelings were entirely one-sided on Yun Sutu's part). There are hints that Qingchan might be descended from the royal line of the half-fish clan, as she's the only one capable of activating the MacGuffin — a weapon left by the last known half-fish monarch — which the party have ventured into the Desert of Death to recover. However, none of these plot strands really go anywhere in the second half, which is entirely taken up with the characters' relationships and power play. There's also a pretty high level of gore: Jiang Wuyou's preferred weapon in the first half of the novel is a flock of ravenous magical birds, and she has no compunctions about using it; Xisha kills and cooks a pet belonging to a fox demon who slighted her, ends up killing the fox demon quite graphically, and is punished by having her face mutilated.
The romance I didn't find particularly well-written, nor the main characters particularly interesting. Qingchan starts out as a Standard Ingenue and pretty much stays in the same role: she doesn't particularly grow in power, intelligence or strategy. Jiang Wuyou, meanwhile, is Mr Darcy-as-perceived-by-fandom: finds it difficult to put words to her feelings, can't help negging Qingchan at almost every turn, and performs romantic gestures which she then immediately undermines. it's also deeply unclear why they fall in love with each other, and Qingchan's feelings are particularly hard to explain away. It's never made clear why Jiang Wuyou is so hell-bent on tormenting her when they first meet, up to and including instructing one of her guards to rape Qingchan (this doesn't happen, but only because the guard feels sorry for Qingchan). Jiang Wuyou never apologises for, or even attempts to justify, any of this. Initially, the reader is led to believe that it's because she needs a half-fish embryo to create the elixir for resurrecting Yun Sutu — but towards the middle of the novel, Jiang Wuyou explicitly explains that she never had any intention of resurrecting Yun Sutu in the first place, as she would then have a better claim to the rulership of Baihe City than her half-sister Yun Hongxiu, and this would throw Baihe City into further chaos. Qingchan is actually more interesting when she's around Ji Liansheng, the de facto ruler of Baihe City, who essentially fills the 'second male lead' role in this novel. Ji Liansheng is the perfect suitor: smooth, courtly, romantic, she'll show you a great time, and when the relationship comes to its natural end, she'll shower you generously with parting gifts. Qingchan is one of the few people who aren't intimidated by Ji Liansheng (whose interest is initially piqued by this), and when she's around Ji Liansheng, she speaks her mind quite bluntly and directly, and sometimes to quite amusing effect. However, Qingchan spends the entire novel completely oblivious to Ji Liansheng's feelings for her, despite the latter's many attempts at dropping subtle — and then increasingly less subtle — hints to that effect.
Despite the many plot holes, dropped plot threads, inconsistencies and not particularly effective romance, I did still enjoy this novel, in much the same way as I enjoyed the k-drama Boys Over Flowers. Structurally, it was a lot more coherent than Spring on the River, which was basically supernatural lesbians going round and round in never-ending emotional circles — at least things happened in the first half of The Favourite! I find I cut Da Ying a lot of slack, partly because I'm perennially entertained by the fact that she went from writing these books to writing She Belongs to Me (她属于我, pinyin: ta shuyu wo), a novel about two completely human women decorously resolving any relationship issues they might have through the Power of Communication, and partly because, as a very early writer (her three xuanhuan novels were first released in 2008, 2009 and 2013 respectively), it's interesting to see how she manages the affordances of both the platform and the genre (even if this is not an outright success), and to think about where her influences come from (I felt that both this novel and Spring on the River had shoujo reverse harem vibes, for instance).
I read the Chinese original of the novel through the uncensored Taiwanese print edition published by morefate. The web version of the novel has been locked in its entirety by JJWXC for content reasons.
