Chinese GL

As a person with a PhD who refers to her PhD supervisor as shifu (for the avoidance of doubt, it is absolutely unthinkable that our relationship could be anything other than platonic), I have somewhat complicated feelings about the shizun romance as a subgenre. I started reading them periodically mainly because I wanted to be able to recommend something to the many people I see clamouring for 'MEATBUN BAIHE' on Twitter. It was in this spirit that I picked up The Wayward Disciple (孽徒, pinyin: nie tu) by Jiang Yi Shui (江一水), an author with a decent following on JJWXC. Her oeuvre is a mix of historical, xianxia and contemporary novels.

The novel summary sounded promising enough: orthodox cultivator Si Nan takes half-human, half-demon, mostly feral child Miao Xingxuan as her disciple. Miao Xingxuan is, in turn, the daughter of Si Nan's ex-fiancee Miao Xingchuan (deceased), who as far as anyone knows at the start of the novel, cheated on Si Nan with Helian Wuyou, daughter of the leader of the cultivation world's pre-eminent demonic sect. The summary also tells us that Si Nan had been motivated to do this in part because she had received a cautionary dream, in which she kept the child Miao Xingxuan imprisoned and attempted to use her half-human, half-demonic blood to achieve immortality. In the dream, this backfires badly: Miao Xingxuan consumes Si Nan alive, and goes on to terrorise the cultivation world until she's finally destroyed by the efforts of the orthodox sects. Si Nan wakes up from the dream determined to take Miao Xingchen into her care and ensure that none of this ever comes to pass. The summary also describes Miao Xingxuan as an 'unhinged' (疯批) disciple, who is motivated by the desire to drag Si Nan from her lofty pedestal and into the dirt with her.

( some spoilers )

In short, this novel frustrated me for the exact same reasons that Reading the Remnants (问棺, pinyin: wen guan) did (my review here), without even the saving grace of a character as brilliant as A-Yin. There were also some bits of plot-relevant xianxia machinery I felt were under-explained, but this could be due to the fact that I got so annoyed with the novel I basically skimmed most of the last quarter.

There is some fun world-building I guess. I like that Si Nan is the sort of cultivator who specialises in artifact forging/crafting (I haven't read a huge number of xianxia novels, but my sense is that the protagonists tend to be sword cultivators or something overtly cool). I also like that, unlike seemingly 95% of the shizun romance interests around, she's explicitly described as well-built and muscular. This particular cultivation world is a queernorm world, and most of the prominent characters are women. Cultivators of any gender can procreate with cultivators of any gender by combining their spiritual essences (though pregnancy canonically takes a huge spiritual toll on the carrying partner). The sex writing (such as it is, given that JJWXC content rules now don't allow anything explicit) would have been effective if I had actually cared about the main couple (there is a really good 'let's fuck spiritually while surrounded by enemies and on the brink of death' setup at the end). But I'm mostly happy to have finally finished this so I can move on to something less frustrating. A final note is that the demonic sects are explicitly linked with non-Han, central Asian peoples; this is not a strong theme at all within the novel, but it is present.

I read the Chinese original of the novel here on JJWXC.