baihe_media | Entries tagged with novels: at her mercy 我为鱼肉

It's difficult to summarise Ning Yuan's writing career in a couple of pithy sentences, in part because it's so long. She's been publishing baihe novels and short stories on JJWXC since at least 2008, and shows no signs of slowing down. Her work covers a broad range of genres, including historical court intrigue, xianxia, sci-fi, urban fantasy, showbiz, contemporary romance, and most recently historical cyberpunk.

( Read more... )

Links and resources

General Ning Yuan information carrd
Carrd (and DW post) for At Her Mercy
Carrd for To Embers We Return

Community reviews of Ning Yuan's novels

The Tribulation of the ~~Peach~~ Runaway Blossom (brief review)
The Creator's Grace (brief review)
Revolutionary Road aka The Path of Life
Ravenous
Hunger. Lust
To Embers We Return
Something I Need to Tell You
Fateful Encounters

(updated version of a piece initially posted on the cnovels comm)

douqi

Across the Empire (纵横, pinyin: zongheng) is, by webnovel standards, an ancient relic. First published on JJWXC in 2005 (for reference, JJWXC itself was founded in 2003), it's one of the earliest court intrigue novels in the baihe genre. It was actually planned as a trilogy of novels chronicling the life and death of protagonist Lin Zong, but only the first volume was fully written. The author started the second volume, but discontinued it after eighteen chapters. In an addendum to the second volume, she provides an outline of how her planned story would have gone.

The protagonist Lin Zong is an interesting twist on the popular cross-dressing lead. She is, at the start of the novel, the only living child of Prince Chu, one of the emperor's brothers. We're told that, being a very sickly child, she was brought up as a boy in order to ensure her good health (this is a superstition/folk belief/tradition that's still extant in some communities; the idea seems to be that, if you raise a child as the 'opposite' gender, you confuse the malevolent forces responsible for their poor health).* So from a very young age, Lin Zong has been treated (and dresses as) a boy, and her father has even designated her his heir, but everyone knows that she was born a girl. This creates interesting tensions down the line.

*This was also the premise of the 2015 Taiwanese drama Bromance, the most accidentally(?) queer cross-dressing drama I've ever watched. Seriously, the protagonist is easily readable as non-binary up to the very last frame of the drama.

Prince Chu is one of those extremely competent, charismatic, loyalty-inspiring princes who are the bane of their emperor brothers' existences. The emperor therefore devises a loyalty test: he arranges for Lin Zong to be married to a high-ranking young noblewoman named Chu Yanran, to see how Prince Chu will respond. Prince Chu and Lin Zong don't really have a choice but to accept the match (the other option is to kick off and basically start a rebellion), and so we end up with the rather surreal scenario of a lesbian marriage sanctioned, nay compelled, by an otherwise institutionally homophobic state.

( some mild spoilers )

I read the Chinese original of both volumes here and here on JJWXC.

douqi

yuerstruly and I came up with this (extremely short, and not all danmei) list for fun. We were seriously hampered in this task by the fact that neither of us reads all that much danmei (and in fact, such danmei I've read consists mainly of the Erha and MDZS sex scenes, at the instigation of friends who wanted to know if they were sexy in the original). There's also the usual problem that there are no non-MTL translations for most of the baihe novels in the list. But ANYWAY.

If you liked Sha Po Lang, you might also like Minister Xie (谢相, pinyin: xie xiang) by Ruo Hua Ci Shu (若花辞树). In Minister Xie, teenage emperor Liu Zao tries to get to grips with ruling an empire while also doing her best to turn her prime minister Xie Yi (who is 14 years older than her, and also her sort-of aunt) into her wife. I have been reliably informed that she is even more Obsessed and Dramatique about the latter task than Changgeng is in relation to Gu Yun. Brief reviews are available here and here.
If you liked Erha, you might also like the first 40% of The Abandoned (弃仙, pinyin: qi xian) by Mu Feng Qing Nian (沐枫轻年). Featuring extreme xianxia shizunfuckery and multiple rebirths, the first chapter of The Abandoned alone has the protagonist masturbating to a painting of her shizun, a curse that's basically the xianxia version of sex pollen, multiple instances of hurt/comfort, stratospheric levels of unhealthy disciple/shizun co-dependence, a double rebirth, the protagonist allowing her shizun to stab her in the shoulder so that she could get close enough to kiss her shizun, and the protagonist stealing her shizun's jade pendant for use as a masturbation aid. I say the first 40% because the remainder of the novel is unfortunately a bit of a drag (though for all I know, the back half of Erha also overstays its welcome). Brief review here.
If you liked SVSSS, you might also like An Incantation for Subduing a Dragon/Dragon Subjugation Incantation (降龙诀, pinyin: xiang long jue) by Shi Wei Yue Shang (时微月上). Protagonist Luo Qingci transmigrates into a xianxia novel and into the body of female lead Ruan Li's evil, conniving shizun. Being genre savvy, Luo Qingci tries her best to avoid the character's canonical grisly fate, only to discover that her disciple might just be falling in love with her. Oh, and Ruan Li is also a dragon. Ongoing fan translation here.
If you liked Qiang Jin Jiu, you might also like At Her Mercy (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou) by Ning Yuan (宁远). Except that everyone in At Her Mercy is evil. An English-language translation of At Her Mercy has been licensed by Rosmei (under the title At the World's Mercy), though the publication date is not yet known.

And now we come to the non-danmei though still danmei-adjacent comps:

If you liked Nirvana in Fire/The Langya List, you might also like At Her Mercy, except that as noted above, everyone in At Her Mercy is evil.
If you liked the Daomu Biji/The Lost Tomb series, you might also like Exploring an Empty Tomb (探虚陵, pinyin: tan xu ling) by Jun Sola (君sola) and Reading the Remnants (问棺, pinyin: wen guan) by Qi Xiao Huang Shu (七小皇叔). Obviously I don't know anything about the Daomu Biji series except that they're tomb-raiding novels, and both Exploring an Empty Tomb and Reading the Remnants are also tomb-raiding novels, so... close enough, I hope? Exploring an Empty Tomb is also literally millions of words long. A partial fan translation of Exploring an Empty Tomb is available here. A partial fan translation of Reading the Remnants is available here, and a fuller one here.

Comment with your own comps, if you have them! Also, feel free to post a danmei title, say what you liked about it and/or what its most notable qualities are, and people who read more baihe can hopefully find some comps for you!

yuerstruly

From political intrigue to showbiz, from sci-fi to coming-of-age, Ning Yuan covers just about every subgenre of baihe novels you can find, and it’s no surprise that she’s brought a genre breakthrough with her latest completed novel, To Embers We Return, a historical cyberpunk novel. Wait, historical cyberpunk? How does that work? If you didn’t believe this could exist, well, Ning Yuan did it, and executed it well beyond my expectations, and perhaps surpassed all her readers’ expectations. To Embers We Return is an action-packed yet romantic novel at its core, and if you are interested in a cast of women attempting to navigate a society that welcomes and honors their feats with positions of power but challenges their core beliefs, then this novel is for you. There are also three side couples that play important roles, both their characters and relationships deeply intertwined with the plot. The plot pushes the romance, and the romance pushes the plot.

As I am somehow terrible with summaries (and making it sound better than an existing one for a beautiful translation), I will quote Douqi’s synopsis here:

When Shen Ni, the empire’s foremost machinist, returns home victorious from battle against their long-standing foe, the emperor showers her with rewards, including the hand in marriage of the woman she had loved in her youth — Bian Jin…Shen Ni takes on the onerous task of retrieving Bian Jin’s lost memories and repairing her much-battered cybernetic spine and neural core, but Bian Jin seems to be keeping something back. Can they trust each other? And can they trust the empire?

The novel’s beginning stage starts off mellow, with much of the setting being Chang’an, the empire’s capital. This is, however, nothing to worry about, as the exciting gradual worldbuilding in these chapters make up for what some people might classify as a slow start. This doesn’t mean the first volume isn’t action-packed! The Black Box virus that infiltrates the entire empire and lands beyond is a consistent threat within the city, even with its so-called fortified walls, so we get to see much of the main cast facing it head-on. The setup for the romance subplots take place here, and we get to see four different couples, all bitterly sweet, with different flavors of push-and-pull. The second volume, which takes place outside the city, rides on the setup of the primary conflict, which is the Black Box virus making rounds even in hard-to-detect corners of the world. It also further develops the romance, and every pair contributes to the overall plot.

Ning Yuan challenged herself with this novel, and though it sits at 832k words, it is in fact one of her shorter plot-heavy historical novels, with At Her Mercy sitting at 1.24 million words and The Cultivation of a Prime Minister sitting at 1.71 million words. It is also a much more digestable read, and keeps you hooked from the beginning. While I wouldn’t say Ning Yuan is particularly praised as a prose stylist, her writing gets the job done, and she hits all the emotional beats where you want them to be. She has mentioned that To Embers We Return was a challenge for her, as it’s something she has never tried before. I commend her for her efforts.

My only gripe with this novel was the pacing—as I have mentioned earlier, the novel starts out on the mellower end, especially compared to the latter half of the plot development. This was, however, not a problem, compared to the last 7% of the main text, which felt somewhat rushed. I believe she stuck the landing, but the resolution was bordering deus ex machina. When I reached the ~500k mark, I thought that she wouldn’t be finishing the novel at less than one million words, and though the plot took a sharp swerve that allowed a sooner resolution, I think more could have been done. Taking this into account, I would probably rate this a 9.2/10. It’s above a 9 for me, but I’m not sure if it quite hit that 9.5 or 10 mark. Still, I would recommend this to anyone potentially interested in the plot or genre, and Ning Yuan as a writer makes many callbacks sprinkled throughout the text, which will leave you mindblown.

P.S. The aesthetics I imagine in my head are Xianzhou Luofu technology meets Court of Fontaine Underground area.

douqi

Rosmei has revealed the covers for all planned eight volumes of Ning Yuan's court intrigue baihe novel At Her Mercy/At the World's Merch (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou). Per previous practice, they did not provide any further information about the novel in their cover reveal tweet, so once again I resigned myself to doing some free marketing and promotional work for a commercial entity. The cover designs are as follows:

douqi

Somewhat overshadowed by the kerfuffle over the lack of a basic plot summary over At Her Mercy/At the World's Mercy (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou) was the fact that Rosmei also released a translation preview (the translator is Shigure) for the first chapter of their other licensed baihe title, near-future sci-fi thriller The Creator's Grace (造物的恩宠, pinyin: zaowu de enchong). I read the preview, mainly to see if they seemed likely to do my favourite baihe novel to date justice. On present performance, I don't think they will.

Overall, the chapter to me reads rather stiff and stilted. This is sub-optimal (to say the least) for a fast-paced thriller. The translator also has a tendency to go for convoluted sentence structures and wannabe-ornate language where the author relies mainly on simple, forceful, effective language: think Patricia Highsmith; This is especially evident for the most emotionally significant lines (as an aside, translators often don't seem to recognise that some lines are particularly load-bearing, and to treat them with the extra care they deserve).

Below, I will set out a fairly detailed analysis of the first quarter of the translation preview. I will attempt to be a generous reader and to give the translator the benefit of the doubt, being all too aware of the challenges of translating long-form genre prose. I will try not to be overly nitpicky. However, I find many of the choices quite puzzling, and there are some that really negatively affect the reading experience and the overall dynamic the novel is attempting to convey. As we'll see as we go along, the translator has a tendency to deviate from the literal meaning of the original text for reasons that are not clear to me and don't improve the final translated text at all. I would be in favour of deviating from the strict, absolutely literal approach on the word level if that helps convey the overall meaning of the passage or sentence more effectively, or improves the flow substantially.

x_los can certainly provide testimony as to how unwedded I am to a strict, literal word-by-literal word approach to translation. But I deviate for good reasons (mostly), and I don't think that's the case with most of the deviations I'm seeing in this translation preview. There are also at least a couple of things that appear to be outright mistakes. If you would like to refer to the Chinese source text for this chapter, it's here.

( Read more... )

I think this sufficiently illustrates my overall point about what I consider to be the main weaknesses in the translation. I'm not going to repeat this exercise for the second part of the analysis (again, otherwise we'd be here until 2025) but will focus instead on the mistakes and infelicities that strike me as particularly glaring.

douqi

Today, Rosmei released via Twitter the cover art for its upcoming print-only English language translation of At Her Mercy/At the World's Mercy (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou) as well as a link to a preview of the first chapter. In accordance with its past practice, Rosmei provided no further information about the novel or the author. When quizzed by concerned Twitter users as to why they had not even provided a simple plot summary, Rosmei responded with a long post that began with the rhetorical flourish: 'Do people need to know the summary of a book before deciding to read it?'

I, as a reader and purchaser of too many books of many decades' standing, consider the answer to be an obvious yes, as did many, many other people giving feedback and/or pouring derision on Rosmei's incomprehensible business decision. As

x_los pithily put it: 'This is like going "Thanks for asking us what our crackers contain. There's ingredients. Some people like to share those. Not everyone though!"'At the time of writing, Rosmei has produced no plot summary. Once again breaking my long-standing rule against providing free labour to corporations, I took it upon myself to do it.

(As an aside, I note that while international fandom seems pleased with the cover art, mainland baihe fans are decidedly less enamoured of it. The overwhelming response from mainland fans is that it looks more like the cover of a danmei novel than a baihe novel. See the replies to this post and this post on Weibo.)

One Twitter user (that I saw) felt the need to defend Rosmei by arguing that these 'aren't new novels' and that people could 'find plenty of summaries and reviews online before purchasing'. This is, technically speaking, correct. It is just that these summaries and reviews are present on the CHINESE internet and therefore practically inaccessible to non-Chinese-speaking international fans. Any existing information available on this novel that I could find online in English has been put up by me and other Chinese-speaking baihe fandom friends. Considering that this novel is so unknown to international fans that it doesn't even have a novelupdates page, I fail to understand how non-Chinese-speaking international fandom was supposed to find out any further information about it.

This has only deepened my misgivings about the whole venture. Rosmei appear to be adopting a marketing/PR strategy which is exactly the same as the one they use for marketing their danmei titles, and similar to how mainland Chinese publishers market print versions of already-popular webnovels. However, there's a huge flaw in that their danmei titles are, by and large, already known to international fandom with existing, mostly complete fan translations. At Her Mercy/At the World's Mercy, by contrast, is virtually unknown to international fandom. That they have failed to recognise this very basic fact and acknowledge that it requires a shift in marketing strategy is making me feel even more pessimistic about this whole business than I already was. As a baihe reader who holds Ning Yuan in high regard, I'm also frustrated that her work is being introduced to an English-speaking public for the first time in such a slapdash manner. It also makes me very pessimistic about the future of English licences for baihe more generally.

Update: As noted by

halfcactus here, Rosmei has posted another long statement basically saying they were previously unaware that 'readers outside Asia' have the odd quirk of wanting plot summaries for books they're thinking of buying. Rather than asking their translators, editors or marketing team to provide quick three-sentence summaries (which would take an hour at most for someone who has read the book in its entirety), Rosmei has taken the incomprehensible decision to hire Yilin Wang, a professional Chinese -> English translator best known for poetry translation, to produce summaries for their novels. For some reason, Rosmei hints darkly in its post that this will be a long and arduous process, stating that 'the initial batch of summaries may not be completed until the end of this year'. The trainwreck continues. At moments like these, I'm always reminded of these words of wisdom:

“go to hell” is pathetic. it’s boring. “i hope your favourite novels get licensed by a disaster pub" is terrifying. it’s real, it could happen to you.

Update to the update: Yilin Wang has stated that Rosmei will be providing them with Chinese summaries of the novels. This makes it even more mystifying why Rosmei did not simply provide the same summaries to their already-hired translators. My concerns that no one in this entire process has actually finished reading the book intensify.

douqi

Today Rosmei 'officially' 'announced' on Twitter that they would be publishing English translations of two baihe novels by Ning Yuan, as detailed in this post. The announcement was accompanied by what I hope are two placeholder graphics for the novels (and not the actual covers). Rosmei provided no further details about the genre or general plot of either novel, and no information about the author herself. I therefore took it upon myself to do it, and graciously refrained from sending Rosmei an invoice for my marketing services, notwithstanding my long-standing principles about not working for corporations for free.

(As an aside: I'm fully aware that I'm being very snarky about Rosmei and this whole situation. I would prefer not to be snarky. I would prefer to be happy and enthusiastic about announcements of this kind. I enjoy feeling positive emotions, which are in short supply at the moment! However, for the reasons detailed here, as well as this latest failure on Rosmei's part to provide basic information about the books it is planning to sell us, and for which more promotional efforts are needed in the absence of a large and established fan base, I have very little confidence in them at the moment.)

The books are due to start releasing in 2025, according to the announcement. Rosmei has not said whether they will be available as ebooks as well as print books. However, in response to a query about whether several danmei titles announced at the same time would be available as ebooks, Rosmei replied that: 'For books licensed from jjwxc, there is no ebooks licensed'. As both of these Ning Yuan titles were initially published on JJWXC, chances of ebook versions being available seem dim. The translator for The Creator's Grace (造物的恩宠, pinyin: zaowu de enchong) has been named as Shigure, whose work I am not familiar with (a very cursory search of her Twitter timeline reveals no previous mentions of 'baihe' or 'GL', though that in itself doesn't necessarily mean anything). The translator for At Her Mercy (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou), which Rosmei have chosen to title At the World's Mercy (so I guess I'll have to start using that now), has not been named at the time of writing, apparently because... they're currently on vacation?

One thing I am curious about is how they will handle the sex scenes in The Creator's Grace. As far as I'm aware, these were never published on JJWXC, being far too explicit for the platform. Instead, the JJWXC version of the novel fades to black and ambiguity at crucial moments. Ning Yuan posted the sex scenes to the smut-focused platform PO18. She appears to have taken them down, but my pack rat instincts mean that I have a copy saved.

Edited to add: Rosmei has now confirmed that these two titles will not be available as ebooks.

Edited again to add: This artist has posted some (mainland) fan-commissioned art pieces for At Her Mercy!

douqi

Today at around 1145 GMT, baihe author Ning Yuan posted on Weibo that two of her novels, historical court intrigue epic At Her Mercy (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou) and sci-fi thriller The Creator's Grace (造物的恩宠, pinyin: zaowu de enchong) had been licensed for publication in English. I saw this about 17 minutes after it was posted (I took note of the posting time), so naturally I proceeded to toss the news post-haste into the roiling mass of Twitter fandom. Ning Yuan's post did not specify the publisher, but speculation was rife.

At about 1600 GMT, Singapore-based publisher Rosmei (who have licensed a number of danmei novels for publication in English), posted a hasty tweet essentially confirming that they were the publisher in question. The tweet is so hasty that they didn't even remember to state in it that the two licensed novels are baihe titles. No further information (identity of the translator(s), whether a digital edition will be available) has been provided by Rosmei at the time of writing.

My thoughts on this generally

I am delighted that Ning Yuan's novels will be available to a wider audience. She is one of the genre's most popular and longest-established authors, and it's practically criminal that international fandom hasn't, to date, heard much about her. The Creator's Grace is one of the best baihe novels I've read so far. In fact, I was planning to translate it myself after I finished working on Purely by Accident, so I'm both rather relieved that I won't have to be the one to tackle a 520K-word behemoth while also feeling faintly downcast about putting it aside. At Her Mercy is also one of the most popular court intrigue novels of the present generation, so I'm pleased that more people will be able to read it.

However, I have serious reservations about Rosmei as a publisher. Not only is their reach very limited — to date, most of their licences are confined to print books (they have managed to get ebook rights only for a few titles), and to Singapore (plus possibly Malaysia) only — but so far, they have not released or shipped any actual product yet. They also appear to pay translators an appallingly low rate, which is a poor guarantee of good work. The bits and pieces of their translation previews (for other novels) I have read do not, so far, inspire great confidence. The fact that this baihe licensing announcement is something they were clearly building up to (based on this tweet, it seems they were originally planning to announce it on 20 February), only to be pre-empted by the author herself, strongly indicates that they did not ask the author to sign an NDA or even strongly emphasise to her that the news should be kept under wraps — which one would imagine to be extremely standard business practice. I also have doubts about the choice of At Her Mercy as a first baihe licence. While the novel is extremely well-known among baihe readers in mainland China, it is also nearly 1.25 million words long in Chinese, and so makes for a very resource-intensive project, particularly for an untested publisher in an untested market.

My other vague thoughts on baihe publishing in English that no one asked for

For me, honestly, the ideal scenario would be to have a baihe English translation published either by a Big Five publisher, via a solid SFF imprint if it's genre fiction, and/or one of the highly-regarded small presses that specialises in works in translation, such as Tilted Axis. I would like to see the process of translation and editing being approached in a genuinely careful and thoughtful way, with an eye to popularising and marketing the work to a much wider audience than — as is the case at present — existing webnovel aficionados. One of my extremely long-term goals is to possibly work towards that, with support from like-minded people.

In the meantime, if anyone has a spare hundred thousand pounds or so for starting a small press focused on good translations of good/key baihe novels, let me know and we can work something out :)

douqi

I'm painfully aware that (1) this comm really needs a resource post on baihe audio dramas and (2) I really don't know enough about audio dramas to be the person to write it. If anyone wants to write such a post, please please please go ahead and do it! You'll have my eternal gratitude.

Fortuitously though, Fanjiao — the specialist platform for baihe audio content, itself a spin-off from the lesbian dating app The L (formerly Rela) — celebrated its fifth anniversary a few weeks ago, with a long video featuring 49 baihe voice actresses, so I've decided to shamelessly glom on to it and provide an introduction of sorts to audio dramas via sketching out the profiles of each VA featured and listing their major works. The list is set out below in more or less alphabetical order based on pinyin. The focus will be mostly on the Fanjiao-hosted dramas which each VA has participated in, but I will provide details of their voice work on other platforms and media where I'm aware of them.

Watch on YouTube

The original video can be viewed on the Fanjiao Weibo account here. For ease of embedding, I've re-uploaded it to my YouTube account. There are currently no English subtitles because I, er, already have a very large backlog of things to translate, but if anyone is interested in trying their hand at subtitling it, you're very welcome to do so, and I'm happy to provide support!

( VAs A to F )

( VAs G to P )

( VAs Q to X )

( VAs Y to Z )

I previously made an excessively long Twitter thread on this topic with less textual detail but with voice clips and images, which you can read here.

douqi

This post is meant to provide a brief introduction to baihe as a literary genre and a starting point for those seeking to get into it. I consider baihe to be a distinct genre of its own, though I'd be hard-pressed to articulate its precise contours (or even general contours). Certainly I have a sense of baihe as being distinct from what I would classify as 'serious queer/lesbian literature', though here I'm hampered by my lack of knowledge about queer literature written in Chinese. Yan Geling's (严歌苓) novella White Snake might conceivably count as one, but I'm simply too unfamiliar with the genre as a whole to provide any sort of sensible comment. I also have a sense of baihe as being in conversation with its Japanese counterpart yuri, but again I'm woefully ignorant of yuri as a genre.

Baihe often seems to be regarded by international fandom as a sort of distaff counterpart to danmei (m/m romance), but my sense is that mainland baihe readers (and potentially other Sinophone audiences in Asia) do not really see baihe and danmei as having particularly close links beyond the fact that they deal with same-gender romance. In fact, I I've seen more mainland baihe readers say they also read yanqing (f/m romance, whose popularity runs rings around both danmei and baihe) than baihe readers say they also read danmei. There is also limited overlap between baihe and danmei in terms of their authorship. There are more authors who write yanqing+baihe than authors who write danmei+baihe, and I can think of no major danmei author who also writes baihe, or vice versa. To date, the only author I can definitively point to who writes both danmei and baihe (as well as yanqing) is Xiao Wu Jun (小吾君) who, while not unknown, is not exactly a major author. There seems to be limited overlap between baihe and danmei in terms of popular subgenres as well. Again, I'm not very familiar with danmei as a genre, but my sense is that a good number of the popular works are historical novels or xianxia novels, while a significant proportion of popular baihe novels are contemporary romances (which would, I think, be legible to a reader of Western genre romance as such). In terms of sheer audience numbers, baihe is very much regarded as a niche genre relative to danmei (quite popular) and yanqing (massively popular).

Having impressed you with my vibes-based ramblings and multiple admissions of ignorance, let's get down to what I do know about the genre. Under the headings below, you'll find information about where baihe novels are published, a list of major baihe authors (plus a few who specialise in specific niche subgenres), a list of notable works that I think provide a useful foundation for understanding the genre, and information about adaptations of baihe novels. A major caveat is that I'm focusing almost exclusively on works by mainland Chinese authors, both because these make up the greatest proportion of baihe novels and because I'm most familiar with them. There are also baihe novels by authors from elsewhere in the Sinosphere, most notably Taiwan, but I am much less familiar with them, so that will need to be the subject of another post (preferably by someone who knows the field much better than I do!)

( Baihe novels and where to find them )

( On the state of baihe novel translations )

( Top 10 current baihe authors )

( 10+ baihe novels that are helpful for understanding the genre )

( A note about adaptations )

I am grateful to xiaozhu for providing valuable input (and making sure I didn't say anything too obviously wrong) into this post. Read their translation of baihe showbiz tragedy Burn here. Special thanks to

superborb for doing the thankless grunt work of proofreading and checking each link.

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Entries tagged with novels: at her mercy 我为鱼肉

Author Profile: Ning Yuan

Across the Empire (纵横) by Lin Cuo (林错): Review

If You Liked This Danmei, You Might Like That Baihe

Cyberpunk in the Tang Dynasty: A Review on To Embers We Return by Ning Yuan

Cover Reveal for At Her Mercy/At the World's Mercy (我为鱼肉)

The Creator's Grace: Translation Analysis (Part 1)

Rosmei At It Again

Rosmei Officially Announces Ning Yuan Licences

Two Ning Yuan Novels Licensed for Publication in English

Fanjiao's Fifth Anniversary: An Introduction to Baihe Audio Dramas

Baihe Novels: Resource Post

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