Chinese GL

The 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. 

( some mid-book reveals; mention of rape, miscarriage/abortion, gore )

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.

I read 22 baihe novels (and one collection of baihe-adjacent short stories) this year, out of a total of 77 books read (including playtexts and graphic novels). Here's the full list, in order of when I read them.



So looking back, I think I've managed to catch up on some pretty classic and popular novels, mixed in with some more niche titles from subgenres I wouldn't typically be super drawn to. For 2024, I'm especially keen to read more work from Ning Yuan and Liu Yuan Chang Ning, and maybe Ruo Hua Ci Shu (despite her letting me down so terribly with the ending to Minister Xie). In fact, I'm slightly toying with the idea of making my way through as much of Ning Yuan's back catalogue as possible over the coming year, maybe at the rate of one Ning Yuan novel per every three baihe novels I read. I'm also interested in reading at least one more each by Yu Shuang and Qing Tang Shuan Xiang Cai, as I found their books unexpectedly enjoyable.