Chinese GL

I read 19 baihe novels and two baihe novellas this year. Here's the full list in order of when I read them, with links to my reviews where available.

( Read more; spoilers have been kept to a minimum )

If I were giving out awards:

Best reads: To Embers We Return, Ravenous, The Little Alpaca.
Compact and compelling: Scrapped, A Broken Bough.
Fun and mostly light: Hunger. Lust.
Biggest letdowns: Above the Fates, The Wayward Disciple.
LET ME EDIT YOU: In Love with a Substitute.

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.